Jewish Culture Does Not Define Us

Wesleyan University president Michael Roth 

I have long been lamenting the decline of American Jews who care about identifying as Jews. That we are now at record levels in that sad statistic is well known, thanks to a Pew Research survey taken a few years ago. The corollary to that decline is that over 70% of American Jews are marrying non-Jewish spouses — which means that in about half of those cases, their children will not be Jewish at all.

Although in some — perhaps many — cases they may still identify as Jewish, it doesn’t help that the Reform Movement now considers patrilineal descent a legitimate definition of Jewish identity. When a denomination whose very genesis came about by rejecting the foundational document that created the Jewish people that defines us, it hardly lends credence to their definitional pronouncements. It only makes matters worse by confusing the rest of the world about who is and isn’t a Jew.

Besides, as most secular Jews will tell you, what difference does it make anyway how a person identifies? To most secular Jews, Judaism is a culture derived from traditions accumulated over time — traditions they later accept or reject as their cultural values evolve.

How we got here is a complicated issue that I have addressed many times. What I will say is that the vast majority of American Jews fall into a category called Tinok Shenishba — literally, ‘a child taken captive’. In this context, it refers to Jews born and raised in an environment that included no substantive Jewish education. Their parents were mostly non-observant, many of whom ran away from the ‘old world’ image of the uneducated, uncultured European Jew in order to assimilate and pursue the American dream. Children raised with those values could hardly be expected to understand what Judaism is about. At best, they will embrace cultural values like social justice and call it the quintessential Jewish value.

Conservative rabbis have only encouraged this attitude and focus little — if at all — on the mitzvos of the Torah. To the extent that they do, their congregants mostly observe those mitzvos in the breach, if they pay attention to them at all.

Even these rabbis are not entirely at fault — this is what they were taught. Reform Jews refer to mitzvah observance as a nice thing to do but ultimately voluntary, while Conservative rabbis do little to convince their congregants to observe the mitzvos they themselves consider mandatory. Which is probably rooted in the way they were educated to relate to their congregants. Both resulting in a willful disregard for the obligatory nature of halacha.

Although this is a situation not of my making, it does not make me feel any less sad. The consequences of either a lack of authentic Jewish education or its distortion by heterodox clergy upon their members have recently shocked me. This has become especially evident since the war in Gaza began and with the exponential rise of antisemitism in this country — most visibly on college campuses, especially the more prominent ones.

The pro-Palestinian voices have been coming almost exclusively from the left — the only politically correct position to take on those campuses. There is also a strong presence of students from the Middle East who are entirely sympathetic to the Palestinian cause while completely rejecting the Israeli point of view. They are joined in solidarity by their American counterparts, by DEI hires — some from the Middle East themselves, often Palestinians or deeply sympathetic to them — and by far-left progressive faculty members, many of whom are Jewish. It should be no surprise that organizations like “Jews for Justice in Palestine” exist and parrot the Hamas narrative at rallies, some of which are blatantly antisemitic and even call for the genocide of Jews in Israel.

The Trump administration has gone out of its way to clamp down on campus antisemitism, including deporting Middle Eastern students who shout such rhetoric. So when a Tinok Shenishba like Michael Roth — Wesleyan’s Jewish president — defends that rhetoric on the basis of freedom of speech, and then makes a point of emphasizing how Jewish he is, that is the saddest thing of all.

Yes, he is Jewish. And yes, he is proud of it. But what exactly is he proud of? Because his status as a Tinok Shenishba makes him unqualified to define what it means to be proud of Judaism. I do not believe he is observant. Without observance — the most essential defining characteristic of being a Jew — his definition is missing Judaism’s most vital component. It’s like a Ferrari owner proudly declaring ownership even though the car is missing its engine.

Yet he has been one of the most vocal critics of the Trump administration’s efforts to clamp down on campus antisemitism, claiming they are merely an excuse to advance a conservative DEI agenda. The thing is, if DEI policies on campus have contributed to the massive wave of antisemitic protests we’ve seen, then looking at DEI as part of the problem is a step in the right direction. So, with all due respect to Mr. Roth, I reject his framing of the Trump administration’s antisemitism policy as a cynical political tool — and his use of his Jewish identity to bolster that argument.

That the vast majority of Orthodox Jews approve of Trump’s antisemitism policies surely indicates that Jews who understand what truly makes someone Jewish recognize that these policies align far more closely with authentic Jewish values than those of cultural Jews whose values shift with the winds of time. It should not go unnoticed that Jewish college students — and even the ADL — approve of the administration’s approach.

The question then becomes: why isn’t the most exponentially growing  right-wing segment of Orthodox Jewry doing more about this? The right wing has largely failed to reach out to the Tinok Shenishba. While there are many fine organizations that do — such as Chabad, NCSY, and Aish, to name just a few — they are nevertheless a drop in the bucket, representing only a small fraction of the Orthodox world.

The last time a right-wing rabbi (Rabbi Yosef Reinman) tried to do something of significance like this — well over a decade ago — he was shot down almost before he started. And there has been no serious attempt since. That is how we get the Michael Roths of the world, who publicly speak as Jews when their Judaism is at best cultural — if that.

The right-wing Orthodox world has become so self-focused that they barely acknowledge the problem. They seem interested only in perpetuating themselves, and they are doing a pretty good job of it. The rest of the Jewish world? In their minds, it is a lost cause — best ignored.

But is this what God really wants? Does God want us to write off 90% of American Jewry? I don’t think so. The results of that attitude have so far not been favorable.