The Jews: Next Year in Which Jerusalem?

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— ethnic, re ligious and political (see box). There are Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews; Ortho dox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist Jews; Zionists and anti-Zionists. In the welter of causes and allegiances that vie for the Jew of the '70s, the essence of Judaism sometimes seems hard to find.

Bearing Witness. "I know what one must do to be Jewish," writes Au thor Elie Wiesel, the melancholy chron icler of the Nazi holocaust. "He must assume his Jewishness. He must assume his collective conscience. He must as sume his past with its sorrows and its joys. Tell the tale. In other words, he must bear witness." Wiesel's definition, however attractive, still leaves the in dividual Jew with a dilemma. Bear wit ness to what? And how? Follow the painfully detailed 613 Precepts set down for devout Jews? Immigrate to a kibbutz in Israel? Write a check for the United Jewish Appeal? How does a modern Jew in the Americas, in Europe or even in Israel "assume his past" when it is so redolent with ancient law, so burdened with melancholy history?

In a sense, the quest for Jewish iden tity today is a sign that Jews are more se cure than they ever have been in their history. For most of that history, the UP permost question has been one not of identity but survival. The Jews had to endure the Babylonian captivity, the leveling of Jerusalem by the Romans, and 19 centuries of exile. That exile was exacerbated by enforced conversions and by expulsions from one country after another, and capped by a crime that beggars the imagination: the Nazis' methodical murder of 6,000,000 people. Then came the painful birth of Israel. As the wandering survivors from the Old World crowded into the infant state, there seemed to be an effort, as Conservative Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum puts it, "to terminate the past and lock the door on it."

Many other Jews, of course, tried to lock the door on the past in a different way: assimilation. Especially in the U.S., where they made up the world's largest Jewish population (approximately 5,000,000 in 1945), Jews played a significant role in the material and intellectual life of the nation during the postwar years and won a generous slice of America's prosperity. By the mid-1960s, 80% of Jewish high school graduates went on to college, in contrast to 40% of the total population. By 1965, 57% of U.S. Jewish families had an income of $7,000 a year or more; only 35% of all U.S. families enjoyed such incomes. Jews were welcomed into most professions, sought out for government office, even invited into some hitherto exclusive white Anglo-Saxon clubs and enclaves. Jewish expressions, literature and customs began to appeal to many non-Jews for their ethnic vigor; the result was a kind of Jewish chic.

Where their parents had found new faiths in Marxism, Freudianism and a succession of liberal causes, many younger Jews followed their contemporaries into the New Left or exotic religious movements such as Krishna Consciousness, Scientology or even the Jesus Revolution. A remarkable number of young people are being won over to the "Messianic Judaism" of an evangelistic group in San Francisco called Jews for Jesus; many of them worship at synagogues and have their jackets emblazoned with Jesus slogans in

Hebrew. For others, young and old, Judaism has been reduced to what one young