Scott Shay, "New York Jews: The Five and a Half Tribes"
David Shasha
New York Jews: The Five and a Half Tribes
By: Scott A. Shay
Examining this article written by the chairman of the UJA-Federation study of New York Jews we learn a number of important things about how Jewish institutions work and how the people who speak on behalf of these institutions think.
It is quite interesting to note who UJA-Federation chose to be chairman of the project. Mr. Shay is chairman of the board and founder of Signature Bank. I had never before heard of this bank, so I went to check their website:
http://investor.signatureny.com/directors.cfm
Signature Bank has on its board of directors former Republican senator Alphonse D’Amato and the daughter of Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump.
There seems to be a real powerhouse coalition there.
Naturally, Mr. Shay, according to his bio on the website, “has been involved in the investment banking and venture capital industries.” This places him in rarefied territory – a 1%-er who represents the interests of the elites. He is a rich banker who works to promote the interests of other rich people. This is an excellent resume for anyone seeking entry into the Jewish institutional world where money is all that counts.
At a 2010 talk at Shay’s alma-mater Northwestern University he spoke about the mortgage securities crisis:
http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/News_Articles/2010/mortgage_crisis.aspx
Like many in the financial industry he seems to believe that the casino-like tool of mortgage-backed securities – the slicing up and repackaging of home loans as investments – was a good thing. How it went bad is explained in an incoherent fashion with little if any real clarity.
So that is the sort of person that gets to run a study of the Jewish community. His main qualification for the job is that he is a financial professional who has some important friends and contacts. That, I suppose, is an important asset when trying to analyze the Jewish community.
In a JTA article about him we see his great interest in the future of the Jewish community:
This article gives us an even stronger sense of why Shay is seen as a savvy and in-the-know Jewish leader: He thinks and speaks in the language of the institutional Jewish echo-chamber. There the hot-button issue is education and how to package and deliver Jewish knowledge to the masses of Jews. In this area Shay emphatically supports the idea that the “client” is always right. It is not a problem of “supply” in his view. The problem is that “supply” is not connected to “demand.” The Jewish consumer is seen in marketing terms – just as a financial manager would see it – and the job of the Jewish educator is to tailor their work to the needs and wishes of the consumer.
There is a strong connection between Shay the banker and Shay the Jewish institutional professional. His status in the business community is based on perception and connectivity – as can be seen in the prominence of D’Amato and Trump on his bank’s board of directors. It’s all about who you know and not what you know.
As a member of the financial elite it is also critical to mouth the platitudes and bromides of the industry. As we know all too well, it is an industry that relies on its own echo-chamber and on the lobbying efforts that make it relatively immune from careful inspection by government regulatory forces. It is all about creating the correct impression and transforming moral corruption into a virtue.
So too in the world of Jewish institutions it is all about appearance and the slick presentation. It is not what you say but the way you say it. Saying that Jewish education should be about what uneducated Jews want makes little rational sense, except when the main value is that of social marketing and networking. That this only serves to reinforce the original problem is not seen as an issue.
With these ideas in mind, we now come to Shay’s article.
Shay tells us that there are a bunch of Jewish factions in New York – Sephardim are, naturally, not one of them. The word “Sephardic” never appears in the article. In spite of the fact that Sephardim do appear – albeit very briefly – in the UJA study, they are not important enough to be enumerated as part of the tribal configuration. It is not that Sephardim did not participate in the organization of the study, it is just that in the final assessment they are not worthy of note.
What makes this even more interesting to me is that for the past few months I have been reading the books of Rabbi David De Sola Pool on Shearith Israel and the central place of Sephardic Jews in New York Jewish history. For those who know anything about this history it is quite clear that Sephardim were not only the first Jews to arrive in New York, but Sephardic Jews created the basic Jewish infrastructure of New York – and by extension – American Jewry.
But this is all ancient history.
Today’s Jews and their representative institutions need not be bothered with history and communal organization. What is important is to better understand the complex reality of an Ashkenazi Jewish community that is indeed balkanized and at odds with itself. How one then finds common ground and fellowship within such a community is akin to repairing the mortgage securities crisis in America. It cannot really be done, so, once again, the “professionals” – those who have some personal stake in the matter – stumble along and offer empty platitudes and incoherent rhetoric in place of actual, substantive analysis. The result is more “business-as-usual.”
Seeing Ashkenazi Jews and the Ashkenazi Jewish tradition – in all its variations – as being the only object worthy of discussion means that we will be tied to the fissures, battles, and general dysfunctional malaise that have torn Jews apart over the past few centuries.
The conceptual tools afforded by Sephardic Jewish culture are simply suppressed and made unavailable to the Jewish community; a community that is founded on a base ethnocentrism and odious cultural prejudice when it comes to non-Ashkenazi Jews.
So in spite of the slick packaging and the use of the most up-to-date marketing tools and strategies, the Jewish institutional world as represented by Scott Shay and his ilk has consigned the Jewish future to instability and ineffectiveness. It will just be more of the same.
It is one thing to ignore the Sephardim; after all Sephardim are a minority in the Jewish community and are not an active part of the discussion. This is bad enough, but what’s worse is the forced suppression and ignorance of the rich and varied Sephardic cultural heritage whose values of Religious Humanism are more relevant to a Jewish community that has become unable to maintain communal coherence and unity.
It is perhaps not the aim of institutions like UJA-Federation to achieve harmony within the Jewish community. So long as the voices in the Jewish institutional echo-chamber maintain their own harmony and homogeneity all will be seen as well. Those seeking funding know this and will do nothing to question that consensus.
It is this sense of “success” in institutional terms that drives Jewish philanthropy. It is a “success” that will continue – as the UJA report strongly indicates – that the fanatical Ultra-Orthodox will continue their ascendancy while the larger Jewish community assimilates and leaves the fold.
DS
According to Jewish tradition, the Jewish people originally consisted of twelve tribes, each descended from one of Jacob's sons. The Assyrian empire exiled 10 of these tribes about 2800 years ago. The newly released Jewish Community Study of New York (JCSNY), sponsored by UJA-Federation of New York, indicates a new twist in Jewish history. While the study identified many demographic patterns, my reading of its findings is that New York Jewry (with important connotations for overall American Jewish trends) now consists of five and a half distinct tribes. This new tribal alignment has far reaching implications for the face of American Jewry, Jewish engagement, and Jewish communal responsibility.
Looking at this new alignment, the first tribe is the Engaged non-Orthodox Jews. With a substantial percentage of adult Jews at 30 percent, but only 25 percent of the children, this group consists largely of Jews with affiliations to the Reform and Conservative movements, ties to Jewish organizations ranging from AIPAC to J Street, and often correlates with high levels of secular education and income. This group used to be thought of by most as "American Jewry" and set its agenda. However, today, despite its many achievements, it is aging and its institutions, both religious and secular, are struggling. Each of the Reform and Conservative Movements lost about 40,000 members in the New York area in the last decade. The American Jewish Congress, once a voice of American Jewry, closed down, unable to appeal to a broader constituency. The question for this tribe is whether current institutions can inspire a renewal and tribal growth, or whether they should down-size their organizational infrastructure.
The second tribe is the Less Engaged Jews. At 25 percent of the Jewish population, of which a disproportionate number are young, this tribe is made up of two groups: intermarried families that are not raising their children as Jewish and of a broad gamut of Jews who just are not into being Jewish. This tribe has similarly high rates of secular education and income as other non-Orthodox Jews and participates in a large range of community initiatives in American society at large. It does not, however, have strong ties to Jewish institutions, Jewish communities or Jewish causes. Rather, Less Engaged Jews maintain their tether line to the Jewish people through the internet and cultural activities that are Jewish but involve non-Jews as well (think Matisyahu concerts or Adam Sandler's "Eight Crazy Days", etc.). The question for this tribe is will they stay Jewish and, if so, how?
The third tribe is the Haredi Jews, which include Hassidic groups and Jews affiliated withyeshivot (centers for advanced, traditional Talmudic learning). At 22 percent of the individuals and almost half of all Jewish children, this group is the fastest growing American Jewish tribe. The Haredi tribe is by definition Jewishly engaged, and has achieved its goal of rebuilding Jewish institutions, especially yeshivot, and replenishing their numbers after the Holocaust. While some Haredi communities like Chabad have been very active in community-wide initiatives, others inside the Haredi tribe lack the desire, skills, and financial resources to engage outside of their own group. In the New York Hassidic communities, just 13 percent of adults have earned a college degree, two thirds of households earn less than $50,000, and 63 percent are poor or near poor. The question this tribe is will they disengage totally from the other Jewish tribes or will they strike a balance between tribal identity and broader community involvement?
The fourth tribe is the Russian-speaking Jews which accounts for 14 percent of the New York Jews. While the Russian-speaking is tribe is decidedly secular -- only a small minority affiliates with any religious movement of Judaism -- it identifies very strongly with the Jewish people. Intermarriage is rare, affinity for Israel is high, and social engagement within the Jewish world is almost double that of other non-Orthodox Jews. Other Jewish groups, such as the early secular Zionists, in the past have divorced being ethnically Jewish from the practice of Judaism as a religion. The question for this tribe is whether their cultural Jewish identification will be keep them connected to other Jews.
The fifth tribe is the Modern Orthodox Jews. This tribe comprises about 10 percent of New York Jews and 12 percent of its children. Previous studies often considered the Modern Orthodox and the Haredi as part of the same tribe, based on orthodox religious affiliation and commitment to Jewish education. However, their differences are substantial. Modern Orthodox Jews have achieved their goal of combining tradition and modernity: their Jewish engagement is both more intense than non-Orthodox Jews and more diverse than all the other tribes, while they demonstrate levels of secular education, income, and participation in the labor market that are barely distinguishable from the non-Orthodox population. The question for this tribe is whether it will use its extensive engagement and ties to different Jews to forge a link between the different tribes
Finally, the "half tribe" in American Jewry is quite a surprise. 5 percent of people who identified as Jewish in the study for whom neither parent was Jewish and never underwent a formal conversion (an additional 2 percent did complete a conversion). The study carefully excluded Messianic Jews. Among the answers we found for people in this group were "My ex-wife and children are Jewish so I consider myself Jewish," or "my friends are mostly Jewish, I keep kosher and I give to Jewish charities." What is most astounding about this statistic is its implication. Whereas after World War II, Jews faced discrimination by colleges and employers, today Jews are such a well-regarded group, that 77,000 New Yorkers have chosen to identify themselves as such.
While there are those who might respond to the results of this study with anxiety that is not the conclusion I would draw. For the Engaged non-Orthodox this is a wake-up call and wake up calls can be useful. For the Less Engaged American Jews there is good news too. We now have a treasure trove of information about which initiatives are meaningful for this group and which are not. For example, we do a pretty good job as a community of the first step of "outreach," that is welcoming all Jews, but a worse job at engaging those who tentatively "try out" Jewish activities.
So
it is time to move away from "welcoming" as an outreach focus toward
true engagement. We know affiliation creates connections with the Jewish
community as a whole and leads to more investment in Jewish education, support
for Israel, and giving to Jewish
as well as American causes. We understand that we need to re-double our efforts
to make supplemental schools effective, to make Jewishly-oriented camping
commonplace for young Jews, and to work so that that two teen or young adult
peer trips to Israel become the gold
standard for American Jewry. For the Russian Jews, we can say with pride that
the second-generation continues to be involved in Jewish community initiatives.
For the Haredi, there is a model of strong tribal identity and broader
community involvement that they can follow, namely the Chabad movement.
Finally, for the Modern Orthodox, we have learned that they have taken strong
community-wide leadership and have the skills to provide the glue for keeping
different tribes together.
We have always been a community of tribes. When the twelve tribes of Israel camped in the
wilderness, each camp separately aligned by the identity of their traditional
matriarch, Leah, Rachel, Billah and Zilpa. These tribes all had very different
tribal personalities, yet when the non-Jewish prophet Balaam looked out at
them, he famously said, "How goodly are your tents, O Jacob, your
dwellings O Israel (Numbers 24:6). Jews have long practiced unity through
diversity. Each group has had an important contribution to make.
Despite the current divisions of American Jewry, there is no doubt that Jews maintain the ability to act in unity when there is a compelling need. Although it may seem like ancient history, this year marks just the 25th anniversary of the massive Soviet Jewry rally in Washington D.C., attended by all sectors of American Jewry that hastened the fall of the Iron Curtain. The rally demonstrated that American Jews can set aside their differences to make change happen. It is my fervent hope that American Jewry once again harnesses that capacity in the current challenging geo-political and social environment to again be "a light unto the nations." If we do so, it will beautiful to gaze upon.
From The Huffington Post, June 21, 2012