The Great American Jewish Placebo

George D. Hanus, the chairman of the Superfund for Jewish Education and Continuity, admits that Reform and Conservative Judaism have only contributed to the assimilation and intermarriage of a huge swath of America's Jews.

The word "placebo" is derived from the Latin for "I shall please" and denotes a medical treatment whose only benefit is in the mind of the patient.

Throughout medical history and even as late as the late 1940's, sugar pills were prescribed by physicians in the hope that taking a pill would mobilize patients' internal powers to combat illness. It is the nature of a placebo that it works better for minor maladies than terminal diseases. A competent doctor would never administer an inert placebo when a genuine treatment was available.

The United States, as we all know, is a country of immigrants. For centuries, wave after wave arrived on these shores, fleeing persecution, hoping to better their economic condition and merge into the mainstream of American society

Jews are no exception to this pattern. Immigrant Jews rapidly learned English, adopted American dress styles and sent their children to colleges and graduate schools as they became respectable members of society. It is no accident that American Jews quickly moved out of poor urban neighborhoods into the suburbs and have become the most successful ethnic group in the United States.

Even while we were moving up the ladder, most Jews did not forget the Torah injunctions to remember our heritage. So we Jews set up neighborhood synagogues, spent our free time involved with Federations and Jewish fraternal organizations and built museums to remember destroyed Jewish communities. We collected money, attended meetings and ate chicken at fundraising dinners. And to religiously educate our children, we invented the Great American Jewish Placebo: Hebrew and Sunday school.

Imagine our surprise and shock, several generations later, when the placebo turned out to be a sugar pill. Our grown children did not follow in our Jewish footsteps. Today, a majority are intermarrying and assimilating. They are walking away from 4,000 years of Jewish history and we are shocked. After all, didn’t we do everything that our rabbinic and philanthropic leadership told us to do?

We provided good homes, sent them to top colleges, gave our annual charity pledges and even ensured their Jewish education in Hebrew and Sunday schools until bar mitzvah. When our children bitterly complained that they hated Hebrew school, while their friends were having fun in other after-school activities, we told them to hush because it was a rite of passage to suffer through Hebrew school just as we parents did. When they didn’t want to continue Hebrew school after the age of 13, we didn’t insist.

But we never imagined we would end up having grandchildren who have abandoned their heritage, know very little about Judaism and don’t believe in God. We never expected to visit their homes in December only to see a giant Christmas tree in the living room.

We are fortunate to live in a country that has allowed us to excel in every field of American endeavor without fear of persecution. But why have we not been equally successful at preserving our Jewish identity?

Part of the problem is the failed model of Hebrew and Sunday school. We delude ourselves that it will ensure the next generation of committed Jews. The great tragedy is that, by now, everybody knows it doesn’t work, yet we continue to go about business as usual. It is the Great American Jewish Placebo.

As documented by WJD's Mindy Schiller in last month’s cover story, "What’s Wrong With Hebrew School?" according to a new study by noted Jewish American sociologist Steven M. Cohen, the likelihood of intermarriage actually increases among students who attend once-a-week Sunday schools, and attending congregational school—two or more times a week, for less than seven years— hardly decreases that percentage. [Emphasis mine.]

"A little learning is a dangerous thing," wrote the poet Alexander Pope in the 18th century, and this seems to apply to Hebrew and Sunday schools today. In fact, at a recent conference of Jewish educators, Joel Hoffman, a language expert and congregational teacher, told The Jerusalem Post, "Our Hebrew schools aren't teaching Hebrew, the kids are miserable and are making the teachers miserable in the process."

So why do Hebrew schools still exist? Because they are funding mechanisms for synagogues, which depend on the dues of families paying for their children's bar/bat mitzvah and confirmation ceremonies to survive. If it weren't for Hebrew and Sunday schools, synagogues would have a lot of families show up from time to time without becoming members. The discontinuation of the Hebrew school model would disrupt the financial structure of congregational Jewish life in this country.

So if the dismal performance of Hebrew schools is one of the biggest open secrets in the Jewish world, why do they remain in place? Like all placebos, Jewish leaders and parents believe they have a benefit. Also, they are relatively inexpensive to administer. We have treated Jewish education as a communal joke by allocating laughable, paltry financial resources to our children's spiritual development.

It is time to declare Hebrew and Sunday school a placebo that is failing our community. After many decades of experience, few academics or rabbis would assert that our current Hebrew school structure is generating spiritually engaged, Torah knowledgeable and truly happy children, who are proud of being Jewish.

It is very troubling that American rabbis and Federation leadership seem oblivious to the obvious. In the United States, there are approximately 1.2 million Jewish children between the ages of 4 and 19. If the current trajectory continues, approximately 55 percent of these children will intermarry over the next 17 years and create 660,000 intermarried units. The 540,000 remaining Jewish children will marry other Jews and create 270,000 Jewish homes. The enormity of this trend is devastating.

Just as no doctor would prescribe a placebo when a truly effective remedy was available, so too our Jewish leadership is aware that there is a potent way of keeping kids Jewish. If day school were free and available to all Jewish children regardless of their stream of affiliation or family finances, the problems of intermarriage and assimilation in America would be significantly diminished. If our children felt connected spiritually with God and our heritage, they would become enthusiastic links for the next 4,000 years.

Can anyone imagine the outrage that would occur if a doctor administered a placebo to a patient, while an effective but more expensive treatment was available?

All parents must decide for their families how they want to Jewishly educate their children. It is a very personal decision. However, there are tens of thousands of young Jewish families who want to attend Jewish day schools, but the tuition costs are economic barriers to entry. This is outrageous. Torah education was never meant to be only for the rich.

It is time that the Jewish community demand an adoption of policies that constitute an effective resolution of the crisis. We must clearly articulate that it is each Jewish community's absolute responsibility to fund universal Jewish day school education for all of our children, irrespective of a child's stream of religious affiliation or family's financial resources. If the existing Federations are unable or unwilling to adopt and implement this policy, then it is incumbent on each Jewish community to start independent fundraising initiatives that focus entirely on Jewish day school education.

We are the guardians of our children's Jewish identity and the custodians of the Jewish future. We are failing miserably in both areas. Massive funding of Jewish education is the remedy required to strengthen and heal our American Jewish community. Everything else is a placebo.

George D. Hanus is chairman of the Superfund for Jewish Education and Continuity, the Jewish Broadcasting Network and the World Jewish Digest.

It's the Irreconcilable Differences, Stupid

Hillel Halkin in the New York Sun makes the case that the wishful thinking and self-delusion of Rice, the US State Department, and other peaceniks will not change the basic facts on the ground. [Emphasis mine]:

The once much-vaunted Annapolis conference has been reduced, a few days before its convening, to the dimensions of a birthday party for an unpopular child at school.

Everyone now agrees that the parents were foolish to think they could improve their child's social standing by staging an event in its honor with lots of food, fun, games, and a special magic show, but the invitations have already gone out and it's too late to call the party off.

All that can be hoped for now is that enough children will turn up to prevent a fiasco and that the party will be gotten through quickly without fights, broken dishes, or other embarrassments.

The day after Annapolis there will be a post-mortem. It will not tell us anything that a pre-mortem could not have told us just as well, which is that this Annapolis represented the kind of mistaken thinking that has characterized every American or international attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the 1991 Madrid Conference: Namely, the belief that there is something in the world of diplomacy called "process" that has an intrinsically positive momentum of its own capable of overcoming deep disagreements on substance between two sides to a dispute.

Just get these two sides to sit down and start talking, the reasoning goes, and little by little they will find points of agreement that will increase trust between them and lead to an overall settlement.

This is of course nonsense. There is nothing intrinsically positive about any diplomatic process. Such processes work when potential points of agreement already exist and can be focused on. When they don't exist, all the processes in the world can't conjure them up. On the contrary, they simply create frustration, disappointment, and rancor.

And in the case of Israel and the Palestinians, such points of agreement do not exist. This is not, as international diplomacy and public opinion go on wishfully thinking, because the two sides are behaving like stubborn children who need to have some common sense cajoled or spanked into them rather than like rational adults.

It is because each side has perfectly rational interests and ambitions that are not compatible with the rational interests and ambitions of the other side. The only way to achieve an agreement between them, paradoxically, would be for one of them to start behaving irrationally.

What are Israel's interests and ambitions? They are to emerge from the conflict as a state that is military secure; that has a safe Jewish majority that will be maintainable in the future; and that is not asked to uproot more settlers from their homes than can be politically or economically managed.

Military security means expanding the 1967 borders in key sectors and ensuring that any Palestinian state will be demilitarized. A safe Jewish majority means that no Palestinian refugee families will be readmitted to Israel. A manageable settler policy means that Israel will retain the large "settlement blocs" near and around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

And what are the Palestinians' interests and ambitions? They are to create a state for themselves that, however tiny and unsatisfactory, will in its initial stage be as large and territorially contiguous as possible; that will have half of Jerusalem as its capital; and that can dream of eventually regaining more or all of historic Palestine by pressing irredentist claims as the Arab population of Israel grows and destabilizes Israel's demographic status quo. A maximally large and territorially contiguous state means near total Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders. A capital in Jerusalem means Israel's yielding much of that city. An irredentist dream means standing firm on the refugee's "right of return" while refusing to accept Israel's definition of itself as a Jewish state – a definition, among other things, that includes Israel's right to have an immigration policy that favor Jews over non-Jews.

These interests and ambitions are not mutually compatible. No amount of diplomatic "process" will make them so. Nor is it the case, as the conventional wisdom has it, that the problem in Palestinian-Israeli relations is that both peoples currently have weak governments that makes it impossible for them to compromise. Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon ran stronger governments and did not make peace either. The strength or weakness of a people's government has nothing to do with its strategic interests.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict may not be exactly a zero-sum game, but neither is it a potentially win-win situation. If one side wins by achieving its goals, the other side will have lost. If neither side achieves its goals, both will have lost. At this point, either's capacity to compromise is extremely limited.

Like many conflicts in history, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not come to an end by means of a negotiated settlement. A viable Jewish state and a viable Palestinian state west of the Jordan River are not both possible.

The conflict will come to an end because the case for a viable Jewish state is the stronger of the two, the Jewish people having no other country and the Palestinians having Jordan, which will sooner or later re-unite with the 90% of the West Bank that Israel will withdraw from. How and when this will happen is impossible to predict. That it will happen is a near certainty. Annapolis will be quickly forgotten, even quicker than the Madrid Conference was. The dire prophecies of what will happen if it fails ("A catastrophe!" Israel's president Shimon Peres, the chief engineer of the catastrophic Oslo Agreement, has predicted) will not come true.

The Palestinian people is not in the mood for a new intifada and Hamas is not on the verge of taking over the West Bank. The broken dishes, if there are any, will be cleaned up and the real processes in the Middle East, which are not the diplomatic ones, will continue to take place.

QOTD: Henry Kissinger

Bret Stevens in the WSJ:

Henry Kissinger once observed that "when enough prestige has been invested in a policy it is easier to see it fail than abandon it."

QOTD: Funding Alternative Energy

From a WSJ editorial, Global Warming, Inc.:

The Manhattan Institute's Peter Huber, a former engineering professor at MIT, exaggerates only slightly when he says that "Basically, 'alternative' [energy] means stuff that nobody actually uses."

Three Golden Threads of Western Civilization

Bruce S. Thornton in his article Golden Threads shows what Ibn Warraq offers as the keys to Western advancement and freedom.

[In his book, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, Ibn Warraq identifies] what he calls the "three golden threads" woven through Western culture since the time of the Greeks: rationalism, universalism, and self-criticism. As Warraq argues, Western intellectual curiosity has driven an interest in other cultures and peoples and created a magnificent edifice of scholarship formalizing that interest. The Western notion of a universal human nature reinforced this intellectual openness to other cultures. And self-criticism has been the engine of the West’s improvement, leading to the rejection of traditional practices that were unjust or inefficient, as Warraq shows with his discussion of the British Empire’s war on slavery. In fact, the West’s most trenchant critics, [Edward] Said included, have always been Westerners.

It is the absence of these golden threads, Warraq believes, not Western crimes abetted by "Orientalism," that accounts for the backwardness and stagnation of the Muslim Middle East—a region that with few exceptions lacks interest in other peoples, adheres unthinkingly to fossilized traditions, and is unable to look critically at its failures. These characteristics have fostered a paranoid cult of victimhood that blames the West for the failures of Middle Eastern regimes...

Warraq, however, is honest enough to accept that his three golden threads have a tendency to degenerate into dangerous weaknesses. Rationalism becomes scientism, universalism becomes a flabby tolerance that disguises a lack of conviction, and self-criticism becomes an irrational self-hatred. Add multiculturalism’s sentimental adulation of a non-Western "Other," superior to the money-grubbing Westerner, and the self-loathing West has essentially validated the jihadists’ reasons for wanting to destroy it. Yet despite these developments, the great ideas of the West—rationalism, self-criticism, the disinterested search for truth, the separation of church and state, freedom of conscience and thought, human rights, and liberal democracy—remain the best means for all people, no matter what race or creed, to reach their full potential and live in freedom.