The Jews: Next Year in Which Jerusalem?

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related to Israel grew out of the determination of American Jews to help their brethren in the Soviet Union. By and large, there was solid Christian sympathy for these efforts. Only two weeks ago in Chicago, a formidable ecumenical group convened a National Interreligious Consultation on Soviet Jewry—including liberal Protestants, black churchmen, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox. But at least some critics have felt that in pressuring Moscow to allow Jews to immigrate to Israel (a sort of modern re-enactment of the let-my-people-go theme), a privilege of free movement was being sought for Russian Jews that no other Soviet citizens enjoy. Besides, the extremist Jewish Defense League, which took the Soviet Jews' cause violently into the streets of U.S. cities, contributed a new and shocking, if hardly lasting image of the Jew as bully—appalling most Jews in the process.

Over and above these pressing concerns, some Jews began to question the wisdom of tying Jewish identity too closely to the precarious existence of a political state. Even International Lawyer Samuel Pisar, 43, an Auschwitz survivor and firmly pro-Israel, warns that "to put the greatness of Jews into that little basket [Israel] is very dangerous. What if it goes?"

Emigration from the U.S. to Israel soared in the years after 1967—28,700 from the Six-Day War to the end of 1971, more than double the number of Americans who went in the entire period between 1948 and 1967. But it is clear that the vast majority of U.S. Jews have no intention of immigrating to Israel, perhaps partly because internal disputes and social conflicts made that state less a Jewish Camelot than it had appeared to be. Jewish thinkers have begun to emphasize an old dialectic in Judaism, the dialectic between the homeland and the Diaspora. In his. 1971 book Tents of Jacob, Anthropologist Raphael Patai points out that Jews had their first consciousness as a people not in the homeland but in an early Diaspora—in "the strange land" of Egypt. History further demonstrates that after the Babylonian captivity, Judaism was never without a Diaspora, never without Jews—some of them important thinkers—in parts of the world other than Israel. Even some committed Zionists now concede that Zionism does not demand immigration to Israel.

Broad Spectrum. Last month, when the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds selected Brandeis Historian Leon A. Jick to direct their new Institute for Jewish Life, Jick emphasized that the $1,350,000 earmarked for the institute over the next three years would go to projects that specifically deepened American Jewish experience. "We intend to reaffirm the value of the Diaspora," said Jick. "Jews in America can't live vicariously in another country. If our Judaism is going to be Portnoy's Complaint and Goodbye, Columbus, what's the use?"

Obviously, the spectrum of Jewish identification is a broad one. "Each man's Jewish story is different," asserts James A. Sleeper in The New Jews. Many Jews insist, with stubborn existentialism, that a Jew is what he chooses to be. Yet the ends of the spectrum seem discernible enough—and some of the many shades in between. At one end, a very large group stresses the people-hood of Judaism, membership in a cultural and ethnic community that may or may not