The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment by Peter Beinart

The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment
by Peter Beinart

In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen.
The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didn’t. “Six times we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness and connection to Israel,” he reported. “Six times the topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish youth used the word ‘they‘ rather than ‘us‘ to describe the situation.”

That Luntz encountered indifference was not surprising. In recent years, several studies have revealed, in the words of Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis, that “non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders,” with many professing “a near-total absence of positive feelings.” In 2008, the student senate at Brandeis, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored university in America, rejected a resolution commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Jewish state.

Luntz’s task was to figure out what had gone wrong. When he probed the students’ views of Israel, he hit up against some firm beliefs. First, “they reserve the right to question the Israeli position.” These young Jews, Luntz explained, “resist anything they see as ‘group think.’” They want an “open and frank” discussion of Israel and its flaws. Second, “young Jews desperately want peace.” When Luntz showed them a series of ads, one of the most popular was entitled “Proof that Israel Wants Peace,” and listed offers by various Israeli governments to withdraw from conquered land. Third, “some empathize with the plight of the Palestinians.” When Luntz displayed ads depicting Palestinians as violent and hateful, several focus group participants criticized them as stereotypical and unfair, citing their own Muslim friends.







Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined. They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs. Luntz did not grasp the irony. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was the kind that the American Jewish establishment has been working against for most of their lives.


Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral. If the leaders of groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations do not change course, they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist leadership whose naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular American Jews who range from apathetic to appalled. Saving liberal Zionism in the United States—so that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel—is the great American Jewish challenge of our age. And it starts where Luntz’s students wanted it to start: by talking frankly about Israel’s current government, by no longer averting our eyes.


Since the 1990s, journalists and scholars have been describing a bifurcation in Israeli society. In the words of Hebrew University political scientist Yaron Ezrahi, “After decades of what came to be called a national consensus, the Zionist narrative of liberation [has] dissolved into openly contesting versions.” One version, “founded on a long memory of persecution, genocide, and a bitter struggle for survival, is pessimistic, distrustful of non-Jews, and believing only in Jewish power and solidarity.” Another, “nourished by secularized versions of messianism as well as the Enlightenment idea of progress,” articulates “a deep sense of the limits of military force, and a commitment to liberal-democratic values.” Every country manifests some kind of ideological divide. But in contemporary Israel, the gulf is among the widest on earth.

As Ezrahi and others have noted, this latter, liberal-democratic Zionism has grown alongside a new individualism, particularly among secular Israelis, a greater demand for free expression, and a greater skepticism of coercive authority. You can see this spirit in “new historians” like Tom Segev who have fearlessly excavated the darker corners of the Zionist past and in jurists like former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak who have overturned Knesset laws that violate the human rights guarantees in Israel’s “Basic Laws.” You can also see it in former Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s apparent willingness to relinquish much of the West Bank in 2000 and early 2001.

But in Israel today, this humane, universalistic Zionism does not wield power. To the contrary, it is gasping for air. To understand how deeply antithetical its values are to those of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, it’s worth considering the case of Effi Eitam. Eitam, a charismatic ex–cabinet minister and war hero, has proposed ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the West Bank. “We’ll have to expel the overwhelming majority of West Bank Arabs from here and remove Israeli Arabs from [the] political system,” he declared in 2006. In 2008, Eitam merged his small Ahi Party into Netanyahu’s Likud. And for the 2009–2010 academic year, he is Netanyahu’s special emissary for overseas “campus engagement.” In that capacity, he visited a dozen American high schools and colleges last fall on the Israeli government’s behalf. The group that organized his tour was called “Caravan for Democracy.”

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman once shared Eitam’s views. In his youth, he briefly joined Meir Kahane’s now banned Kach Party, which also advocated the expulsion of Arabs from Israeli soil. Now Lieberman’s position might be called “pre-expulsion.” He wants to revoke the citizenship of Israeli Arabs who won’t swear a loyalty oath to the Jewish state. He tried to prevent two Arab parties that opposed Israel’s 2008–2009 Gaza war from running candidates for the Knesset. He said Arab Knesset members who met with representatives of Hamas should be executed. He wants to jail Arabs who publicly mourn on Israeli Independence Day, and he hopes to permanently deny citizenship to Arabs from other countries who marry Arab citizens of Israel.

You don’t have to be paranoid to see the connection between Lieberman’s current views and his former ones. The more you strip Israeli Arabs of legal protection, and the more you accuse them of treason, the more thinkable a policy of expulsion becomes. Lieberman’s American defenders often note that in theory he supports a Palestinian state. What they usually fail to mention is that for him, a two-state solution means redrawing Israel’s border so that a large chunk of Israeli Arabs find themselves exiled to another country, without their consent.

Lieberman served as chief of staff during Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister. And when it comes to the West Bank, Netanyahu’s own record is in its way even more extreme than his protégé’s. In his 1993 book, A Place among the Nations, Netanyahu not only rejects the idea of a Palestinian state, he denies that there is such a thing as a Palestinian. In fact, he repeatedly equates the Palestinian bid for statehood with Nazism. An Israel that withdraws from the West Bank, he has declared, would be a “ghetto-state” with “Auschwitz borders.” And the effort “to gouge Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] out of Israel” resembles Hitler’s bid to wrench the German-speaking “Sudeten district” from Czechoslovakia in 1938. It is unfair, Netanyahu insists, to ask Israel to concede more territory since it has already made vast, gut-wrenching concessions. What kind of concessions? It has abandoned its claim to Jordan, which by rights should be part of the Jewish state.

On the left of Netanyahu’s coalition sits Ehud Barak’s emasculated Labor Party, but whatever moderating potential it may have is counterbalanced by what is, in some ways, the most illiberal coalition partner of all, Shas, the ultra-Orthodox party representing Jews of North African and Middle Eastern descent. At one point, Shas—like some of its Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox counterparts—was open to dismantling settlements. In recent years, however, ultra-Orthodox Israelis, anxious to find housing for their large families, have increasingly moved to the West Bank, where thanks to government subsidies it is far cheaper to live. Not coincidentally, their political parties have swung hard against territorial compromise. And they have done so with a virulence that reflects ultra-Orthodox Judaism’s profound hostility to liberal values. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Shas’s immensely powerful spiritual leader, has called Arabs “vipers,” “snakes,” and “ants.” In 2005, after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon proposed dismantling settlements in the Gaza Strip, Yosef urged that “God strike him down.” The official Shas newspaper recently called President Obama “an Islamic extremist.”

Hebrew University Professor Ze’ev Sternhell is an expert on fascism and a winner of the prestigious Israel Prize. Commenting on Lieberman and the leaders of Shas in a recent Op-Ed in Haaretz, he wrote, “The last time politicians holding views similar to theirs were in power in post–World War II Western Europe was in Franco’s Spain.” With their blessing, “a crude and multifaceted campaign is being waged against the foundations of the democratic and liberal order.” Sternhell should know. In September 2008, he was injured when a settler set off a pipe bomb at his house.


Israeli governments come and go, but the Netanyahu coalition is the product of frightening, long-term trends in Israeli society: an ultra-Orthodox population that is increasing dramatically, a settler movement that is growing more radical and more entrenched in the Israeli bureaucracy and army, and a Russian immigrant community that is particularly prone to anti-Arab racism. In 2009, a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 53 percent of Jewish Israelis (and 77 percent of recent immigrants from the former USSR) support encouraging Arabs to leave the country. Attitudes are worst among Israel’s young. When Israeli high schools held mock elections last year, Lieberman won. This March, a poll found that 56 percent of Jewish Israeli high school students—and more than 80 percent of religious Jewish high school students—would deny Israeli Arabs the right to be elected to the Knesset. An education ministry official called the survey “a huge warning signal in light of the strengthening trends of extremist views among the youth.”



You might think that such trends, and the sympathy for them expressed by some in Israel’s government, would occasion substantial public concern—even outrage—among the leaders of organized American Jewry. You would be wrong. In Israel itself, voices from the left, and even center, warn in increasingly urgent tones about threats to Israeli democracy. (Former Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak have both said that Israel risks becoming an “apartheid state” if it continues to hold the West Bank. This April, when settlers forced a large Israeli bookstore to stop selling a book critical of the occupation, Shulamit Aloni, former head of the dovish Meretz Party, declared that “Israel has not been democratic for some time now.”) But in the United States, groups like AIPAC and the Presidents’ Conference patrol public discourse, scolding people who contradict their vision of Israel as a state in which all leaders cherish democracy and yearn for peace.

The result is a terrible irony. In theory, mainstream American Jewish organizations still hew to a liberal vision of Zionism. On its website, AIPAC celebrates Israel’s commitment to “free speech and minority rights.” The Conference of Presidents declares that “Israel and the United States share political, moral and intellectual values including democracy, freedom, security and peace.” These groups would never say, as do some in Netanyahu’s coalition, that Israeli Arabs don’t deserve full citizenship and West Bank Palestinians don’t deserve human rights. But in practice, by defending virtually anything any Israeli government does, they make themselves intellectual bodyguards for Israeli leaders who threaten the very liberal values they profess to admire.

After Israel’s elections last February, for instance, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice-chairman of the Presidents’ Conference, explained that Avigdor Lieberman’s agenda was “far more moderate than the media has presented it.” Insisting that Lieberman bears no general animus toward Israeli Arabs, Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that “He’s not saying expel them. He’s not saying punish them.” (Permanently denying citizenship to their Arab spouses or jailing them if they publicly mourn on Israeli Independence Day evidently does not qualify as punishment.) The ADL has criticized anti-Arab bigotry in the past, and the American Jewish Committee, to its credit, warned that Lieberman’s proposed loyalty oath would “chill Israel’s democratic political debate.” But the Forward summed up the overall response of America’s communal Jewish leadership in its headline “Jewish Leaders Largely Silent on Lieberman’s Role in Government.”









Not only does the organized American Jewish community mostly avoid public criticism of the Israeli government, it tries to prevent others from leveling such criticism as well. In recent years, American Jewish organizations have waged a campaign to discredit the world’s most respected international human rights groups. In 2006, Foxman called an Amnesty International report on Israeli killing of Lebanese civilians “bigoted, biased, and borderline anti-Semitic.” The Conference of Presidents has announced that “biased NGOs include Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Christian Aid, [and] Save the Children.” Last summer, an AIPAC spokesman declared that Human Rights Watch “has repeatedly demonstrated its anti-Israel bias.” When the Obama administration awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mary Robinson, former UN high commissioner for human rights, the ADL and AIPAC both protested, citing the fact that she had presided over the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. (Early drafts of the conference report implicitly accused Israel of racism. Robinson helped expunge that defamatory charge, angering Syria and Iran.)

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are not infallible. But when groups like AIPAC and the Presidents’ Conference avoid virtually all public criticism of Israeli actions—directing their outrage solely at Israel’s neighbors—they leave themselves in a poor position to charge bias. Moreover, while American Jewish groups claim that they are simply defending Israel from its foes, they are actually taking sides in a struggle within Israel between radically different Zionist visions. At the very moment the Anti-Defamation League claimed that Robinson harbored an “animus toward Israel,” an alliance of seven Israeli human rights groups publicly congratulated her on her award. Many of those groups, like B’Tselem, which monitors Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories, and the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights, have been at least as critical of Israel’s actions in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank as have Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

All of which raises an uncomfortable question. If American Jewish groups claim that Israel’s overseas human rights critics are motivated by anti- Israeli, if not anti-Semitic, bias, what does that say about Israel’s domestic human rights critics? The implication is clear: they must be guilty of self-hatred, if not treason. American Jewish leaders don’t generally say that, of course, but their allies in the Netanyahu government do. Last summer, Israel’s vice prime minister, Moshe Ya’alon, called the anti-occupation group Peace Now a “virus.” This January, a right-wing group called Im Tirtzu accused Israeli human rights organizations of having fed information to the Goldstone Commission that investigated Israel’s Gaza war. A Knesset member from Netanyahu’s Likud promptly charged Naomi Chazan, head of the New Israel Fund, which supports some of those human rights groups, with treason, and a member of Lieberman’s party launched an investigation aimed at curbing foreign funding of Israeli NGOs.

To their credit, Foxman and other American Jewish leaders opposed the move, which might have impaired their own work. But they are reaping what they sowed. If you suggest that mainstream human rights criticism of Israel’s government is motivated by animus toward the state, or toward Jews in general, you give aid and comfort to those in Israel who make the same charges against the human rights critics in their midst.


In the American Jewish establishment today, the language of liberal Zionism—with its idioms of human rights, equal citizenship, and territorial compromise—has been drained of meaning. It remains the lingua franca in part for generational reasons, because many older American Zionists still see themselves as liberals of a sort. They vote Democratic; they are unmoved by biblical claims to the West Bank; they see average Palestinians as decent people betrayed by bad leaders; and they are secular. They don’t want Jewish organizations to criticize Israel from the left, but neither do they want them to be agents of the Israeli right.

These American Zionists are largely the product of a particular era. Many were shaped by the terrifying days leading up to the Six-Day War, when it appeared that Israel might be overrun, and by the bitter aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, when much of the world seemed to turn against the Jewish state. In that crucible, Israel became their Jewish identity, often in conjunction with the Holocaust, which the 1967 and 1973 wars helped make central to American Jewish life. These Jews embraced Zionism before the settler movement became a major force in Israeli politics, before the 1982 Lebanon war, before the first intifada. They fell in love with an Israel that was more secular, less divided, and less shaped by the culture, politics, and theology of occupation. And by downplaying the significance of Avigdor Lieberman, the settlers, and Shas, American Jewish groups allow these older Zionists to continue to identify with that more internally cohesive, more innocent Israel of their youth, an Israel that now only exists in their memories.

But these secular Zionists aren’t reproducing themselves. Their children have no memory of Arab armies massed on Israel’s border and of Israel surviving in part thanks to urgent military assistance from the United States. Instead, they have grown up viewing Israel as a regional hegemon and an occupying power. As a result, they are more conscious than their parents of the degree to which Israeli behavior violates liberal ideals, and less willing to grant Israel an exemption because its survival seems in peril. Because they have inherited their parents’ liberalism, they cannot embrace their uncritical Zionism. Because their liberalism is real, they can see that the liberalism of the American Jewish establishment is fake.

To sustain their uncritical brand of Zionism, therefore, America’s Jewish organizations will need to look elsewhere to replenish their ranks. They will need to find young American Jews who have come of age during the West Bank occupation but are not troubled by it. And those young American Jews will come disproportionately from the Orthodox world.


Because they marry earlier, intermarry less, and have more children, Orthodox Jews are growing rapidly as a share of the American Jewish population. According to a 2006 American Jewish Committee (AJC) survey, while Orthodox Jews make up only 12 percent of American Jewry over the age of sixty, they constitute 34 percent between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. For America’s Zionist organizations, these Orthodox youngsters are a potential bonanza. In their yeshivas they learn devotion to Israel from an early age; they generally spend a year of religious study there after high school, and often know friends or relatives who have immigrated to Israel. The same AJC study found that while only 16 percent of non-Orthodox adult Jews under the age of forty feel “very close to Israel,” among the Orthodox the figure is 79 percent. As secular Jews drift away from America’s Zionist institutions, their Orthodox counterparts will likely step into the breach. The Orthodox “are still interested in parochial Jewish concerns,” explains Samuel Heilman, a sociologist at the City University of New York. “They are among the last ones who stayed in the Jewish house, so they now control the lights.”

But it is this very parochialism—a deep commitment to Jewish concerns, which often outweighs more universal ones—that gives Orthodox Jewish Zionism a distinctly illiberal cast. The 2006 AJC poll found that while 60 percent of non-Orthodox American Jews under the age of forty support a Palestinian state, that figure drops to 25 percent among the Orthodox. In 2009, when Brandeis University’s Theodore Sasson asked American Jewish focus groups about Israel, he found Orthodox participants much less supportive of dismantling settlements as part of a peace deal. Even more tellingly, Reform, Conservative, and unaffiliated Jews tended to believe that average Palestinians wanted peace, but had been ill-served by their leaders. Orthodox Jews, by contrast, were more likely to see the Palestinian people as the enemy, and to deny that ordinary Palestinians shared any common interests or values with ordinary Israelis or Jews.

Orthodox Judaism has great virtues, including a communal warmth and a commitment to Jewish learning unmatched in the American Jewish world. (I’m biased, since my family attends an Orthodox synagogue.) But if current trends continue, the growing influence of Orthodox Jews in America’s Jewish communal institutions will erode even the liberal-democratic veneer that today covers American Zionism. In 2002, America’s major Jewish organizations sponsored a large Israel solidarity rally on the Washington Mall. Up and down the east coast, yeshivas shut down for the day, swelling the estimated Orthodox share of the crowd to close to 70 percent. When the then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told the rally that “innocent Palestinians are suffering and dying as well,” he was booed.



America’s Jewish leaders should think hard about that rally. Unless they change course, it portends the future: an American Zionist movement that does not even feign concern for Palestinian dignity and a broader American Jewish population that does not even feign concern for Israel. My own children, given their upbringing, could as easily end up among the booers as among Luntz’s focus group. Either prospect fills me with dread.


In 2004, in an effort to prevent weapons smuggling from Egypt, Israeli tanks and bulldozers demolished hundreds of houses in the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip. Watching television, a veteran Israeli commentator and politician named Tommy Lapid saw an elderly Palestinian woman crouched on all fours looking for her medicines amid the ruins of her home. He said she reminded him of his grandmother.

In that moment, Lapid captured the spirit that is suffocating within organized American Jewish life. To begin with, he watched. In my experience, there is an epidemic of not watching among American Zionists today. A Red Cross study on malnutrition in the Gaza Strip, a bill in the Knesset to allow Jewish neighborhoods to bar entry to Israeli Arabs, an Israeli human rights report on settlers burning Palestinian olive groves, three more Palestinian teenagers shot—it’s unpleasant. Rationalizing and minimizing Palestinian suffering has become a kind of game. In a more recent report on how to foster Zionism among America’s young, Luntz urges American Jewish groups to use the word “Arabs, not Palestinians,” since “the term ‘Palestinians’ evokes images of refugee camps, victims and oppression,” while “‘Arab’ says wealth, oil and Islam.”

Of course, Israel—like the United States—must sometimes take morally difficult actions in its own defense. But they are morally difficult only if you allow yourself some human connection to the other side. Otherwise, security justifies everything. The heads of AIPAC and the Presidents’ Conference should ask themselves what Israel’s leaders would have to do or say to make them scream “no.” After all, Lieberman is foreign minister; Effi Eitam is touring American universities; settlements are growing at triple the rate of the Israeli population; half of Israeli Jewish high school students want Arabs barred from the Knesset. If the line has not yet been crossed, where is the line?







What infuriated critics about Lapid’s comment was that his grandmother died at Auschwitz. How dare he defile the memory of the Holocaust? Of course, the Holocaust is immeasurably worse than anything Israel has done or ever will do. But at least Lapid used Jewish suffering to connect to the suffering of others. In the world of AIPAC, the Holocaust analogies never stop, and their message is always the same: Jews are licensed by their victimhood to worry only about themselves. Many of Israel’s founders believed that with statehood, Jews would rightly be judged on the way they treated the non-Jews living under their dominion. “For the first time we shall be the majority living with a minority,” Knesset member Pinchas Lavon declared in 1948, “and we shall be called upon to provide an example and prove how Jews live with a minority.”

But the message of the American Jewish establishment and its allies in the Netanyahu government is exactly the opposite: since Jews are history’s permanent victims, always on the knife-edge of extinction, moral responsibility is a luxury Israel does not have. Its only responsibility is to survive. As former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg writes in his remarkable 2008 book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes, “Victimhood sets you free.”

This obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among America’s secular Jewish young. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israel’s. Yes, Israel faces threats from Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, Israelis understandably worry about a nuclear Iran. But the dilemmas you face when you possess dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, and your adversary, however despicable, may acquire one, are not the dilemmas of the Warsaw Ghetto. The year 2010 is not, as Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed, 1938. The drama of Jewish victimhood—a drama that feels natural to many Jews who lived through 1938, 1948, or even 1967—strikes most of today’s young American Jews as farce.

But there is a different Zionist calling, which has never been more desperately relevant. It has its roots in Israel’s Independence Proclamation, which promised that the Jewish state “will be based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew prophets,” and in the December 1948 letter from Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and others to The New York Times, protesting right-wing Zionist leader Menachem Begin’s visit to the United States after his party’s militias massacred Arab civilians in the village of Deir Yassin. It is a call to recognize that in a world in which Jewish fortunes have radically changed, the best way to memorialize the history of Jewish suffering is through the ethical use of Jewish power.

For several months now, a group of Israeli students has been traveling every Friday to the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where a Palestinian family named the Ghawis lives on the street outside their home of fifty-three years, from which they were evicted to make room for Jewish settlers. Although repeatedly arrested for protesting without a permit, and called traitors and self-haters by the Israeli right, the students keep coming, their numbers now swelling into the thousands. What if American Jewish organizations brought these young people to speak at Hillel? What if this was the face of Zionism shown to America’s Jewish young? What if the students in Luntz’s focus group had been told that their generation faces a challenge as momentous as any in Jewish history: to save liberal democracy in the only Jewish state on earth?

“Too many years I lived in the warm embrace of institutionalized elusiveness and was a part of it,” writes Avraham Burg. “I was very comfortable there.” I know; I was comfortable there too. But comfortable Zionism has become a moral abdication. Let’s hope that Luntz’s students, in solidarity with their counterparts at Sheikh Jarrah, can foster an uncomfortable Zionism, a Zionism angry at what Israel risks becoming, and in love with what it still could be. Let’s hope they care enough to try.

—May 12, 2010

Peter Beinart is Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York, a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, and Senior Political Writer for The Daily Beast. His new book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, will be published in June

Jewish communal life in Argentina and Brazil at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st: a sociological perspective

Jewish communal life in Argentina and Brazil at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st: a sociological perspective

Yossi Goldstein

Jewish communal life today is founded on a sophisticated organizational system. The link of the Jew as an individual to communal organizations depends both on the individual’s sense of belonging and on the services this system offers which could satisfy the individual’s needs —be they educational, cultural, or social welfare. How are communal institutions facing these needs in a postmodern world? How can it be assured that the interweaving of the different communal institutions gives way to the establishment of an organized community and, as such, justifies the use of the concept kehila (voluntary community)? How can this system confront the new tendencies of an individualized and atomized world, on the one hand, and a globalized world on the other hand? Is it possible to preserve a communal framework without having a collective identity that is vibrant and relevant? These are some of the questions that ought to guide us when trying to analyze Jewish communal life in the 21st century. The key to advancement in this direction is not only to reformulate the concept of kehila in a globalized world, but also to accelerate the development of comparative research among Jewish communities and institutions within cities and countries, regions and continents (Davis, 1963; Goldstein, 2005).
The wide and comprehensive field of research that has grown in the past few years in Jewish communal life in the United States allows us to raise some comparative questions. One important question in this respect is whether the Jewish North American model serves as an archetype for understanding the community structure of the Jews in a globalized and multi-cultural world. The position expressed here is that we have to advance the development of comparative studies in order to better understand the elements of Jewish communal life in the 21st century, taking into consideration the relevant contributions of Jewish North American researchers as well as Israeli researchers in this field.

The comparative approach within the research of Latin American Jewry
Even though the comparative approach has been central in interdisciplinary research revolving around the field of contemporary Jewry, much of the existing research on South America has not adopted this approach.
The pioneering work of Moshe Davis in Jerusalem during the fifties and the sixties established the foundation for comparative study among Jewish communities, applying North American Judaism as the archetype or comparison model. Davis was the first researcher to include this comparison in studying Argentine Jewry by analyzing three Jewish centers in the Western Hemisphere: the United States, Canada and Argentina.[1] Davis’ goal was to “outline, by means of comparison, some disparate and common elements in the three main Jewish centers in the Western Hemisphere,” emphasizing the organizational aspects as well as the study of representative institutions (Davis, 1963: 4-26).
Another center of comparative research of Latin American Judaism was developed at the University of Tel Aviv during the seventies, as manifested in the research of Schers[2] and Singer (1977). This work was carried out at the Horowitz Institute within the framework of a research project on Jewish communities in Latin America, spearheaded by Schers. In this research, both external and internal factors that influenced the Jewish communities were studied, including their interaction and impact on the preservation of a particular collective identity within the context of nationalistic as well as assimilationist settings.
In 1983, Daniel J. Elazar, together with Peter Medding, published a systematic study of Argentine, Australian and South African Judaism in the book Jewish communities in frontier societies. Its political-organizational approach toward the Jewish communities brought forth fruitful comparative research which was clearly delineated in the book People and polity: the organizational dynamics of world Jewry (1989). In this work Elazar adopted a comparative approach in examining Jewish centers in Argentina and Brazil (pp. 262-286). Elazar highlights that “Latin America is not like the United States,” due to the very different general and historical contexts. Moreover, as far as patterns of Jewish identification are concerned, he describes a condition of being “in limbo” due to the absence of a deep feeling of belongingness and integration of the younger generations. This generation, he argues, is focused on a search for wealth, businesses and sports, with a proliferation of sports organizations that now play a central role in Jewish life (p. 262). Also, Elazar emphasizes the presence of Israel, the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization in a manner similar to Elkin who considers Zionism as the “religion of the Latin American Jews” (p.263). Today, these assertions deserve a thorough reconsideration given the new tendencies in Jewish Latin American studies.
Haim Avni continues the approach established by Davis at the Institute of Contemporary Judaism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has published at least fifteen papers bringing forth a global and comparative vision of Latin American Jewry, even though his principal research focuses on Argentina. Avni’s (1988, 1993, 1999) comparative perspective is an attempt to define and clarify the most relevant subjects or dilemmas of the Jewish presence, such as its legitimacy from a greater society’s perspective, the ethnic and cultural diversity, and the dependency on international Jewish organizations. In his comparative work during the 1990s, Avni stressed that it is still important to investigate “the intensity of Jewish public life” (1993: 13); the limits of the right to be different by comparing the Jews to other ethnic and religious minorities; the achievements of Jewish voluntarism; and “the role played by the State of Israel in organized Jewish life in Latin America for the last fifty years” (1999: 30f). Avni was undoubtedly the precursor and promoter of comparative research among Jewish communities in Latin America, an endeavor he transmitted to his students and other academicians (Ben Dror, 1998; Bejarano, 2005 and Goldstein, 2003, 2005).
Judith L. Elkin in her classic book Jews of Latin American Republics (1980, updated edition 1998) together with her compilation with Gilbert Merkx, The Jewish presence in Latin-America (1987), attempts to show a global as well as a continental vision, in which emphasis is placed on a systematic comparison between United States Jewry, defined as ‘the North’, and Latin American Judaism Jewry, defined as ‘the South’, together with an analysis of the evolution of the Jewish communities on the continent in general (Elkin, 1980’s edition: 238-253; 1998’s edition: 215-229). Elkin stresses the external factors influencing these different forms of Judaism, such as the Hispanic legacy with its enormous Catholic and medieval weight. At the absorption level, Jewish immigrants were not capable of integrating themselves politically, only culturally. Their loyalty was permanently questioned, and the Catholic majority never really abandoned their perception of the Jews as foreigners. Low political representation and a certain vulnerability in their political life, which was manifested in a lack of ‘civic assimilation’, can be considered consequences of the above mentioned conditions. Essentially, according to Elkin, Latin American Jews are “history’s orphans” (Elkin, 1998’s edition: 218 and 228f).
It is worth mentioning that Elkin did not modify her analysis even after the very important transformations of the nineties. This approach was stressed again in the revised edition of her book published in 1998. Her vision applied specifically to Spanish speaking countries. In the case of Brazil, there is no systematic analysis. Elkin claims that although an expanding market economy exists there, the civic assimilation of the Jews is in its initial stages and therefore still very far from the United States model. (Elkin, 1998’s edition: 222 f.; 228).
Following this line of analysis, we suggest the application of a theoretical sociological model bolstered by a comparative methodology within the context of communal life in Argentina and Brazil, two countries deeply affected by the processes of globalization since the end of the 1980s. To accomplish this research goal, it is important to maintain a comparative perspective regarding the research developed in this field in the United States. Our study will encompass three main areas:
Communal work and planning
Jewish leadership
Jewish continuity and communal crisis

Communal work and planning
Sociological research has contributed enormously to the diagnosis of problems and to locating the needs of communal life. The field of communal work requires a connection between theory and practice, between analytical study and planning, oriented to the implementation of change. Evaluation and planning are essential tools in this discipline. In this respect, Ukeles (1991) argued that United States Jewry seems to lack serious resources which can be invested in strategic planning as a continuous process that may foster the definition and constant review of the institutional mission of the community (p.171).
To understand the phenomenon of community, it is necessary to study the individual and his or her surroundings, both geographically and culturally. It is also important to incorporate ‘diagnostic tools’ that assist in community planning. A concrete example of this is the creation of the Center of Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, founded in 1978 by the sociologist Marshall Sklare. From its inception, this center integrated a theoretical orientation together with practical goals, working together with Jewish federations to develop empirical studies about Jewish life in the United States. The central message brought forth by this conception is that Jewish life is going through profound changes and the key to satisfying new needs and offering new community services is the planning inspired by a long term vision of the future (Sternberg, Tobin and Fishman, 1991). The departure point of this research is the acknowledgement of a profound dynamism in Jewish communal life and a permanent need to face the changes that have been prevalent since the 1990's (ibid: XI).
A holistic approach to the phenomenon of a voluntary Jewish community in a postmodern age calls for an analysis of the potential for renovation and reconstruction of communal organizations. Thus, it is imperative to move beyond the old conceptions of uniform and homogeneous communities, what in a previous paper I labeled an anachronistic usage of the concept of kehila (Goldstein, 2005: 46-47). A socio-anthropological vision must begin from the perspective of the Jewish individual, his needs, and the concentric circles that surround him. Even for Daniel Elazar, the concept of ‘the American Jewish Community’ is not something obvious, but rather a descriptive instrument whose purpose is to analyze this phenomenon from a “neutral and practical” point of view. His conclusion leads to the need to understand this Jewish community as a “mosaic” or a “multi-dimensional matrix of institutions and organizations” (Elazar, 1995: XIII and 5).
The great challenge in this age of globalization is to face the need for permanent communal renewal and reconstruction, thereby satisfying the needs of the Jewish individual to belong and maintaining the symbolic significance. This challenge constitutes the central axis of the approach offered by Jonathan Woocher, who ten years ago developed a unified theory in the field of Jewish continuity. Any debate about assimilation or dissolution of Jewish identities must include a social and cultural context of community building. The open and multicultural world in which most Jews live today also calls for pluralistic institutions. As an example, Woocher suggests that the Jewish synagogue must renew itself if it desires to be preserved as a central agent in Jewish life in the United States. The main objective ought to be the construction of an institutional inter-community network that would guarantee synergy and would enable cooperation without the obliteration of particular identities, or the specific vision of each component of this communal mosaic (Woocher, 1995: 38-48).
Within this context, it may be worth considering reapplying Elazar’s model, including his comparative analysis of the Jews in Argentina and Brazil. When analyzing the characteristics of the ‘Jewish Community in Argentina’, Elazar suggests focusing on the following spheres: 1) the communal welfare sphere; 2) the defense sphere and external relations; 3) the Israel sphere and the edah (worldwide organized Judaism); 4) the congregational-religious sphere and 5) the educational-cultural sphere.
This analytic scheme has not been applied to Brazilian Jewry, which is presented in a descriptive and superficial manner. The most valid conclusion would be one that emphasizes the weakness of the communal public sphere in Brazil, given the deep integration with the national culture. This weakness of the communal sphere is the reason Jewish activities are concentrated in the private sphere or at the sport clubs which have gained importance. However, the final conclusion indicates that both Brazilian and Argentine Judaism depend on an external “infusion of energy” which comes from Israel through the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency, “sinking slowly in a ‘protectorate status’” within the context of the edah (Elazar, 1989: 284)
The research regarding Brazilian and Argentine Jewish Communal life published in the last few years emphasizes the relevance of taking into account the political, economic, social and cultural contexts upon which Jewish life developed. In this sense, the differences between Brazil and Argentina are enormous. In Brazil, Jews demonstrate the imprints of an open society (of relatively more tolerance) with a view more oriented towards the future, lacking a collective historic memory which legitimizes mixed race breeding and ethnic diversity (Sorj, 1997). Bernardo Sorj even refers to a “cultural colonialism” due to the enormous Israeli and U.S. influence, whose derived consequence is “terrible intellectual poverty.” In Argentina, on the other hand, since the 1990s Jews have lived in the shadow of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel attacks, which even now, in pluralistic and democratic times, generate an existential sense of insecurity. The cyclical recurrence of an economic crisis together with the political instability secure the bond Argentine Jews feel with the State of Israel and yet, at the same time, explain the development of a collective awareness with strong ties to the memory of the Holocaust and to the chain of anti-Semitic instances in the history of the country.
By and large, Judaism in Brazil is closer to the pluralistic model than in Argentina. Still, research in this area is lacking and its influence at the level of community politics is practically null. There is also a lack of publications that provide institutionalized scenarios for public thought and communal debate. The high level publications, such as Raíces or Megamot in Argentina, disappeared some time ago. In both countries, the newspaper remains the only forum for discussion and reflection, such as Tribuna Judaíca or Semana Judaíca in San Pablo, the culture magazine Judaíca or the bi-monthly O Hebreu.
A recent study that sheds light on some of the processes within the Jewish community was carried out by Mara Topel regarding the Teshuva movement in the city of São Paulo. Topel analyzes the impact of globalization on the Jewish community of São Paulo together with the reaction to it of orthodox groups such as Chabad. This group was able to capitalize on the new needs of the community, i.e. the search for absolute values, spirituality and a sense of belonging linked to the creation of a new sense of the Jewish community in a postmodern context. What drives this process is the need felt by many Jewish individuals to ‘feel at home’ in the community, sharing values that are considered transcendental in their individual lives (Topel, 2005: 34-41; 275-294).
The physical space of communal life in South America is very different from the congregational model in United States, where the community gathers and constitutes itself around the synagogue. In Argentina and Brazil, the geographic space of Jewish life is decentralized and characterized by dissolution, or in other words a sporadic belonging, sometimes circumstantial. Even the Jewish Communal School, an established space in the past, has been weakening since the 1990s. In great measure, the school has failed to be a center of Jewish communal life, just as the attempts of the conservative movements (Masortí) have failed. Even given the premise that the movement was able to establish a legitimate non-orthodox setting around the synagogue, membership in these communities is often circumstantial and fulfills only specific ritual functions. Membership hardly has a qualitative impact on the members’ Jewish identity. Yet, the appearance and growth of the Conservative movement in both Argentina and Brazil has pointed to a meaningful process. Unfortunately, researchers have not focused on the role of the Conservative movement as one of the axes of community building, nor has there been much research on the attempt to try to synthesize tendencies that arrive both from the United States and Israel.
The debate over the past few years (an almost clandestine one) is about the functionality of Hebrew and the number of hours assigned to its teaching as a mandatory subject. This leads to a clear conclusion: Hebrew has been delegated as the national language that forges identity and transmits culture. The Brazilian model, in which Hebrew is disappearing in high schools, is slowly being implemented in Argentina with the ORT school model (5-6 weekly hours of Judaic studies, with 1 to 2 weekly hours of Hebrew language), or with the new private Jewish school model such as Arlene Fern or Beth (Judaism in English). Hebrew language instruction was also reduced at the Renascensa School in São Paulo, Brazil.
It can be argued that Jewish communal life in Argentina has taken huge strides towards the Judeo-Brazilian integration model, which is not only integration into society in general, but also integration into the global village. Part of this shift is tied to the image that young parents have of a globalized economy which requires technical training as well as languages oriented towards the United States and the so-called first world.
Argentinean Jewry has a long tradition of centralism in dealing with community issues, educational policies, and key subjects for Jewish continuity. Since 1957, when the Central Educational Committee was established, until the 1990s, it fulfilled an active role in the creation and supervision of curricula, training of teachers, organizing of trips to Israel, and the implementation of the Hebrew language as the central feature of the Jewish school. In the early 1990s, this institution demonstrated signs of decadence, loss of authority, and impotence facing the impact of the government economic policy. Towards the end of 1992, a committee of strategic planning was established, advised by the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and greatly financed by Israel’s educational funds (the Pincus Fund and Keren Meshutefet). This process, which I researched a few years ago (Goldstein, 2001), mobilized the community’s establishment. It generated resources for change and promoted innovative educational projects with the goal of improving the Jewish educational system. Yet, these changes were not institutionalized. Moreover, they did not generate the building of a stable yet dynamic community that could overcome the symptoms of dissolution, such as the disappearance of the concept of a Jewish school network.
There is no doubt that the bombing on July 18th 1994, which killed 85 people and destroyed the main building where most of the Jewish institutions were located in Buenos Aires, became a catalyzing agent in this process. The tragedy accelerated the dissolutionist tendencies and accentuated the symptoms of the community crisis. It is not by chance that the bomb exacerbated the dependency of the community’s leadership on external factors, such as Israel and the United States.
The Joint Distribution Committee, an agency for assistance and philanthropy with its epicenter in the United States, was an important element in the projection of a communal model imported from the North. Towards the end of the eighties, this agency supported and financed publications aimed to promote long term planning and the communal vision, solidifying the role of professional Jews in building communal continuity. An example of this was the magazine Megamot, published in conjunction with AMIA —Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (Argentine Israelite Mutual Association)— and the Association of Professionals in the Jewish Community. The fact that these initiatives were short lived demonstrates the structural weakness of this model of communal life.
Another example of it is the publication of Communal Space written by the psychologist and thinker Janan Nudel (1989) and supported by the JDC. In this book, Nudel analyzed underlying trends within the institutional communal activities and the problematic relations — sometimes pathological— among the principal actors, especially between the professional leadership and the lay people. The key for understanding this problem lies within the Jewish family, which has progressively been giving up its characteristic Jewish values. His thesis asserts that “the Jews search in the community what they lost outside of it, and outside the community for new things” (p. 24).
The JDC had a significant role in the planning and promotion of communal change. Its publication Contacto served as the basis for the dissemination of projects and ideas of change, as well as for the short and long term planning needs.
The following exemplify this phenomenon:
The promotion of strategic alliances as alternatives for communal development: In May 1995, Contacto published three different approaches related to this subject, and not solely from the perspective of the economic crisis which led to this unification.[3] The public debate, as explained above, constitutes an indispensable link in the development of public reflexive thought as well as for the implementation of structural changes. It is not coincidental that in December 1995, in its 5th issue, the magazine published an article that analyzed the fusion or union between Amos High School of Hebraica and Wolfsohn4. This union was initially very successful, but eventually failed just like the model of the fusion of social/sports club Hebraica with Hacoaj, which had also been promoted and financed by the JDC.
The study of the phenomenon of the ‘new Jewish poverty’. In the mid 1990s, the JDC promoted research on this subject, whose results were published in the magazine Contacto at the end of 1995 and were discussed in a book by sociologists Kessler and Golbert (1995: 12f). The treatment of Jewish poverty ever since and the structuring of unified assistance for the needy sectors, which rose to about 20% of the Jewish population after the socio-economic crisis of December 2001, was carried out through support networks, thanks to a strengthening of the role of tzedakah (charity giving) as a central community entity. This undoubtedly constituted a positive example of successful community building, even though it was a contingent and temporary response to the symptoms of crisis and dissolution
For many years, the socio-sport clubs constituted the principal meeting space for Jews, reflecting the prevailing role of the social over the educational and cultural dimensions of communal life. Nowadays these spaces are still playing an active role in Jewish communal life, albeit to a lesser extent, as a result of the economic crisis and the growing importance given to social integration. A comparison between the North American Jewish community center and the socio-sport clubs constitute examples of two different Jewish communal models. Over the past few decades, Jews from Argentina and Brazil have strengthened their ties with North American Jewry and at the same time suffered from the impact of neo-liberal economic policies (with all its implications in the institutional context). These processes strengthened Jewish communal life in the United States, while in the context of the South American Jewish communities, they operated as weakening forces which are understood in post-modern terms of construction and dissolution in the specific cases of Brazil and Argentina. The phenomenon of Jewish poverty in wide sectors of the Jewish middle class is a central aspect of Bernardo Kliksberg’s research. Kliksberg himself is an educator, thinker and consultant of the Inter-American Development Bank, as well as an important personality in Argentine Judaism. He criticized the lack of a strategic agenda in Latin American Judaism and the absence of a clear debate about the need to “formulate and develop community policies in an uncertain general and Jewish world in which the region, while sharing the global uncertainty, has a greater level of it” (Kliksberg, 1993: 24). According to Kliksberg, the continent is undergoing three important developments: 1) democratization; 2) a deep economic crisis and 3) an exponential growth of the social problem, i.e. poverty (p. 29). The latter is generating an increase in the number of impoverished Jews, manifested on a great scale after the political crisis in Argentina in December 2001.
In 2002, Kliksberg put forth the hypothesis that 25% of Jews in Argentina might be living in a state of structural poverty, a phenomenon that would be even more intense in Brazil and around which communal planning in both nations has been designed (Kliksberg, 2002: 9f).
Due to its cultural and social peculiarities, Brazil, as compared to Argentina, is a continent unto itself. Centralist trends are not strongly manifested on the Jewish communal level in this country as its federal structure, as well as the distribution of the Jewish population across the different states —mainly in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul— impedes any attempt to coordinate communal life at the national level. Historic rivalries among the states also explain the lack of national coordination, except for the political activities undertaken by CONIB (Israelite Brazilian National Confederation). Even at the level of large cities and states, the impotence of the Jewish Federations in handling educational policy is noticeable. An enormous gap between the political discourse and the reality of multiple identities and cultures which characterize Brazilian Jewry is evident.

Jewish Leadership
The 1995 report from the Wexner Foundation regarding “Jewish professional leadership today,” as well as other research carried out in the 1990s, provides us with a glimpse into the great dynamism of communal life in the United States (Cohen, Sarna and Fishman, 1995). In general, this research emphasizes the importance of training and developing a new type of leadership, both professional as well as voluntary, as part of global strategic planning. Reisman, for example, considers the training of professional leadership in light of the current needs of communal life pointing out how young generations of North American Jews (third or fourth generation) have easily integrated into their social setting and are seeking a revolutionary change toward a more meaningful communal life. This generation requires a Jewish leader who is both a statesman and an expert (Reisman, 1991: 233-235). The Wexner Foundation report highlights that the reasons for the new generation of professional communal leaders to take this path are not the influence of the Jewish federation, the Jewish school or the synagogue, but rather their personal experiences, family influence or the model role of current leaders (Sarna, 1995: 46).
The new profile of communal life is projected in publications such as the Journal of Jewish Communal Services, edited by the Jewish Communal Service Association (JCSA), an organization that has been active for over a hundred years. In its pages we find a calling for the preservation of the communal service professional and its role in developing a new vision to face the new millennium (Kleinman, 1999; Reisman, 1992). The Jewish leader in a postmodern globalized age must strive to become a unifying element and a generator of common symbolic meaning. For this to occur, leaders must have a clear understanding of the institutional context and the culture of the organization especially when trying to improve Jewish education5 and work towards promoting unity and a sense of belonging. Institutional change is considered impossible to implement without this new type of both lay and professional leadership (Shevitz, 1995: 177-178). Some argue that this new type of leadership should be a “shared leadership”, i.e. leadership based more on team work and less on the charismatic individual (Samuels and Aron, 1999: 25).
One of the central features of community life in Latin America is precisely the lack of strong lay leadership. The old askan (lay person leader) leadership model, justified by early 20th century ideology —which arose from the political parties that are in decay today, such as Avoda and Likud— is gradually disappearing, and no clear continuity with a new vision reflecting the new reality is evident yet. Moreover, the attempt by the JDC to create a setting for the training of new leaders was not very successful among the lay sectors, though it did have a significant impact on the formation of professionals working in the Jewish community. The evolution of Leatid as an entity created by the JDC towards this ends points to the ambivalence of lay leadership.
However, problems within the communal leadership are not easily identifiable as not much research has been devoted to analyzing such issues in Latin America, especially when contrasted with the abundance of literature on Jewish communal leadership in the United States. As an attempt to fill this void, an initiative of the JDC was noted in the aforementioned book by the Argentine psychologist Janan Nudel. For him, “communal leadership could be defined as authoritarianism represented by the figure of the father” and is characterized by the use of the “messianic fantasy” and the dismissal of the professional who is considered a “mercenary” (Nudel, 1989: 37-38). According to this analysis, the Jewish leadership in Argentina is not a dynamic agent for change, but rather part of “the machinery of immobility” (p. 39).
According to Kliksberg (1993: 25), Jewish communal leadership in Latin America operates in a pretty restricted background, ignoring the challenges of an uncertain world. In other words, the lay leadership lacks vision of the regional and international context in which Jewish communities develop. At the same time, Schers (1987: 290) defined the problem of Jewish leadership in Latin America as a function of the lack of positive cultural identification with Judaism, which translates into a problem of identity and cultural dearth.
The rise of alternative leadership, through the activism of socio-sport clubs or within the Conservative (Masorti) movement, did not lead to a stabilization of the institutional settings. On the contrary, in the end, the alternative leadership was canalized through Jewish bankers like Ruben Beraja or Sergio Spolsky. The collapse of their respective banks in 1998 (Mayo and Patricios), generated a chaotic fall in Jewish communal life which resulted in financial debts and a bad reputation that stained the Jewish leadership as a whole. This model was not repeated in Brazil where philanthropic bankers such as the Safra family continue to give significant amounts of money to Jewish institutions, without intervening in the internal political arena or establishing their own power base. Communal leadership is today comprised of rabbis from the different movements6 and constitutes a model whose success is worth studying more in depth and on a comparative level.
Within the Judeo-Argentine context, the symptoms of instability were found to be caused by internal dissolution. Responsibility for the problems was attributed to the fragmentation and the damage of the moral reputation of its leadership. This internal struggle was identified by two prestigious newspaper reporters as the clearest symptom of the communal crisis in Argentina towards the end of the 20th century (Melamed, 2004: 14f; 235-240; Chab, 2001: 17, 264-267).7 Regarding this subject, the historian Efraim Zadoff proposed that “the Jewish leadership has failed in articulating Jewish interests, a fact that may be seen as a symptom of a new stage in the changing trends of incorporation and integration of Argentine Jews” (2000: 38).

Jewish continuity and communal crisis
The concept of continuity has been a central axis in Jewish communal life in the United States since the National Community Census of 1990. The urgent problems that the Jewish community confronted were decadence in the organized community, demographic decline and crisis in leadership. Several researchers attempted to develop a ‘strategic vision for the Jewish Community’, starting by addressing issues of assimilation and acculturation. Woocher (1995) suggested the rebuilding of communities and cultures as social realities, both vital and cognitive, that will nourish and preserve strong Jewish identities. In a postmodern world, every community must begin from the individual and his or her needs. This is the main principle which Jewish continuity can be built upon. The community, above all, must offer a sense of meaning and hospitality (p. 24).
Sarna argues that North American Judaism is afflicted by a crisis of confidence which manifests itself in four challenges: 1) the preservation of Jewish continuity; 2) the changing nature of Jewish Identity; 3) the threat of a lack of sense of hospitality and belonging felt by North American Jews and 4) the dissolution with the sense of unity and the strong links towards the State of Israel. These challenges, according to Sarna, are symptoms of crisis, yet at the same time, they offer the potential for renovation and positive change.
More recent research, such as the book by Cohen and Eisen (2000), emphasizes this conclusion. The proposed new guidelines of a community life rest more and more on the archetype of a ‘sovereign Jew’, whose identity is complex and whose connection stems from his or her subjective needs and symbolic meanings. In 2003, Cohen published an interesting work on research regarding Jewish identity in the U.S that appeared in a volume that deals with the issue defined in its title: Continuity, commitment and survival (Encel and Stein, 2003). The author emphasizes the shift in focus from integrationism to survivalism, a shift which took hold in 1967. Since the end of the 1980s, a middle ground has prevailed which emphasizes continuity or authenticity, and new forms of Jewish identity based on the gathering of data from empirical research. Jewish identity in the United States, even if grounded in cultural significances which defined it as belonging to the religious and ritualistic dimension, also adopted ethnic nuances. Without the ethnic dimension, it is hard to understand the sense of belonging and inclusion within the communal framework. This includes the shared vision of having common ancestry, sharing a culture and historic milestones as well as a shared destiny (Cohen, 2003: 13). It is interesting to note that empirical research in the U.S. shows a decline in ethnic expressions of Judaism, such as endogamy, affiliation to Jewish institutions, level of philanthropy and enthusiasm towards Israel. But at the same time, the level of collective achievement and commitment from the Jewish community elite (lay people, donors and practicing Jews) points to great advances that can be measured both quantitatively and qualitatively.
In other words, North American researchers such as Moshe Davis, an Israeli born in the United States, identify the problems in the Jewish community as a ‘crisis of Jewish identity’, which is expressed through ‘detachment’ manifested in mixed marriages and in the ideology of assimilation and acculturation. To Davis, this problem is “common to the Jews of Canada, the United States and Argentina and represents ‘the crisis of identification’ which is affecting many Jews” (Davis, 1963, citing the Spanish translation (1967): 18-27, citation on p. 19).
Diego Melamed sees the 1990s as a “period of convulsions” marked by the collapse “in buildings, interests and values” of the Jewish community in Argentina, which, at the end of the millennium, was left “fractured and betrayed by its representatives” (2000: 13-15).
According to the World Jewish Congress, the critical condition of the Jews in Argentina since 1998 has been epitomized by two fundamental milestones: the attack against the Amia-Daia in July 1994, and the collapse of the Mayo and Patricios banks in 1998. The official dispatch of this situation is described as “From crisis to crisis” (World Jewish Congress, 1998: 1-4). Thus ‘community in distress’ appears to be a more and more appropriate label to characterize the situation of Argentine Jewry. Still, this very expression was adopted by Kliksberg (2002) to describe not only the condition of Argentine Jews, declaring it “a Jewish community in danger”, but also the condition of all Latin America. According to Kliksberg the most important symptom of this structural crisis is the general impoverishment of the middle class and the resurgence of a “dramatic social scheme” of “a new Jewish poverty” in particular (pp. 5-15).
Several researchers of Argentine Jewry widely use the concept of community crisis to characterize the internal structural situation towards the end of the last century and the beginning of this one. The crisis is mainly associated with the financial and economic condition which arose in 1998 and climaxed in 2002 (Zadoff, 2000: 35, 141; Schenkolewski-Kroll, 2004: 194f). Avni stresses the relationship between this community crisis and the national and social context of the country, especially towards the year 2002. Yet he defines it as “an immanent crisis in the last decade of the 20th century” (Avni, 2005: 450-453). Almost all of these authors link this crisis to the weakened structure of communal leadership, as well as its fragmentation. Nonetheless, the journalist Silvia Chab was the only one who took on the concept of crisis as a central axis in her investigative reporting book. She defines this crisis as “internal diasporization”, founded in the “crisis of a functioning institutionalized and centralized system, and in the sense that the term community ever had” (2001: 17; 261)
Judith Elkin opted to portray the condition of Argentine Jewry as a “cataclysm”, a “bankruptcy of institutions”, a sense of “vulnerability and isolation”, within the national context of a “chaotic economy”, “government corruption” and “disaster” (2003: 149f). Without using the concept of crisis, Elkin presents a pessimistic analysis regarding the future of Argentine Jewry, one of “disintegration” and disorientation regarding “strategies for Jewish survival” with the failure of the Secular-Zionist model of Jewish continuity. The author concludes that the destruction of the national economy which took place at the beginning of this millennium could inflict a “mortal blow to the Jewish community in Argentina” (pp. 165-170).
The concept of communal crisis is rarely applied to Brazilian Judaism, which some perceive as a “great community whose members are now full participants in every aspect of the social, political and cultural life of the country” (Falbel, 2001: 16). Thus, it is not surprising that the success of social integration may be seen as a double edged sword, and that the main concern is the fleeting Jewish identity of its youth. The main problem is, then, that of Jewish continuity due to the “centrifugal attraction of an open society” (pp. 24-27). On the other hand, the sociologist Bernardo Sorj defines Brazil as the “country of the future”, or a “country with no memory.” A society that rejects the past or undervalues it, a fact that in a way facilitates the integration of Jews as immigrants, yet demands a great price at the organizational level of the Jewish community. According to Sorj, this dilemma brought about by modernity endangers the socialization mechanisms of organized Jewish life (1997: 17, 19).
This sociological approach is clearly adopted by Monica Grin (1997) in her study about the crisis of modern Judaism in the Brazilian context. By undertaking a political-institutional analysis of the Israelite Federation in Rio de Janeiro, Grin stresses the permanent struggle among two models of kehila: the centralizing one, which is based on European Jewish life until the Second World War, and the modernizing one, which promoted the pluralistic approach among the communal frameworks (pp. 103-107). In other words, the debate around the crisis of Brazilian Jewry is presented according to the paradigm of the research agenda of North American and Western Judaism. The framework is that of a dilemma of Jewish identity and social disintegration, and not that of a socio-economic problem, or a physical existential threat.

Conclusions
In the light of the theoretical analysis discussed, it is possible to conclude that the challenges of communal life in the 21st century demand an approach encompassing the three axes that we have presented. A circular flux among these axes is the key in understanding the symptoms of the communal crisis. The lack of connection between strategic planning, the capability to build and renew communal institutions according to the new identities and needs of the Jewish individual, and a professional and lay leadership with new visions may together explain the existence of a crisis with destructive potential that could threaten the Jewish continuity in a globalized, multi-cultural world.
The comparison between Jewry in United States and in South America shows not only three different models of Jewish continuity, but it also highlights the importance of deepening the systematic comparative research in Jewish communal life in Latin America. An interdisciplinary vision that incorporates sociological and anthropological aspects of the communal organization and new schemes of Jewish identity is necessary to better understand the answers of the Jewish world to the impact of globalization. In this sense, the systematic comparison between Jewish communal life in Argentina and Brazil can greatly contribute to the understanding of this phenomenon on an international level.
[1] The original English version of this pioneering work was presented in the “Third World Congress of Jewish Studies” which took place at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1961.
[2] See also Schers’ (1987) article, the result of his lecture at the LAJSA (Latin American Jewish Studies Association) congress which took place in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in March, 1984.
[3] Contacto (May 1995), Year 3, N° 4, Buenos Aires: Joint Distribution Committee. See dossier “Strategic Alliances”, approaches from J. Nudel, B. Blejmar and J. Schulman, pp. 11-20
4 Contacto (December 1995), Year 3, N° 5, Buenos Aires: American Joint Distribution Committee, pp. 8-9

5 See the N° 11 of Agenda: Jewish Education (Spring 1999), specifically the articles written by Green and Flexner.

6 Such as Rabbi Tzvi Grumblatt from Chabad in Argentina, Rabbi Daniel Goldman from the Bet El community in Buenos Aires, Rabbi Sergio Bergman from the Israelite Congregation and the Judaic Foundation, Rabbi Milton Bonder from the Conservative Movement in Rio de Janeiro, etc.
7 See more about this subject bellow, in the section “Jewish continuity and communal crisis”.