One of the elements that Jewish voters took into account during the last
Presidential election were their concerns about what constitutes Jewish interests and so in this issue of the monthly Bulletin, I would like to present
portions of an article written this past month in Commentary Magazine called
"Security and Jewish Interests," by Professor Wertheimer. Professor Wertheimer is Provost and Professor of American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary - Conservative Judaism's Central Institution.

"Six decades after the Holocaust, a new wave of anti-Semitism has swept the
globe, spearheaded by radical Muslims in the Middle East and Europe but taken up with gusto in democratic Western society not only by right-wing nationalists and neo-Nazis but by liberal and left wing 'anti-Zionists.' With frightening regularity, Jews have been assaulted either physically or in venomous words, synagogues and community centers have been bombed or incinerated in places as far-flung as Turkey, Tunisia, Argentina, England, and France, anti-Zionist rallies on American college campuses have deteriorated into anti-Jewish harangues, and Jews and Israelis have been blamed for everything from using the blood of Palestinian children for baking matzah to masterminding the September 11 attacks on the United States. To some limited degree, today's circumstances have also forced a general rethinking of where Jewish interests lie. To put it mildly, such a rethinking is long overdue. For even if anti-Semitism had not exploded on the international scene with such ferocity, unfolding trends within the United States should long ago have compelled the organized Jewish community to reassess its alliances and its political strategies, and toreconsider certain deep-seatedhabits of mind. The Jews had experienced a half-century of population growth thanks to earlier waves of immigration, to their stillsignificant levels of fertility, and to low rates of defection. The early postwar period was a time, moreover, when Jews and Judaism were gaining a status and respectability unprecedented in American history. Symptomatically, the most important study in religious sociology in those years, Will Herberg's Protestant-Catholic-Jew, acknowledged an equal role for Judaism along with Protestantism and Catholicism in the 'triple melting pot' of the great American experiment. Today's religious and ethnic landscape offers a startling contrast. If the numbers of Jews at mid-century greatly exceeded the combined populations of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, that is far from the case today. While the total population of the United States has increased from 160 million to over 280 million in the past 50 years, the absolute number of Jews has, at best, remained static. Even with the arrival of several hundred thousand Holocaust survivors after World War II, and more recently of Jews from the former Soviet Union, Iran, and Israel, low Jewish birthrates and the upward spiraling of intermarriage have resulted in a failure to increase. In proportional terms, the Jewish share of the overall U.S. population has declined from a mid-century high of 3.7 percent to somewhere between 2 and 2.5 percent. There has been only limited discussion within the Jewish community as to how these altered patterns are affecting America's Jews, or as to how Jewish agencies should reposition themselves to forge links with groups that are growing in size and influence. For reasons that are readily apparent, the quandary in which the agencies find themselves in is very deep. Take, for example, today's Hispanics, who make up the largest segment of Christian immigrants. Although politically liberal, Hispanics, in R. Stephen Warner's words, "tend to be morally conservative." How are Jews, who continue to be not only politically liberal but outspoken in their support of liberal social causes like abortion, gay rights, and ending the death penalty, be able to find common ground with their Hispanic neighbors? How, with their bias toward secularism or toward the more rationalistic forms of religious expression, will they forge links to the expanding numbers of Pentecostal Christians, or to adherents of African variants of Christianity, not to mention Santeria, voodoo, and other alien religious practices? How, especially in the light of Islamist anti-Semitism, are Jewish groups to respond to the growing political influence of Muslim populations in places like Michigan? Some observers in COMMENTARY and elsewhere, began to question the steadfastly liberal orientation of the organized Jewish community. So did Orthodox groups. For the most part, however, the major Jewish agencies stayed the course that had been set at mid-century. For the most part, they still do. The world, however, has moved on. Especially during the last few years, shock after shock has been
delivered to yesterday's assumptions about friends and foes. If, for example,
American Jews have historically placed their faith in the civilizing influence of
higher education, sending their children in disproportionate numbers to college and universities in the expectation of finding there a bastion of liberal tolerance, since 2000 these putative oases have erupted in anti-Israel demonstrations that in some cases have crossed the line into open anti-Semitism. To the further consternation of many Jews, the hue and cry against Israel and its supporters has been joined by the established liberal media, as well as by the more specialized journals of the educated classes. In this country, a new low in the
campaign to delegitimize Israel was reached when the New York Review of
Books, the house organ of the highbrow Left, published an article arguing for the
dismantling of the world's only Jewish developments. Thus, at its most recent
convention, the Jewish community-relations organizations and once an unabashedly liberal agency, voted to expand cooperation with evangelical Christians on a wide range of mutual concerns. But others, unable to take yes for an answer, have insisted on maintaining their distance from the Christian Right, supposedly out of distrust of its millenarian motives (some Evangelicals view Israel as a divine instrument in the unfolding of the Second Coming).
Blindsiding its longtime liberal allies in the Jewish community, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA recently instructed its investment managers to eschew the stocks and bonds of corporations doing business in Israel. In its press release, the church linked its divestment program to the successful campaign of the 1970's and 80's to end apartheid in South Africa - thus suggesting that Israel, too, is a racist state. Adding insult to injury, the
Presbyterians also voted to continue funding a messianic church that targets Jews for conversion. Over the past half-century, no more fixed principle has taken root in the Jewish mind than the necessity for an impermeable wall of separation between church and state. In the words of one veteran insider, that wall is essential 'not only to religious freedom but to the creative and distinctive survival of diverse religious groups, such as the Jewish community.' As it happens, quite a few exceptions have been made to the principle of separation over the centuries, and neither the republic nor the Jewish community has been any the worse for them. But this has not stopped Jewish groups in the postwar era from litigating against even the slightest fissure in the wall, fearful that otherwise the entire structure would collapse. By the end of the 20th century, the separationist faith had so suffused the organized community that the head of the National Council of Jewish Women, declaring her opposition to any form of state aid to religious schools, could say without a hint of self-reflection that “We can't put a chink in the wall just because (doing so) will benefit Jewish children.”
Perhaps, ironically, what is now testing the separationist faith of Jewish groups is the terrorist war against America. Institutions around the country, including
religious ones, are investing huge sums to improve security at their buildings by adding barriers, guards, surveillance cameras, and the like. The principal of an all-day Jewish religious school recently estimated that his annual security costs exceeded $1,000 per pupil. The question on the table is: ought religious institutions obtain a share of federal and state funds set aside for homeland security? Most Jewish organizations have supported legislation, now before Congress, that would channel government money directly to contractors
rather than to religious institutions themselves, thus preserving the spirit as well as the letter of the First Amendment. But not all the major groups are
satisfied; among the vocal dissenters are the ADL and the Religious Action Center of the Reform movement, the largest of the Jewish denominations. The
latter group in particular has opposed the bill on the grounds that it indirectly
allows for 'government-funded capital improvement of houses of worship, and we think that is a bad idea.' This is an emblematic instance of the otherworldly
quality that continues to affect the work of those Jewish community-relations
organizations that remain committed to fighting yesterday's wars whatever the
consequences. Synagogues and other Jewish institutions around the globe have already been targeted by terrorists, at a terrible cost in human life. More
attacks are hardly inconceivable. In what sense is the physical safety of real
people-Jews and others who happen to be in the vicinity less important to Jews than an intractable belief in the separationist faith? France separated church
and state nearly a century ago any more than it has shielded young French
Jewish children from Arab hooligans today. How long can American Jewish
organizations continue to place their obsession with an impermeable wall of
separation above the physical security of the Jews for whom they claim to speak? Here again, in microcosm, is the confusion besetting the organized American Jewish community. Before the heady days when Jewish defense meant building a full-blown 'domestic agenda,' Jewish agencies focused, sharply, on the protection of Jewish lives, rights, and property. In the quieter decades of the late 20th century, mandates and ambitions began expanding as Jewish organizations embraced the causes of nonsectarian groups, often with greater fervor than those groups themselves and sometimes to the detriment of palpable Jewish interests. Now, as threats to Jewish security have multiplied, the time for business as usual has long passed, and the time to reconsider is urgently at hand."

I wanted to present this article to you, to the members of the Congregation, because Professor Wertheimer's essay deserves serious consideration. Our
old alliances and our unwavering love for the liberal left and its values, may
no longer serve the needs of the Jewish community. What we may have to
contemplate, is that those previous alliances are inimical to current
Jewish interests.

We had once thought that after the Shoah, Jewish survival would be
assured in the great democracies. Sadly, we have come to realize that
this is not necessarily so. If we are interested in Jewish survival, then it is time to rethink old alliances and beliefs. The old truism must once again be
reconsidered. Nations have no friends, only interests. For the Jewish people, the words of the Torah should never be forgotten "Behold you are a nation that lives alone!"