The Jewish are at a crossroads

Every #metoo scandal is different, but most are alike in at least one way: Whether among Hollywood moguls or Southern Baptists, congressmen or Catholic bishops, the fall of prominent men usually accelerates some pre-existing debate about where the larger institution or culture should be going, and which side of its internal arguments deserves to gain.

Lately, the American Jewish community has presented an interesting case study, with the series of accusations against Steven M Cohen, a sociologist who has spent much of his career studying the demography of American Jewish life, and linking intermarriage and fertility to his people’s cultural continuity.

In answering his accusers Mr Cohen has embraced the cliches of male big shot contrition — promising a “consultation with clergy, therapists and professional experts” and “a process of education, recognition, remorse and repair”. But meanwhile, his fall has inspired a critique not only of his behaviour but also his life’s work, with three female historians writing in The Forward that his sexual sins should prompt a larger reappraisal of “the troubling gender and sexual politics long embedded in communal discussions of Jewish continuity and survival.”

What Mr Cohen’s critics have in mind, specifically, is the way that the long-standing angst within the American Jewish community around assimilation, intermarriage and fertility tends to sustain a kind of soft traditionalist pressure even in liberal Jewish life — one that defines Jewish identity in exclusionist terms while marginalising “single women, queer people, unwed parents, and childless individuals or couples”.

What the authors are describing pejoratively, the way that a general Jewish liberalism can coexist with more conservative impulses and attitudes, has long been particularly obvious in debates about the state of Israel, where the most cosmopolitan of Jewish liberals can suddenly sound like strident nationalists. But it extends to a general Jewish interest in, and sometimes alarmism about, issues like fertility rates and cultural preservation that in the world of Gentile politics are associated with the right.

This combination has often frustrated more thoroughgoing conservatives — Jewish ones especially — who don’t understand why more American Jews don’t extend their conservative impulses beyond the tribe and vote Republican. But a “liberalism without/conservatism within” combination is common to minority populations, and it’s a particularly reasonable reaction to the experience of Jewish history: An oft-persecuted people’s flourishing can both depend on maintaining a certain conservatism about its own patterns of marrying and begetting and cultural transmission, and on encouraging liberalism and cosmopolitanism in the wider, potentially-hostile order in which the diaspora subsists.

The interesting question is whether the combination can survive the pressures of our own era. One form of pressure comes from the left, which is increasingly intent on rooting out all residues of traditionalism within the liberal order — treating any form of nationalism as suspect, any policing of religious orthodoxy as dangerous, any approach to sex and family and child-rearing that isn’t purely genderegalitarian as a dangerous atavism.

At the same time, there is a different pressure from Israel itself. As the Jewish state’s political and cultural debate has shifted to the right, Benjamin Netanyahu has embraced the view that European Jewry’s old enemy, Christian nationalism, is less dangerous to the Jewish future than the dissolving effects of liberal cosmopolitanism and the threat posed by Islamist anti-Semitism. Thus you have the striking phenomenon of the Netanyahu government cultivating friends like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, on the grounds that joining an alliance of conservative nationalisms actually offers a surer ground for the Jewish state’s survival than sticking with the secularism and antinationalism of the present liberal project.

These centrifugal forces, pulling leftward and rightward, have already alienated younger liberal Jews in the United States from the uncomplicated pro-Israel sentiments of their grandparents. And they may portend a future where the “liberal politics with a dose of cultural conservatism” combination gives way to a sharper choice for many Jews: a more consistently conservative Judaism bound to Israeli nationalism, and a liberal Judaism that’s more consistently liberal and less identitarian — and perhaps ultimately more secularised and assimilated.

As for whether this divergence will ultimately be, as they say, good for the Jews — well, that’s a question this Gentile columnist leaves to the chosen people to debate.

Ross Douthat is a columnist with The New York Times.