Since the New Vilna Review is a publication devoted to exploring modern Jewish identity in arts, culture, politics and theology, I thought this week I would take a look back in time at some previous conceptions of Jewish identity, to explore the connection between the Enlightenment and modern Jewish life. For the modern Jew there are numerous sources to draw on when it comes to constructing an identity, and numerous ways to express that identity, both religiously and culturally, but at the heart of the formation of this identity, there is in essence, I would argue, a struggle.

This struggle is not new – we find evidence of it stretching all the way back to the Torah itself – but it is one which I would submit has been felt in a particularly acute way in the last three hundred years or so, at least among Jews in the west. It is the struggle between the desire to embrace modernity with its many ideas and avenues for progress and exploration, which so often seems to be in contrast to the preservation of not just traditional ways of Jewish thought but ways of life as well. There have always been Jews who either singly, or in groups, have sought to make their own way in the world (which is by no means necessarily a bad thing) but it was during the period of the Enlightenment in Europe and the ensuing Emancipation of the Jews, that the road to the modern world truly opened up. It was with this sea change in relations between Jews and their neighbors that the question of how to be Jewish, and at the same time part of a larger world beyond the bounds of one’s own Jewish community, was laid before the Jewish people en masse.

As editors and compilers, scholars Paul Mendes-Flohr and Yehuda Reinharz address this very issue in their book “The Jew In The Modern World, A Documentary History,” in which they write that “Emancipation, or at least the promise of emancipation, stimulated a process of acculturation among the Jews. Emancipation implied the breakdown of the Jews’ millennial social and cultural isolation; indeed, this was often the explicit expectation of the Gentile advocates of Jewish emancipation.” Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz are actually raising two very interesting points here: at first glance they are pointing out the way that emancipation broke down barriers between Jews and non-Jews, but upon closer inspection they are also pointing out an aspect of the emancipation of European Jewry which is itself fraught with potential issues - the influence of Gentile culture on Jewish identity. There is something here that calls our attention to outside expectations, and asks us to think about the way that the non-Jewish supporters (who happen to be Christian Europeans in this case) of Jewish emancipation thought about Jews and how they could or should be integrated into broader society.

While the public discourse has generally moved past open discussion on whether and how Jews fit into modern society (within western democracies anyway) I would argue that within the Jewish community the tensions between Jewish tradition and modern, secular culture, remains part of the conversation about modern Jewish identity, if only as subtext. I think that for many modern Jews (if not most) there is still a question about how we balance tradition with modernity within our own lives, and for many individuals there is still a sense that these two ideas and their accompanying ideals, do not, and perhaps to some extent, cannot, fit together seamlessly. Another lingering question is how those outside of the Jewish community perceive Jews and Judaism, and whether or not this has any bearing on how we see ourselves.

Ultimately, each individual Jew and each Jewish community decides for themselves what elements make up their sense of identity and how they choose to express that identity. Speaking only for myself, I find this struggle has actually become an important part of my own Jewish identity, and it is something I feel most acutely, perhaps, when I am interacting with a text. Whether it is the parsha of the week or an Atlantic Monthly article about the threat an Iranian nuclear weapon could pose to Israel, it is in these moments that I actually feel the most Jewish, and somehow, simultaneously, the most a part of the modern western world. It is in these moments that I realize, I think, that while a tension may exist between an embrace of tradition and the modern world, that these two things are not mutually exclusive, but rather just part of the challenge of being a Jew in 21st century America. It may not be a comfortable place to be at times, but at least for now I can honestly say that there is nowhere else I would rather be.

-Daniel E. Levenson

Publisher and Editor-in-Chief

The New Vilna Review

*This piece orginially appeared on the New Vilna Review website.