In an opinion piece in the Jewish Week the three co-authors of the recent study ofNew York’s Jewish population cheerfully report on why their findings are so promising:

Much has been written about the somewhat surprising results from the “Jewish Community Study of New York: 2011.” Probably the most noted developments were the explosive growth of the haredim the sharp surge in poverty and the increasing number of non-denominational Jews.…But…we were most struck by the incredible — and expanding — diversity of New York Jewry in so many dimensions.… This diversity is healthy. It makes this community stronger and more interesting. It provides individuals with multiple stimuli and options for Jewish living.…

Along with all this diversity in age ideology national origin culture and social class comes diversity in approaches to life Jewish life and Jewish engagement.… To some the sheer diversity translates into polarization and disunity. To us the diversity poses a remarkable opportunity: to enhance personal and communal creativity to build patterns of mutual enrichment to celebrate difference while building bridges across difference.  Ultimately we can develop a new model of Jewish collectivity that celebrates diversity while seeking integration

It’s got all the stock buzzwords: “multiple stimuli and options for Jewish living” “building bridges across difference” “new model of Jewish collectivity.” Welcome to the oh-so-predictable sociology-speak that reigns supreme in secular-JewishAmerica. One has to assume that the newspaper’s proofreader could easily have switched a couple of these phrases —  substituting say “multiple options for a new Jewish collectivity” and “new model for Jewish living” – without even the authors themselves noticing. The irony is that the very way they discuss their study’s findings — using the tortured antiseptic hyper-intellectual verbiage that puts everyone but themselves to sleep —  and the ossified approach to Jewish living that it symbolizes goes a long way toward explaining the hemorrhaging of non-Orthodox life depicted in their study.  

But apart from their style they’re also mistaken in their substance with their Pollyannaish musings about the opportunities for “celebrat[ion] of difference” — another sleep-inducer. But Jack Wertheimer is having none of it.  Every movement needs someone who brings hi-falutin’ academics like these back down to earth with one “Get real.” And Wertheimer who as a serious historian and provost at the Conservative seminary who can’t be easily dismissed has been doing that for years now with a series of devastating truth-telling pieces about American Jewry in Commentary. In his latest offering he reviews the same UJA-Federation study:

In light of the many fissures that have opened on the Jewish scene the mantra of Jewish life over the past decades has shifted from proud assertions of Jewish unity to less convincing rhetoric about the joys of intra-Jewish diversity. In an act akin to making lemonade out of lemons communal leaders have taken to celebrating diversity now that it is clear that differences cannot be bridged. But even if valuing diversity is a worthy goal it is of limited help when trying to build a community. As Eli Lederhendler another leading historian ofNew York’s Jews has observed: “Internal diversity in a social system is a historical fact of life. But the sine qua non in the process of community formation is the predominance of collective commitment over sectoral and private self-definitions.” 

What that last quote means translated into plain English is that communities are always diverse but what makes them communities is that this diversity takes place within a larger context of an overarching commitment that its members have to a certain set of ideals and practices. That’s a perfect description of the Orthodox community which features so much more diversity in every way imaginable than its non-Orthodox counterparts could possible hope for but all within a larger context of shared beliefs and actions. 

And while he’s at it Wertheimer has some choice words for the Forward which editorialized when the survey was first released about the need to deny poor Orthodox children — the “undeserving poor” — their milk subsidies:

 [A]n editorial published by the Forward … stigmatized Haredi families as “undeserving poor” because their poverty is based on their own bad choices to bear children they cannot support even as they allegedly fail to acquire an education that would help them enter the labor market. Before tarring an entire community it might have been prudent for the editors to learn about the actual lives of these people the sacrifices they are prepared to make for their large families and the luxuries they are happy to forgo in order to transmit a strong Jewish identity to their children.

If however one insists on indulging in the dubious exercise of identifying types of Jews who are “undeserving” it behooves us to ask who in fact is most worthy of communal support: those who are failing to raise and nurture a successor generation of Jews or those who are producing and educating enough Jewish children to make up for the indifference of the rest? If nothing else the New York study should drive home the realization that Jewish life in this country and in most places around the world is now being played according to new ground rules since the once dominant non-Orthodox sectors are failing to reproduce enough of their own and are thereby relying on the Orthodox to ensure a viable Jewish future. 

Hey I didn’t write that; Jack Wertheimer did. But I suppose I can still be indicted for that high crime in today’s Jewish America called ‘Orthodox triumphalism’ for noticing what he wrote and bringing it to your attention.