The Jews: Next Year in Which Jerusalem?

(3 of 11)
Jew contemptuously calls a "gastronomical experience": blintzes, bagels and lox, gefilte fish.

Paradoxically, during roughly the same period, assimilation ran into a countertrend. Orthodox and Conservative Jewry experienced a pronounced new growth in the U.S. Orthodox Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik describes the change: "When I came here in the 1930s [from Germany], there was a certain naivete, a great pride, a confidence in the American way of life. I'm not sure what the American way of life was, but everyone—including a great many Jews —thought it was best. Jews wanted to disappear." That attitude began to shift, first merely in reaction to the Nazi disaster that had befallen Germany's Jews, who had wanted to assimilate more fervently than anyone else; later, because the old confidence in the American dream was shaken, and a hunger for spiritual rearfirmation became evident among all groups, religious or otherwise. Now, says Soloveitchik, "America is reaching for values above historical change"—values that he believes Orthodoxy provides.

Tie to Israel. Assimilated or tradition-bound, religious or secular, Jews found common cause in their response to the 1967 challenge from the Arab world: Israel must be destroyed. The effect was electric. Recalls Jewish Historian Max Vorspan of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles: "The Six-Day War tapped Jewish feelings among peopie who didn't know they had any." It also tapped a flood of Jewish cash. Financial support for Israel, always strong, crested to a new high: the 750 Jewish families of Charleston, S.C., alone raised a remarkable $250,000 —nearly $100 per person. Young people—and sometimes their parents—suddenly found themselves on jets to Israel, ready to fight, or at least to take the soldiers' places in the kibbutzim.

For the moment, the answer appeared simple, even if it was not. Most Jews seemed to decide that to be a Jew was to commit oneself to Israel. In the five years since then, that answer has apparently remained sufficient for many Jews. Says Rabbi Robert Seigel, Hillel Foundation director for North Carolina: "Israel's survival is our survival."

Black Anger. But the war complicated things as well—not least because Israel was victorious beyond all expectation. Some Jews, especially younger ones, had trouble adjusting to the image of the Jew as conqueror. Those in the New Left found it possible to assail Israel as the new upperdog and to defend the underdog Palestinian guerrillas with Jerry Rubin's phrase, "Right on, Al Fatah!" The chorus was joined by black militants, who now hurled epithets at the very Jews who had first marched with them in civil rights protests. The blacks' anger, overtly against Israel, at least partly reflected domestic friction: they were finding up-from-the-ghetto Jews in many of the jobs or homes they aspired to.

Jews also began to feel isolated in other ways. To be sure, they found staunch new allies among many evangelical Protestants, to whom Israel represents biblical fulfillment. Billy Graham's 1970 film His Land was pointedly pro-Israel. But Protestant liberals, once political allies of U.S. Jews and supporters of Israel, began turning their sympathies toward Palestinian Arab refugees in the wake of the war.

Another issue