Developments in Jewish Community Organization
in the Second Postwar Generation
Daniel J. Elazar
A New Generation and a New Agenda
In 1976 I published Community and Polity: The Organizational
Dynamics of American Jewry, a description and analysis of
developments in the American Jewish community through the first
postwar generation -- roughly 1946 through 1976.1 Those were the
years in which the American Jewish community completed the
development of its communal structure, modes of Jewish
affiliation, and basic patterns for collective action. American
Jewry, along with the United States and the world as a whole,
since has passed into the second generation of the postwar and
indeed postmodern epoch.
As could be expected, the new generation brought a new agenda
which it is presently in the process of defining. In some cases,
trends from the first generation have continued to play
themselves out. In others there have been reversals of previous
trends, sometimes unanticipated. New organizations and
institutions have developed along with new issues. All told,
twelve years into the new generation, while we are still seeking
appropriate ways to deal with the new agenda, a preliminary
description and analysis of these new developments is in place.
This article is, in that sense, an update of Community and Polity
to show how both the American Jewish community and its polity
have developed in the new generation.
Our examination will focus on the community and its polity as
they are organized locally, countrywide, and increasingly on a
statewide and regional basis. In particular we will examine the
transformations taking place in local community federations and
in the countrywide federation movement, the decline of the
mass-based organizations and the exceptions to that decline, the
shift in the forms and organization of Jewish education, the
changes taking place in the synagogue movements in response to a
general stabilization of membership at a lower level than
anticipated, and the problems of Jewish unity generated by
inter-movement competition, the new ambiguity in the sphere of
community relations, the impact of demographic shifts on Jewish
community organization, the institutionalization of new
relationships between the American Jewish community and Israel,
the emergence of new model organizations to mobilize and serve
the Jewish community, and the emerging changes in communal
leadership.
Transformations in the Jewish Community Federations
At the end of the first postwar generation, the Jewish community
federations had become the framing institutions of virtually
every local Jewish community of any size in the United States. As
such, the local federation raised about half the money raised
from Jews for Jewish purposes (excluding fees for services), by
far the largest share; had extended its influence into every
sphere of Jewish activity, in most cases with the exception of
the religious congregational sphere, where the synagogue still
remained fully or substantially independent; and through its
powers of the purse had undertaken responsibility for community
planning in such a way that the federation did as much as any
single Jewish organization possibly could to shape organized
Jewish life.
There were, of course, limitations on the newly powerful
federations. Some were situational. Federations had no
significant influence over Jewish demographic trends, whether
birth rates, intermarriage, or inter-neighborhood, city-suburb or
inter-regional migrations. To these forces they could only
respond and not always well. Federations had little if any
influence on synagogues, not even in such matters as their
relocation or building campaigns, which had a significant impact
on the larger Jewish community. Federations did not choose to
have an impact on the content of Jewish education except in
peripheral ways. While federations had extended their control
over the community relations sphere by bringing the local
community relations councils (CRCs) more or less under their
control, to the extent that they exercised a veto over CRC
activities if they did not set the CRC agenda, they still had to
deal with relatively independent branches or chapters of the
national community relations organizations.
The federations' dominance in the communal welfare sphere was
more complete. Even so, individual agencies in the federation
"family" remained federated with the framing institution, not
subordinate to it. Federation domination may have been most
complete in the Israel-overseas sphere, at least in the realm of
fundraising, and since not much else was going on in the way of
local community connections with Israel, that was sufficient.
The new generation has brought a number of important changes or
developments modifying the previous situation:
1. Federations have become more involved in the
educational-cultural and religious-congregational spheres. As
more Jewish education has become day school education and a
greater share of the day school budgets have come from
federations, federation involvement has grown as part of the
normal processes of Jewish communal governance. By the end of
the previous generation, concern over the state of
federation-synagogue relations had led to the development of
coordinating committees in most communities. While these
committees soon found that they had relatively little to do and
synagogues still remain very much in the category of private
institutions, ways have been found to provide federation aid to
synagogue programs in many communities and a certain amount of
inter-synagogal coordination under federation auspices or with
federation encouragement has begun to emerge.
2. Within those spheres in which federations already had a strong
presence, some federations have begun to move from federated to
direct control arrangements. This has been the historic pattern
in the so-called "integrated federations," where each of the
communal functions is handled by a federation department or
committee rather than a separate agency. But the federated
pattern is by far the more common. Recent efforts by federations
to either absorb formerly federated agencies as federation
departments or to take over the budgeting process of still
nominally federated agencies in such a way that their freedom of
decision-making is reduced to mere housekeeping, is an increasing
trend.
Much as the growth of federations was a good thing for the
American Jewish community, there are signs that this new trend is
not healthy for the community. While it may seem like a logical
extension of the earlier movement from fundraising to financing
to community planning, it is in fact a break from the federated
pattern toward a unitary one, and unitary government has never
worked either in the United States or in the Jewish polity unless
it is a result of coercion from the outside, and certainly not
where a voluntary community is concerned. People will simple vote
with their feet and no longer volunteer. Indeed as we shall see,
as the federations have become more powerful, there is every
evidence that their share of the total Jewish fundraising dollar
has declined as new people who do not find the federation
establishments open to them or advancement through federation
sufficiently rapid or far, seek other places to put what are, in
the last analysis, voluntary contributions of time, effort and
funds.
3. One of the characteristics of the new generation has been more
direct diaspora involvement in those aspects of Israeli
development where diaspora funds are involved. The greatest and
best example of this is Project Renewal, where local communities,
the larger ones alone and small ones in consortia, were twinned
with Israeli neighborhoods and development towns to undertake
urban revitalization projects. While some may have been
reluctant at first, most of the stronger federations seized this
opportunity as it became clear to them that it would give them
more direct operating responsibilities than most have in their
own communities.2 By 1985, some forty federations have appointed
their own representatives in Israel, in most cases to work with
Project Renewal, but in at least four -- New York, Los Angeles,
Chicago, and San Francisco -- to be comprehensive representatives
of federation interests and local community programs in the
Jewish state. From this it was an easy step to demanding that the
federations choose the community representatives to the governing
bodies of the Jewish Agency, even if they are formally nominated
by the United Israel Appeal.3
Another important element in the growth of the federations' power
is the expansion of federation endowment funds. The effort of
the past twenty years to increase those endowment funds has now
begun to bear fruit. The income from these endowment funds has
given the federation leadership increasing amounts of
discretionary money to use to initiate or support programs that
might not otherwise be able to pass through the normal
allocations process.
4. Already at the end of the previous generation it was becoming
apparent that federations were forming alliances with a
newly-resurgent if still numerically small Orthodox Jewry in a
manner not dissimilar to the alliances between the leading
non-religious parties and the religious camp in Israel. Since
then these alliances have spread and deepened. There are several
reasons why this became a natural development. Mainstream
Orthodox Jewish institutions do not compete with federations. At
the same time they can use federation services and indeed are
excellent clients for services which non-Orthodox Jews no longer
require or seek from the Jewish community. Hence, the very
cooperation with federations strengthens federations' role in the
community and if the Orthodox can be persuaded to become
federation contributors as well, in return for services, that
role is further strengthened.
All this is enhanced by the growing strength of Orthodoxy on the
American Jewish scene. In raw percentages the differences do not
seem to be important. Orthodox Jews still constitute
approximately ten percent of the American Jewish population. But
a more careful analysis reveals that, increasingly, that ten
percent consists of real rather than nominal Orthodox Jews,
seriously committed to Orthodox Judaism with all that means. This
means that nearly all of the ten percent Orthodox are actively
Jewish, something that cannot be said for the 60 percent of
American Jewry who identify with one or another of the
non-Orthodox movements, of whom only about half are active at
best and a third is probably a more accurate figure. Those who
identify with no branch of Judaism are virtually all inactive.
Thus the one-third non-Orthodox Jewish actives constitute 20
percent of American Jewry, while Orthodox Jews constitute nearly
10 percent, which gives Orthodox Jewry approximately one third of
all active Jews in America. Thus the Orthodox community has
acquired real weight on the American Jewish scene.4
If we add to this the minimal interest of the Reform movement as
a movement in federation services, and the long-standing (though
now diminishing) antagonism between many Conservative rabbis and
the federations, the picture comes into even sharper focus. In
the first postwar generation the Reform movement had almost no
demands on federation services. Whatever services Reform Jews
used, they used as individual members of the community. This has
changed somewhat in the second generation as segments of the
Reform movement have sought more intensive Jewish education and
have sought federation support for their day schools and even
their supplementary schools. Also, its struggle for presence and
standing in Israel has led the Reform movement to try to mobilize
federation support for Jewish Agency allocations to their Israeli
institutions. Still there is no where near the level of
utilization of local services among Reform Jews that there is in
actuality or potentially among the Orthodox.
During the first postwar generation when Conservative synagogues
were laying claim to everything in sight and were particularly
disturbed by the competition with the Jewish community centers
for their youth, a real antagonism developed between the
Conservative rabbinate and the federations. Now that it is
apparent that few if any Conservative congregations will become
all-embracing synagogue centers and the Conservative movement's
new leadership has come to perceive what it means to be in
conflict with the federations, changes are in the offing, but
they have just begun and it is too soon to assess how strong the
shift is likely to be.
5. All this is reflected in the new presence of observant Jews in
the federation civil service. Gone are the days when most
federation personnel, especially senior personnel, were
secularists from socialist or communist backgrounds who had found
their way back to the Jewish people through their careers in
Jewish communal service. This remained true through the first
postwar generation, but shifted rapidly in the 1970s and is
continuing to shift.
Today Jewish communal service, like the rabbinate or Jewish
education, tends to attract those who are especially committed to
Judaism in all its facets and who find a Jewish career
environment makes life easier and richer for them as observant
Jews. We do not have percentages to draw upon but the change is
palpable, especially among the younger age groups although the
fact that the executive vice-presidents of both the Council of
Jewish Federations and the Conference of Presidents of Major
Jewish Organizations, not to mention the World Jewish Congress,
the Anti-Defamation League, and the National Foundation for
Jewish Culture, are Orthodox Jews speaks for itself.
One clear indication of the shift is to be found at the annual
General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations, the major
gathering of American Jewry. Until just a few years ago, the
Orthodox services had trouble attracting more than two or three
minyanim even on Shabbat, as compared to the hundreds attending
non-Orthodox Sabbath services. In 1987 the Orthodox service on
Shabbat had approximately 250 participants, leaving the service
still in third place but in the same size range as the
Conservative and Reform services. Moreover it was the Orthodox
service that drew the highest percentage of senior Jewish civil
servants.
Nor should it be thought that all the traditional Jews in Jewish
communal service are Orthodox. Those who are not Orthodox on the
federation staffs are increasingly drawn from among the serious
Conservative Jews whose personal and family observance level is
high and who are participants in the more intensive Conservative
frameworks such as havurot and Solomon Schechter day schools, as
well as products of the Ramah camps.
6. The annual campaign has become more locally oriented.
Federations rose to their present positions of power in great
part because they became the principal fundraisers for Israel.
For years Israelis and supporters of Israel charged that the
local communities were living off the back of Israel, raising
large sums of money in Israel's name and then keeping too much of
it at home for local purposes -- that in the days when up to 70
percent of the campaign was allocated to Israel. Toward the end
of the first postwar generation, the percentage of funds
allocated to Israel began to decline and has continued to do so,
so that the average is now more or less 50-50. This has served
to intensify the aforementioned claim.
At least since the Lebanon War in 1982, however, there has been a
tendency to shift the emphasis in the campaign to local needs,
even downplaying Israel. In recent years there have even been
campaigns in some cities in which Israel has hardly been
featured. This is partly a result of the fear on the part of the
federation leadership that Israel's bad press has made it less
attractive to donors, but it is also a reflection of the
increased consciousness of the donors of local Jewish needs,
especially in the realm of formal and informal Jewish education.
The further spread of the Jewish population outward from the old
metropolitan centers and around the country, away from the
northeastern seaboard, has moved an increasing number of
federations to begin to develop new forms of state-wide and
regional organization to accommodate a situation in which most
Jews are no longer located in clear-cut metropolitan
concentrations. State-wide organization first came in an effort
to find a basis for providing federation support for Jewish
programs on the college campuses. Since many universities,
including many of those most attractive to Jewish students, are
located outside of normal federation service areas, and even
those that are within metropolitan areas draw students who do not
originally come from the local community, the need to develop an
equitable basis for supporting Jewish campus services led to
regional or state-wide consortia of federations.
These consortia were paralleled by the establishment of
intra-state regional federations for small Jewish communities
such as those of southern and central Illinois. In the first, a
number of very small Jewish communities created one common
federation to service the Jews in the southern third of the
state, while in the second, a number of separate federations
created a federation of federations to deal with the Jews in the
central third. More recently, statewide confederations of
federations have been established in Florida, Illinois and New
Jersey, in part for joint representation at the state capital,
and in part for a wider range of joint activities designed to
serve statewide Jewish populations.
This is a new departure for American Jewry which had always been
organized on a city-wide or metropolitan basis. As yet it is not
a major transformation, but it may be a significant one. Indeed,
the Council of Jewish Federations is now discussing countrywide
or continent-wide planning to deal with such demographic trends
as the Jewish move to the sunbelt.5
Declines in the Mass-Based Organizations
A second great change taking place in American Jewish community
life is the decline in membership of the great mass-based Jewish
organizations. B'nai B'rith has been in serious trouble since
the mid-1970s as its older members have died and fewer and fewer
younger people find it attractive. New forms of leisure time
activity have replaced the traditional B'nai B'rith bowling
leagues and brunches which were the primary attractions for many
otherwise marginal Jews. The insurance packages offered by the
organization, once attractive benefits, especially to the
self-employed, now compete with insurance and pension plans that
do not require organizational membership. Nor has B'nai B'rith's
Jewish content been focused enough to attract those Jews who seek
Jewish activity.
The women's organizations including Hadassah have also been
hard-hit by the changing environment. The women's movement with
its emphasis on careers for women in areas once considered the
province of men has attracted many of the younger women,
occupying their time so that they no longer have the need, the
energy or the leisure for voluntary organizational activity in
women's groups. Those who do find time for such activity are
more likely to seek expression in what were once men's groups
that now recruit leadership regardless of gender, such as the
federations themselves, their agencies, synagogue and school
boards, or the local chapters of AIPAC (the American-Israel
Public Affairs Committee).
This has had two consequences. On one hand, the role in Jewish
life of general purpose mass-based organizations outside the
synagogue in Jewish life is diminishing. B'nai B'rith has for
all intents and purposes transferred its most important functions
to other bodies. ADL has become even more independent than it
was. The Hillel Foundations have become part of the federation
world. The synagogues have become the institutions that have the
troops, i.e., they have become the only places where large
numbers of Jews assemble regularly. If they cannot compete with
the federations for leadership in the Jewish community, they do
play a mobilizing role which federations cannot. Hence there now
is a greater incentive for both federations and synagogues to
develop linkages based upon the special ability of each to
mobilize either funds or people.
Stabilization in the Congregations
At the end of the first postwar generation, the situation in the
synagogues looked cloudy, if not gloomy. The great religious
revival of the 1950s had ended in about 1962. Few new
congregations were founded after that date except where migration
brought Jews to unsynagogued areas. Hence synagogue membership
actually began to decline, a decline that continued for the next
thirteen years. The situation stabilized about 1975, just at the
generation's end, and since then remains stable. While there has
been little if any growth in synagogue membership, the decline in
other forms of Jewish association, particularly among the
mass-based Jewish organizations, has actually strengthened the
synagogues' overall position in the community somewhat, while
improved federation-synagogue relations have helped reinforce
those two institutions as the twin pillars of the local
community.
Within the different synagogue movements, there have been
apparently contradictory trends. The Reform movement has
benefitted most from such growth as there has been to the point
where it now is at least equal if not larger in membership than
the Conservative movement in most communities. The trend to more
traditional observance in Reform congregations has continued and
the National Federation of Temple Youth, the Reform youth
movement, is undoubtedly the strongest of the synagogue youth
movements. On the other hand, the drift of most Reform Jews away
from comprehensive Jewish experiences is equally pronounced.
The Conservative movement has suffered the greatest decline of
all of the movements. By the end of the postwar generation,
members of Conservative congregations fell into three categories:
a very small percentage, probably no more than five percent, were
seriously practicing Jews who found their Jewish expression
within Conservative congregations. These were the authentic
Conservative Jews who lived up to the formal requirements of
Conservative Judaism. There were perhaps 50,000 of them in the
United States at most, and most were rabbis, Jewish educators,
cantors and their families. For that small nucleus of those
seeking to be authentic Conservative Jews, the havura became a
major vehicle -- a few separate from established congregations,
and an increasing number within the congregational framework.
Between 25 and 30 percent of the movement's congregational
membership could be identified as following accepted Conservative
practice, that is to say, identifiably concerned with religious
practice and in a way characteristic of Conservative Jews, but
not fulfilling the mitzvot in the manner that the movement
formally required. These were the kind of people who maintained
kosher homes but did not observe kashrut outside of the home.
The other two-thirds of the members of Conservative congregations
had not found themselves a Conservative way of life beyond
synagogue membership. Many of their children began moving over
to Reform, leading to a serious decline in Conservative movement
membership and a religiously leftward swing in most Conservative
congregations.6
As already indicated, Orthodox synagogues were undergoing their
own changes. Those congregations whose membership consisted
primarily of the nominally Orthodox either declined or were
transformed by the new seriously Orthodox and new congregations
of the latter grew in strength. By and large, Orthodox
congregations moved to the right religiously.
New Trends in Jewish Education
The early 1960s also witnessed a peaking of the number of Jewish
children enrolled in Jewish schools and the beginning of a long
decline that as yet has not been arrested. This decline is in
part because of the sharply declining Jewish birthrate. At a
time when 85 percent of the Jewish population is over the age of
16, there are simply not that many Jewish children available.
Beyond that there is also some slackening off of interest in
Jewish education and at least on the more peripheral circles. In
part this is a matter of increasing geographic deconcentration of
the Jewish population. Jews who have moved far away from centers
of Jewish population simply find the cost too great in terms of
travel time. In other cases it is simply that the issue of
Jewish identification is less important and the idea of Jewish
education as a "inoculation" to enable Jews to live in a hostile
world has diminished.
On the other hand, there have been shifts in the forms of Jewish
education.7 Day school enrollment, even thirty years ago almost
negligible on the Jewish education scene, has now reached 25
percent of the total enrolled in Jewish elementary and secondary
schools at any given time. The growth of day schools has come at
the expense of more serious supplementary schools. Supplementary
Jewish education today has been reduced from the six hour norm of
a generation ago to an average of four hours per week. The drop
in number of hours is even more apparent at the secondary level.
Significantly, while day school education has become quite
popular on the elementary level, there are still very few
secondary day schools outside of the Orthodox community. Perhaps
this is because parents are worried about their children's
chances to enter college, even though the record of such
secondary day schools as exist is very good in that respect. Be
that as it may, there are very few substitutes at the secondary
level so that children who graduate elementary day schools
frequently do not continue and have their Jewish education
arrested at the age of 13 as their parents had theirs arrested at
the same age through bar or bat mitzvah. Most supplementary high
school programs are extremely weak, often involving two hours a
week of courses on subjects such as medical ethics, feminism and
the Jewish experience, or teenage sexuality -- all important
subjects in and of themselves but hardly the substance of a
Jewish education as traditionally conceived.
The day schools themselves are mixed. Some are quite serious,
others less so. Many are under ultra-Orthodox sponsorship, even
though they appeal to a broader population and hence face a
certain disharmony which effects their results. Today, however,
every religious movement has its day schools and there is a
communal day school network as well.
A good part of this growth has been stimulated by the general
trend to private schools among the upper middle class. Many
Jewish families of limited religious commitment decide that if
their children are going to go to private schools in any case, it
would be good for them to go to Jewish ones. The more these
schools reach out to a cross section of the Jewish public, the
more problems they have in squaring their educational goals with
the Jewish behavior of the home, creating new problems but at
least good ones from the point of view of the Jewish community.
Jewish education at the college level has continued to expand
quantitatively in the number of positions, chairs and Jewish
studies specialists. It is now well-accepted that any university
or college of full status will have some kind of Jewish studies
component. Qualitatively, on the other hand, university-based
Jewish studies have been something of a disappointment. As
student interests shifted in the 1970s to become more career
oriented, enrollment in Jewish studies programs dropped along
with enrollment in all courses not career relevant. Moreover
students who do enroll not only do not become majors, but they do
not even go beyond one or perhaps two courses, usually taken out
of curiosity or to fulfill a liberal arts requirement. Third, the
popular courses are those on the peripheries of the discipline
such as courses on the Holocaust or Jewish feminism. Courses in
classical Jewish studies, especially those which require even
basic knowledge of Hebrew, tend to languish and unless specially
endowed, tend to be cancelled by cost-conscious universities.
One result of this, unanticipated by most, has been the revival
of the Hebrew colleges. While they, too, have had to compromise
their Hebrew standards, they still probably provide a more
intensive education in Jewish studies than any other tertiary
institutions. Moreover a number of them have developed a wide
range of professional programs leading to the Masters degree,
often jointly with professional schools at nearby universities,
in Jewish education, social work and communal service, which have
given them a new clientele and a new lease on life. In the
process they have begun to upgrade their organizational and staff
facilities, moving from the old normal school model to one more
approximating the general university.
It should be noted that the oldest independent graduate school of
Jewish studies, Dropsie University, ceased to exist for all
intents and purposes in 1987, long after it ceased to be an
effective source of Judaica scholars. It was converted into a
center for advanced study in Middle East and cognate fields.
Ambiguity in the Community Relations Sphere
The Jewish community relations agenda remains ambiguous,
following the break-up of the black-Jewish coalition in the late
1960s and the diminution of the ethnic movement in the 1970s. On
one hand, the Jewish community, especially those active in the
community relations field, remain as sympathetic as ever to the
complete integration of blacks into American society, interested
in maintaining inter-ethnic coalitions whenever possible, and
even shares many of the dogmas of the new liberalism. On the
other hand, affirmative action, which often became quotas under
another name, was recognized by most as a blow to the basic
Jewish interest in a fully open society in which advancement was
based strictly on merit, and there were increasing differences of
opinion among opinion-molders in the Jewish community with regard
to the new liberal agenda. The responses to this differed from
community to community depending on the voluntary and
professional leadership of the community relations agencies, but
in no place were the answers easy. One result of this was that
the traditional community relations agencies lost much of their
energy and drawing power with individual Jews seeking more
specialized single-interest groups that reflected their special
concerns, whether AIPAC or the New Jewish Agenda.
Small Town and Rural Jews
For approximately a hundred years, from the Civil War to the
1960s, the trend in American Jewish settlement patterns was from
smaller to larger places. With the countercultural revolution
and the deconcentration of economic activity of the 1960s and
1970s, a growing number of Jews began to settle in small towns
and rural areas away from the major metropolitan centers.
Moreover they did so not necessarily to leave their Jewishness
behind, but rather sought to bring it with them. Thus new Jewish
organizational frameworks emerged in many parts of the country
where Jews had hardly been seen before. In most cases these fell
within traditional frameworks -- synagogues, local chapters of
Hadassah -- but they also developed some new dimensions.
Two examples of this are to be found in rural New England and the
Colorado mountains. As Vermont became a center of the
counterculture, many Jews settled in that state. Others in
smaller numbers settled in rural areas of New Hampshire and
Maine. Collectively they have organized on both a local and
regional basis to provide at least a minimum of organized Jewish
life with regular activities up to an annual regional meeting
which, in the spirit of the counterculture, is more in the form
of a happening than for organizational business.
One can find a similar phenomenon in the Colorado mountains
without the regional organization. There Jews who have settled
in the ski resorts or the mountain exurbia within commuting
distance to Denver have organized congregations that tend to meet
sporadically but which offer a framework within which to
associate as Jews. A curious phenomenon has taken place in
connection with these congregations. Normally the pattern for
naming synagogues is to choose some biblical phrase or Hebrew
words indicating their moral purpose (Emet V'Emunah or Beth
Shalom). These new mountain congregations have names such as
Beth Evergreen or Beth Vail after the towns in which they are
located.
Changing Relationships in the "National Agencies"
The first postwar generation marked a shifting of power away from
the community relations agencies to those of the federation
movement. In the second postwar generation there has been a
shift within the community relations sphere as the old-line
agencies such as the American Jewish Committee, American Jewish
Congress, and Anti-Defamation League have given ground to newer
ones such as the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish
Organizations, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, and
the Simon Weisenthal Center. This is not to suggest that there
has been an absolute decline in the old-line agencies, only a
relative one, with the old-line agencies becoming more limited
and specialized and less able to draw attention.
What is characteristic of their replacements is that they are
either identified heavily with Israel or with the Holocaust as
distinct from being identified with the fight against
anti-Semitism and for such traditional liberal causes as
separation of church and state characteristic of the old-line
agencies. Not that the latter have not tried to adapt to these
new issues, but the public image remains strong. Moreover the
new power-brokers have found it more to their liking to build new
bodies rather than try to capture the old ones.
The Conference of Presidents, founded over 30 years ago, first
surfaced on the American scene when Yitzhak Rabin was Israel's
Ambassador to the United States. He wanted a vehicle through
which American Jewry could approach the White House without
having to rely upon the president's aide for Jewish affairs. The
Presidents' Conference position was further strengthened when
Menachem Begin found it in his interest to cultivate it when he
was Prime Minister of Israel. These steps made the Presidents'
Conference more visible, but not necessarily more influential.
It is only in the second generation that its influence may have
begun to grow under the leadership of its new executive director,
Malcolm Hoenlein.
AIPAC followed a similar pattern. Originally a small
organization of insiders, discretely lobbying the U.S. Congress
on behalf of Israel, its name began to get out as a way to be
associated with insiders. Then in the 1970s it began to attract
federation leadership looking for a vehicle to work politically
for Israel. They joined AIPAC on an individual basis and both
its power and visibility grew. With the nearly successful AIPAC
fight against the sale of Phantoms to Saudi Arabia which brought
the organization headline attention, many more people sought to
join. Tom Dine, the new executive director, saw the possibility
of transforming AIPAC into a mass organization with local
chapters, a far larger budget, and increased activities, and he
moved the organization in that direction with great success.
Today AIPAC is one of the most dynamic membership organizations
on the American Jewish scene but continues to pursue its single
issue.
Very different but equally successful is the Simon Weisenthal
Center. Founded and operating entirely outside of the
establishment except for a link with Yeshiva University, the
Center's extremely dynamic director, Rabbi Marvin Hier adopted
the latest in mass mailing techniques and by exploiting the
Jewish fascination with the Holocaust and perennial fear of
anti-Semitism, managed to build a very large base of contributors
who provided a very large budget in small segments. At the
beginning the Center raised money but had no visible program.
When its leadership felt it was ready, it moved into Nazi hunting
and once again, mastering the public relations aspect, made
front-page news doing what other organizations have been doing
for years.
In part the shift taking place is a reflection of the new
generation's desire to funnel their funds into very focused
activities, if not single-issue organizations. Thus
multi-purpose organizations where the use of funds is left to the
discretion of the senior leadership, often the professionals,
have had a hard time reaching out to the younger generation.
Beyond that, the breakdown of the liberal consensus in the
community has also had its effect. While a higher percentage of
Jews vote for Democratic candidates than that of any other white
ethnic group, it is down from the astounding totals of the New
Deal years to the point where a third or more of all Jews
regularly vote Republican in presidential elections, among them a
group of serious-minded intellectuals and activists who have been
developing their own organizations to express what has become
known as the neoconservative point of view. Thus the Presidents'
Conference is strictly neutral and AIPAC has assiduously avoided
liberal or conservative positions per se, while the hard-line
position of the Weisenthal Center would have to be considered on
the conservative side of the spectrum.
Changing Roles in the Communal-Welfare and Israel-Overseas
Spheres
At present three great organizations dominate this sphere
countrywide -- the Council of Jewish Federations, the United
Jewish Appeal, and the United Israel Appeal. A fourth, the Joint
Distribution Committee, is somewhat smaller but one of the most
respected organizations in the Jewish community.
The end of the last generation found the CJF in the process of
initiating a self-study in preparation for a transition to new
leadership. The end result was some strengthening of its internal
organization, a modest expansion of its budget and consequently
its organizational capacity, and a substantial expansion of its
role in Israel and overseas programs. The catalyst for that
expansion was the intrusion of UJA into the sphere of activity of
the local federations, especially in leadership development. With
its far larger budget skimmed off the top of funds it received
from the federations, it was able to freely expand its program
while the Council was constricted by the caution of the local
federations when it came to expanding its role and their
resultant reluctance to increase its budget. The Review
Committee took almost immediate cognizance of this issue, but
decided that the way to deal with it was through quiet action
rather than formal recommendations. As a result, CJF initiated a
process which in effect brought UJA to heel, convincingly
demonstrating to those who witnessed the act where the power lay
in the American Jewish community.
The principal vehicle used by CJF to do so was the United Israel
Appeal. Once the United Palestine Appeal, the fundraising arm of
the Zionist movement's Keren Hayesod in the United States, with
the establishment of the UJA by joint action of UIA and JDC in
1937, the UIA had lost its direct fundraising role. While it
continued to be of lessened but still real importance for another
decade, in the 1950s its role was further reduced and it became
for all intents and purposes a paper organization whose major
function was to accept funds from UJA and transfer them to the
Jewish Agency. With the reconstitution of the Jewish Agency in
1970, the UIA acquired a new lease on life as the body that
formally designated the American community representatives in the
Agency's new governing institutions. The CJF took this revived
instrumentality, brought about its reorganization, and revived
its role in the governance of its creature, the UJA, which had
become its master, and through CJF representation on the UIA was
able to secure a restoration of UJA to something closer to its
proper position in the constellation.
One result of this was the continued growth in importance of the
UIA as a principal arm of the American Jewish community in
overseeing the use of funds raised for Israel. While the three
organizations continued to have substantial overlapping board
memberships as well as constituencies, in the ensuing years each
developed its own bedrock functions. The CJF is the coordinating
body and spokesman for the federations, with a primary
responsibility for community planning. The UJA is the
federations' fundraising arm for Israel and overseas needs with a
primary responsibility for fundraising. The UIA is the
federations' arm for overseeing the use of the funds in Israel
with a growing responsibility for oversight and evaluation. This
is not to suggest that competition does not continue to exist
between the three. It is almost a given that there should be a
certain amount of competition and tension at their points of
intersection and overlap. This leads to periodic suggestions
that the three should be consolidated into one organization. In
fact what has developed is a kind of system of checks and
balances among the three which may very well strengthen the
community's governing processes.
In all of this, what became the dominant feature of the new
generation was a new concern with the Jewish Agency and how
federation-raised funds were being spent in Israel. The
reconstituted Jewish Agency soon became a major item on the
agenda of the federation movement. This was manifested through a
strong commitment to making the new reconstituted Jewish Agency
Assembly, Board of Governors, and Executive more responsive to
diaspora -- meaning for them American -- Jewish concerns. From
there it developed into programmatic concerns, particularly after
Project Renewal was launched in 1977-1978 and individual
federations began to be involved in specific Israeli communities.
At every stage it was concerned with achieving greater efficiency
and accountability.
Organizational Changes in Jewish Education
The changing face of Jewish education, while particularly
manifested locally, spilled over into the countrywide arena. The
old American Association for Jewish Education, deemed a failure
even by its friends, was subject to critical examination which
led to its restructuring as the Jewish Education Service of North
America (JESNA), a body designed to play more of a service than a
promotional role. However because JESNA's principal constituency
consists of the central agencies for Jewish education and the
constituency of the central agencies is primarily the declining
supplementary schools, despite good will and efforts to provide
basic funding for a take-off, JESNA has found it difficult to
find an appropriate role for itself other than to represent
Jewish education in the give-and-take of the national agencies.
The Coalition for Alternatives in Jewish Education (CAJE), on the
other hand, is a prime example of a new phenomenon in American
Jewish life, a countrywide grassroots organization whose annual
"happening" rapidly became the most exciting activity on the
North American Jewish educational scene. CAJE was developed as a
countercultural instrument, sparked by the young veterans of the
Jewish countercultural revolution of the late 1960s who saw
Jewish education as the place where they wanted to make their
contribution, but refused to do so through what they perceived to
be the tired institutions of the Jewish education establishment.
Originally spurned by the educational establishment, as it
demonstrated that year after year it could draw hundreds of
teachers who came at their own expense to learn and socialize
together for a week every year, the establishment sought it out.
Today it has established itself, holding several summer
conferences in different parts of the country and in 1988 in
Israel.
Religious Challenges to Jewish Unity
We have already noted the growth and strength of Orthodoxy which
also became the major source of energy in Jewish life during the
second postwar generation. Israel continued to be the central
concern of American Jews, but Zionism was no longer a prime
source of energy. Nor could the non-Orthodox groups generate the
kind of energy that Orthodoxy could. On the contrary, the
Conservative movement, as we have noted, began to lose the
children of its more casual members, fourth generation American
Jews and beyond who drifted into the Reform movement or nothing
in about equal proportions. The Reform movement was more
successful than the latter in building important institutions on
the American and, indeed, the world Jewish scene as the
Conservative movement had been a generation before. But as
important as these were, they could not generate the same level
of motivation as did Orthodoxy in either the religious or
political spheres.
One result of the new ascendency of Orthodoxy was a boldness on
the part of the ultra-Orthodox in challenging the legitimacy of
non-Orthodox Judaism. This issue was exacerbated by the rising
tide of intermarriage, the perennial problem of non-halakhic
conversions conducted by Reform rabbis, and the new and even more
difficult problem of the Reform movement's recognition of
patrilineal descent as a means of becoming Jewish. Orthodox
reluctance to recognize the religious acts of non-Orthodox rabbis
was exacerbated by these new phenomena. The Orthodox refused to
recognize the acts of Conservative rabbis no matter how fully
halakhic for political reasons, in an effort to deny them
legitimacy, but with regard to Reform the denial could be on
halakhic grounds alone.
Israel's position was key here since the determination by the
Knesset of who is a Jew for purposes of the Law of Return, while
affecting very few American Jews directly, struck at the
self-esteem of virtually all those who identified with
non-Orthodox movements. Thus the issue became a cause celebre
for both sides, with the ultra-Orthodox groups pressing for more
rigid definitions of who is a Jew designed to protect the
Orthodox monopoly and the non-Orthodox insisting on full
recognition of their legitimacy. By the mid-1980s people were
raising the question as to whether or not there would be a split
in the Jewish people. The reluctance of virtually all Jews to
allow such a drastic step to happen led to an effort on the part
of the various groups to find some common ground and to avoid any
ruptures.
In the meantime the Reconstructionist movement replaced the
Reform movement as the most radical religious movement on the
American Jewish scene. By the end of the previous generation,
the Reconstructionists had emerged as a fully articulated
movement, separated from its Conservative parent although still
in the Masorti (or Conservative) camp. Led by the
Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and its student body, the
movement moved rapidly during the 1970s out of the Masorti camp
in the direction of far more radical positions.
The original Reconstructionist movement rejected the binding
character of halakha but still looked to halakhic tradition for a
vote, though not a veto, to paraphrase Mordecai Kaplan. The new
Reconstructionist movement had no interest in halakhah per se
except for historical purposes. Rather it sought Jewish
self-expression along the lines of the current liberal and
radical agendas. Like the Reform movement it found a place for
homosexual Jews, going beyond the Reform movement to warmly
welcome them into the Reconstructionist rabbinate as well.
Because of their radical commitment to free individual choice,
they were able to tolerate individual expressions of Jewishness
to an extent beyond anything any other Jewish movement had known
since the days of the Frankists.
New Model Organizations
One of the features of the new generation was the emergence of
new model organizations. We have already mentioned the growth of
the Weisenthal Center and the transformation of AIPAC. In
addition, what was originally founded by Rabbi Irving Greenberg
as the National Jewish Conference Center and which became in turn
the National Jewish Resource Center and CLAL (the Center for
Learning and Leadership), an organization which can best be
described as one that fosters participatory leadership education
for adults, has become a featured player in the Jewish arena. A
communal body led by an Orthodox rabbi who has built his
organization on the premise that the federation movement is the
most significant game in town, CLAL cultivates the federation
leadership as its most important constituency. CLAL preaches a
religion of what Jonathan Woocher has termed "sacred survival" in
which the survivalist and communal dimensions of Jewish life were
emphasized, embellished by certain key religious rituals designed
to impart transcendent significance to the very act of survival
and the activities necessary to ensure it.8
Still another new model of Jewish organization is the Center for
Jewish Community Studies/Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. It
is a worldwide Jewish policy studies center with offices in
Jerusalem, Philadelphia, and Montreal, designed to provide the
Jewish people and Israel with a think-tank on the model of the
Brookings Institution or the American Enterprise Institute. Less
a direct teaching institution than CLAL, it is an institution of
the new information society in which the acquisition,
organization, and analysis of information are important tools for
communal growth. The Center also turned principally to the
federation leadership for its support and attracted many of the
most significant figures of American Jewish life behind it. It
focuses on policy research and interpretation, ranging from
questions about the political behavior of American Jews to
specific studies of the Conservative movement on the occasion of
its 100th anniversary or the proper role of the Boston Hebrew
College, all anchored within the intellectual framework of the
Jewish political tradition whose study and teaching was pioneered
by the Fellows and Associates of the Center.
Yet another group of new model Jewish organizations are the very
large philanthropic foundations founded by very wealthy Jewish
families or individuals. Jewish family foundations were not a
new development. Until recently, however, most were vehicles for
relatively modest contributions for general support of
established Jewish institutions such as the UJA or the local
Jewish hospital. There were a few private foundations that did
engage in funding of worthy projects through a more open
competitive process rather than a preordained one, but it is only
recently that very large private foundations with assets in the
tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars have been established
under Jewish auspices. Among these leading foundations are the
CRB Foundation established by Charles Bronfman of Montreal,
focusing on Jewish and Canadian interests; the Koret Foundation
of San Francisco, focusing on Jewish and San Francisco Bay area
interests; and the Wexner and Wexner Heritage Foundations, both
founded by Leslie Wexner, the first specializing in the
development of better Jewish professional leadership and the
second, better Jewish voluntary leadership. These foundations
have assets which make them major players on the American Jewish
scene and there will be others coming along. It is too soon to
assess the implications of this new source of wealth dispensed by
private individuals, following the very personal preferences of
their founders.
The Blurring of Lay and Professional Roles
One of the truly unexpected developments of the new generation
has been the blurring of the roles of the voluntary and
professional leadership in organization after organization in the
Jewish community. If there was anything that characterized the
first postwar generation it was the sharpening of the distinction
between the two sets of leaders in most spheres, only excluding
the campaign where the professionals did not come with any
particular advantage. The rise of a new body of senior civil
servants for the Jewish community working full time at their
jobs, increasingly trained for their careers, and possessing a
near-monopoly of the information needed to make decisions led
observers to speculate that professionals would come to dominate
the communal leadership to such an extent that voluntary leaders
would become no more than decorations. Instead, quite the
contrary has happened.
Today, despite the even further professionalization of the senior
civil service, voluntary leaders have become increasingly
involved in decision-making to the point of interfering with
legitimate professional prerogatives, leading recently to a
number of notable resignations of top professional leaders from
major Jewish organizations and institutions. Why has this change
taken place? One reason seems to be the diminution of
educational differences between voluntary and professional
leaders. In previous generations, many of the top voluntary
leaders were self-made men, who had left school early out of the
necessity of making a living and had prospered. Today both
voluntary and professional leaders have the same level of general
education with similar advanced degrees, similar intellectual
interests, read the same periodicals, general and Jewish, so that
the difference between the two groups is more like the difference
between attorneys and medical doctors, i.e., one of
specialization, rather than level of competence, and that in a
field in which the importance of specialization is less than
self-evident. The situation is further compounded by a modest
movement of voluntary leaders into the ranks of professionals and
vice versa which has not always been successful, and an equally
modest movement of Jewish academics into Jewish communal service,
whose results are not clear. What this will do to the confidence
of the carefully crafted Jewish communal service is not at all
clear.
The one area in which the professional leadership may have an
advantage is in their Jewish knowledge, though only in the case
of those who come from serious Jewish backgrounds. For the rest,
all have been exposed to the same kind of Jewish education from
bar or bat mitzvah to university Jewish studies. Nor does Jewish
knowledge count as much as it might in strengthening the
professionals.
The Unravelling of the Progressive Solution
This last phenomenon in particular suggests what may be an
overall trend in Jewish community organization in the United
States, that is, the unraveling of the progressive solution.
American Jewish community organization as we know it was
developed during the Progressive era and indeed is a product of
the organization theories of the Progressives, including the
reliance upon professional managers and experts functioning under
the general policy-making direction of non-professionals,
federated organizational structures, emphasis on localism and
local problem-solving, reliance on functional organizations
rather than upon traditional patterns of communal activity in the
philanthropic sphere, and the treatment of philanthropic
activities as civic activities to be fully insulated from
politics.
This Progressive approach has remained dominant in Jewish
community organization to the present and has contributed no
small share to the amazing growth and vitality of Jewish
organizational life. Indeed, this Progressive dimension has been
one of the secrets of the success of the organized Jewish
community. Now, however, over two generations after the end of
the Progressive movement as an identifiable force, parts of this
Progressive-Jewish synthesis may be unravelling.
Not only are lay and professional roles becoming blurred, but as
the American Jewish community becomes involved in the larger
Jewish world, the distinction between the civic and political
dimensions of organized Jewish life are also becoming less
distinct. Other Jewish communities and, most especially, Israel,
never adopted the distinction. For them, public affairs are
inevitably political. This has led to clashes between the
American Jews and the others in the world Jewish arena but it
also has influence the American Jewish leadership, moving them
more into politics than ever before.
At a time when the new organizational theories are emphasizing
the virtues of many competing units, it is not surprising that
American Jews, along with other Americans, are finding their way
back to a more diffused system. While just as the organizational
diffusion called for by the present organization theorists works
only because of the existence of strong federal and state framing
institutions, so too is it likely to work in the Jewish community
as long as the local and countrywide framing institutions remain
strong. Today the trends are pulling in two directions. Within
the federation family there is a trend toward centralization,
while the scope of activities of the agencies may be undergoing
some reduction as people choose to give their support to other
organizations as is easy to do in a voluntary community. The
great spheres of communal activity continue to grow closer
together, but the institutions within those spheres may be
further dividing. As always, then, contradictory trends exist
side by side.
Notes
1. Daniel J. Elazar, Community and Polity, The Organizational
Dynamics of the American Jewish Community (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society, 1976).
2. Cf. Paul King, Orli HaCohen, Hillel Frisch, and Daniel J.
Elazar, Project Renewal in Israel (Lanham, Md.: University Press
of America and Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 1987) and
Charles Hoffman, Project Renewal: Community and Change in Israel
(Jerusalem: Renewal Department, Jewish Agency for Israel, 1986).
3. Cf. Daniel J. Elazar and Alysa Dortort, eds. Understanding the
Jewish Agency (Jerusalem and Philadelphia: Jerusalem Center for
Public Affairs, 1985), rev. ed.
4. I have elaborated on this in "Who is a Jew -- and How?",
Jerusalem Letter/Viewpoints, VP40, (May 12, 1985).
5. Cf. Carl Schrag, "The American Jewish Community Turns to the
States: The Springfield Office of the Jewish Federations of
Illinois," Jerusalem Letter, JL100, (February 21, 1988).
6. Daniel J. Elazar, Steven M. Cohen and Rela Geffen Monson,
"Planning for the Future of the Conservative Movement," A Study
by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs/Center for Jewish
Community Studies (February 8, 1987).
7. Contemporary Jewish education
8. Jonathan Woocher, Sacred Survival (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana
University Press, 1987).
