In Search of Identity and Spirituality in the Fiction of American Jewish Female Authors at the Turn of the 21st Century. Dorota Mihulka
Brown, 2003: 311; Karesh and Hurvitz, 2006: 369).
The history of Orthodox Judaism begins with a rabbi named Hatam Sofer (1762–1839), the unquestioned leader of the Orthodox Jewish community of Hungary. He resisted the modern world through a program of neo-traditionalism that vehemently opposed any change or reform on the grounds that “The new is forbidden by the Torah,” a motto that later became the banner of radical Orthodoxy. He believed so strongly in the traditional lifestyle that he encouraged a complete separation from modernity, allowing the minimum contact necessary for work or survival. Neo-traditionalists also rejected Enlightenment, Emancipation and the involvement of Jews in western society and culture. In comparison with Hungarian extremism, German Orthodoxy’s response to modernity was noticeably moderate. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888) developed the Neo-Orthodoxy Movement from the viewpoint that traditional Judaism could be compatible with the modern world and with emancipation (see Section 1.2.4.2 in this chapter). In Eastern Europe, in turn, the representatives of Orthodox Jewry, the Hasidim and Mitnagdim, developed a unique Orthodox response to modernity and secular Jewish ideologies (see Section 1.2.4.1 in this chapter). What was observed in Eastern Europe was a discernible movement towards increased (mystical, spiritual) piety and religious conservatism among both Hasidim and Mitnagdim and within the major rabbinical academies, most of which prohibited the study of secular subjects.
From the last decades of the nineteenth century until the Holocaust, Orthodox Judaism both in Eastern and Western Europe underwent a worsening crisis which was caused by the fact that increasing numbers of young Jews abandoned religion for a secular way of life. By doing so, they rejected an anachronistic way of life offered by Orthodoxy, which they viewed as an outdated and unnecessary remnant of the past. The rapid deterioration in the overall condition of Orthodoxy resulted in a trauma that had an impact on Orthodox Judaism for many decades. It was also during this time that many Orthodox European Jews planned to emigrate, either to the land of Israel or the United States. European Haredi leaders did discourage emigration to the land of Israel and the United States, a country in which the full observance of the Halakhah was rare and difficult in their opinion. However, the objection was not too harsh, and as Benjamin Brown points out, “practically, Orthodox Jews’ immigration to these countries continued nonetheless, thus preparing the infrastructure for their becoming future religious centers” (2003: 317).
In fact, Orthodox Jews had already started emigrating to the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many of them from Eastern Europe.16 Although most of the immigrants were not concerned about religious ←41 | 42→matters as much as they were about the difficulties of everyday life, Orthodox Jews managed to establish new communities, synagogues, yeshivot, and even genuine Hasidic courts in the New World. Moreover, the Hasidic rebbes, who fled from Eastern Europe to the United States in the 1940s, together with some distinguished Talmudic and Halakhic sages, were able to reverse the tendency of decline that was characteristic of Orthodoxy until World War II, resulting in its unprecedented thriving and growth decades later (Brown, 2003: 317–318; Nadler, 2008: 97–98).
The survey of U.S. Jews conducted by Pew Research Center in 2013 finds that even though Orthodox Jews constitute the smallest of the three major denominational movements with only 10 percent of all American Jewish population,17 they are much younger, on average, and tend to have much larger families than the overall Jewish population. In the past, high fertility rate in the American Orthodox community was at least partially balanced by a low retention rate. The 2013 Pew Survey of U.S. Jewry demonstrates – as opposed to previous studies, for example the 1990 and 2000–2001 National Jewish Population Surveys (NJPS) – that the Orthodox unequivocally have the highest retention rate of all Jewish denominations nowadays. The survey also shows that the fall-off from Orthodoxy appears to be declining at a much slower rate than in other branches of Judaism, and is significantly lower among younger than older people (“A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” 2013: 10, 48, 51). According to the researchers, this suggests that “unless there is a dramatic reverse in the current trends, […] Orthodoxy’s place among the active and strongly connected American Jewish population will only expand in the coming decades” (Ferziger, 2015: Introduction).
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By contrast, population surveys of American Jews conducted shortly after World War II and throughout the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated that in the group of Orthodox Jews, higher percentages of Orthodox Jews were located in the 18–34-year-old group than in middle-age groupings; but the highest percentage of Orthodox Jewish population in any age category was over 65. Moreover, those surveys repeatedly found that younger Jews from Orthodox homes intended to abandon an Orthodox identification and defect to more liberal Jewish denominations. According to sociologists and historians, the findings of these surveys could be interpreted as a source of future weakness for Orthodoxy rather than its future strength (cf. Wertheimer, 1989: 71–74, 80–82; Shapiro, 1995: 243; Sarna, 2001). For example, Wertheimer claimed that Orthodoxy, even though maintaining its attractiveness to its youth, would have to confront continuous depletion of its members through the death of its older population, a group that was considerably more numerous than its youth population. Thus, his conclusion regarding American Orthodox Jews’ future was rather pessimistic: “despite higher birth rates, Jews who identify as Orthodox are not likely to increase in the near future” (1989: 81).
Although this assessment proved incorrect in the long term, it accurately described the more visible trend in the American Orthodox life at that time. This negative population trend among Orthodox Jews has started to change gradually since the last decades of the twentieth century.18 Thanks to the revival of Orthodoxy, the movement achieved significant credibility in the eyes of both non-Orthodox Jews and non-Jews, as well as dynamism. Orthodoxy became more attractive to the younger generation of American Jews due to the introduction of numerous programs, whose major aim was to inculcate a strong sense of allegiance among its youth. As a result, nowadays Orthodox youth constitute the most numerous age group among Orthodox Jews, and its numbers are significantly higher than those of their more liberal counterparts. The programs introduced by Orthodoxy have been so successful that they continue to be increasingly imitated by the other denominations that also wish to attract and retain their younger Jews (Wertheimer, 1989: 108–113; Ferziger, 2015: Introduction).
According to American Jewish sociologists and historians, there are at least two major factors that account for Orthodoxy’s impressive revival and success in the last decades of the twentieth and early decades of the twenty-first centuries. They claim that Orthodox ultimate success has been primarily attributed ←43 | 44→to its formal and informal educational institutions which bear full responsibility for formal education and socialization of the young people in the Orthodox community. Equally important, all-day religious schools provide an environment in which a strong attachment to the Orthodox group is built by advising proper standards of religious behavior and disseminating strong ideological indoctrination among their young students. Orthodox synagogues, in turn, provide separate religious services as well as a range of social, educational, and recreational programs in an Orthodox environment for the youth outside of school. In addition, Orthodox groups have invested heavily in vacation resorts and summer camps, which provide an all-embracing Orthodox experience during vacation months. Finally, it has become the norm for Orthodox teenagers to spend some time in Israel, again in an Orthodox ambience (Wertheimer, 1989: 73, 114–115; cf. Sarna, 2004: 289–291, 326–329).
A second factor that contributed to the revitalization of Orthodoxy in the second half of the twentieth century was the participation of Orthodox Jews in the post-war economic boom that brought exceptional wealth to Americans in general. A large number of Orthodox Jews, similarly to Jews from other denominations, acquired college and graduate degrees and entered the professions, fully taking advantage of American life while adhering to traditional observance. An important consequence of this newly acquired wealth has been the ability of Orthodox Jews to isolate themselves more effectively from the larger American Jewish community. Living in separate communities with their own synagogues, day schools, recreational programs, kosher restaurants, and summer camps, has helped, as Jack Wertheimer remarks “to foster an élan among Orthodox Jews and a belief,