HOW DID LIBERALISM BECOME JUDAISM?

By Steven Plaut

Steven Plaut:   The following article is a bit long and appeared in “Jewish Magazine” more than 15 years ago. It still timely. http://www.jewishmag.com/9mag/plaut/plaut.htm 

 It is too long to reproduce in full here.  Here is but one segment, and if you find it interesting you can read the full piece at http://www.jewishmag.com/9mag/plaut/plaut.htm :

  Beyond simple persecution, the Diaspora Jews have long suffered from serious psychopathologies, and in particular a sort of assimilationist self-hatred. While the early Zionists were rebelling against the religious authorities in Eastern European communities, it became clear fairly quickly that Zionism was also a rebellion against the tendencies by many assimilationist Jews to advocate national self-destruction. The Jewish socialist and communist Left in Eastern Europe, but also many Jewish liberals elsewhere, promoted radical assimilationism, where Jews would cut themselves off altogether from their Jewish culture and roots and assimilate aggressively into the surrounding majority cultures of the Russians, Poles, Hungarians, etc….

There emerged a new form of Jewish assimilationism, the “Liberalism-as-Judaism” form of pseudo-Judaism. Especially in the United States, this “school of thought” held that Judaism was nothing more nor less than the American liberal political agenda, including the advocacy – in the name of Judaism and “Prophetic Ethics” – of liberal fashionable political ideas. The beginnings of this were in the New Deal era, when American Jewish support for Franklin D. Roosevelt was nearly unanimous. It continued after World War II.

  The “Liberalism as Judaism” School argued that all of Judaism and Jewish tradition could be boiled down into a search for civil “justice” and secular “freedom”. Since it was axiomatic, in the eyes of Jewish liberals, that the liberal political agenda was synonymous with justice, freedom, and righteousness and that the opponents of liberalism were evil and unjust, “Judaism” itself could be conscripted in the cause of promoting liberal partisanship.

  In the era when liberalism meant civil rights, anti-poverty programs, basic social welfare “Safety Net” programs, etc., that is from the 1930s through the 1960s, such a set of axioms seemed plausible to a great many. By aligning themselves with the forces of progress and enlightenment, Jews would promote their own acceptance and reputation, at least among the thinking progressive majority of Americans.

  They would join the “good” Americans in their struggle for a better society. It would be a society in which Jews were appreciated and honored as comrades in arms in the battle for freedom, a society of general tolerance in which Jews would be amongst those tolerated.

  Numerous institutions developed in the American Jewish community devoted to the new “Liberalism as Judaism” orthodoxy. The raison d’etre of the many Jewish Community Relations Councils was first and foremost to pursue the liberal political agenda, to conscript organized Jewry behind liberal social programs and civil rights. The community “federations” also pursued liberal causes, and often operated as the Jewish analogue to Christian charity groups, funding general community hospitals and social services. The Jewish weeklies that formed the main communications network of American Jews, generally owned and published by the “federations”, were invariably liberal.

  The “defense organizations,” such as Bnai Brith, American Jewish Congress, and the American Jewish Committee, originally founded in large part in order to battle against anti-Semitism, joined the struggle for

  Liberalism and often devoted the bulk of their resources and energies to the promotion of liberal causes. Large parts of the Reform and Conservative synagogue movements, and to a much smaller extent some Orthodox as well, jumped on to the “Liberalism as Judaism” bandwagon. Many Reform and Conservative Rabbis devoted their weekly synagogue sermons to the advocacy of liberal causes. “Social action” committees abounded in synagogues and other Jewish community institutions, where “social action” meant only one thing – the liberal political agenda.

  From the start, there were of course problems with the formula of “Liberalism as Judaism,” that is, with the assertion that the essence of Judaism is nothing other than moral sentiments that may be conscripted in support of liberal ideological fads. The first problem was that if one accepts this assertion literally, there is no reason at all for anyone to remain Jewish. Surely, Jewish tradition speaks nobly and highly of the search for justice and peace, but so does virtually every other religious or non-religious humanist tradition. After all, like that famous old advertisement for eating Levy’s Rye Bread, you don’t have to be Jewish to be a liberal. There were plenty of folks advocating liberal causes and civil rights who ate pork, prayed in churches or not at all, celebrated Christmas, etc. So if the whole point of Judaism was thought to be to inspire liberalism and devotion to “social justice”, Judaism was superfluous. There were far easier ways to express and advocate liberalism and social justice.

  Thus what had begun as a mass public relations scam and as a sort of play-acting by insecure Western Jews seeking a method for making themselves appear more acceptable to the non-Jewish majorities surrounding them quickly metamorphosed into an avenue for assimilation. For the new generations of Jews growing up in Western freedom and tolerance, there was little if any reason to retain their Jewishness. As secularism and higher education spread, approaching universality for Jews, religiosity diminished in general among the educated classes in which Jews were concentrated. Once national identity and ritualistic observance were abandoned, there was little – if anything – to motivate retention of Jewish identity, whether religious or secular. The result was rampant assimilation. By the 1970s large segments of the non-Orthodox Jewish community in America (and to a somewhat smaller extent the non-Orthodox in other Western countries) had for all intents and purposes assimilated and ceased to be [performing] Jews. They no longer regarded themselves as Jewish in any meaningful way. They had no formal ties with any Jewish institution, religious, cultural, political, nationalist or otherwise.

  This was especially notable among the young Jews in America. Intermarriage rates crossed the 50% barrier. Jews whose Jewishness plays some dominant role in their self-definition and life are a small fraction of that number. Assimilated American Jews do not define themselves as Jewish in a purely religious or national sense. With astronomical intermarriage rates, complete assimilation for the non-Orthodox is now simply a matter of time, and sufficient time has already transpired to have eliminated much of American Jewry altogether. So the “party line” or public relations formula for Western Jews has long been that they are nothing more than a religious minority, having jettisoned claims to constituting a Jewish “nationality” or ethnic-nation.