Chair: Good morning everybody and welcome to this first workshop of the day. It is entitled “A case of new identity” – which means that we have to pay western civilisations apologies to Agatha Christie because we are going to try and detect the forces facing Jewish identity and community.
We are delighted to have with us two distinguished guests. Professor Steven Cohen who you have just heard from and heard about – so I won’t spend too much time on his biography. On my left is Professor Kate Loewenthal who is Professor of Psychology at Royal Holloway and Bedford College at the University of London and has spent most of her academic career focusing on psychology and religion. She has published numerous works: perhaps in this week after Purim, the most significant of her publications is Drowning Your Sorrows? Attitudes Towards Alcohol in UK Jews and Protestants.
We want to spend our time today on figuring out how Jews live their lives at this time; to the extent to which they are focused on individual needs and interests; what do they really make of Judaism and the Jewish community? – and that against the backdrop of – What are the trends happening in British society as a whole?
So that is our brief. Kate is going to go first – and you will have to look at the screen.
Professor Kate Loewenthal
This is quite a lightweight talk, I hope I am going to talk about the psychological aspects of being Jewish, feeling Jewish and what we and other Jewish people do about it. I am obviously going to do it from a psychologist’s perspective. I have a series of overhead projector slides. This is a legacy of working in an academic department which insists that every time you stand up to speak, you have to have a range of visual aids and other things. I would like to address particularly four questions which were given to me by Jonathan Boyd, one of the energetic organisers of this Conference.
The questions he suggested were:
What are the psychological factors involved in being Jewish?
Are there differences between the ways men and women respond to their Jewishness?
What are the positive and negative psychological factors that impact on identity?
Generally, what is happening to Jews today and how should our efforts – educational or otherwise – and initiatives respond to these trends?
What I am going to say obviously depends on who I am and I am trying to get into the habit of saying something about myself so that you can see the perspective, or the frameworks, from which I am talking.
So – I am a woman: quite an old one – and a wife. And the mother, and the grandmother, of a large family. I have had an association, going back many, many years, with the Lubavitch movement and I am an academic psychologist – also for many, many years. And a number of other things – including being a researcher with many projects, looking at religion, culture and mental health. Many of those projects are in the Jewish community. So it is from these perspectives that I am going to be talking.
Here are some of the recent projects that I have done (see the list at the end).. I felt I ought to list them because I should say ‘Thank you very much’ to the various funding bodies that have funded these projects, and to the people I have worked with. There are others as well, but I just want to acknowledge here the generosity of the many government and other research bodies that have funded some of the work that I have been involved in. Many charitable trusts as well.
Students are encouraged to start off by defining their terms. So, I’ll follow the same safe ploy and first of all ask: What do we mean by ‘identity’? I am looking at the factors that impact on identity, so I would like to know what it is. So I turn first to my faithful 1950s Dictionary of Psychological Terms. That said, rather reassuringly, that it is
“the unity of personality over a period of time.”
But then I thought that I need something more modern so I took out one of my social psychology books. This was edited by Miles Hewstone who is a kind of guru of modern views of social identity and categorisation. Lo and behold! – his fat textbook didn’t even index ‘identity’. Perhaps it was thought that it is such a salient and important term that we don’t need to be told what it is any more.
So I took out another book. That did index identity and it said, “Identity is a multi-faceted concept”. Well, thank you very much. So is everything else. It refers to
“a conscious sense of direction and uniqueness”.
Well, ok. And then it says,
“It is derived from a variety of psycho-social experience: psycho-social experiences that are integrated by the ego.”
I realised at that point that – oh my goodness! – this must be a chapter on Eric Erikson and, yes it was. So that is really an Eriksonian definition of identity. Erikson is the guy who first claimed and introduced us to the concept of an identity crisis.
So I’ll stick with my favourite definition of identity, which is the answer to the question, “Who am I?” – and that is a very popular measure of identity as well.
“Who am I?” – and, particularly, what are the factors that impact on my sense of myself as Jewish? I am going to be looking at
Halachic definitions
and then a few scattered factors:
Dress – its meaning and impact.
Very highly selected aspects of the legacy of customs and beliefs and values.
The way in which identity impacts on our beliefs and behaviour.
The halachic definitions of Jewish identity are:
We might be born with it. A person is born to a Jewish mother – that halachically makes them Jewish.
We might choose to be Jewish. That is a person who has converted to Judaism according to Jewish law.
Let’s turn now to a second factor, one of thousands, that relates to Jewish identity – dress, and its meaning and impact. Well, these gentlemen are Jewish -
and they clearly want others to know it.
Slightly less obvious but still obvious. This is a picture that accompanied a newspaper article about some of my research looking at stress among Jewish women and these are haredi women in Jerusalem chatting with each other with their kids milling around. Most people would know that these ladies are Jewish.
Are these people Jewish? Obviously not – and they want people to know who they are. In case you don’t recognise it, these are South Asian Muslims – as it happens, living in London – and I think probably identifiable as such.
But how about these? Could be – but we don’t know. They are from our highly-prevalent youth culture and very many of our young Jewish people are going to dress according to the norms of this particular culture. So it is going to be a very hidden aspect of their identity, not necessarily publicly available.
How else is Jewish identity affected and does it affect what we feel and what we do? Well, in the post-Purim mood here is a set of attitudes that we have been looking at lately. We were surprised at how prevalent in the Jewish community were the negative views of drinking and drunkenness compared to those among the people of Protestant background that we interviewed. I am just citing this as an example of ways in which our Jewish identity can affect our beliefs and our behaviour without us necessarily being particularly conscious of it. For the Jews that we interviewed, the normative response was that drinking makes you lose control; it can be off-putting, repulsive, demeaning, undignified – whereas the Protestants, including those who were not practising religious people at all, said rightly that drinking is normal in British society and that it is relaxing, an important way of socialising, that people need a chance to let their hair down and that they want to enjoy themselves and put problems on one side.
So our identities can colour all kinds of ways of thinking and behaving that we are not necessarily highly conscious of.
How about this?
What was your first thought when you saw that or heard about it? – Did your Jewish identity play any role in what you thought?
I think my first thought was – very very serious catastrophe. But Jewish thoughts came up very quickly. I personally saw it as some sense in which America was identified with the Jewish cause because there were so many Jewish people known to be working in the World Trade Centre. A number of people to whom I spoke said that now the Americans would know what it feels like – referring of course to the many, all too many, terrorist attacks in Eretz Yisroel.
So many of these thoughts are thoughts that I – and perhaps you – wouldn’t have thought if Jewish identity were not so salient.
Our identity affects our behaviour in obvious ways like:we might attend shul, perhaps at least on Rosh Hashanah. We might engage in celebrating Shabbat. We might observe kashrut. This is a very scrupulous lady scrutinising a lettuce leaf for a bug.
Jewish identity can affect how much we drink. It isn’t just that Jews find drinking undignified and off-putting. They actually do drink quite a lot less than people from the dominant cultural religious background in the UK.
It can affect our choice of career. Does anybody not know who this person is?
It’s Freud (of course). Psychotherapy, psychoanalysis – one of the many occupations in which Jews are proportionately strongly over-represented. Taxi-driving is another and there are many others.
Being Jewish can also affect our choice of leisure activities. For instance, this gentleman’s preference for poring over a volume of the Talmud.
Jon’s next question was: Are there differences between the ways men and women respond to their Jewishness?
Now a thing that has caused a lot of controversy is the issue of halachic responsibilities and rights. Other issues that I would like to look at briefly are – differences in religious practice and differences in religious feelings.
First of all, religious responsibilities. The important thing that I want to say here is that the halachic responsibilities of men and women are, in most important respects, very similar. Everybody, whether they do it or not, has an obligation with regard to Shabbat, kashrut, prayer and so on. Although, as is well-known, our obligations to carry these out can vary according to what else we are doing at the time and women, as is known, are traditionally exempt from many time-bound positive mitzvot. This has led into a lot of feminist controversy which I am not going to spend a lot of time addressing.
But, with regard to many of the feminist controversies, I would like to make an observation which is that for many years I was engaged in a project in which we were doing hundreds of interviews across the whole spectrum of the Jewish community, looking at people’s everyday problems. These were very long interviews: they could sometimes take as long as four or five hours. Sometimes they were much shorter. But we were trying to probe people’s experiences – insofar as they were willing to talk about them – of events and difficulties of all kinds. One thing that I would like to reflect on is the fact that a lot of the issues that attract media attention – women’s rights to participate in synagogue services and so on – weren’t actually being mentioned at all.
Those weren’t what people were losing sleep over – and they were losing sleep over a lot of things. What we were hearing about were a lot of problems that you might think are grass roots problems, but nevertheless they are ones that probably preoccupy you as much as they preoccupy me. There were, for instance, for singles the heartbreaks and anguish involved in finding the right marriage partner. Both women and men getting into their thirties and forties and not yet having met the right Jewish person. Health, employment, finance, relationships and, in many cases, worries about relatives in Israel which were as preoccupying then as they are now.
Let’s turn to differences in religious practice. Are there differences between men and women in levels of religious observance? These are some data that we published recently and we were surprised by the media reaction. We presented these findings by referring to a fact that is cited in lots of books on the psychology of religion, and it is meant to be an accepted, hallowed truth, that women are more religious than men. What we found, not very surprisingly – and these are data pulled together from a number of studies involving several hundred participants – is that in terms of religious practice, men are praying more regularly and studying more regularly. Now that is not very surprising, although it surprised and interested a number of media people.
It doesn’t mean that women are less religious than men and, if you look at different aspects of religiosity, we found that in the Jewish community there are differences. For instance, styles of religiosity – intrinsic and quest religiosity, which are the aspects of religiosity that one would regard as more spiritual in today’s understanding of the term ‘spirituality’, were actually higher among the Jewish women whom we interviewed and studied than they were among the men. (Those are the darkest and lightest bars: they are quite noticeably higher.)
Now to my third topic - well, Jon's third question - which is: What positive and negative factors can impact on people’s identity? I’ve picked out four: two positive – our sense of group belonging and our sense of spirituality and how that impacts on different aspects of psychological wellbeing; and I’ve picked two negative – first of all anti-semitisim, which can cover both specific individual experiences and also the generic, political anti-semitism which was spoken about earlier today.
How about positive experiences within our own group?
Having nice experiences associated with being Jewish: these are girls at an orthodox wedding, obviously having a good time and that, hopefully, is giving them a good feeling about being Jewish - that there are nice things you can do when you’re Jewish.
Spirituality: perhaps surprising to some people (although I’ve been plodding around in this field for a number of years so it is sort of everyday to me) is that Jewish spirituality, like any other spirituality, is probably associated with all kinds of goodies in terms of both psychological and physical wellbeing. Here is a list of factors that scientifically have generally been shown to be positively associated with higher spirituality. The people who are high on spirituality are generally less lonely, have stronger purpose in life, high existential wellbeing, high on intrinsic religiosity, better physical health, lower depression and stronger identity achievement.
How about negative factors? anti-Semitism. Well, individual experiences of anti-Semitism may not be as salient and important today as the world political sense in which anti-Semitism is being promoted but, nevertheless, we found a large number of individual experiences. Here is one which came up in an interview that I did. The family was woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of their windows and doors being smashed, and by obscene shouts of ‘effing’ Jews and ‘gas ovens’ – which is how the anti-Semites in this area often greet Jews who they pass in the streets.
The mother threw some water out of the window, hoping that that might help to deter the intruder while the father ran to the phone and called the police. The police, when they came, said that this was an isolated drunkard. It wasn’t a concerted anti-Semitic attack and that the family really shouldn’t be upset. The family found that its insurance police doesn’t cover damage caused by riotous behaviour and so financially they were out of pocket. The children have been terrified and the parents have been sensitised still further to the really quite high levels of street anti-Semitism that exist in some part of London and might have an impact on people’s sense of Jewish identity.
I don’t want to dwell on this but there is a growing literature suggesting that all kinds of people, Jews and others, may seek alternative identities given the opportunity if they feel unfulfilled, bored or put off by negative experiences within their own group. Examples might be: boring synagogue services, nasty teachers, a poor home atmosphere and not finding the right marriage partner.
What are the implications? There are very many and I have just chosen to focus on two broad ones. First of all, gender. Is feminism an issue? Probably, yes – certainly as fair as the media are concerned. And I have met a lot of women who, probably rightly, have concerns that are to do with women’s rights. Are we doing enough to value the roles that women play in devoting themselves to their families and children and trying to give them a positive experience in being brought up as Jewish children? Are we doing enough to encourage Jews to marry Jews? Banal – but very important.
In general, are we doing enough to make sure that Jews in this country have positive experiences in all the areas of experience – both during their upbringing and during their adult life. And, particularly – I know we can put ourselves on the backs at the many wonderful welfare institutions that we have, but the truth is that they are struggling financially. They are over-stretched. They are under-resources and we can always do more to help our welfare institutions and to continue to support the people in our community here.
(Acknowledgements: Thanks to collaborators and funders of the following projects:
Depression in orthodox Jewish men and women (with Vivienne Goldblatt and others)(Nuffield Foundation, ESRC)
Causes and cures of mental illnesses (with Marco Cinnirella and others) (Central Research Fund)
Stress, religion & coping (with Andrew MacLeod) (Wellcome Foundation)
Alcohol- and suicide-related beliefs and behaviour (with Andrew MacLeod) (ESRC)
Emotional and behavioural disorders in orthodox Jewish children (with Caroline Lindsey & Stephen Frosh) (Sure Start, PPP Healthcare Trust)
Culture-sensitive support groups (Leverhulme Trust Fellowship)
Chair: Ok. Great. Thank you very much, Kate.
We are now going to ask Steve, as an outsider, to look at the Jewish community in this country. But, following several visits and an extensive reading programme, he is an informed outsider. So he going to ‘take some gloves off’ and offer you a perspective of what he makes of what is going on in the Anglo-Jewish community.
Professor Steven M. Cohen
Thank you. Before I speak I would like to say a few words!
I am so grateful to Kate for having given us a psychological portrait on Jewish identity and, as I wrote to her in an email, I have always wanted to have this sort of dialogue. I view identity like democracy: it’s a pretty bad word but it is the best one we have. I wouldn’t say that the psychologists have hijacked it because actually we imported the word ‘identity’ from your discipline. But I think that the psychological overtones of identity lead us astray from what it is that I think we really care about.
Let me tell you what I really care about and why identity doesn’t quite work for me. But, as I said, I have no other word.
There are three points:
Identity is for me an instrument, a resource to something else – like community. It is not an end in itself.
Identity is socially constructed, socially determined and affected by the Jewish opportunity structure. To rephrase Lennie Bruce: If you’re Jewish in Iowa, you’re goyish. But if you’re goyish in Brooklyn, you’re Jewish – even if you’re goyish! So there’s something to be said for this. It turns out that we can predict intermarriage a lot more successfully by postal code in the United States than we can by Jewish day school or Jewish education. It is not a matter of motivation – feeling very Jewish – but where you are and how you are connected affects the expression of Jewish identity. I would say that we are about the expression.
It doesn’t have to be this way, but identity has a kind of emphasis on attitudes. I think we care about behaviour That’s why, Kate, the difference in the research between religion – which means Protestants basically, and what you found among Jews is that religion, faith in the world, means attitudes. How do you feel about salvation, the word of God, Jesus – and so forth. And Jews have, I think correctly from our point of view, put behaviour – what you do – on top and then seen attitudes as a kind of important and subordinate route to that.
So, those are my problems with identity. But, again, I don’t have any other word. I tried inventing one once and no-one liked it so I won’t try it again. You know – ‘If you don’t succeed – stop!’
As Jonny indicated, I really had two talks prepared: one is the conventional well-constructed logical and time-tested talk on the Jew within. I would tell you about the personalism of American Jews and their voluntary efforts and so forth and I would ask you to compare American Jews to British Jewry and you’ll find points of comparison, points of difference. We’d have an interesting conversation and I would think you’d find it very useful. That’s what got me here and I probably should give that talk.
But – I’m not going to give that talk! I want to do something extremely chutzpadic and Johnny announced it. I want to give you my initial observations about British Jewry and I would like your permission to be superficial, to be wrong, and to offend. So – with that [inaudible interjection from audience] – I’m an American from Brooklyn living in Israel! I can do all these things very well! So let me try my four initial take-away points about British Jewry – about British-Jewish identity, community, call it what you will. And tell me if I’m right or wrong. I really want your help. This is a kind of pre-research. I’ve spoken to a few of you in the room and many of your colleagues. You are the experts on British Jewry. I haven’t spoken to you – to Jews about themselves. So, let’s see what we have. I am very curious to see if I change my mind after six months or a year. Unlike other people, when I get new data I change my mind!
First, you are very British. In so many ways, our societies affect who we are. Kate too referred to that. Here are the ways in which I think that you are British.
One is that you define yourselves publicly as ‘religious’ and not ethnic or political. American Jews have defined themselves as cultural and political as well as religious. For many years being liberal, being left of centre, was part of the Jewish identity in America. JCCs, as I mentioned, are a cultural, communal expression. You don’t do that.
The second point is that so much of your Jewish life is in synagogues. The reason I learned that is that I saw so many wonderful Jewish things here and everybody, frankly, was down on their dreary Jewish life. So I went through a whole list of things that had seemed very interesting and people when they understood ‘Jewish life’, they understood ‘synagogues’ and ‘rabbis’. This is interesting. In America we have dreary rabbis and awful synagogues – and there is still Jewish life outside of synagogues. Yet here there was a sense of defining the Jewish experience as contained much more within the synagogue.
Next, you have in many ways centralised and hierarchical structures – as this country does. You are organised out of London. You’ve got a top, you’ve got a middle, you’ve got a bottom. It’s a whole hierarchy here and it’s centralised.
Next, you are very deferential to rabbis. You don’t listen to them. Many Jews don’t listen to their rabbis. But you give them a lot of deference. That’s interesting. I’m serious. I’m not trying to say that you shouldn’t: I’m saying that it’s a fact. American Jews and Israeli Jews don’t give as much deference to rabbis as you do. In fact, in Israel quite the opposite. Rabbis here have more tenure and more security. This is a fact. It is an element of the deference issue but it’s there.
At the same time you under-support and under-fund and under-help your rabbis. Right? You give them tenure – but no help. This is very interesting. I am not sure which is the better circumstance. But as I came to understand this, this is not so different from the Anglican clergy. You’re given a limited kind of job. This is a country where, I’ve read, there are 70 million Anglicans and a million are church-going. In America, 40 per cent of American Christians are regarded as church-going. It’s a different society and it is different for pastors and ministers in the States. Some are extremely prominent and they are major figures and are well-supported. You have, in your synagogues, smaller staffs, smaller salaries – but tenure, a bit like universities.
Then, you have a lot of concern for authenticity and resistance to change. America is much more change-oriented and values individual initiative and entrepreneurship. You don’t expect a lot from your religious communities. American Jews expect more. They may not be getting more or less. It is just that the expectations are higher and there is more bubbling and hiring and firing and tinkering and innovating.
So this is all a reflection of being part of the society. I understand it. As a mirror, I am trying to teach – and maybe you understand it. And I would ask you to please correct me when I’m wrong – as I’m sure I sometimes am.
Secondly, related to this British issue – and I’m not sure if this is true only for the older and middle-aged generation with whom I’ve spoken, and not the younger ones to whom I have not spoken – but I am going to say that, at least for those of the older generations, there seems to be a lot of concern with integration and acceptance by the larger society. Again, something that I see not at all in America.
Here are my pieces of evidence – and you may say that I have misinterpreted it. But here is the evidence. In the rhetoric of a society, in the written documents, in the public speeches – I hear lots of references to Gentiles who like and admire us, a lot of references. I started hearing this and I thought: Where have I seen this before? – Oh, I know where. In the Hertz chumash. Every Shabbos morning I was reading about that. I was reading about scientific discoveries which proved that Jews are actually da-de-da and that the Jewish way of doing this is better than that of other people, or that it’s not true – and I was reading all this stuff, all quoting non-Jewish scholars or jurists [?] or theologians. And this has continued in this society.
I remembered that the last time American Jews had done that had been in the ‘40s and ‘50s. We used to have books like Jews Fought Too. Jewish boxers, Jewish sports heroes, Hank Greenburg, whatever. There was a whole period when we also did it. Now we don’t tell people. Ok, we’ve got Bronfman, we got Mort Mandel – we’ve got rich Jews but no-one mentions that. Jews are very successful.
I assure you: go to American synagogues. Listen to sermons. Read texts written about American Jews. No-one quotes Gentiles to prove how good and smart and wonderful and moral Jews are. It happens here all the time. What does this mean? I think it means a concern with integration acceptance. I’m not sure.
Next one – and I think there are lords and ladies and ‘sirs’ sitting in this room. And aspirants to be lords, ladies and ‘sirs’! This is the part where I am about to offend – but I really don’t want to. It is interesting that here is a community – and I don’t know of any other community that does it – that accepts titles from the larger society, legitimately and rightly so and these are people who we respect, that they’ve done wonderful things for British society, for Jewish society – and we in turn, as a community, appropriately give them honour and deference. This is very interesting.
It is just that there aren’t other societies that do this. Wait a second: I’m a professor; I’m a doctor; I like using those titles. You know that you’d like your kids to have those titles too. So, maybe it is not just the British. Here’s what you’ve got here. You’ve got ‘sirs’, lords and ladies – and professors and doctors and whatever else. In the rest of the world, all we have is professors, doctors, attorneys, whatever the other titles that are around. So we all do it. I am just saying that here there are more choices and there is more experience. Does that go together with the Hertz chumashian rhetoric in this society? Is it part of this concern with integration and acceptance? I don’t know.
You also have a real issue in that you really do have anti-Semites and anti-Zionists in society much more than in the States – although maybe less than in France. I’m not sure. So there is concern about that and that heightens notions of acceptance and concern.
Is it as prevalent among the younger generation? I have no idea. That’s one of the things that I want to find out.
Third: centrality of Israel. When I mentioned about your travel to Israel, it wasn’t just about travel and it wasn’t just about the British Friends being so committed, and it wasn’t about your generosity towards Israel. The larger fraction of essentially collected communal dollars that go to Israel and other overseas needs – Israel is really very alive here, much more alive than it is in the United States.
In the early ‘70s, a bunch of us who were Israel-oriented were already writing articles critical of Havurah Bundists. There was a Havurah movement in the United States – The Jewish Catalog generation – and they were not especially Israel-oriented. So a number of said: Those are Havurah Bundists. Lenin defined the Bundistsas ‘a Zionist with sea-sickness’. Someone whose belief in Jewish nationalism is just not there!
So Israel is major, prominent, organised – for advice and concern from you in the sense of Jewish identity.
My last point, which brings a lot of this together, is: ‘ethnic inside, religious outside’. Or ‘ethnic content and religious institution’. Look what you’ve got. I hear stories about how many bar mitzvahs and weddings you have, and the brit milah, where all the guests are Jewish. (Judy, you are the only other living American here: am I right?) We American Jews – when I was living there – we always have lots of non-Jews at our private events. It’s something. And not just because they’re supposed to be there. We like them. They are part of our lives. American Jews are much more integrated. Look, I say that it is a good thing. You are still living your important private life within Jewish precincts. Again – how much so among younger people? Less so. Intermarrieds? Probably much, much less so.
Next, thank you. You provided me with a taxi-driver, whose name I am not going to mention. This man, who is Jewish, was full of ethnic stereotypes – that I hadn’t heard of by a lot of American Jews since the 1950s and ‘60s – and I’d heard of by Jackie Mason on recordings. But he was just full of them. And we know what they are. All the ethnic stereotypes towards non-Jews. I wondered if he was alone in this. He had no problems saying these things. He is socially brain-dead. Or was he reflecting something about working-class Jews still in a society who feel – and you must here it too, because this man is your brother or your uncle or your father or your friend. Are there other examples? I don’t know. But there is an ethnic stereotype that occurs here.
Next – I mentioned and I want to emphasise it – the residential clustering. Barry Kosmin and Stanley Waterman are doing this wonderful work on Jewish geography. I went downstairs to the basement and they pulled out their maps of Jewish London. There are these big maps. Then there is this little green strip. The Jews were in green. It goes: West End, St John’s Wood, Golders Green, Hendon, (am I getting it right?) Finchley, up to Radlett and Shenley there at the very top. If you look at this map, you see a little, thin green strip covering maybe 3 – 5 per cent of London and everywhere else is ‘goyland’! There are a few dots: there’s Redbridge up in the north. I’m told there was a bombing here of some sort back in the 40s and the Jews from the East End kind of blocked up there!
What does this tell us about Jewish residential choices? (Tony, you remember when I was on your block? I was walking around Tony’s little cul-de-sac and I saw only one mezuzah there – Tony’s. So I said, ‘Tony, what are you doing here?’ And he said that there was a bunch of them who’d be moving into this area as they wanted to live where they could walk to synagogue.) So, even when you move ‘out’, you move just 10 minutes away from a synagogue and that is considered to be moving out.
I mentioned Israel. I mentioned residence. I think – and I’m speculating now – that American Jews who are married to non-Jews are less alienated from the Jewish community than they are here. I think that here they are more alienated – by both sides. The Jewish community doesn’t talk about them, doesn’t want anything to do with them. There was an article in the Jewish Chronicle last week by somebody saying that we should be nice to them. And the inter-marrieds themselves are more distant because – and here is my point – because the community is very ethnic.
Religiously, Jews can accept inter-marriage more than they can ethnically. It is very interesting. Ethnically, they have problems with it. Religiously, well we do a lot of things religiously and no-one says anything.
The youth group experience here – didn’t know that it was to do with students. Youth groups are students. I saw a pattern here that I’ve seen nowhere else in the world. In most parts of the world, people are religiously high in their childhood. That is when they get Sunday school and everything else. They go into religious depression during high school and college years – and before you know it, they have a seven-year-old child. When they have a seven-year-old child they re-enter the religious community and the cycle starts again.
That may be true to some extent here, but I’ve met a lot of people whose peak Jewish experiences occurred between the ages of 16 and 24 and now they are in depression. They’re saying that they are waiting for something good to happen to them Jewishly – and they’re 40. Right? So that means there is a pattern going on out there of very powerful youth groups and Jewish experiences – can you build upon that? But that reflects also this ethnic period … [some words lost when tape turned over] …
I spoke to you – and I meant it – about the beginnings of religious innovation. But they are just the beginnings. American Jews are more advanced in thinking about ways to make the congregations more friendly, about hiring more accessible mission-oriented rabbis, and so on. You’ve done some of that but I keep hearing that ‘I won’t get the number’. X-number of fantastic rabbis in Britain – and there’s no implication about the rest. Several great congregations – but implications about all the rest. And there are things happening. But they are happening here later than they happened elsewhere.
The other thing is: whatever happened to Jewish feminism? It started in the States a long time ago. All my friends were in it. I published an article about Jewish feminists, a serious scientific article, in 1980. Jewish feminism in the United States was a religious movement. I take its absence here as a serious religious movement as also an absence of a kind of religious fermentation.
My last point is – and this is a superficiality – I spoke to an Orthodox rabbi here who is one of the stars and he said to me, ‘You know, none of my congregants are Orthodox.’ I said, ‘Huh, that’s interesting.’ He meant that although they are Orthodox-affiliated, they are not Orthodox. I spoke to a Reform leader and he said, ‘You know, hardly any of our people are Reform’. I said, ‘Wait a second, this is interesting’ – but I didn’t ask him. What they are both saying is that the ideologies, the content of Orthodoxy or Reform (and maybe in Progressive although I don’t know yet – I have to learn about the Progressives) – are not typical, are not really learned, are not held on to by the members. Rabbi Bayfield has no problem in saying that that is right. He has got a mission to fulfil.
But in Masorti, which is a much smaller movement, an elite movement – I didn’t hear that. I heard more that ‘our people are really Masorti’. That’s what I heard – but maybe I’m wrong.
So what I have here are reports of high ethnic contents; reports of low religious content. Absence of ethnic institutions: presence of religious institutions. So, Sinclair – this is a bottom-line top guy – What do you do for a living? Are you an accountant or something? Do you make things? –
Sinclair: I have a kosher restaurant.
Steve Cohen: A kosher restaurant. But you’re not a poet or a violinist, are you? You get things done, right? So it seems to me that you have ethnic content but no institutions. So, create ethnic institutions. By the way, a restaurant is an ethnic institution. Create more of them. On the religious side, you’ve got the institutions but not the content. So, do the work that you are doing – which is trying to fill out the religious life and create an engaging, more religious, dialogue. And also, more religious controversy and conflict. I think you don’t have enough of it, in an odd way. I’m serious! You have personality conflicts but I don’t know if you have genuine religious conversations in which religious Reform Jews speak to religious Masorti Jews or speak to religious Progressive Jews or religious Orthodox Jews about our different religious approaches to being Jewish – around ritual, around intermarriage, around Israel, around kashruth, God – whatever it is that religious people like to talk about. You should sit down and you should have those serious conversations and let people learn by – defending what they know and going back and learning more and so on. I think that you don’t have them.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the religious content of this place can emerge so that observant secular people like me would have a very interesting place to go and an interesting dialogue. That is the end of my superficial and offensive comments. Thank you.
Chair: You are obviously free to make your own observation as to how ‘informed’ and how ‘outsider’ the ‘informed outsider’ was. We are going to take questions and comments.
Jerold Gotel: Thank you very much, both of you. I’m the Chairman (fool that I am!) of the London Jewish Cultural Centre and two thoughts occurred to me this morning, hearing the first and second sessions. Your observation about the comparison between the two communities – I just want to make one statement and I promise to ask a question! But the observation is that possibly the differences come from security and insecurity. That the very fact that we live in locations, that we see ourselves in that narrow green strip, that we don’t invite as many non-Jews to our events that the Americans do – is possibly that we feel less secure in our Jewishness here than the Americans do.
This leads to my question. For my crazy meshugas, I’m involved with the idea of creating a long-term project to create a true cultural centre: a building in London where different groups with different backgrounds, with different ideas, can express their Jewish identity. There is a counter view put to me that says: Don’t do it in terms of bricks and mortar, do it by being wherever there is a need. There are lots of places you can hire, you don’t need one building.
Now, listening to your point this morning, it poses to me quite an interesting sort of metaphor for our problem in this society. Do we bring people to us and strengthen the facilities, bring people, draw people to an identifiable place or numerous places? Or do we disperse, do we come out of that green belt that you described, and actually try to find people? And I think it is not just a physical question of whether we should have a building. It’s a much more philosophical question to do with the identity that you raised and the difference between Britain and America. And, if we get it wrong, we really are missing a very important future opportunity. So that is really the question: Do we go out or do we bring people in?
Alistair Falk [Head Teacher at King Solomon High School]: Steve, there is enough material there – as in the famous remark from a well-known British comedy – ‘for an entire Conference’! (Those who get the reference will know it.) I don’t disagree at all with the conclusion about creating ethnic institutions and it’s too long obviously to go through all of the points, but there are some really important points there. I suppose the question would be one that you’ve already answered, which is that the stuff that has always concerned me about looking at the kind of Jew within research as to how far that does actually apply in Britain. But that leads on to the next question, which is that still within your remarks there is an assumption about (and I hesitate to use a kind of centralist notion of identity) but there is an assumption about a kind of cohesive nature to the community – which, arguably, just doesn’t exist at all. One of the issues about Jews who happen to live in the geographical area which we may call – which we no longer call Britain, actually, but which we call England, Scotland and Wales and Ireland, so that in itself is a change – how Jews themselves actually understand themselves and whether there isn’t a need for a much more localised look at what is actually happening.
For example, you touched briefly on the issue of class. Now, if you were examining any communities in this geographic framework you would need to look at issues of class. You talked about groups and you made specific reference to policymakers. There is a lot of interesting research to be done about what were the Jewish experience of those who are policymakers, and what difference do those who make policy actually make to the changes which may already be happening?
Now I am making this as a research point rather than a political point. But if you just take the last question, and the question was – Should we bring people to us? – and you talked about creating ethnic institutions, then there is a strong case that you can argue that regardless of policymakers and policy decisions, the factors that are part of the society in which we live have led to the growth of Jewish day schools. Even that term of course, is a borrowed term because they are not called ‘Jewish day schools’ anywhere outside of conferences like this. Look at the American model. People call them Jewish schools and parents call them Jewish schools. What you have got in recent years is the creation of a tremendous amount of new kind of ethnic institutions where, in a sense, the growth has come from the ground upwards.
It is completely irrelevant to policymaking and the political points we made about what implications that has for policymaking. I’m sure that many of the factors that you, quite rightly, identified are responsible for that. But I would suggest that the way forward therefore for trying to understand them might be to look most closely at the people who are involved in Jewish institutions in completely different ways. The example I always give, to answer the point before – if you want to find out where Jews are, well, on 190 days a year there are x-thousand of them in Jewish institutions, plus their families who are there at four o’clock to pick them up. So they are much more easily identifiable and locatable than they ever were before.
This raises lots of interesting questions about Jewish identity – and the term that we’ve avoided using, ‘Jewish identification’. One of the most interesting pieces of research that I have seen recently was a piece of research done by an undergraduate student who just happened to come into my school. She was a social geographer and was talking to young Jews about their understanding of themselves from the perspective of social geography.
The other question which I would raise, which you touched on at the beginning, is how far we are using – not just different cultural backgrounds but different actual disciplines to start looking at issues of Jewish identity and understanding Jewish identity.
So at the very least I am saying that there is enough material there for five more conferences. But if you broke it down into some of those factors and some of those different groupings and started to look at a much more localised starting point and looked at different perspectives, you would find there are huge differences in class; there are huge differences in the way in which people understand themselves; and there are interesting similarities between the ways in which Jews understand their identity in relation to the other; and this society in relation to what many young Jews who haven’t got the slightest religious identification in traditional terms at all would have, would describe as Christians – (we saw the example here of Jews and Protestants) – that Jews would describe as Christians, and the way in which other groups function in this society as well. Whether they are Greek Orthodox, who also live in very localised communities and have a particular view. Or whether they are Muslims.
There is also a lot of interesting research which may yet need to be done, and questions which need to be asked, about parallels between young Jewish people and their understanding of their communities, and parallels between young Muslims and their understanding of themselves and their communities. Again in a completely different perspective from where we have been looking at so far. If you then compared that with how the policymakers understand what is going on, you might see some more interesting distinctions.
Jacqueline Nicholls: Thank you. I just wanted to make an observation which will then lead on to a question. My observation is this: given that this topic is about a case for new identity, I was slightly concerned to hear of some of the factors that you were both using as your abstract pattern to define identity. Kate, you were talking about Jewish religious practice and looked at attendance, prayer and study – very male-centric institutions, and then compared women and men. That concerned me, that perhaps is an example that if there were other factors which were used, then a very different story would be painted.
Steve, you talked about still defining our community in terms of religious denominations of Orthodox, Reform and Masorti – just using those categories to then sort of talk about membership. I question that assumption and maybe the assumption is that by questioning whether that is still relevant when we are talking about new identities.
My question which follows is really: Is there any room in comparing what is going on in the Jewish communities today with what is going on in the British society today, that there is this polarity with sort of alternative cultures and subcultures coming up within England in different ways – of a sort of growing tension within British society and the Jewish community within that – the sort of deference to the knighthood etc. side.
Rabbi Tony Bayfield: Could I ask Kate to what extent her research was based upon genuinely cross-communal studies, and to what extent it – or her remarks and conclusions – was based upon predominantly the Orthodox community? And could I ask you both: to what extent to you feel the British class system impacts upon Jews in this country and the way we behave? And, finally, could I ask you why we find it so difficult to ask you questions?!
David Rose: Thank you, Steve, for answering some of the points I tried to raise before. I want to return to two things you talked about: the possible generational split in our community between our attitudes that the Jewish community relates to the wider community, and the lack of ferment in our institutions.
From when I was young in this country, Jews were the largest ethnic minority in this country apart from the Irish. We felt ourselves as a distinctive uniqueness which, perhaps, many of the older generation tried to hide – and you’ve indicated some of the reasons. Young Jews today are one of very large numbers of ethnic minorities in this country. It is one of the problems that we have with our community, as shown by the census problem that too many of the older members of our community still think of Jewish identity in religious terms, whereas many of our younger people see it in terms of ethnic identity and as a sense of pride which their parents are lacking.
Marlena Schmool: I’d just like to pick up on that last point. It’s fed into what I wanted to say, and also the question of women’s issues. I think that Kate, with respect, has under-estimated the degree to which there is activity in terms of women’s concerns – particularly in relation to points like being able to say kaddish, being able to have prayers for special events in the life cycle that relate to women – and these are being addressed quite broadly through the community.
That also brings in the question of what was being said about that green line. Much of the impetus towards women’s issues and activity has come from the regions and the JPR map of London only represents two-thirds of British Jewish life and there is a lot outside London centricity and I think we have to take this into account and that the women in the smaller communities, where there is much less division on a day-to-day basis than there is here in London, have all worked together very strongly for that.
Then, to come to David’s point just about the census, one of the points that came very clear to me in the Board of Deputies office while the census period was on was the people who were ringing up and saying ‘Is it all right for us to write ourselves in as Jewish in the ethnic question?’ People were clearly willing to do this but had not yet recognised whether this was a possible thing to do. Now younger people particularly are very, very clear that if they want to write in ethnic, they will write in ethnic. But older people in a way needed permission to do this. Permission in terms of both what the census was doing, but permission in terms of their Jewishness. And I think that it shows very, very clearly that there is a big generational difference in attitude, right across the community on a whole range of issues. Giving to Israel is one of them. And if you are looking at what is making British Jewry tick, it is how younger people are voting with their feet.
And a question: do you think that if you looked at postal codes for intermarriage in Great Britain, you would get the same pattern as you would in America?
Chair: There are loads more people on the list to speak but unfortunately our time has come to an end so just one last question.
Dr Alan Webber: Can I just briefly say that I recognise on the whole Professor Cohen’s picture o the Jewish community. But I think that you must understand its development in terms of British society, which in only the recent decades has become multicultural, and the historical development in that basis. That is interesting.
But there is life outside the synagogue, though the formal structure is based on the synagogue. I really have two questions to Professor Loewenthal: can you, from what you have described as identity, pick out the main points in regard to those of who are involved in trying to influence people to remain in Judaism, or come into Judaism? Can you pick out one or two which you would consider the main factors one ought to look at? And, secondly, to Professor Cohen – although he has probably answered that – Do you think we ought to be changing the structure of the community and developing formal institutions outside the current structure?
Chair: Thank you. We are going to go to our two panellists for brief responses. Kate, do you want to go first?
Professor Kate Loewenthal: I’m not sure because there were more questions than –
Chair: So just choose a couple.
Professor Kate Loewenthal: I’d like to respond – not answer – with a couple of very, very personal observations and comments. These are very personal and I think that they are founded more in my private life as an Orthodox woman than in the academic work that I have been doing, although there are obviously a lot of effects going from one to the other.
This is in response to Jacqueline and Marlena. There is a concern which I have, which I think was addressed by Lady Jakobovitz’s husband when he said that demographically (and Marlena may disagree with me) a lot of the Jews of the future are going to be born into Orthodox families. Now I know that Marlena was having an argument about this but I myself felt personally very committed to the idea that I should have a large number of children. This was my answer to Hitler.
I felt that from large sections of the community, neither politically nor in terms of media coverage, was I getting the kind of support that I might have appreciated. It is extremely, extremely hard to bring up a very large family – extremely hard. In the media I was being described as ‘self-indulgent’, ‘lacking control’, ‘don’t I know about contraception’. It’s my choice and I still feel that my concerns, as a mother trying to bring up a large family, I was very under-resourced, very unsupported and I feel that I – and women like me – need and deserve more support and more attention. More support and more encouragement. You may disapprove, but I honestly think that my concerns – you know, sleepless night after sleepless night, struggling, where am I going to find money for bread? – are at least as important as those concerns about women’s roles in the synagogue. That’s a very coal-face view and it’s a very personal one.
The other thing that I want to say is also a very personal one. That is that most of my married children are working as Chabad shluchim. They are both going out and bringing in. They are not the only people that are doing this. There are Bnei Akiva shuichim. There are throughout Russia people doing this kind of work. In a sense, our community owes it to the rest of the world to be providing the kind of educational resources and upbringing that is not only going to serve the British community, but is going to serve the world community. So the answer to the question about making centres or going out is that it is possible to do both simultaneously and that there are many, many Jewish people who are successfully doing this.
Professor Steve Cohen: Some wonderful comments and I just want to underscore some of them so that we hold on to them. A number of you have said in various ways, and accurately so, that my presentation failed to give justice to issues of class, regional variation, age variation. I want to indicate that that is certainly the case. And there is also another variation, and that is the various ways of negotiating the relationship with the changing larger society. I have certainly heard about these. These are important issues. I have no time to elaborate upon them and would underscore their critical importance.
Secondly, the question of about locating the physical facility or not, inside or outside. It’s a larger problem. This is from an index card of mine that I wrote in 1985: My basic approach to Jewish educational policy in Outreach and all that stuff is: Define a population you regard as moderately-affiliated – for whatever purpose. It’s between the population that you already have and the population that you’ll never reach. For whatever it may be. For Israel Experience. For your minyan. For donors. For yiddishkeit. Whatever your goal is, you’ve got three populations. Construct your work aiming for the moderately-affiliated for your purpose.
And now to answer your question. I have no idea where you should put that damn cultural centre! But are there enough people in that area who are not Jewishly-engaged, etc.? Secondly, with all my snotty remarks as a teenager about edifice complexes and everything else, it turns out that Jewish space and Jewish turf are really very important. People relate to place. Israel’s good: if you can’t do Israel, you’ve neighbourhood; you’ve got institutions. I’ve done some research on JCCs in the United States and I find the same community [issues]. There are some JCCs that create community and other JCCs, because of their space, create less community. So space is important – and then how you do space is very important.
My last comment. It was running through these remarks and the other remarks.
Look, Orthodox Jews, even the type of Orthodoxy you have in this country, which is different from the Orthodoxy we have in other countries – and I say it admiringly (because it’s more inclusionary, it embraces more people, or it’s less frum – depends how you want to look at it) – Orthodox Jews are more involved, more committed, score higher on all the measures that I seem to care about, that we seem to care about. But that doesn’t lead me to an Orthodox-only answer. It is not out of, in any way, chas vecholilah, failing to admire and respect the wonderful contributions of Orthodoxy to Jewish life. In fact, hahefech [the opposite].
My concern in the States and in the Jewish world is that the Orthodoxy that I grew up with, the Orthodoxy that I experienced on both sides of the fence, was an Orthodoxy that was in there campaigning for the things that I care about: Soviet Jewry and Israel and kashrut and Shabbos and Jewish learning, things that were very important. It’s less true here. Other parts of the world, that Orthodoxy has separated from the rest of the world. And all of a sudden, guys like me (and I’m formally Masorti) are on the extreme right wing of the Jewish people, the Jewish community, because the real right wing has taken a walk and is now sectarian. To me, that is a loss – both for Orthodoxy and the rest of Am Yisrael.
My constant urging, and I’ve said it several times – I was very clear to keep saying all four movements. I kept naming them. It wasn’t by accident. I kept talking about dialogue. That wasn’t by accident. Because I believe that by creating this interaction and this dialogue, Orthodoxy will return to being more clal Yisrael-orientedand non-Orthodoxy – Reform, Conservative, Progressive, Masorti, secular – will begin to learn more about the things that they should learn from Orthodox. To me – that is why I am pushing for this dialogue. It is not out of lack of respect. In fact, it’s just the opposite. It’s out of a great admiration for the yiddishkeit that Orthodoxy can give us and I don’t want to see us lose it. I have more to say, but I’ll leave it there.
Chair: Great. We want to thank Tony Danker for microphone duties and the two panellists, Professor Kate Loewenthal and Professor Steven Cohen. It’s appropriate, I suppose, when we’re talking about identity and playing with terms like id and ego to take a leaf out of the Book of Ruth and say, ‘Wherever ego I go’ [ooooh!]. So we’re meant to go upstairs to lunch. Thank you very much.
[End of session.]