Jews and the New American Scene PDF
Preview Jews and the New American Scene
Jews and the New American Scene "An intier [entire] new scene will open it self, and we have the world to begin againe." Mordechai Sheftall, 1783 ^ Jews ^ and the New American Scene Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England, 1995 Copyright © 1995 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding materials have been chosen for strength and durability. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Lipset, Seymour Martin. Jews and the new American scene / Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-47493-7 1. Jews—United States—Identity. 2. Jews—United States—Social conditions. 3. Jews—United States—Politics and government. 4. United States—Ethnic relations. I. Raab, Earl. II. Title. E184.J5L745 1995 305.892'4073—dc20 94-32358 CIP Designed by Gwen Frankfeldt For Kassie and Sydnee ^ Acknowledgments ^ Our obligations to others are many. They extend particularly to both the Russell Sage Foundation, which supported Lipset's research for a year in New York City and also provided a grant for subsequent work, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which awarded a fellowship to Raab for a year's freedom to harvest some of the materials that ended up in this book. The Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies contributed much to our resources, as did the Mandel Institute for the Advanced Study and Development of Jewish Education. We are especially grateful to the Hoover Institution, where Lipset, as a Senior Fellow, did much of his writing, and to the Perlmutter Institute at Brandeis University, which gave Raab the free time to pound away on his computer. Mordichai Rimor of the Louis Guttman Institute for Applied Social Research in Jerusalem provided us with analytic tables from the 1990 National Jewish Population survey that underlie many of our conclu- sions, although the statistical analyses are not detailed in the body of this book. Some are presented in Lipset's The Power of Jewish Educa- tion, published by the Wilstein Institute in 1994. We owe a debt of gratitude to those who conceived and carried through the population study and made the data tapes available to the scholarly world, in particular Barry Kosmin and Sydney Goldstein. We would also like to acknowledge a few of the many colleagues viii ^^ Acknowledgments who contributed to our knowledge in conversations and who freely offered commentary on written work: Robert Merton of the Russell Sage Foundation; Shmuel N. Eisenstadt of Hebrew University; Arnold Eisen of the Jewish Studies program at Stanford University; Seymour Fox and Annette Hochstein of the Mandel Institute in Jerusalem; David Gordis of the Wilstein Institute; Bernard Reisman, Jonathan Sarna, Lawrence Sternberg, and the late Marshall Sklare of Brandeis Univer- sity; Don Kash of George Mason University; and Daniel Bell and Na- than Glazer of Harvard University. For research assistance we have relied on the many and varied contributions of Scott Billingsley, Jeffrey Hayes, Marcella Ridlen Ray, Chris Winters, and Steve Wuhs. At Harvard University Press, Aida Donald was steadfast in her en- couragement and support during critical stages of the book's publi- cation. Last, but very far from least, is our debt to Susan Wallace Boehmer, whose editing improved the flow of our analyses and kept us on our toes by challenging some of our interpretations of biblical and theological issues. Seymour Martin Lipset Earl Raab September 1994 ^ Contents ^ Introduction: America's Tribal Dilemma 1 1 An Old People in a New Land 9 2 The Promise of Double Freedom 29 3 The Downside of Exceptionalism 45 4 The Riddle of the Defensive Jew 75 5 Israel, the X-Factor 111 6 Still on the Left 138 7 The Fragile Remnants 173 Notes 209 · Index 235
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