Articles

We are living in an age of multiple “Judaisms”. These diverse expressions of Jewish identity are changing the current marketplace. Judaism continues to metastasis in response to outside triggers, involving multiple types of social and cultural stimuli. Key events have contributed to creating these alternative expressions. In an age of personal choice, it can also be seen as a very personal and individualized effort in defining one’s connections and ties to Jewish tradition and culture.

In a COVID environment, we are seeing a number of emerging and transformative trends. While these are generic in scope, each has specific implications for the Jewish community. Five sectors are in play: the religious environment, the economy demographic considerations, socio-cultural forces, and science and health measures. Of the many factors undergoing rapid change, we selected to examine ten specific elements in this report:

No doubt, a significant impetus for these changes can be directly linked to the rise of both global and domestic terrorism, with Jews often being identified as targets, the 2008 economic crisis and its impact on all sectors of society and the economic fallout of the 2020 pandemic, each of these factors has also contributed to this changing equation of church-state relationships. Responding to each of these situations, the federal government has accelerated its financial connections with the religious sector.

This coming week the 2021 USC Casden Institute’s Annual will be released. This volume examines the impact of Donald Trump’s Presidency on American Jewry and Israel. I was privileged to have been invited to serve as the editor for this publication.

Jews are a communal people, with a collective set of rituals and traditions. Ours has been a culture of assembly, as symbolized by the centrality of the synagogue and the shared focus around celebrated holidays and festivals as Passover, Yom Kippur and Hanukkah. We gather, we pray with a minyan, we eat, we learn, we celebrate simchas and we mourn, all in a communal way.

American Jews have been deeply engaged with the American story. As such, Jews have been active partners in celebrating the importance of community, especially after the country emerges from crisis. When the COVID-19 pandemic subsides, how will we encourage our people to reconnect with the communal organizations that have pulled us through, and to move, as we pray in Psalm 30, “from mourning to dancing?”

More than any other political measure, campaign giving signifies a particular level of intensity and commitment. The 2017 Pew Study on American Political Giving affirms that more Americans than ever are financially supporting their party’s candidates.

In this analysis, the role of Jewish political giving is examined in some detail. As we would expect, Jewish support for political parties and candidates or specific issues and causes reflects a heightened level of participation.

The United States may be facing its most serious threat to its democratic institutions since the Civil War. The character and content of this nation’s politics is marked by a deep and dangerous political divide. We are living through a fundamentally disruptive moment in our political culture. Not only are we experiencing strikingly different policy options but the cultural artifacts of politics, namely how some of our politicians operate are dramatically challenging the existing norms of our democracy by introducing conspiratorial ideas, delivering hateful messaging, and promoting acts of violence. The politics of hate will sadly but likely impact the 2022 mid-term elections.

Former President Donald Trump in a recent radio interview commented: “You have, between AOC and Omar and these people that hate Israel, they hate it with a passion. They’re controlling Congress, and Israel is not a force in Congress anymore.” The former president again lamented his poor support among American Jews, saying “it’s incredible that I didn’t get the kind of a vote from Jewish people that you would think I would get. Jewish people in this country, many of them, do not like Israel.”

No event in our lifetime has so transformed America and its citizens as 9/11. The orchestrated attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon would fundamentally disrupt this nation’s sense of security and forever change the character and content of our democracy.