Samizdata

There is an interesting article with links on Brothers Judd in which Orrin Judd muses on the question of the fading of Jewish identity, referring to articles by Richard Just in American Prospect and Gary Rosen’s review of the dismal Alan Dershowitz’s interesting book ‘The Vanishing Jew’. That this diminution of Jewish identity is in fact a problem seems to have been accepted as axiomatic by Orrin.

But maybe it is just that Jews in America (and Britain for that matter) have just grown up and evolved away from a narrow tribal collective mindset. They realise that their identity is not primarily I am a Jew, but rather I am David Cohen. In fact, perhaps the reason for this Jewish ‘problem’ is that due to hundreds of generations of being free from the limiting delusion of ‘blood and soil’ has made Jews uniquely suited to embrace individualistic notions of identity. Jews have a Jewish nation state in Israel now if they want it… and it is just another messy nation state like any other, better than some and worse than others. Few people are better placed psychologically than the world’s Jews at this point in time to see the world for what it really is: the ‘Promised Land’ is Jewish again and the world still sucks.

Perhaps the only thing that made the Jews a collective ‘tribe’ at all was being forced together by the hostility of host societies who despised them for not being part of their ‘Volk’. The Jewish ‘problem’ of a loss of identity in the larger cosmopolitan society is not a problem at all… it is a blessing! Just as ‘everyone can be Irish on St. Patrick’s Day’, there is nothing wrong with letting Jewish identity (and every other limiting ghetto-of-the-mind) become little more than a bit of cultural spice of only passing significance. As other people have stopped regarding Jews as a people apart, it is not surprising that Jews have started to do the same.