So, Vhat’s Nu ?

A congregation in Los Angeles plunging into conflict over whether to add the names of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah to a prayer that traditionally mentions only Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; a group of fervently Orthodox undergraduates at Yale suing the school for the right to live off campus, away from the coed bathrooms and condom distribution in the college’s dormitories; a 31-year-old failed kosher butcher placing a bomb in a Florida synagogue in an attempt to stop a former prime minister of Israel from speaking there--these, as Samuel G. Freedman explains in “Jew vs. Jew,” are dispatches from “the struggle for the soul of American Jewry,” a struggle so deep and intense that Freedman likens it to a civil war.

With American Judaism lacking a Lincolnesque figure, the war may result in permanent schism, Freedman warns. He writes, “[T]he divides between the existing branches of Judaism on both theological and social issues are growing so vast, so irreconcilable, that in time those branches, like Christianity after Martin Luther, will be divergent faiths sharing a common deity and a common ancestry.” A provocative thesis but it is not supported by Freedman’s anecdotes or borne out by reality.

Freedman, a professor at Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism, is a smooth writer with an eye for detail. He structures his book episodically, interspersing case studies with essays on aspects of the disagreements racking American Jewry.

The most dramatic of Freedman’s case studies are those of the Florida bombing, the Yale undergraduates and the attempt by a group of Orthodox Jews in Beachwood, Ohio, to win the approval of their non-Orthodox neighbors for the construction of a campus consisting of synagogues, ritual baths and a day school. Freedman uses these tales in an attempt to support his argument that American Jewry is in the midst of a civil war. The pipe bomb, discovered in a Conservative synagogue, is, for Freedman, an example of the way the feuds in Israel over concessions to the Arabs are infecting the American Jewish community. Freedman profiles Harry Shapiro, who pleaded guilty to using an explosive to commit a felony and is serving 10 years in federal prison. Shapiro claimed he wasn’t trying to hurt anyone but was simply trying to stop Shimon Peres from speaking at the synagogue.

The “Yale Five,” who sued the university for the right to opt out of its supposedly licentious New Haven dorms, have garnered plenty of press attention. Freedman’s account considers some of the subtleties, not least of which is that Yale’s president, Richard Levin, and its dean of students, Betty Trachtenberg, are both Jewish. The man who emerges as the moving force behind the lawsuit, though, is Rabbi Daniel Greer, father of one of the complaining students and founder of the New Haven yeshiva that educated another. The case is still in court.

Less potentially violent than the bomb in Florida, less publicized than the fight against Yale, the zoning dispute in Ohio, may offer the most interesting view into the conflicts among Jews. In this Cleveland suburb, even the volunteer firefighters are Jewish, but the Orthodox residents of the city struggled to win government or popular approval for their plan to construct new synagogues and a school. At one climactic meeting of the city’s planning and zoning commission, all six members, all Jewish, voted against the project. The main character in this episode is a gastroenterologist, David Gottesman, an Orthodox Jew who spearheaded the effort to win approval of the building projects and who ended up dismayed by the communal rifts that are delaying the construction. (Three months ago, a court partially approved the project.)

Fortunately for the Jews--but unfortunately for Freedman’s argument--all this amounts to much less than the apocalyptic civil war, permanent schism or even “‘struggle for the soul of American Jewry” that the author promises. Freedman interprets each dispute as a monumental battle rooted in the core religious and cultural values of Judaism. In fact, however, the conflicts he describes are mere skirmishes, and it would be more sensible to attribute them to broader trends in general American society than to intrinsically Jewish disagreements.

The question of including the matriarchs in the prayer at the Library Minyan of Temple Beth Am, for instance, echoes dozens of non-Jewish feminist battles in America, from the creation of women’s studies departments on college campuses to the inclusion of female images on American specie. Many religious Christians share Greer’s opposition to coed bathrooms and condom distribution in freshman dormitories, and many Americans of all faiths have joined Greer in becoming more politically conservative as they grow older. The passions inflamed by the Beachwood zoning dispute seem motivated more by concerns over property values and by not-in-my-backyard sentiments than by struggles over souls or religious doctrine.

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As for pipe-bomb felon Shapiro, we learn from Freedman that he was subject to outbursts of temper that “included holding his breath till he passed out,” that in junior high school he was medicated with Ritalin and Dexedrine and that young Harry’s parents shipped him off to a military school. Shapiro, in other words, had always been a problem personality looking for an issue to provoke him. Freedman blames the bombing attempt on the influence of Israeli settlers on the West Bank and Jewish self-defense advocates who spoke on the campus of Yeshiva University. It seems entirely possible, though, that if Shapiro were born a Christian or a Muslim, he might have also ended up in prison for his role in a bomb scare, just one with a different target.

However important these flaps may seem to Freedman and to those involved in them, a longer view would see them as minor. No one was injured in the Florida bombing; the bomb never went off. The Orthodox undergraduates had to pay Yale for their dorm rooms, but the college didn’t discipline them for living off campus. Several of the students involved in the suit got married, which excused them from having to live on campus. And, in the end, would it really be such a tragedy if they’d had to settle for Harvard? The Orthodox Jews in Beachwood made do with their cramped synagogues, and they were able to use ritual baths in a nearby suburb and at a Conservative congregation. In Los Angeles, the congregation decided to let the volunteer worship leaders decide on an individual basis whether to include the names of the matriarchs in the prayer. Not a single congregant left in protest.

Part of the reason Freedman so misinterprets the developments in contemporary American Jewry may be that he didn’t do the required reading. His bibliography inexplicably omits two of the best works on contemporary American Jewry published in recent years: “Jews and the New American Scene” by Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab and “‘Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America” by Elliott Abrams. Lipset and Raab beat Freedman to the prediction that though there may be fewer American Jews in the decades ahead, those remaining Jews would be more religious. And Abrams beat Freedman to the hypothesis that if American Jewry is to be sustained in the decades ahead, it will be the result of religious identity, not cultural attachments.

This leaves as Freedman’s main contribution his dire prediction that American Jewry will permanently splinter on theological grounds into “divergent faiths.” Don’t bet on it. Young Jews of the Orthodox, Conservative and Reform varieties frequently cross the lines dividing the movements when they get married. Many extended families comprise members of all three movements, as well as members of the smaller Reconstructionist strand and those who consider themselves Jewish but do not identify with a religious movement. Many Jews traverse two or three of these options over the course of a lifetime journey of intermittent Jewish practice and involvements. Moreover, for most Jews, choosing a synagogue or identifying with a movement has less to do with matters of theology or ideology than with practical matters, such as whether they get along with the rabbi, whether the institution is near their homes and whether the Hebrew school meets at a time that conflicts with soccer practice.

What, then, should we make of the Jew-versus-Jew tensions that undeniably do exist? Freedman characterizes them as a “groundless hatred” and compares them to the situation of Jewish forces in Judea during the 1st century, when Jews fought against one another, allowing the Romans to conquer Jerusalem. It’s yet another case of the author interpreting American Jewish history in the context of ancient Judea rather than America. In America, ideological and religious differences are seen as healthy aspects of a free and pluralistic debate that contributes to a stronger society, an attitude not altogether foreign to Judaism, whose Talmud, after all, is full of vigorous debates and whose people have ended up none the worse for them.