It is a Tree of Life to All Who Hold Fast to It

I wrote this in early 2019 to process my grief and confusion about the morning of October 27, 2018. It was originally published in Brisket, and I am re-publishing it on my blog for the one-year anniversary.

On Saturdays, Jews from Jerusalem to Jacksonville, Florida, gather for morning prayers. “Jew” is a broad category, encompassing strict observers of Judaism as well as completely secular but self-identified ethnic Jews. Not all Jews practice the religion of Judaism, and those who do may choose to practice rituals, rules, and traditions in very different ways. But some number of Jews throughout the world leave their homes on Shabbat morning, a day of rest set apart from the rest of the week, to pray together with fellow Jews.

This does not look the same everywhere. Some go to Orthodox synagogues and others attend Reform temples. Some meet in large buildings and others in rented rooms. Some are organized into a congregation, others are more informal. Some affiliate with a movement like Reconstructionist, Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox Judaism, and others simply call themselves a community. There are services where prayer is led in Hebrew, others that prefer English, and many that use both. Some congregations will not begin without a minyan, the quorum of ten adults needed to sanctify the ritual, while others begin with optimism that people will trickle in a few minutes late. But regardless of where it happens and what traditions a group does (or does not) follow, these Jews have come together on Shabbat to read the Old Testament from the Torah’s scrolls. 

 

On Shabbat mornings, services at Congregation B’nai Israel in Gainesville, Florida, begin at 9:30 AM. The congregation rarely begins with a minyan, but a congregant will be there to lead shacharit, the morning prayer service, and they stand at the front of the sanctuary. They begin with the Mah Tovu prayer. “Mah tovu ohalecha yaakov, mishkenotechah yisrael,” they sing. “How lovely are your sanctuaries, people of Jacob, your study houses, descendants of Israel.” This prayer acknowledges the interconnected modes of revelation, the revelation that comes through study and learning and the revelation that is God. The congregation joins, singing in Hebrew, “Your great love inspires me to enter Your house, to worship in Your holy sanctuary, filled with awe for You.” 

If you visit B’nai Israel today, you enter a serene lobby, but if you had visited the synagogue in the early 2000s, back when I was a teenager, you would have entered through a set of nondescript glass doors into a small foyer. Wall-to-wall blue carpet dominated the space.  You could have passed through it in five strides—into the social hall if you walked straight forward and into the sanctuary if you went right—grabbing a kippah from the yarmulke holder built into the wall as you went along your way.

A few years ago the congregation decided to enlarge the entry space to make the synagogue more welcoming and give a better first impression. They pulled up the blue carpet and laid tile. They pushed out the frontage of the building so congregants could mill about after services and meals. The blonde stone that used to be the facade of the building but now serves as an interior wall glows in the Florida sunshine, brightening the space. It is inviting.

By the time the leader recites the Shema Yisrael—the central prayer of the service, and one of the most important prayers in Judaism for its affirmation of monotheism, which concisely declares, “Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one”—a few more congregants will have passed through the entryway and into the sanctuary. They file into their preferred pews, pick up prayer books, and rifle through the pages to catch up with the service. The head of the ritual committee—who has been filling that role since before my bat mitzvah—sits in his regular spot, and six or seven regular attendees who happen to arrive on the early side that morning will dot the pews. The rabbi is there, or will be there soon. Some of them are parents who have first deposited their young kids in childcare. But most are older, in age and tenure in the synagogue.  

 

On Shabbat morning, October 27, 2018, Jews gathered to worship in the holy spaces of a synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood. Three congregations—two Conservative and one Reconstructionist—held services together but apart in the same building. Early-arriving congregants walked from their homes or their parking spots up the inclining slopes of Wilkins Avenue or Shady Avenue, arriving with cheeks flushed by the exertion and brisk air. Crossing through the buildings entryway, members of New Light headed downstairs to the basement, while Tree of Life-Or L’Simcha gathered in the chapel and Dor Hadash’s Torah study service assembled in the sanctuary. Already by 9:45 AM, 75 people bustled within the building. 

Not everyone was there early to pray—or solely to pray. Richard Gottfried and Daniel Stein, members of New Light, were in the kitchen preparing for a congregational breakfast. Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz, Daniel Leger, and another Dor Hadash member set up for the morning’s services as they did every Shabbat. With a bris scheduled, they put out a table in the foyer with glasses for wine and whiskey. Cecil and David Rosenthal were there arranging the siddurim and talitot—prayer books and prayer shawls—and greeting fellow Tree of Life members as they entered the synagogue’s doors. At promptly 9:45 AM, with just two other New Light congregants assembled, Melvin Wax began chanting the first words of shacharit: “Mah tovu ohalecha yaakov, mishkenotechah yisrael.”

Five minutes later, an armed man walked into Tree of Life’s foyer where Cecil Rosenthal stood, ready to welcome him to Tree of Life.  

 

That was the morning I learned a new term: stochastic terrorism. This expression describes how mass communication can be used to motivate random actors to violence. [1] The violence itself is predictable, because it has been incited by public calls to take action, but no single violent action or event can be predicted. [2] For example, it was not random that a man with a gun decided to punish Jews on a Saturday morning in October because of their support for immigrants and refugees. The President tweeted on October 22 that “Mexico’s Police and Military are unable to stop the Caravan heading to the Southern Border of the United States. Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in.” He described it as a “National Emerg[ency],” and three days later he deployed troops to the border. [3] So it was random that it was a man in Western Pennsylvania who packed up his car and drove to Pittsburgh on the 27th. But it could have been any number of gun-owning white nationalists fearing that immigrant criminals were infiltrating their country.

Just as the perpetrator was not entirely random, neither were the victims. It was not random that Jews were killed that Shabbat—it was random which Jews were killed. There are other synagogue buildings in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, and the region that could have been targeted. And there are other congregants who could have, indeed might have, been in Tree of Life’s building that morning. A weekend with a bar or bat mitzvah, for example, would have increased attendance, even at that early hour. 

There are, however, factors that even the stochastic nature of this violence would not have changed: the aging populations of Jewish congregations, and the burden of care that older members of communities overwhelmingly shoulder while younger members labor to meet the demands of late-stage capitalism. It is the loss of these communal caretakers, as much as the loss of life and the fear inculcated by terrorism, that made these murders a  tragedy. 

 

It was me who was in Pittsburgh on October 27, not my parents, but they were at greater risk than I was on that morning. They are regular synagogue attendees, not me. Had this stochastic event struck in North Central Florida instead of Pittsburgh, perhaps my parents would have been among the 11 killed.

If violence entered B’nai Israel at 9:50 AM and walked through the sunlit lobby, it would find at least 25 people in the building—fewer than 75, certainly, but for a single congregation and not three. Violence would find the handful of congregants who take turns leading the earliest part of the morning service, and the members who arrive early to make up the minyan. Violence would find the synagogue’s leadership, including several officers and board members as well as the rabbi and the executive director. The congregation’s leadership capacity—in prayer and governance—would be significantly depleted in just a few minutes. Someone new would have to step up to manage the relentless coordination of Torah and Haftorah readers and leaders for Shabbat services. There would be fewer people to ask to read and lead. Members would have to be elected to the Board, to serve without access to valuable wells of institutional memory. 

 

This would be true at many  Conservative or Reform synagogues in the United States. [4] Congregations are aging because the American Jewish community is older compared to the broader adult population; 26 percent of Jews are older than 65, compared to 19 percent nationally. (The exception to this demographic trend is in Orthodox communities, which have younger median ages as a result of higher birthrates). [5] In 2010, the FACT-Synagogue 3000 survey of 946 Conservative and Reform congregations found that “young people between the ages of 18 and 34 represent a scant 8 percent” of membership, compared to 24 percent aged 65 and older. [6] The latter figure is even more pronounced in smaller congregations (less than 250 families), where 30 percent of members are older than 65. Consequently, congregations are shrinking. The same survey found that “Saturday morning services in Conservative synagogues drew an average of 24 worshipers for every 100-member families. Friday evening services at Reform temples drew an average of 17 worshipers for every 100 families.” [8]

Although Pittsburgh is currently the 32nd largest Jewish community in the United States, with a population of 50,000, it is still subject to these same trends. [8] Congregations are merging, selling buildings, and consolidating resources. Tree of Life, the second-oldest congregation in Pittsburgh and one of the oldest synagogues in the United States, merged with upstart congregation Or L’Simcha in 2010 after several years of renting them space in their capacious building, which was constructed in the 1950s at a time when Tree of Life was a much larger congregation. This infused over 100 members into Tree of Life’s declining congregation, which was losing people to aging and to suburban synagogues. In the same year, Dor Hadash became a tenant in the building. New Light Congregation, like Tree of Life, was founded in the nineteenth century and experienced growth throughout the mid-twentieth century, but they too found themselves with a shrinking membership by the early twenty-first. In 2017 they also moved in with Tree of Life after selling their own building to Chabad’s rapidly expanding Yeshiva Schools, holding their services in the basement while the other two congregations used the main sanctuary and the chapel. [9]

Most synagogues could use an infusion of youth into their leadership. But there are structural reasons why these roles tend to be filled by older congregants. They are established in careers, or perhaps even retired. If they have children, they are older and more independent. They have time to volunteer to do the hard work of sustaining a community. 

If ethnographic or sociological studies have been done of synagogue lay leadership, they are not easily found. When I asked Rabbi David Kaiman of B’nai Israel why he thinks synagogue leadership is dominated by older folks, he noted that the synagogue increasingly becomes a place for routine socializing as people age. As older adults age out of the social orbits around schools and workplaces, religious spaces continue to offer connection and engagement. 

 

I do not bemoan the aging and shrinking of American congregations, because I do not see anything wrong with secular Jewish identity and because I am optimistic that these institutions will give way to new ways of practicing Judaism. But there is great anxiety within the Jewish community about their loss, and the question of how to attract younger Jews to synagogue has been the subject of much debate, experimentation, and investment. [10] Congregations have lowered their dues, renovated their spaces, revamped their programming, and placed greater emphasis on social justice—welcoming in Jews who previously felt excluded because of their class, race, or politics, or because they converted, or because they lack proficiency with Judaism or Hebrew. Synagogues have been so eager to invite people in and make their sanctuaries more welcoming—to Jews, of course, but also to communities of other faiths, immigrants, and other minority communities—that they inadvertently became a threat to white nationalism. With their lobbies and greeters and come-one-come-all enthusiasm, synagogues became targets, and vulnerable ones at that. 

 

Had this stochastic event struck in North Central Florida on October 27, my parents likely would not have been in synagogue as early as 9:50 AM. If my mom is not leading shacharit or volunteering in the kitchen to help prepare the lunch that follows services, they tend to arrive around 10:15 AM, when the congregation begins to read from the Torah. Would that have spared my parents from being among the victims? 

Possibly, but likely not. To read through the list of victims is to read through the archetypes that make up many American Jewish congregations. [11] Rose Mallinger, Melvin Wax, and the Rosenthal brothers attended synagogue every week without fail. Mallinger helped prepare breakfast for the congregation for many years. Joyce Feinberg and Irving Younger liked to greet fellow attendees as they entered the building on Shabbat mornings. A co-president of New Light, Stephen Cohen, told the New York Times that Wax, Daniel Stein, and Richard Gottfried were “the people who conducted our services, they did Torah readings.” [12] Every synagogue has their own Rose, Melvin, Cecil, David, Joyce, and Irving, as well as other archetypes. My brother, who spent two years working at a Conservative synagogue, claims that every congregation has “a Gary”—an older malcontent who complains about children. Rabbi Kaiman told me a story about his brother, who returned from visiting Conservative synagogues around the country and swore that every single one had a life insurance salesman responsible for getting together ten people for a minyan three times a week. 

My parents are among “the regulars” at Shabbat services. My mother has served on the synagogue’s Board of Directors and is the long-time president of the Sisterhood. Their social lives revolve around B’nai Israel, and their closest friends are all fellow congregants.  They are both in their 60s. 

 

It was the day after the shooting, at the vigil held on Sunday afternoon, that I heard Rabbi Meyers of Tree of Life describe what he witnessed the previous morning. I stood outside the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial in the rain with the hundreds of other people who arrived too late to find a seat inside. We listened as the speeches were broadcast over loudspeakers. “There were 12 of us in the sanctuary at that time,” Rabbi Meyers said, “And as is customary in the Jewish faith—and I’ve also seen it in other faiths—all the early people come and sit in the back.” [13] The image he conjured with those words squeezed tight around my heart and shortened my breath and drew tears from my eyes. All of Tree of Life’s leaders, praying together, standing in a row. 

Amidst all of the heterogeneity of global Jewry—our diverse rituals, traditions, politics, and spaces of worship—I was struck by this fundamental similarity. The older people come early and join their friends in the back row. I thought of my parents and their friends, sitting together in the same three back rows every week.  

 

“The three people who died are the heart of our congregation,” Cohen told the Times. “It’s a stab in the heart.” [14] This is the underlying tragedy of these murders. Whether or not you believe in the preservation of organized religion, or the traditional American synagogue, these members did. They found immense value and comfort and community in belonging to their synagogues, and they helped create and sustain their congregations for others who felt similarly. Their murders meant a loss of invaluable human capital and of the capacity needed to maintain communities. And that’s the real tragedy at the heart of this story: their killer was more successful than he even realized. 

Yet in the end he did not meet his objective. Today, Tree of Life, Dor Hadash, and New Light continue to meet every Shabbat. Two other local congregations with grand buildings host them in their chapels and classrooms. With painful resilience, their members have resumed Sisterhood and Men’s Club activities, planned Purim celebrations, held committee meetings, and strategized about their futures. In the coming months, each congregation will receive an allocation from the donations made in the wake of the tragedy--money I imagine they would rather not have, considering the circumstances, but that nonetheless will help sustain their operations. [15] Their endurance does not belie the tragedy—it is a refusal to let white nationalism win. 

 

 1. Thank you to my friend Phil Rocco, a political scientist and native Pittsburgher, for teaching me this term and thereby providing the framing for this essay

2.  Jared Keller, “To Discuss the Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting, We Have to Discuss Trump,” Pacific Standard, October 29, 2018.

 3. Opheli Garcia Lawler, “What’s Important to Know About the Migrant Caravan,” The Cut, October 30, 2018.

4.  It is difficult to find data on the Reconstructionist movement.

5. “Jewish Population in the US,” Steinhardt Social Research Institute at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, Brandeis University. Consulted February, 2019.  

6.  Steven M. Cohen, Lawrence A. Hoffman, Jonathon Ament, and Ron Miller, “Conservative and Reform Congregations in the United States Today: Findings from the FACT-Synagogue 3000 Survey of 2010,” 2011.

7.  S3K Synagogue Studies Institute, “Reform and Conservative Congregations: Different Strengths, Different Challenges,” S3K Report, March 2012.

8.  As of 2018. Berman Jewish DataBank, “Pocket Demographics 2.0: US Jewish Population,” 2018.

9.  Adam Reinherz, “Yeshiva Schools purchases former home of New Light Congregation,” Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, December 20, 2017. 

10.  For example: Rabbi Michael Knopf, “What’s Driving Jews Away from Synagogues? Not Dues, but ‘Membership,’” Haaretz, May 26, 2016; Ben Sales, “More synagogues are getting rid of their mandatory dues,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 30, 2017.

11.  Moriah Balingit, Kristine Phillips, Amy B. Wang, Deanna Paul, Wesley Lowery, and Kellie B. Gormley, “The Lives Lost in the Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting,” The Washington Post, October 28, 2018.

12.  Campbell Robertson, Sabrina Tavernise, and Sandra E. Garcia, “Quiet Day at Pittsburgh Synagogue Becomes a Battle to Survive,” The New York Times, October 28, 2018.

13.  Rabbi Hazzan Jeffery Meyers, “Rabbi Hazzan Jeffery Meyers Addresses Pittsburgh Vigil," Cantors Assembly, October 30, 2018.

14.  Robertson, Tavernise, and Garcia, “Quiet Day at Pittsburgh Synagogue Becomes a Battle to Survive.” 

15.  Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh Victims of Terror Fund, “Independent Committee Report,” March 5, 2019.

What Jews Can (and Cannot) Learn from the JCC Bomb Threats

In the middle of the morning on February 20, 2017, nursery school teachers at the St. Paul Jewish Community Center (JCC) calmly began lining up their students to go outside. Instead of loosing the kids to play freely on the Center’s playground, as they usually did, the teachers led their students on a walk down the block and around the corner to Fire Station 19. Firefighters backed one of their trucks out of the stationhouse and teachers began seating the 200 young children on mats where the truck usually parked. The kids watched with rapt attention as the firefighters donned their gear and demonstrated how they get ready to go put out fires. 

For the kids, the visit to Station 19 was a diversion from the usual routine of their days. For their teachers, it was making the best of a scary situation. At around 10:00 AM, the JCC had received a phoned-in bomb threat similar to the robo-calls that 65 other JCCs and Jewish institutions had received since January 4. Staff immediately evacuated children and adults from the building.

After a thorough search of the building, the St. Paul Police Department’s bomb squad deemed the call a hoax. Within a few hours, media reported that the St. Paul JCC was one of 12 JCCs—stretching from Buffalo, NY to Albuquerque, NM—that received the robo-calls that morning. The city’s two newspapers, public radio affiliate, and television news stations all carried the story, with many featuring quotes from Steve Hunegs, the executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas. “To see the JCC having to evacuate is very sad,” said Hunegs, “and unfortunately a reflection of the times in which we now live.”

The mainstream news media’s coverage of the threats against Jewish Community Centers (JCCs) brought more attention to the institution in the first three months of 2017 than perhaps ever before in the 140 year history of the JCC movement. In total, 85 JCCs received at least one hoax call before the suspected perpetrator was arrested on March 23. Between January 1 and March 22, news outlets posted almost 6,000 articles online about the Jewish Community Center.[1] Despite constant news of dysfunction in Washington and hate crimes against immigrants, refugees, Muslims, and people of color, the media took notice as week after week, JCCs across the United States evacuated their buildings to search for the threatened explosives.

Leaders within and outside the Jewish Community quickly spoke out to condemn anti-Semitism. The assumption running throughout these statements, sometimes expressed implicitly and other times explicitly, was that the blame for the threats lay with bigots, white nationalists, neo-fascists, and other ideologies at the populist fringes of the alt-right. Commentators expressed a similar view. Elissa Strauss at Slate, whose child attended preschool at a JCC, walked the line between condemnation and accusation when she wrote: “For many on the alt-right, the taunts and threats they issue—possibly including the ones aimed at the JCCs—are an elaborate practical joke.” A wave of cemetery desecrations and neo-Nazi activity bolstered this assumption.

The increasing, and increasingly visible, anti-Semitism of internet harassment and vandalism and bomb threats provoked insecurity, discomfort, and fear within Jewish communities. After police declared the call to the St. Paul JCC a hoax, St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman and Councilman Chris Tolbert released a statement that acknowledged the emotional toll of the threat. “While no one was physically hurt,” they wrote, “we know that it will take time for you [the affected families] and your children to feel safe.” Since the idea of a “tri-faith” Protestant-Catholic-Jewish America emerged after World War II, Jews living in the United States have navigated a place for themselves within the country’s social mainstream. This inclusion has not always felt secure or comfortable, and some Jews have retained a feeling of outsiderness; Jews nonetheless sought and achieved inclusion for its economic and social benefits. With the rise of anti-Semitism, however, Jews now find themselves amidst marginalized groups with whom they rarely identified prior to the 2016 presidential campaign: Muslims, refugees, Mexicans and Latinxs.

Compounding the feeling of insecurity was the sense that Americans—particularly the American president—were not standing up against the rising tide of discrimination. This perceived abandonment raised questions amongst Jews about their place in American democracy, and by extension the health of American pluralism. Writing in The Forward, the executive director of the Anne Frank Center For Mutual Respect accused President Trump of ignoring “an epidemic” of anti-Semitism sweeping the United States. Even optimists like Dave Simon, the executive director of the JCC of Greater Albuquerque, expressed some concern about the increasing number of anti-Semitic incidents globally. When interviewed by The Atlantic writer Emma Green, he argued, “This is the best time in history to be a Jew in the United States. Our country is so phenomenal, and Jews have come so far in this country, and we have so many blessings.” He nonetheless felt the need to defend pluralism from assault, adding, “We can’t tolerate anti-Semitism or hate and discrimination against anybody.”

It took many observers by surprise, then, when the suspected perpetrator was arrested in Israel. Michael Kadar, an 19-year-old Israeli-American teenager, has been indicted for phoning in bomb threats to American JCCs—among a slew of other crimes. Over a three-year period, Kadar targeted over 2,000 institutions across the globe, including 142 threats involving air travel, 48 to police stations, and the extortion of Delaware State Senator Ernesto Lopez (R). JCCs and Jewish schools were far from the only targets of Kadar’s terror.

Complicating the indictment, however, is a question about Kadar’s mental fitness. News outlets have reported that the teenager suffers from an inoperable brain tumor that affects his behavior and decision-making. According to Kadar’s lawyers, the impairment caused by the condition is significant enough that the Israeli Defense Force excused Kadar from mandatory military service. This detail, in tandem with the diversity of the perpetrator’s targets, makes it difficult to assess his motivation for targeting Jewish Community Centers to a greater extent than other institutions (Jewish and non-Jewish). Although Kadar’s testimony at trial may eventually reveal a justification, it will be complicated by the question of his ability to reason.

Kadar was not a member of the American alt-right or an anti-Semite, as most people assumed—he is a fellow Jew. Why would a Jew attack Jewish institutions, and why the JCC in particular? What do these threats reveal about Jews’ sense of belonging within broader American society, and even more puzzlingly what do the threats tell us about Jewish acceptance of other Jews within our religion, ethnicity, or culture? 

Without attributing motivations to Kadar, the bomb threats are less contradictory when understood as attacks on pluralism rather than as Jewish anti-Semitism. Indeed, Kadar’s robo-calls raise some interesting questions about the state of pluralism in the United States and within global Jewry. Pluralism for Jews in the United States operates on two levels. Jews benefit first and foremost from American democratic pluralism, the ideal of including all minority groups in the body politic without demanding that they relinquish their independent cultures and identities. Within the Jewish community and intra-Jewish relations, however, pluralism is the idea that all Jews should be welcomed in communal spaces regardless of their affiliation with a religious movement—such as Reform, Conservative, Orthodox—or their lack of affiliation or their secularism. Just as anti-Semites have sought to exclude Jews from American citizenship and society, there are Jews whose concern for the loss of religious traditions and Jewish ethnic identity has also led them to resist American Jewry’s integration into mainstream American society.

The history of the Jewish Community Center is a prime example of how Jews have debated the balance between religious pluralism and American democratic pluralism. JCCs were religiously pluralistic institutions from their origination. In the late nineteenth century, American Jewish communities began establishing local Young Men’s Hebrew Associations (YMHAs) to bring together all of the Jews living in the area under one roof. Regardless of which synagogue a person belonged to, they were invited to become a member of the YMHA. By 1945, there were more than 300 YMHAs and Jewish Community Centers throughout the United States and Canada.[2] As the institution evolved, the JCC came to focus more on Jewish culture than on Judaism—leaving religious activity and education to synagogues and rabbis. The JCC movement especially welcomed Jews that did not practice Judaism or belong to a congregation, believing that these secular members would disengage from the Jewish community if the JCC did not exist to provide them with a non-religious way to affiliate with the group.

The JCC movement’s embrace of a civic, cultural Jewish identity may have made the institution appealing to Jews uninterested in the rituals and prayers of Judaism, but it also made it a constant target of the rabbinate, religious Jews, and traditionalists. In the early 1960s, for example, a number of Conservative rabbis issued a challenge to the JCC movement, arguing that JCCs promoted secularism and did not do enough to foster their members’ identification with Judaism. Leaders of American JCCs found themselves struggling to explain how secular Jews contributed to Jewish survival.

A decade later, the growth of Orthodox Jewish communities in cities like New York flipped the debate. In the 1970s, philanthropists concerned by the declining population of urban Jews pressured the JCC movement to be more inclusive of Orthodox members of their communities. This required downplaying the JCCs’ acceptance of secularism and placing more emphasis on holiday celebrations, Judaic educational content, and the observance of kosher dietary laws.

The question of non-Jewish membership proved even more controversial in the JCC movement. Membership policy differed from agency to agency. Some JCCs strictly excluded non-Jews. Most, however, allowed non-Jews to use their facilities, participate in some or all of their programs, or even join as full members. In the mid-1960s the JCC movement attempted to create a unified policy about whether non-Jews should be allowed to become full members of the JCC. In the context of the Civil Rights Movement, this debate over the value of an inclusive membership policy became deeply polarized. While the majority of JCC stakeholders believed that accepting non-Jews as JCC members would reflect Jews commitment to minority rights and democratic pluralism, others argued that the JCC would not be able to preserve Jewish identity if JCCs began to be filled with non-Jews. What would make the JCC different from any other American civic institution? This tension generated a national controversy within the JCC movement, but ultimately most Centers decided to institute an open membership policy and serve all people living in their local community. As a result, JCCs became small but emblematic American institutions where Jews and non-Jews mixed freely.

Today, there is more consensus and acceptance of the JCC as a pluralistic space—indeed most are very diverse. The JCC of San Francisco reportedly serves 2,000 non-Jews per day.   In the statement released by St. Paul's mayor and city councilman , their remarks acknowledged the diversity of individuals within the JCC when it received the bomb threat: “Our hearts are with the families of the 190 children and their caregivers – people of every faith – who had to be evacuated.” Indeed, non-Jews have claimed the JCC as a valued community institution. Reflecting on the bomb threat phoned into the Levite JCC in Birmingham, Alabama, AL.com columnist Roy Johnson stressed that Jews held a valued place within American democratic pluralism. “Birmingham is as much their (our) hometown as anyone who resides here, works here, sends their children to daycare and school here,” Johnson wrote on February 20, adding, “Some have lived here for generations and are making positive contributions to our city, not trying to rip it apart.”

That the threats received such extensive news coverage also indicates that Americans perceive the JCC as a pluralistic civic space. For non-Jewish, native-born white Americans who may never experience what it means to be a person of color, or a Muslim, or an immigrant or refugee, they could imagine themselves working out at a Jewish Community Center gym or sending their kids to a JCC preschool. Unlike anti-Semitic vandalism of a synagogue or online harassment of Jewish journalists, the JCC bomb threats resonated beyond the Jewish community because the threat extended beyond Jews.

Although a suspect has been arrested and indicted, a sense of insecurity lingers within the Jewish community. Safety has always been a concern for JCCs, but a renewed attention is being paid to the protection of local Centers. The alt-right remains active, and it doesn’t help matters that now fellow Jews also seem to pose a threat of violence. For a small but vocal group of Jews, violence is justified if it achieves the preservation of Jewish identity as they define it. Jewish particularism prioritizes Jewish preservation above pluralism; some particularists insist that the pluralistic mixing of Jews and non-Jews—or of Jews with other Jews who they consider, for reasons of religious practice, to be a corrupting influence—can only lead to the decline of Jewry. Today we see tensions around particularism largely outside the JCC, in struggles over spaces like the kotel, where the Women of the Wall are fighting for equal rights to pray, read torah, and wear tallit, and over the issue of intermarriage, which is currently roiling up controversy in the Conservative movement. 

In the face of this insecurity, how can Jews preserve the legacy of religious, ethnic, and racial pluralism fostered in institutions like the JCC? It is essential to remember that the leaders of the JCC movement along with the board members, staff, and membership of local JCCs constantly renegotiated what pluralism would look like in their institutions. Religious and ethno-racial pluralism has always been under debate amongst JCC stakeholders, and it’s foolish to think that a consensus will ever exist. Thus, those who value it must always defend pluralism. The work is not only to convince other Americans that Jews belong in this country and contribute to what “makes America great.” The work is also to condemn Jews who eschew pluralism in a misguided attempt to preserve a particular vision of Jewishness.

Thank you to Geraldine Gudefin, Ayelet Brinn, Barry Goldberg, Max Baumgarten, and Cassie Miller for sharing their thoughts and providing editorial assistance as I worked through this piece.

[1] I found 5730 articles by searching Google News for “Jewish Community Center Bomb Threats” and filtering the results for only those articles published between 1/1/2017 and 3/22/2017.

[2] There is no functional difference, after WWII, between Jewish Community Centers and Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Associations. Jewish Community Center just became the more fashionable name to use after the 1940s. Although for the sake of clarity I use JCC exclusively, I mean it to include the many YM- and YWHAs that did not change their name to JCC when it came into common usage after WWII.

Rock Concert

This past week, I have been writing a case study about the Senior Citizens Center established at the YM-YWHA of Washington Heights-Inwood in 1973. As a result, I have been thoroughly rereading the minutes of the meetings held by the Y's Board of Directors in the 1970s. Although the Board devoted much of its discussion to its new programs for older adults, the minutes reflect that the Board was also concerned by declining participation in their programs for teenagers and young adults. They often discussed strategies to reengage lapsed members and recruit new ones.

One suggestion that arose again and again was a "rock" concert [puzzling quotation marks theirs, not mine]. Board members proposed a rock concert on three separate occasions in 1971 and 1972, without ever elaborating on what bands they could possibly get to play such a show. Neither did they reflect on the fact that teenagers may not be interested in an act or band that a group of middle-aged adults found palatable. 

In 1978, the Y actually did follow through on the strategy. In May of that year, the Y's Teen Supervisor, Stan Friedman, suggested to the members of the Board's Program Committee that they re-launch the Teen Program with a rock concert. The minutes recorded: "Members would be allowed to bring one friend. Again, a special invitation would go to the list of Jewish Teens. Stan said that a former gym member of the Y, Dennis Minogue, is now a band manager."

The concert was held in December, and in the intervening months the goal shifted from recruiting teenagers to recruiting college-aged young adults into a new Y program for this age group. Although staff member Martin Englisher reported to the Y Board that 110 people had attended the show, most were non-Jewish high school students who were not Y members. Englisher concluded, "It was felt that the concert, although it went well, did not really serve the Y's purpose."

Most remarkably, the rock concert continues to be an idea that adults suggest for teen recruitment and engagement. I texted a friend who works with teenagers in the Jewish community about the Y's history with rock concerts--admittedly, my description was hyperbolic--and she responded that this is an idea she still hears with regularity, despite rock music's precipitous decline in popularity in the 21st century.

The problem with suggesting a rock concert, besides its being freighted with nostalgia, is that it is not something that teenagers need. A rock concert is something that adults think teens want, and no one likes to be told what they should want or what they should find meaningful. With history on my side, I urge the adults who lead Jewish communal organizations to retire this strategy. 

Civilization in Decline

Over the course of this year's high holy days, I sat through four sermons by two different rabbis at two different congregations. These sermons left me deeply frustrated. Each one predicated a plea for greater communal participation and affiliation on the premise that Judaism and the American synagogue are in decline and that Jews and Israel are under threat from anti-Semites and the many enemies of the Jewish state. These declensionist arguments reduce demographic and cultural trends in Jewish (and American) life to a binary of better-then and worse-now and obscure historical and contemporary homogeneity in the American Jewish community. While this doom-and-gloom portrayal provides a foreboding backdrop against which to inspire popular engagement, it is an ahistorical interpretation that precludes possibilities by narrowly defining the engaged Jew as religious, affiliated, and Zionist.  

The narrative of Jewish decline, translated to a line graph, maps a trajectory upwards throughout the 20th century until, as one sermon posited, a rise in "skepticism" and secularism correlated with a fall in Jewish identification. As my mother succinctly put it, "I remember hearing that sermon when I was ten years old." That was 1961, in the midst of an era that Jews now point to as the definitive highpoint of synagogue affiliation and participation in Jewish communal life. Decline is a weary argument, one that historians of American Jews spent the last quarter of the 20th century challenging with a narrative of synthesis:

“Over and over again for 350 years one finds that Jews in America rose to meet the challenges both internal and external that threatened Jewish continuity—sometimes, paradoxically, by promoting radical disconstinuities. Casting aside old paradigms, they transformed their faith, reinventing American Judaism in an attempt to make it more appealing, more meaningful, more sensitive to the concerns of the day.”
— Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism (Yale University Press, 2004), p. xiv

Historians in the 21st century have gone even farther to complicate neat stories of ascent and descent, arguing that the preservation of Judaism and Jewish identity was always an ambivalent and contested undertaking [1]. To argue for decline is to look back into the past and ignore the many varied ways that Jews have historically engaged with their religion and peoplehood; since 1654 American Jews have splintered off the Reform and Conservative movements, imbued socialist politics with a distinctly Yiddish culture, rejected the synagogue in favor of small havurot and lay-led minyans, and revived a distinctly Jewish politics for the 21st century in the form of social justice programs like Jewish Voices for Peace and Repair the World. That many people no longer identify as Jewish does not detract from the strength and vitality of the community that remains.

And yes, it's true that there has been a decline. But is it really so serious, so worthy of alarmist sermons? A Portrait of Jewish Americans, the 2013 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, did indicate a decline in Americans who identify as "Jewish by religion" (as opposed to by birth or a sense of shared peoplehood). This decline was measured, however, as a percentage of the total US population. In terms of raw numbers, there seem to be more Jews by religion now (4.2 million) than there were in 1957 (3.9 million) when the best comparative data was last collected. In the past 20 years, the Jewish share of the adult population of the U.S. has remained fairly stable [2]. I couldn't find good data on synagogue affiliation, but if we can accept that there is a connection between interest in Jewish education and rates of Jewish identification or affiliation, there's also not much bad news when it comes to enrollment in Jewish studies courses in American universities. A 2014 survey of members of the Association for Jewish Studies revealed that almost 50% of university professors who responded indicated that their enrollments have stayed the same over the past three years [3]. Yes, there are still 30% of respondents reporting declining enrollment, and yes, declines outnumbered increases 7% to 4%, but as Historian Jonathan Sarna noted in his Presidential Address to the 2014 AJS Conference, "That is not exactly an indication of imminent catastrophe." [4]

So, we are not where we were in the heyday of the mid-twentieth century--but I think that's a good thing. Yes, an estimated 60% of Jews belonged to a synagogue in the late 1950s [5], but the 1950s were also a time of stultifying conformity, racism, and male chauvinism. It's a difficult decade to romanticize. Instead of looking backwards with nostalgia, I urge anyone trying to write an inspiring high holidays sermon to see the particularities of the present and, when turning to the past, to evoke the enduring beauty and meaningfulness of Jewish practice that has ensured our continuity for 5775+ years. 

Shana tova.

[1] Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Harvard University Press, 2005). 

[2] See Chapter 1: Population Estimates in: Pew Research Center, A Portrait of Jewish Americans. October 1, 2013. http://www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/jewish-american-beliefs-attitudes-culture-survey. Accessed September 24, 2015. 

[3] Steven M. Cohen, Profiling the Jewish Studies Profession in North America: Highlights from the Survey of AJS Members. July 15, 2015. http://www.ajsnet.org/surveys/AJS-2014-Full-Survey-Report.pdf. Accessed September 24, 2015. 

[4] Jonathan Sarna, AJS 2014 Presidential Address. December 14, 2014. http://www.ajsnet.org/plenary2014.htm. Accessed September 24, 2015.

[5] Jack Wertheimer, "The American Synagogue: Recent Issues and Trends," American Jewish Year Book (2005), p. 10.