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American Jews or Jewish Americans?

July 2007

From the Desk of Rabbi Cohon

The month that includes Independence Day is a perfect time for us to explore our twinned identity as Jews and Americans.  I remember when I was a teenager growing up in Los Angeles I attended a teen retreat at a camp that explored exactly that theme. 

The title of the retreat was something like “are we American Jews or Jewish Americans?”  The core question was one of identity: do we identify more as Jews who happened to live in America , or as Americans who happened to be Jews?

As I recall, almost all the teenagers present decided that we were Americans who happened to be Jews, although we were proud of being Jewish.  Shortly after that they asked us to pretend that our civilization was about to be destroyed, and gave us a series of objects--a Torah, a tallis, an encyclopedia, a copy of the Declaration of Independence, Shabbat candlesticks, and such--and asked us to break us into groups and decide what three objects we would preserve in the event of nuclear war.  Another 13 year old and I got kind of bored with the program, and decided to liven it up.  So we stole the Torah and slipped outside to look at the stars and talk.

When the camp counselors and directors found us we were sitting under the stars, discussing, well, not whether we were more American than Jewish or the other way around.  We were just getting acquainted, two American teenagers starting to get to know each other, holding a Torah between us in the cold night air when the counselors came and busted us.

Maybe, in our own way, we really were exploring what being American Jews meant to us at that moment, in our just-adolescent way.

That theme sticks with me now, because we live in a very different kind of America 30 years later.  Jews have run for president, been cabinet officers and Supreme Court Justices, become a big part of the Senate and the House, had all kinds of films made about us, been accepted in country clubs and many social organizations, owned and played on World Series and Super Bowl winning teams, and been widely accepted within American society to a degree that seems to imply, at least most of the time, full acceptance by almost all of America.

The issues we face now are much more focused on whether we will choose to practice our Judaism in meaningful, resilient, and enduring ways now that we are fully American.

In a way, our acceptance itself has at times been a bit disillusioning. You know, what happens when you get what you ask for and the results aren¹t what you expect? 

Here we Jews are now about as American as baseball and apple pie, and it turns out that means that often we become about as Jewish as apple pie, too.

This paradoxical nature of American Jewish identity means that we need to consciously choose to affirm our Judaism on a regular basis—even if that involves stealing the Torah from time to time…

L’shalom v’rei’ut, in peace and friendship,

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon