The Sklare Family saga inverted the Jewish American dream

Photos: Eli Greengart, family archives

The general trajectory of American Jewry is well-known: an immigrant first generation, which in many cases held on to the kashrus and Shabbos observance of their birthplaces; a second generation with warm memories of their parents’ religious rituals but a dominant focus on achieving financial and social success; and then a third generation with no strong memories of observant bubbes and zeides, and pitifully insufficient connection to the Jewish community or tradition to provide a buffer against the twin sirens of assimilation and intermarriage.

Ironically, the story of the Sklare family takes the opposite trajectory. It begins with Marshall Sklare, a leading scholar and famed chronicler of the Conservative movement in America, continues with his son — who as a young teen sought out great Jews like Rav Aryeh Levin and the Steipler Gaon to guide him into the world of Torah — and flourishes today with a third generation of maggidei shiur and marbitzei Torah.

Though Marshall Sklare and his wife initially resisted their son’s move to fervent Orthodox observance, in time he came to take pride in the path his son had chosen and rejoiced that his descendants would not be among those lost to the Jewish people, like the children of so many of the Jews he studied. And they, in turn, recognize that his abiding love of the Jewish people and courage in telling unpopular truths planted the seeds of the family’s return to tradition.

Marshall Sklare was one of the first to sound the alarm on the threat of intermarriage

The Courage of His Convictions

Marshall Sklare

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arshall Sklare (b. 1921) came from a family of business people. From them he absorbed a strong work ethic and commitment to giving tzedakah. But from an early age, he also showed an intellectual bent, combined with a deep attraction to Jewish life. He affiliated Conservative, like his parents — but he was likely influenced by his father’s Orthodox parents. (His immigrant grandmother resisted all acculturation so fiercely that after 50 years in America, she spoke less than 100 words of English.)

Even as a high school student and throughout college at Northwestern University, Marshall Sklare took courses at Chicago’s College of Jewish Studies (today the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies). One of his teachers there, Fritz Bamberger, an émigré historian from Germany, was so impressed by his student’s eagerness to learn Jewish history that he undertook to teach with him privately, without recompense.

For his doctoral thesis at Columbia University, Sklare chose to write about Conservative Judaism in the United States. He worried that he could not be sufficiently objective about a movement in which he was raised. But he need not have feared. A prominent Conservative rabbi is said to have told him after the publication of the thesis as Conservative Judaism: An American Religious Movement by the Free Press in 1955, “Young man, who told you to write the truth about the Conservative movement?” For he had exposed both the movement’s lack of a coherent theology, and the lack of interest in such on the part of the laity, who controlled the synagogues. (See this week’s “Outlook” column for a fuller treatment.)

At the time, a plurality of American Jews was affiliated with the Conservative movement, and it was the fastest growing segment of American Jewry, particularly in suburban areas. Unlike the Reform movement, the Conservative movement never formally declared its break with halachah, though among the laity, few could be described as observant.

Marshall Sklare’s Conservative Judaism was widely hailed, and has been republished many times, most recently in 2012, 20 years after his passing. It is a masterpiece of narrative sociology presented without academic jargon.

In Sklare’s telling, the American movement was formed almost entirely of second-generation American Jews of Eastern European backgrounds, who were put off by the Reform movement’s coldness and complete break with tradition. They did not want the strict mitzvah observance of their Orthodox ancestors — but they still hoped to retain a taste of their childhood traditions.

But that sentimental attachment to “tradition” sans firm fealty to halachah could not be passed on and has proven unsustainable. Since at least the early 1990s, the movement has suffered an implosion of membership. Sklare’s warnings proved prescient; he correctly identified the movement’s vulnerabilities and predicted its downward turn.