The Secular Spirit of Judaism

I see from the publication of Annie Polland’s Landmark of the Spirit: The Eldridge Street Synagogue that the venerable New York edifice it describes has been with us, in one form or another, since 1887. Sadly, I’ve only managed two visits there, both in its 121st year. The first was when I took my 10-year-old daughter Eve Rose for a service, which required a bribe of a Chinatown meal organized by my rabbi, David Gelfand of Temple Israel Park Avenue. Since the services there were conducted entirely in Hebrew by the Orthodox Congregation Kahal Adath Jeshurun, with the women separated from the men, it was not really a smashing success for either one of us. The second visit was for a Sunday morning lecture by the historian Tony Michels on the role of Yiddish-speaking intellectuals during the heyday of the Jewish Lower East Side, and proved more congenial.

Tony and I entered the Stanford doctoral program in history together, back in 1991, and I left in 1993. So it felt like a double mitzvah to see him all grown up, and bedecked with the title of George L. Mosse Associate Professor of American Jewish History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, talking about the same things he and I kicked around in endless seminars followed by more arguments over beers a few lives ago. When Tony took questions from the audience, I asked how Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers—the gazillion-selling doorstop of a book that probably defined the Jewish Lower East Side for almost all literate Jews of a certain age—had held up as history. Tony said he had a much higher opinion of it than did most other professional historians. Howe, in Tony’s opinion, had gotten many of the details about the Jewish Lower East Side wrong, but he had gotten the big questions right. Indeed, it’s easy to see how a non-professional historian might be tempted to take the imaginative leap here or there, even the non-historian who grew up in this world.

The strangeness of that profoundly unassimilated culture makes some of its most extraordinary aspects difficult to, um, assimilate. It wasn’t merely Howe’s own socialist commitments that led him to define socialist politics at the epicenter of immigrant Jewish life. It actually belonged there. But the strangeness—at least from our perspective today—hardly ends there.

Take the fact that a good number of these socialist intellectuals—many of whom vociferously but deeply anachronistically insisted that they were not “Jews” but “Yiddish-speaking Socialists”—did not come to this country actually speaking Yiddish. They may have known it, but they conversed with one another in Russian. As Michels points out in his book A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York, following the strikes and protests in 1886, they came to see the value of forging an alliance with German socialists, many of whom were gentiles. So to be more effective in America, these Russian-speaking Jews switched back to Yiddish, which the Germans did not speak themselves but understood. These intellectuals might have dropped by Eldridge Street, but like yours truly, they weren’t much for shul. “[Y]oung Russian Jews were more likely to attend a lecture than a synagogue service, dance hall, saloon, card game, [or] night school,” Michels explains.

And so we had come full circle, albeit now in English. Tony and I were doing what Jews had been doing in exactly that location for 120-plus years. And here the very same building—nearly a century and a quarter later—was being used for exactly the same purposes. There is still a congregation praying at Eldridge Street, but the building itself is now maintained by a foundation that recently completed a magnificent $20 million restoration. Sitting in that room, we were connected “from generation to generation” not by a religion, but by a quest for knowledge on the one hand and justice on the other. “Socialism is the name of our desire,” was the way Irving Howe once put it, but he was speaking, if not exclusively, then primarily for and about Jews. Today, we no longer seek socialism but social justice leavened with social knowledge—and the modesty and humility that such knowledge brings.

“In remembrance is the secret of redemption,” Polland writes. And it is interesting just how much of what serves as Jewish secular culture is based on this “secret.” I was invited to speak recently to an extremely diverse Jewish group of Yale students over Shabbat dinner, and I chose as my topic something that’s been troubling me of late: “What do (non-Orthodox) Jews believe?” I was nearly bowled over by the eloquence of the students and the passion with which they debated the question. Thing is, nobody could answer the question. The closest we came were variations on “our history” and the “quest for knowledge.” These are deeply unsatisfactory answers and filled with intellectual flaws when you consider them in a historically disciplined fashion. (Do I really share much history with, say, a Yemenite Jew?) And isn’t it a bit ethnocentric, not to say false, to assume that all Jews share a quest for knowledge. Was that what Meyer Lansky was all about? David Berkowitz?

Still, it’s the best we can do for now, and looking about both of those rooms full of Jews, I believed them. Even though, to be honest, I knew better.