The End of an Era

The UC Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine called the 20th century “the Jewish century” for good reason. Scholars who were Jewish by birth played pivotal roles in anthropology, chemistry, linguistics, physics, psychology and sociology and, later in the century, in art history, English, history and philosophy, too.

In many spheres, Jews stood at the vanguard of modernization, promoting modern art, the musical theater and innovations in popular song and symphonic music. A list of academic concepts introduced by Jewish scholars is a long one and would certainly include cultural pluralism, day-to-day resistance, emotional intelligence and the identity crisis. Within the academy, one cannot think of deconstruction, the new historicism, positive psychology or even the study of slavery apart from Jewish contributors.

If the Holocaust cost the lives of two-thirds of all European Jews or about a third of the world’s Jewish population, Jews in the United States experienced unparalleled success. Twentieth-century American comedy, film, music and theater is unimaginable without Jews. The outsize Jewish roles in cosmetics, fashion, investment banking, journalism, marketing, medicine organized labor, philanthropy, real estate, retailing, social work, toy making and the Old and New Left and the feminist movement are also notable.

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The number of recent Ivy League presidents, Nobel Prize winners, billionaires or leading academics of Jewish descent is extraordinary, especially given that Jews comprise no more than 2.4 percent of the U.S. population and 0.2 percent of the world’s population. Just to look at one tally: between 1965 and 1982, Jews made up:

But even though the list of Jews in the Biden administration is a long one—encompassing Ron Klain, Janet Yellen, Alejandro Mayorkas, Tony Blinken, Merrick Garland, Jared Bernstein, Rochelle Walensky and Jeffrey Zients—simple demographics mean that an era of unparalleled success is likely ending.

A recent article in Tablet entitled “The Vanishing” enumerates the shift that is underway:

• Just 4 percent of elite American academics under 30 are Jewish, compared to 21 percent among the baby boomers.
• Fewer than 10 percent of Harvard undergraduates are Jewish, compared to 25 percent in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Demographics, along with intermarriage, secularization, acculturation and assimilation, are bringing an incredible run to a close. According to the Pew Memorial Trust, the non-Orthodox Jewish birth rate is 1.4 children, higher than Taiwan’s 1.07 and South Korea’s 1.09, but less than Italy’s 1.47. Jews are also older than other Americans. The average age of Conservative Jewish adults is 62, compared to 46 for all U.S. adults.

American Jews’ outsize record of success has, of course, had several disturbing consequences. It has led many commentators to:

1. Overstate the role of ethnic culture (and of initiative, innate intelligence and resourcefulness) as a causal explanation for group achievement.
2. Make invidious comparisons between ethnic groups.
3. Seriously downplay the role of discrimination, policy, labor markets and history as key contributors to differences in economic outcomes.
4. Conclude that any attempts to counteract the impact of bias and structural impediments to opportunity and success are attacks on merit.

There can be no doubt that ethnic solidarity, prior experience, timing and location of arrival, access to structures of opportunity, and, to a certain extent, cultural values, traditions and family patterns have, in certain instances, contributed significantly to Jewish success. So, too, did geography.

Turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants certainly benefited from entering the labor market with artisan skills, commercial experience, higher levels of literacy and greater experience in urban environments at a time when the economy in the Northeast and industrial Midwest was rapidly expanding.

Also, the experience of some Jews as middlemen and intercultural brokers made a difference. Middleman minorities—including Jews in Europe, Lebanese in West Africa, Chinese in Malaysia, Gujaratis in East Africa—have tended to be especially successful, even as they have been repeatedly derided as clannish, condescending and exploitative and as their very success has produced recurrent violent backlashes.

Another factor that shouldn’t be ignored is how the sense of marginality and outsider status helped fuel a kind of restless (some would say unbridled) ambition that was captured in the 1941 Budd Schulberg novel What Makes Sammy Run? and the 1974 Canadian film The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.

For American Jews, certain facts made a big difference:

• That large-scale Jewish migration took place at a time and places where their prior experience in the apparel and garment industries, retail trade, urban crafts, and labor organizations paid off.
• That the earlier success of German Jews created economic opportunities and role models for their Eastern European landman.
• That access to advanced education, retailing and law and medicine provided avenues for advancement when other opportunities (for example, in chain stores, most corporations and manufacturing industries) were largely closed off.

As David Brion Davis has argued, the Jewish experience provided a flawed and misleading model for ethnic success. As the great scholar of slavery and abolition pointed out, many Black leaders, from the early 19th century onward, including Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, James Weldon Johnson, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., thought that the strategies of advancement they associated with Jews—ethnic solidarity, economic nationalism, antidefamation, assimilation and intermarriage, legal struggles against discrimination, Zionism, and upward mobility through education—would be sufficient to overcome lynchings, racism, discriminatory public policies and biased banking, business and labor practices.

That was an illusion. The barriers to Black opportunity were structural and systemic as well as attitudinal and interpersonal, reinforced by public policy and profound inequities in schools, college access, health care, hiring practices, income and wealth. A lack of access to loans and resistance from white producers, consumers and customers made matters worse.

Of course, it’s not clear what it means to be Jewish in America. Many individuals deemed Jewish are atheists or agnostics. Many define their identity by their job or politics or sexual orientation rather than their religion.

In general, being Jewish today is more a matter of birth, descent and cultural identity than it is of religious practice, ritual observance, spiritual beliefs or even of self-identification. For American Jewry, the ghettos are a distant memory and Yiddish survives largely as a series of catchwords: chutzpah, futz, glitch, kibitz, kvetch, klutz, megillah, mensch, schlemiel, schlimazel, schmaltz, schnorrer and zaftig.

It’s striking that today’s most famous Jewish comedian, Mrs. Maisel, is played by an actress, Rachel Brosnahan, who isn’t Jewish at all. The long line of Jewish comedians—Woody Allen, Roseanne Barr, Jack Benny, Fanny Brice, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce, George Burns, Sid Caesar, Sacha Baron Cohen, Billy Crystal, Larry David, Fran Drescher, Marty Feldman, Jerry Lewis, Groucho Marx, Jackie Mason, Gilda Radner, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers, Mort Sahl, Jerry Seinfeld, Peter Sellers, Phil Silvers, Jon Stewart, Jerry Stiller and Gene Wilder—now consists of Seth Rogen, Sarah Silverman and Adam Sandler, surely a story of decline.

White ethnic identities, the sociologist Stephen Steinberg argued over four decades ago, had become little more than a thinly veiled defense of class privilege and a way to draw invidious comparisons with less economically successful groups. But, Steinberg insisted, in reality these groups’ economic success hinged less on cultural attributes than on other factors, notably preparation for participation in an industrial economy, experiencing living in urban settings, pre-existing skills and the timing and location of immigration. In the face of acculturation and intermarriage, white ethnic identities had grown exceeding thin and now serve largely as a source of the self-serving nostalgia found in Fiddler on the Roof.

Steinberg’s book, The Ethnic Myth, sought to rebut the “Jewish Horatio Alger myth” that had, in his view, clouded understanding of the factors that contribute to social mobility. But there is another way to think about ethnic myths. Much as families have myths (which typically begin “In our family …”), ethnic groups have myths that goad, inspire and constrain. As Steinberg demonstrated, the Jewish myth about education as the key to the group’s advancement is more complicated than legend would have it. Only after Jewish immigrants had achieved economic security and saw examples of education-driven success did large numbers pursue advanced education.

But that myth took on a life of its own, and by the end of the 20th century, over 90 percent of young Jews attended college. Currently, over 60 percent of Jewish adults have a college degree, a figure exceeded only by Hindus at 77 percent and Unitarian Universalists at 67 percent.

If, as seems likely, Jewish Americans’ striking record of success were to gradually decline, this won’t be the first time that a relatively small subset of the American population rose to prominence and radically reshaped the culture and discourse, before the wave subsided. Think of the Quakers and the Unitarians, who persist, but whose biggest impact on American culture occurred two centuries ago.

So, what might the decline in the relative or absolute size of the American Jewish population mean? Will it make any difference, given that the ills of American society are as manifest among Jews as everyone else: the worship of consumerism and the bitch goddess success, snobbery and, yes, prejudice.

It might. The greatest Jewish impact on American society has been not in business or even on popular culture, but elsewhere. Perhaps you’ve heard the quip: to be a secular Jew is to worship not at a temple or synagogue but at the altar of art and culture, activism and politicking, business and finance, science and technology, and medicine and psychotherapy.

I certainly understand the hesitance of scholars to place much weight on the significance of ethnic cultures, especially among groups that are highly assimilated and intermarried. How can one possibly generalize about Jews, given their very different backgrounds, outlooks and religious ties?

Still, it seems to me that one can speak of a secular American Jewish faith—which involves activism, the arts and culture, entrepreneurship, intellectualism and science, behavioral, physical, psychological and social—and an American Jewish legacy—that, at its best, is a commitment to cultural pluralism and social justice, to peshat (intensive study and exegesis of texts), tzedakah (charity as a moral obligation), and tikkum olam (the obligation to repair and improve the world).

I know full well that those commitments aren’t wholly shared among Jews and are often compromised in practice. But ethnic ideals, even those that are unrealized, nevertheless stand as a rebuke to those who fail to live up to those moral pretensions.

It strikes me as essential that those within the academy, irrespective of their religion or background, champion those values. All of us who have the privilege of working at a college or university need to reaffirm a commitment to a rich, robust intellectual life, reassert the importance of infusing humanistic perspectives into our teaching and research and uphold the notion that the ultimate purpose of the college or university is not vocational training or contract research, but to grapple with life and nature’s deepest questions and most pressing challenges.

For a substantial majority of American Jews, the university proved to be the true path to the Promised Land of economic opportunity, professional success and social status. More now than ever, we need to take steps to ensure that all students who have the ability and desire to pursue a college degree have the chance to attend full-time and study and interact with scholar-teachers and receive a well-rounded education that goes far beyond vocational training or career preparation.

The university should be this society’s true counterculture—a kind of utopia, a common ground where ideas and intellectual and cultural life take precedence and where instructors and students alike are committed to understanding the world even as they strive to change it. That is a covenant we ought to embrace and shouldn’t forsake.