Originally published in Quillette. November 12, 2020.
Excerpts:
When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, many Jews in the Russian Empire hoped for a French victory. Napoleon had eliminated barriers to Jewish integration and advancement in France; the Russian regime and its policies, by contrast, were thoroughly infused with anti-Jewish discrimination and hostility.
But one prominent Hasidic leader disagreed with those cheering Bonaparte. Schneur Zalman of Liadi, founding Rebbe of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect, fervently supported Russia’s Tsar Alexander I. Publicly, Schneur Zalman argued that the Tsar served God while Napoleon served only himself. Privately, however, the rabbi had another reason. Writing to a friend, he explained that if Napoleon were victorious, conditions would greatly improve for the Jews and this would weaken their commitment to God, whereas if the Tsar prevailed, Jews would suffer but remain religiously committed as a result. Closing his letter, he quoted Psalm 119: “‘Princes have persecuted me without cause; But my heart stands in awe of Your words.’ And for God’s sake: Burn this letter.”
…Schneur Zalman’s focus was piety, not identity, yet in a way he seems to have known a truth that research later confirmed, and that all sides of today’s culture wars would be wise to remember: when you attack an identity, you make it stronger.
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Fighting identities is the true meaning of the culture wars. What’s odd is that so little effort goes into doing the job well.
It’s not that we don’t care about the question of how. Twitter discourse loves arguments between an explicit or implicit “cancel culture” strategy — shouting down the target identity or shaming it out of existence — and a high-minded civil persuasion strategy, in which we speak to people calmly and directly about why some of their commitments and identities are harmful.
The problem with these arguments is that when it comes to identity, both approaches will backfire. While a small number of people may be very occasionally cowed into submission by hostility, or persuaded by rational argument, most people will react to identity threat — whether hostile or civil — by defensively reinforcing the salient identity.
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So if hostility and persuasion both fail, what succeeds? What does uproot an identity?
I don’t have a full answer, but I do have a partial one. I work in the Jewish nonprofit sector, and my field’s central problem can be a template for part of America’s solution.
For the past few generations, American Jewish institutions have been confronting a severe weakening of Jewish knowledge, practice, and identity. Napoleon lost Russia, but Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi’s “nightmare” of freedom, integration, prosperity, secularization, and a resulting weakness of Jewish commitment has come true here. The memory of the Holocaust, threats to Israel, and occasional flare-ups of domestic antisemitism—small doses of identity threat—keep American Jews defiantly proud of being Jewish, but for many of them Jewish identity is secondary and ambiguous, a vague ethnic pride that makes no demands of them. They overwhelmingly embrace the Jewish label, but are often either ignorant or dismissive of much of the particular substance that the label used to denote.
That isn’t because American Jews have become radically liberated individuals, each going her own unpredictable way; it’s because American Jews are, for the most part, utterly normal Americans. Whenever mainstream American values and customs conflict with traditional Jewish values and customs, a majority of American Jews either don’t realize the conflict, support movements explicitly reforming Jewish norms to conform with mass culture, or simply ignore the countercultural parts of Jewish tradition. Jewish identity still lives in America, but it is being tamed and brought to heel by the American identity.
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Jewish identity is positive, but the example of its struggles is nonetheless relevant to negative identities that we may want to erase. The main lesson is this: even if you can’t kill an identity directly or immediately, you can weaken it over time by overshadowing it out with a more popular and enticing rival identity…
Seth Chalmer 