Logical Meme

Cohen, S.M. 2001. “Religiosity and ethnicity: Jewish identity trends in the United States”, in Who owns Judaism? Public religion and private Faith in America and Israel, vol. XVII, ed. E. Lederhendler, pp. 101-130. Oxford University Press.

Cohen identifies 6 dimensions of Jewish ethnicity:

1. A sense of peoplehood as expressed through feelings of common destiny with other Jews.
2. Tribalism, or a sense of special responsibility for taking care of other Jews in need.
3. Marginality, or a sense of feeling apart from other Americans.
4. Attachment to Israel.
5. Attachment to Jewish institutions other than the synagogue.
6. Opposition to intermarriage.

From “Accounting for Jewish Secularism: Is a New Cultural Identity Emerging?” by Bruce A. Phillips. Source: Contemporary Jewry, Vol. 30, No. 1, Special Issue: Jewish Secularism (June 2010), pp. 63-85:

All Jewish immigrants, regardless of when they came, brought with them to America the experience of religion and ethnicity as an undifferentiated whole. The American Jewish experience can be understood as a series of institutional innovations that combine religion and ethnicity in evolving Jewish communal structures. In the early years of the American Republic Sephardic Jews used the synagogue as a communal institution (Sarna 2004). Eastern European Jewish immigrants similarly “transformed the traditional synagogue when they transplanted it in New York” into a communal institution (Moore 1981). In immigrant enclaves such as the Lower East Side these “Russian” Jews created hundreds of landsmanschaften, which combined ethnic and religious functions: “the landsmanschaft shul was a community reconstituted in the form of a synagogue, a ‘synagogue-community’ serving both religious functions of the synagogue and the social needs of the community” (Kaufman 1999, p. 170). As often as not, the landsmanschaft synagogue included a “bikkur cholim” or “gmilus chesed” which were respectively a mutual aid society and a free loan society (Tenenbaum, 1993) (Phillips, p. 66)

Another passage, later in the piece:

For well over a century, American Jews have expressed their ethnicity through their religion even while maintaining a worldview that is the most secular in America save for those without any religion at all. Moreover, Jews by religion run a close second to the most secular of Americans when it comes to belief in God and church/synagogue attendance. American Jews have not been particularly troubled by the  apparent contradiction between their secular outlook and identification with a religion. This is because Judaism is based on the concept of peoplehood. Membership in the Jewish faith is conferred by birth, not belief (Phillips, p. 81).

Excerpt from Abraham Myerson’s “The ‘Nervousness’ of the Jew,” Mental Hygiene 4 (1920): 65–72:

It is idle, of course, to deny that the Jew has an innate character, different from that of other races, which perhaps predisposes him to psychoneuroses and other mental diseases. Unquestionably deeply emotional, clinging to belief and opinion with a tenacity unparalleled in the history of the world, extremely active mentally, and in point of intellectual achievement to be compared only with the great races of the world, he is curiously passive in his resistance and curiously indomitable in his hold on life and success. Accused of materialism and yet furnishing proportionately more social reformers than any other race; accused of materialism and yet responsible for the two most ethical religions in the world; said to be dominated by love of gain, but the birthplace of the ethics that govern his accusers, the Western peoples; a race of contradictions, inconsistencies, strongly individualistic and extraordinarily social, it may well be that such a soil would produce great failure as well as great success, psychoneurosis as well as genius.