Review Essay

BERNARD J. FIRESTONE

The War Among the Jews

SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American
Jewry. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. 397pp., $26.00.

A
lthough its particulars may be argued, the central theme of
Samuel G. Freedman’s Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of
American Jewry, winner of a National Jewish Book Award for
non-fiction, is beyond dispute. The American Jewish community is
deeply, even hopelessly divided on issues of theology, Israel, and per-
haps most distressingly, the nature of Jewish identity. Far from offering
grounds for optimism about the future, the author concludes with the
following gloomy assessment: “It is tragic, yes, that American Jews have
battled so bitterly, so viciously, over the very meaning of being Jewish. It
is more tragic, perhaps, that the only ones fighting are the only ones left
who care” (359).
Freedman is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School
of Journalism and a former New York Times reporter. In this largely jour-
nalistic account, he builds his thesis with a series of well-told stories,
each designed to illuminate another facet of the rift within the American
Jewish community. Beginning with the rise and fall of a Catskill summer
camp for secular Yiddishists to a battle between anti-Orthodox and
Orthodox Jews in Beachwood, Ohio over construction plans for an

BERNARD J. FIRESTONE is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and
Professor of Political Science at Hofstra University. His latest book, The United
Nations under U Thant, was published in summer 2001.
173 The Torah u-Madda Journal (10/2001)
174 The Torah u-Madda Journal

Orthodox educational and religious complex, Freedman surveys a social

landscape pockmarked with interdenominational craters. The stories
recounted here include an ill-fated Beit Din for conversions in Denver,
Colorado, composed of rabbis from the Orthodox, Conservative, and
Reform movements; the alienation of a Jewish feminist from her syna-
gogue in Los Angeles, California; the attempted assassination of former
Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres by an Orthodox zealot in Jack-
sonville, Florida; and a lawsuit against Yale University initiated by a
number of Orthodox Yale undergraduates unwilling to live in mixed
gender dormitories. Each of these stories is prefaced by a sociological
overview, the effect being a combination of sociology and journalism
and, over the course of the book, a thumbnail history of the American
Jewish community in the twentieth century.
Although acknowledging that division is not new to the Jewish
experience, Freedman sees the contemporary split against the back-
ground of a dramatic transformation in post-World War II notions of
Jewish identity. This transformation was occasioned by the demographic
shift of Jewish America from densely populated urban areas to the sub-
urbs, and the influx to this country in the aftermath of the Holocaust of
a cadre of Orthodox Jews determined to recreate the deeply pious and
separatist Eastern European Jewish experience in the United States.
With obvious admiration, Freedman describes the first half of the twen-
tieth century as one in which Jewish ethnicity, or “Yiddishkeit,” domi-
nated the American scene. As Freedman writes:

Born in Eastern Europe and carried to American steerage with the immi-
grants, Yiddishkeit was less an organized movement than a sensibility.
And that sensibility, as the historian Gerald Sorin has put it, “had to do
with language, style, values, and behavior more than with belief.” Yiddish-
keit did not reject Judaism as much as appropriate it, treating religious
tradition not as the ultimate expression of Jewish identity but as part of
the raw material for it (35).

The bonds which emerged from this sense of Jewish ethnicity were, in
Freedman’s view, remarkably strong. He cites the words of the literary
critic Alfred Kazin, “son of a free thinker father,” who described his
childhood in Brooklyn in the following way: “We always had to be
together: believers and nonbelievers, we were a people; I was of that
people. Unthinkable to go one’s way, to doubt or escape the fact that I
was a Jew”(36).
 Bernard J. Firestone 175

This American brand of Yiddishkeit, as the author acknowledges,

survived under rarefied conditions that would soon give way to change.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, Jews were clustered into
urban ghettos and socio-economically constrained by both overt and
covert forms of anti-semitism. Post-war affluence, however, did not dis-
criminate among America’s white population. As quotas fell and as anti-
semitism began to recede, American Jews, who shared in the affluence
of the post-war economic boom, moved from cities to suburbs, where
the institutions of secular Jewish culture, from Yiddish newspapers to
theaters, found an unwelcome environment. The suburban Jew no
longer spoke or read Yiddish and, as time went on, synagogue member-
ship became the sole marker of Jewish identity. But it was a synagogue
membership that in many ways was designed to take the place of the
ethnic Jewish identification that had declined in the wake of the Jewish
shift toward the American suburbs. In that respect, the Conservative
and Reform movements, which made very few religious demands upon
the individual, were perfectly suited to the new Jewish identity. Apart
from the Jew’s occasional participation in the life of his synagogue or
temple, he was otherwise indistinguishable in dress, manner, kind of
employment, and recreational preferences from his gentile neighbors.
As a consequence, the Conservative and Reform movements grew and
thrived. Insofar as Orthodoxy was concerned, its distinctive values and
practices were dramatically out of place in the suburbs. By 1955, in the
words of Jewish sociologist Marshall Sklare, Orthodox Judaism had
become “a case study of institutional decay”(217).
Forty-five years later, Sklare’s characterization of the Orthodox
movement in the United States, accurate as it might have appeared in
1955, has been proven wrong. The resurgence of Orthodox Jewish prac-
tice in the subsequent decades was the result, according to Freedman, of
foundation work already well underway by the mid-1950s. In particular,
Freedman traces the revolution in American Orthodoxy to the immi-
gration to this country in 1941 of Rabbi Aharon Kotler, a noted Polish
rosh yeshivah, who in 1942 established the Bais Medrash Govoha in
Lakewood, New Jersey. Rabbi Kotler was followed by a number of
prominent refugee rabbis who established European-style yeshivahs in
other parts of this country. The migration of a rabbinic elite determined
to maintain a strict demarcation between their congregants and American
culture was destined to have a profound effect on what it meant to be a
Jew in America. As Freedman writes: “For the first time in modern
176 The Torah u-Madda Journal

American history, the secular, humanistic impulse of American Jewry,

as expressed most powerfully by Yiddishkeit, faced the challenge of a
vibrant, charismatic, and almost completely antithetical belief system
with institutions and folkways of its own”(34). At the end of the centu-
ry, with Conservative and Reform Judaism unable to guarantee the con-
tinued Jewish identity of those brought up in their synagogues and tem-
ples, and with the Orthodox model increasingly confident and self-
assertive, Freedman concludes, in direct counterpoint to Marshall
Sklare’s virtual obituary for Orthodoxy, that “in the struggle for the soul
of American Jewry, the Orthodox model has triumphed”(338).
The rise of Orthodoxy, however, carried with it the seeds of intra-
communal division. As Freedman explains, whatever one’s religious
practice or synagogue affiliation, the cultural aspects of Jewish identity
could be universally shared by all who identified with Yiddishkeit as a
culture. The breakdown of Yiddishkeit as a source of Jewish identity,
however, and its replacement by religious belief and practice, exposed
the deep fissures within Judaism. The schism grew wider beginning in
the early 1970s as the Conservative and Reform movements, sometime
haltingly, attempted to keep pace with the social revolution affecting the
status of women and gays. In the 1970s, the Conservative movement
decided to include women in a minyan. As time went on, women were
increasingly enrolled in the rabbinical classes of the Jewish Theological
Seminary and Hebrew Union College. In the 1990s, the Reform move-
ment conferred approval upon gay marriages. But the rift had taken on
existential meaning with the Reform movement’s adoption of patrilineal
descent in the 1980s and the Orthodox rabbinate’s periodic campaigns to
delegitimize conversions overseen by Conservative and Reform rabbis.
As long as being Jewish was a cultural referent, the Jewish umbrella was
wide enough to encompass both the devout and non-devout. Once the
Conservative and Reform movements grew substantial enough to chal-
lenge the Orthodox monopoly on religious authority and dogma, and
once the Orthodox, in turn, grew sufficiently self-confident to mount a
credible counter-challenge, the divisions multiplied and increased in
bitterness. And so we are left, in the author’s words, with “Jew vs. Jew:
the struggle for the soul of American Jewry.”
Freedman’s case studies, or “parables” as he calls them (28), succeed
in making his theme widely accessible, just as rabbinic parables served
to spread Torah knowledge beyond the learned elite. But parables are by
their very nature didactic, and, by necessity, given to oversimplification.
The purpose of the parable is to teach a lesson, usually an ethical one,
 Bernard J. Firestone 177

and it intentionally discards those subtleties that might obfuscate or,

even worse, undermine the message. If there is a moral message in this
book, it is that the divisions among Jews in America are a modern rep-
resentation of sin’at h.innam, pure or groundless hatred, which tradition
tells us led to the destruction of the Temple. In Freedman’s relentlessly
distressing account of Jewish life in America, those who have striven to
overcome the inter-denominational schisms, such as the Orthodox rab-
bis who participated in the Denver Beit Din, have not only failed but
have been pilloried for their efforts. As Freedman writes, he is fulfilling
the Jewish mission of “bearing witness” (28), and what he witnesses and
chooses to relate allows no subtlety, only the bleak picture of internal
warfare and dissolution of Jewish identity.
Like any good journalist, Freedman serves up a compelling story.
But the connection between the stories he tells and the central thesis of
Jew vs. Jew is uneven. The chapter on the Denver Beit Din effectively
illuminates the interdenominational struggle over “Who is a Jew”, and
the account of Beachwood, Ohio’s zoning battle painfully illustrates
what happens when internecine conflict seeps into the grass-roots. But
the section on the attempted assassination of Shimon Peres is less an
example of interdenominational strife over Israel than it is a sad account
of one man’s struggle with mental illness. Indeed, some of the most bit-
ter conflict over Israel’s position in the Middle East occurs within
Orthodoxy, where political concessions touch on core religious beliefs.
A case study of the lonely battle fought by Orthodox peace advocates
against the overwhelming sentiments of their community would have
illustrated that Israel’s existence is not only a source of interdenomina-
tional conflict. And the inclusion of the ego-driven “Yale Five” case as
an illustration of the battle within Orthodoxy for the soul of traditional
Judaism succeeds as human interest. It otherwise fails, however, to cap-
ture the more broadly based conflict between the “right wing” and
“modern” factions of American Orthodoxy, where issues of woman’s
rights, liberal education, etc. mobilize far greater passion and interest.
Unfortunately, the story of Rachel Adler’s alienation from her syna-
gogue over her effort to change the Shemoneh Esreh to accommodate
the role of the immahot (matriarchs) in Jewish tradition is insufficiently
reflective of the Orthodox woman’s daily struggle to gain dignity within
the largely man’s world of Jewish ritual. After all, in Rachel Adler’s syna-
gogue, women are permitted to lead services. That is not the reality for
the overwhelming majority of Orthodox women. Here too, more salient
examples abound.
178 The Torah u-Madda Journal

Notably lacking in Freedman’s study is a systematic discussion of

the H. abad movement, which, apart from several references, does not
receive the fuller treatment the subject deserves. For better or worse,
H. abad has redefined Orthodoxy for many Jews, both Orthodox and
non-Orthodox, in many cities, towns, and college campuses across this
country. In its flamboyant effort to cross denominational lines with its
sweetly presented inclusive message in the service of an ultimately
exclusivist ideology, it simultaneously rejects pluralism and crosses the
barricades that are so much a part of Jewish existence in America. No
examination of American Jewry at this point in time can safely ignore
this idiosyncratic group which has assiduously carved for itself a promi-
nent niche in Jewish communal life, and Freedman’s book is somewhat
diminished for not having done so.
None of this is to say that Freedman is wrong, only that his “para-
bles” may not have produced a sufficiently nuanced picture of the
American Jewish community. The 1999 Annual Survey of American
Jewish Opinion, conducted by the American Jewish Committee, showed
considerable, in fact predictable, differences among denominational
adherents on questions relating to Jewish identity. It is not surprising,
for example, that 57 percent of Orthodox in contrast to 9 percent of
Reform respondents should consider “religious observance” an impor-
tant source of Jewish identity.1 But it does raise questions about the
intensity with which these differences are felt, a theme that is central to
Freedman’s thesis and highlighted in at least two of his case histories,
when only 17 percent of the respondents answered that tensions between
the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform movements in the United
States constituted a “serious” problem (as opposed to “somewhat” of a
problem or “no” problem at all).2 The Orthodox were substantially
more likely than Conservative and Reform respondents to see these ten-
sions as “serious,” but even among the former, only 32 percent chose to
answer with the word “serious.”3 Surely the warring neighbors in Great
Neck, New York who constitute the reader’s introduction to Jew vs. Jew,
would have answered that tensions between Orthodox and non-Ortho-
dox Jews are a matter of great seriousness. So too would the residents of
Beachwood, Ohio. But the AJC Survey indicates that Freedman’s “para-
bles,” as accurately reported as they are, may exaggerate, in the name of
driving home the author’s point, the reality of American Jewish opinion.
In fact, these findings suggest that American Jews, while clearly con-
scious of the religious differences among them, are perhaps less emo-
tionally and intellectually invested in their civil war than are their
 Bernard J. Firestone 179

respective religious and lay leaders. In their relations with one another,
the doctrinal and institutional elites of the three major denominations,
with some notable exceptions, produce an almost pathologic synergy.
Justifying their own existence through the alleged misdeeds of their co-
religionists, from destroying Jewish identity on the one side, to intoler-
ance and triumphalism on the other, America’s three major Jewish
denominations are bound together by the rhetoric of mutual abnega-
tion. The rank-and-file, however, exist in relative isolation from one
another. The Orthodox, both by choice and necessity, live in their own
communities, go to their own schools and synagogues, and rarely marry
outside the denomination. The non-Orthodox predictably find living
among the Orthodox confining. Only occasionally do the communities
come close enough to collide, as they did in Beachwood, but the more
normal course of events is a slow but peaceful demographic shift, with
older, non-Orthodox residents moving to make way for their younger,
more devout co-religionists. For the vast majority of the American
Jewish community, the problem, then, is not “Jew versus Jew” but Jews
leading parallel lives in separate communities.
Freedman links the existence of these parallel lives to the collapse of
Judaism as a source of ethnic identity and its reincarnation as a source
of religious identity. The latter he attributes to the increasing affluence
and mobility of American Jews, which destroyed Yiddishkeit and forced
Jews to define themselves in religious rather than ethnic terms. But
Freedman may be ignoring another factor in the transformation of
Jewish identity in the post-World War II era, for the rise of Orthodoxy
has coincided with a more broadly based religious revival in the United
States. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, according to Alan Wolfe, Director of the
Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, religion
was viewed by sociologists as incompatible with modernity.4 Judaism,
not unlike other religions, was seen as a “sociological marker,” a set of
seemingly secular social and political attitudes among affiliated mem-
bers, but no more. But contrary to what had been predicted as the vir-
tual demise of religion in the United States, a religious revival did occur,
one that looked toward tradition as the individual’s means of dealing
with the psychological complexities of post-modern existence. Had the
sociologists of religion been proven correct, Orthodoxy in the United
States would have been limited today to the rigidly insular and aggres-
sively anti-secular h.aredi community. What is striking about contempo-
rary Orthodoxy in the United States is not so much its size relative to
other denominations, which in fact is only about 10 percent, but the
180 The Torah u-Madda Journal

fact that Sklare’s very reasonable prediction about the future of

Orthodoxy in an increasingly modern and secular world has been proven
untrue. In fact, a substantial number of well-educated American Jews
have found Orthodoxy both personally fulfilling and not contradictory
to the otherwise modern lives they live. This, as much as the pioneering
work of Rabbi Kotler and his colleagues in transplanting the European
yeshivah to American shores, has contributed mightily to the resiliency
of Orthodoxy.
In examining the rise and future of Orthodoxy, Freedman appears
to conclude that the right wing has triumphed and that Modern
Orthodoxy has been progressively marginalized. In looking toward the
future, he sees the Modern Orthodox separating from the right wing to
establish an alliance with more tradition-minded Conservative Jews to
form a “Conservadox” denomination of Judaism. In an excellent pro-
logue to his chapter on the “Yale Five” incident, Freedman very nicely
captures some of the flavor of the dispute between right wing and
modern factions of Orthodoxy and describes the indicia of the right
wing ascendancy, including the increasing separation of boys and girls
in formerly modern yeshivot and the widespread adoption of h.umrot,
particularly with regard to issues of kashrut. Certainly, there has been a
manifest increase in the prominence of the right wing within Orthodoxy,
and there is no question that the h.aredi community, with its typically
large families, has tilted the demographics within Orthodoxy. On the
other hand, it may be premature to signal the end of “modern” Ortho-
doxy, especially since Freedman has not sufficiently defined what
“modern” Orthodoxy is. The doctrine of Torah u-Madda that is central
to the mission of Yeshiva University, for example, involves the engage-
ment of secular culture by religious Jews, but does not, by any means,
require that Orthodox Jews be any less stringent than others in their
adherence to miz. vot. That young Orthodox Jews today are more atten-
tive to and visible in their observance of Halakhah does not necessarily
mean that they have capitulated to the right wing in the latter’s separa-
tion from secular society. Today, Yeshiva University attracts more
undergraduate students than ever, and Orthodox Jews attend Ivy League
universities in record numbers. Gone are the days when Daniel Greer,
the main protagonist in Freedman’s “Yale Five” story, ate his meals in
isolation in his own room at Princeton University. Today, Orthodox
young men and women attending Ivy League institutions can easily find
kosher eating facilities, prayer services, and even Torah study sessions.
While there are young Orthodox men who return from a year or two of
 Bernard J. Firestone 181

yeshivah study in Israel who opt not to enter the professional world, the
dominant trend is toward the acquisition of a college degree and
engagement in professional life. It is a mistake, then, to confuse a pro-
nounced trend among young Orthodox Jews toward greater care in the
observance of Halakhah with the defeat of Modern Orthodoxy.
Meanwhile, leaders of the Conservative and Reform movements
have begun to discover that religion without tradition is no more suc-
cessful at maintaining Jewish identity than was Jewish culture without
religion in the early decades of the twentieth century. Consequently, as
Freedman notes in his epilogue, “throughout the late nineties, both the
Reform and Conservative movements embraced tradition in a series of
major actions” (340). The question is whether their response will prove
to be too little, too late to arrest the tide of intermarriage that has
engulfed their movements. When asked by the AJC whether “any of
your children have a spouse who is not Jewish,” 17 percent of the
Orthodox, 59 percent of the Conservative, 73 percent of the Reform,
and 74 percent of the Just Jewish responded “yes.”5 And it is difficult to
foresee how greater tolerance on the part of the Orthodox, no matter
how welcome and even salutary it would be, can compensate for the
endemic weaknesses of Conservative and Reform Judaism. With statis-
tics such as these pinpointing where American Jewry is most vulnerable
to disappearance, Freedman may be correct in predicting that only the
Orthodox will “flourish” as Jews in the future (338). That should pro-
vide small comfort to the Orthodox, whose triumph will coincide with
the further shrinkage of the American Jewish community. At that point,
the era of “Jew versus Jew” described by Freedman may be looked upon
nostalgically, as the time when the Orthodox at least had co-religionists
with whom to contend.

Notes

1. American Jewish Committee, 1999 Annual Survey of American Jewish

Opinion (New York, 1999), 72.
2. Ibid., 8.
3. Ibid.
4. Alan Wolfe, “What Scholarship Reveals About Politics and Religion,” The
Chronicle of Higher Education (September 8, 2000), B7-B9.
5. American Jewish Committee, 11.