The New Jew Is Who?

The Yiddish word galut means exile, and for thousands of years it defined the Jewish experience.

Jewish identity has historically been rooted in a sense of otherness, if not outright oppression. In America, at the very moment Jews started moving en masse into the middle class and dominating the intelligentsia, the holocaust reminded them that their survival was a mere accident of geography, that their freedom was and perhaps always would be precarious. As Irving Howe wrote in "World of Our Fathers," his monumental study of Jewish immigrants to the US, "Haunted by the demons of modern history, most of the immigrants and many of their children kept a fear, somewhere in their minds, that anti-Semitism might again become a serious problem in America."

As Jews assimilated into the American middle class, it was negatives that held them together: lingering anxiety about anti-Semitism, speechlessness before the horror of the holocaust, alienation from the gentile mainstream.

Yet if the idea of galut is central to Jewish identity, what happens while the exile ends? For a new generation of Jews, it no longer makes sense to define themselves by the hostility of the goyim. Younger American Jews have largely grown up unscathed by prejudice. No neighborhood, university or profession is closed to them.

"I think anti-Semitism is still an issue to a lot of people, but it was the motivating factor of many Jewish people's identity for the last fifty or a hundred years," says Jennifer Bleyer, founder and editor of the freshly-launched magazine Heeb: The New Jew Review. "It kind of gave them a reason to be. Especially in this country, where Jews have enjoyed an incredible upward class drift over the past fifty years, and have become virtually entirely assimilated into the mainstream upper-middle class and upper-class culture, very little of that paranoia about anti-Semitism is warranted."

In other words, anti-Semitism defined Jews externally. Now that it has receded in America, young Jews are looking around and wondering what it means to be Jewish if being Jewish no longer means being persecuted.

Clearly, it's about more than religion. Jewishness is an amalgam of ethnic, cultural and spiritual identity. After all, there's no such thing as a Christian atheist or a Muslim Buddhist, but you can scorn the idea of god or join a Himalayan monastery and still be Jewish.

So if a Jew can be anything, what is a Jew? That question, with all the historical tensions and progress it contains, is animating what some are calling the new Jewish renaissance. Even as orthodoxy flourishes in America, a new leftist Jewish movement, or a confluence of new movements, is swelling on both coasts. A group of audacious activists are, in the words of one writer, "heating up the core of Judaism."

You can see it in Heeb, which speaks to hip, urban Jews and seems to reinvent Lower East Side Yiddishkeit culture for the hip-hop era, with its Jewfro pictorial and profile of "The Last Yiddish MC." It's in books like Lisa Schiffman's "Generation J", a 1999 memoir of a pork-eating, intermarrying agnostic's search for Jewish identity, and in the anthologies like the recent "Yentl's Revenge" and the forthcoming "Joining the Sisterhood," both about young Jewish feminists.

It's in Jewish groups like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, which fought the racial profiling of Arabs in the wake of 9/11, and in centers like Makor, a new Manhattan community center that features Yoga classes, jazz performances and presentations like "Jews, Muslims and Interfaith Utopia."

The new sensibility is reflected in the boldness of "Mirroring Evil," the hugely controversial exhibit set to open this Spring in Manhattan's Jewish Museum. Instead of predictably focusing on concentration camp victims, "Mirroring Evil" takes a look at the Nazis themselves, using techniques of irony and pastiche that spurn the hushed reverence usually accorded the Holocaust. In mainstream Jewish culture, the Holocaust is regarded as almost metaphysically unique and incomparable. But the artists in Mirroring Evil, like other newer Jewish thinkers, tend to see it as part of a whole century of brutality, one that we're all culpable for.