Seeds Planted Long Ago

The December 31 Jerusalem Post obituary of Professor Elihu Katz, who became the first director of Israel TV in 1967, sent me on a trip down memory lane.

In truth, I only encountered Katz once in my life, as a contributor to the 1964 Commentary symposium “Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals.” But I remembered that his essay had stood out for me: He was the only contributor who expressed an interest in living in Israel, as well as the only contributor who wrote of a day school education and of being shomer Shabbos, at least through high school.

I decided to use his passing as the occasion to reread the symposium, after the passage of nearly two decades since the last time. Most of the contributors went on to distinguished careers in academia, or as writers or public intellectuals. And their essays were almost uniformly well written and intelligent. Ultimately, however, the collection is highly depressing, as it foretells the rapid descent of non-Orthodox American Jewry over the following sixty years. (The collection is dated only by the paucity of women contributors — two out of 31.)

The symposium appeared in the midst of a rapid building boom of suburban Conservative and Reform houses of worship. Yet as Martin Diamond, a professor of religion at Princeton, accurately perceived, that boom represented a revival of affiliation, not of religious faith.