92NY and the Gettysburg Address

Last week, we published a Jewish Telegraphic Agency report about a speech that the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens had given at the ridiculously rebranded 92NY (formerly formally known as the 92nd Street YM-YWHA). In that annual talk, which the Y grandiosely calls the “State of World Jewry,” Mr. Stephens said that the fight against antisemitism is doomed, and instead we should work to teach young Jews to be proud and actively joyful about being Jewish. “Victimization cannot be at the heart of our identity,” he said.

Because part of Mr. Stephens’ talk was a direct if polite attack on the ADL, I jumped on the chance to ask Abe Foxman, who lives in Bergen County and is the retired longtime head of the ADL, what he thinks should be done about antisemitism.

To be clear, Mr. Foxman refuses to be drawn into talking about the ADL; he respects it far too much to want to have anything to do with any situation affecting it. But he did talk about Mr. Stephens’ views about antisemitism.

“Bret is a brilliant pundit and a very important voice in the Jewish community, but here’s he’s only about 90 percent right, and 10 percent wrong,” Abe told me. “He’s right that we neglected Jewish education and identity and pride for 75 years. We concentrated on opening up America to Jews, so Jews could be accepted and assimilated, but we neglected to install Jewish identity in them.

“But Jewish pride is not enough to secure a Jewish future.”

American Jewish institutions cannot teach many Jew-haters not to hate Jews, but they can teach people who don’t know very much who we are, he said. “It isn’t the Jewish community’s job to change bigots’ minds. It is our job to give the non-Jewish non-haters the knowledge to stand up against the bigots, to be not bystanders but upstanders.

He doesn’t know why antisemitism exists — it does seem to morph to fit the culture in which it’s lodging, Abe said. He quoted Mark Twain, who said, when he returned from a trip to Europe, that he thought that the reason for antisemitism isn’t theological or political. It’s simpler than that. It’s jealousy. “It’s the envy of Jewish success. Despite persecutions, Jews succeed,” Abe said. “And I have come to believe that he’s right.

We have to come up with a strategy, and that strategy must involve unity, he said. The Jewish community is divided; a divided community cannot stand under pressure.

That brings us to this weekend, when we celebrate Presidents Day. This is a fraught time to preach about the country’s underlying values, because people on either side of an every-growing divide don’t recognize that they possibly could share any.

That makes it even sadder that this year, for the first time in many years, Rabbi Joseph Prouser will not deliver the Gettysburg Address, which he translated into Hebrew and set to haftarah trope. It’s powerful — the short, sharp syllables gallop, and the trope gives it even more urgency. It offers an opportunity to think about how Jewish values and American values are intertwined; it is realistic in acknowledging both the the hatred that ended President Lincoln’s life and the hope — entangled with death, because he delivered the speech in a grave-strewn battlefield — that led him to write those urgent words.

There’s extra pathos in thinking about why Rabbi Prouser isn’t delivering the address, particularly this year, when clearly we need it so badly. The shul he led, Temple Emanuel of North Jersey, closed at the end of last year. The demographics changed.

But the hope — the hope that Abe Foxman has hung on to for so many decades now, the hope that Joe Prouser felt when he translated the Gettysburg Address, for that matter, the hope that Abraham Lincoln felt when he wrote it — survives. The hope that “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

—JP

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