The Jews: Next Year in Which Jerusalem?

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have religious significance to them. At the other end, a smaller but steadfast group regards Judaism principally as a strict and compelling faith, in which nothing less than exact adherence to Torah and Talmud* will do. In between are those who acknowledge the universal community of Judaism, but who trace that community to traditional roots in a common faith.

ETHNIC OR EXISTENTIAL JUDAISM

Jews in this group may be completely secular—even atheist—or sometimes members of a denomination like Reform Judaism. They simply do not feel that formal ritual or denominational affiliation is crucial. Though a rabbi himself, Philadelphia's Jacob Chinitz insists that "it is membership in the Jewish people that ties a Jew to Judaism, not his membership in a synagogue."

Particularly among students, this new communal Jewishness is creating a heightened interest in Hebrew, Yiddish, Jewish history and even Bible study—though for many the latter is more cultural than religious. On U.S. campuses, an impressive number of Judaic courses have been added to the curriculums, often at the students' instigation. At least 55 secular colleges and universities—more than half of them top-ranking schools—now offer courses in Jewish studies, compared with only eleven a generation ago. Where formal Jewish studies fail to meet the demand, "free Jewish universities" have sprung up for adults as well as collegians.

Samuel Pisar, who is a naturalized American living in Paris and the widely acclaimed author of Coexistence and Commerce, is perhaps the paradigm of the existential, communal kind of Jew. Of the 900 students in his Polish elementary school, Pisar is one of two to survive the holocaust. He calls the communal ties of Jews a "bond of suffering that comes whenever Jews are threatened." He felt the pull of that bond when he attended an international conference in Kiev last summer. After a VIP tour of the city, he became uneasy. "The [concentration camp] numbers on my arm," he recalls, "began to itch." When his turn came to speak, he threw away his prepared text and told the Soviet hosts that the tour had been incomplete: it had not included Babi Yar, where the German Occupation forces had killed hundreds of thousands of Kiev citizens, starting with 70,000 Jews. After a stunned silence the Russians gave in and bused their visitors and themselves out to Babi Yar for a mutual lesson in the bitter fruits of antiSemitism.

"Jewishness becomes stronger," comments James Sleeper in The New Jews, "when you realize that your people have known what it is to live as pariahs in the universe, with the shadow of total annihilation a constant reality. In such moments of awareness, a lesson of Jewish survival is 'hope against hope.' Hope when it makes no sense. Hope when you have known the seamy, brutal underside of a church that stirs the hearts of millions [Christianity], or when you have begun to understand the claim of a Jew dying in the Warsaw ghetto that he would be the oppressed rather than the oppressor if the choice were to be made."

Existential Judaism operates on a less cosmic scale too. Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz tells in Making It how a high school teacher once insisted on taking him to a nonkosher restaurant—and he was so revolted that