The Jewish Establishment

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bcases actively initiated the death of any meaningful and bexclusive Jewishness and with it generations of young Jews.

b3.aNever since the Great Depression had the manifesta- btions of anti-Semitism been so clear and bold.

bAssimilation in America in the year 1968 had reached bfrightening proportions. It was not just the Jew who con- bverted or who married a gentile and disappeared from the branks of the Jewish people. It was the far more numerous bJews who simply did not care. They may have married Jews bbut that was simply because the right gentile had not ap- bpeared. It was not readiness but opportunity that was lack- bing. But even as they remained officially in the fold, their bsubjective ties with their people and faith simply no longer bexisted. Their Jewishness was no more important to them bthan any other aspect of their physiological or biological bcondition which had been bestowed on them through no bdesire or request of their own. If they were Jews, it was bbecause their parents were; they could not give any other breason or meaning to their heritage. They were the product bof the melting pot, the public schools, and the drive for bequality and uniformity that the Jewish Establishment had bfought for, so long and so hard.

bAnd the temples and synagogues that were produced by bthose leaders betrayed the same kind of assimilation, confu- bsion, and hypocrisy, a religious kind of “let us have our bJewish cake (nor need it be kosher) and eat it too!” The bAmerican Jewish religious theories that came into being bincluded the Reform brand, whose distinguishability from bChristian Unitarianism was evident only to the keenest of bscholastics or philologists; a thing called Reconstructionism, bthe product of Mordecai Kaplan (Sample: “G-d is a func- btional, not a substantive, noun, thus denoting that power in bthe cosmos, including man, that makes for the salvation of bmen and nations”); and Conservatism, a slippery theological bthing that meant all things to all Jews, and that prompted bJulian Freeman of Indianapolis, a prominent Conservative blayman, to complain that “ten different Conservative rabbis bwill have ten different ideas of Conservative Judaism.”