Reflections on British Jewry in 2007

I don’t know if I am suitably qualified to write an authoritative article about trends or developments in British Jewry, particularly because I have spent most of the past few years elsewhere – working for the Jewish Agency in New York and on a two-year academic fellowship in Jerusalem. That may or may not be an advantage – it certainly helped me to look at British Jewry through a different set of lenses, but it equally distanced me from some of the day-to-day realities of British Jewish communal life. I offer the thoughts below therefore with that caution, along with the caveat that everything that follows is a personal view, shaped, of course, by my personal experiences, background, preferences and prejudices.

Antisemitism is interesting right now. For a while in the 1990s it almost seemed to disappear – Israel was engaged in a peace process that appeared to bode well for an end to conflict, few people anywhere had even heard of Al-Qaeda, and books like Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man which pointed to the apparent victory of liberal democracy over other more dictatorial forms of government, suggested that all forms of oppression and discrimination were on the wane. Then came 9/11, 7/7, Afghanistan, Iraq, the second intifada, the rise in antisemitic incidents in Britain and elsewhere, and Hamas’s election victory, and suddenly we were back on familiar ground – a world which hates Jews. The truth is, I don’t know if the world ever stopped hating Jews, or indeed, if the world hates Jews any more or less in 2007 than it did in 1907, 1807, 1707 or 1607, but I’m deeply struck by the community’s embrace of the issue. While I was abroad, CST seems to have discovered its sense of purpose and is now an organization renewed, the recently-rebranded JC has a bizarrely gleeful regular column entitled “They Hate Us, They Do,” and Melanie Phillips’s view of the world appears to strike a much greater chord in the community than Jonathan Freedland’s or Daniel Levy’s. Antisemitism seems to fuel us in some way – we abhor it yet thrive on it, it simultaneously repels and attracts us. I’m not a psychologist, but I am far from alone in thinking that we remain a profoundly traumatized people, still haunted by the horrors of Auschwitz and Treblinka in spite of the fact that we have probably never lived in a more tolerant, open, and free society. I wonder what we ought to do about that – whether it is more important for us to leave behind those horrendous chapters of our history, or whether we need to carry them with us always, as a reminder of who we are. In short, as Berl Katznelson asked almost a century ago, is it more important to remember or to forget, and what ought to be the appropriate balance between those two forces?

Right-wing Orthodoxy is intriguing. Many argue that it is winning the battle for Jewish hearts and minds – organizations like Aish Ha-Torah, the Jewish Learning Exchange and Ner Yisroel appear to be thriving, and the birthrate figures in the charedi sector alone indicate that an ever greater percentage of British-born Jews will grow up within that realm. Indeed, some community leaders and commentators, including Manchester University’s Dr Yaakov Wise, suggest that in two or three generations’ time, the vast majority of identifying British Jews will sit in this part of the community, and, by implication therefore, the more secular and progressive forms of Judaism will go into decline, or even cease to exist. The data partially backs up this thesis, yet it ignores other factors – British society’s secularist and liberal tendencies, and the small matter of ‘events’ – unknown future developments that will inevitably impact on our identity in all sorts of unknown ways. Furthermore, even if British Jewry was to become 100% charedi, that moment wouldn’t spell Fukuyama’s end of history – time will move on, and Jews will continue to be attracted to forces and ideas outside of Judaism. Indeed, the growing data on living conditions within parts of the charedi community – reports of families of ten existing in one or two bedroom apartments – will surely take their toll over time. In Israel, the problem is even more acute – the government currently forecasts that by 2019 charedim will make up 25% of the population, and is increasingly concerned by the fact that two-thirds of charedi men don’t work for a living, many rely heavily on welfare, and all are exempted from military service. How much longer can that trend continue before charedi society simply implodes? Nevertheless, the shift towards right-wing Orthodoxy concerns me – partly because I was brought up as a liberal-minded pluralist Jew – but mainly because I don’t think a singular monolithic, “authentic” and “true” version of Judaism is good for the Jewish People. It closes down discussion, dialogue and debate, it closes us off from some of the positive forces and ideas that exist in wider society, and potentially takes us off in the direction of fundamentalism and fossilization. I happen to regard multiple versions of Judaism and Jewish practice as a blessing because I think it does the opposite, yet the question remains: what will become of British and world Jewry religiously?

Connected to that, I find the lack of interplay between the organized Jewish community and the wider social concerns of British society of more than passing interest. When one considers the issues that dominate general political discourse – the environment, poverty and disease in the developing world, the ever-increasing gap between the richest and poorest parts of the world – it is striking how irregularly these seem to feature on the communal agenda. How can it be that 22% of the world’s population lives below the poverty line, at least 841 million people go to sleep hungry each night, and 30,000 people die every day from preventable diseases, and the Jewish People barely comments? Instead, our internal conversation focuses on intermarriage, assimilation, antisemitism, Israel – all important issues, but largely removed from the wider context. America and Israel are slightly better than us in this regard – they have organizations like the American Jewish World Service and Latet that have high profiles and do valuable work – here, in contrast, Tzedek, the Make Poverty History Jewish Coalition and JCore are little-known and desperately struggle to raise the funds they need. Trevor Pears is starting to invest in and champion this agenda – a development that ought to be greatly welcomed – and Jonathan Sacks is increasingly speaking and writing about it, but ‘Jewish’ issues continue to feel different from ‘social’ issues. Judaism has much to say on these concerns, and there are plenty of Jews who are involved in them on an individual basis, yet these factors rarely seem to a coalesce in any meaningful sense to create a state of affairs in which the Jewish People is at the forefront of social change in the world. Is it not remarkable that we have been given a noble tradition with a strong social conscience, yet in most instances, when we study that in depth, the result is insularity and particularism? Why is that, and can, indeed should, it be changed?

I’m struck by the fact that the number of opportunities that exist to learn more about Judaism have sky-rocketed. The London School of Jewish Studies, the London Jewish Cultural Centre, the new Jewish Community Centre for London, Limmud and LimmudFest, Jewish Book Week, the Jewish Learning Exchange, the Florence Melton Adult Mini-School, individual synagogue learning programmes – the list goes on and on. Jewish learning in Britain has probably never before been so varied and vibrant, dynamic and diverse. Why is this? Partly because we can create these opportunities today – we no longer feel compelled to rely on others to do it for us. Partly too, lifelong learning has become a norm in contemporary society, and we are expected, even compelled to develop new skills and understandings as we travel through adulthood. However, perhaps most importantly, it may reflect a certain quest for identity and meaning – a growing desire amongst us to figure out who we are, where we come from, and where we ought to go. This is particularly interesting in Britain, because, as Professor Steven M. Cohen has argued, British Jews are typically “dwellers” rather than “seekers” – that is, content with the status quo of Jewish communal life, as opposed to being open to change and rejecting the notion of a right way to be Jewish. On the other hand, Alan Hoffman has questioned whether the trend may be likened to the last vestiges of a pot of boiling soup – in the same way as that is the often the richest and most tasty part of the pot, it also spells its end. I wonder whether the flowering of educational opportunity represents a new dawn for British Jewry, or whether it is simply a final desperate attempt to save us from our inevitable demise.

Lastly, in contrast to the communal culture of the late 1990s, I don’t see much evidence of serious thought going on in the community today. My teacher, mentor and friend, Jonny Ariel, has an almost anthropomorphic view of community change. He has likened strategic change to acupuncture – the key is to locate and focus on the critical points in the community’s infrastructure that would, if stimulated, improve its health generally. He has also spoken of the equal importance of “head, heart and hands” – thinking, feeling, and doing. Looking around the community today, I don’t experience a great deal of tolerance for serious or iterative thought; the dominant culture seems to have moved much closer to gut, raw action. On too many occasions I hear the sentiment that communal renewal or revival is very straightforward – it is obvious what to do, we just need to find people to do it. I’m afraid that simply isn’t true – if Jewish communal regeneration was simple, thirteen million Jews around the world would be thoroughly engaged in their Jewishness and find inspiration in it on a regular basis. The reality is that community development is profoundly complex, constantly influenced by the forces of sociological and philosophical change, always requiring a dialogical combination of reflective thought, affective sensitivity, and creative action. The moment any one of these three components is lost or downplayed, the others suffer. There are thought centres in our community – the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and the Board of Deputies’ new Community Policy Research Group, and both are important bodies – yet, the real challenge is how to integrate their thinking into the realm of community action. In too many instances, decisions about what to do in the community are taken without reference to the research or analysis, but rather purely on the basis of what individual lay or professional leaders feel compelled to do. We have limited funds; my own belief is that we ought to spend them more thoughtfully than we often do.

These are a few reflections. There are more, of course, yet these are the five that have struck me most powerfully since my return. I am happy to be challenged on any or all of them – I may well be wrong, and if so, I would certainly welcome the feedback. However, one thing is absolutely clear to me and is no different today than in the past: the community needs intelligent, active and wealthy leaders to drive it forward – people who want to engage in the debate, act on their beliefs, and invest their own funds in the community’s future. With these, the sky is the limit.


(Commissioned for the Adam Science Foundation, and also published on www.ujia.org)