Does Liberal Jewry Have a Future?

The Jewish Culture That Helped Shape Modern America—and May Not Survive It

American Jews are not about to disappear. Orthodox communities are growing. Jewish schools, synagogues, philanthropies, museums, and advocacy organizations remain active. Antisemitism itself, grimly enough, may strengthen Jewish identification among people who had previously regarded their ancestry as incidental.

But a particular kind of Jewish culture may be approaching the end of its historical run.

I mean a Judaism that was philosophical, literary, intellectual, artistic, funny, politically liberal, historically conscious, and only intermittently religious.

It did not necessarily rest on synagogue attendance, ritual observance, theological belief, or comprehensive knowledge of Jewish texts. Nor did it reduce Jewish identity to support for Israel. It was a way of inhabiting modern culture: skeptical but morally serious, cosmopolitan but historically alert, secular but haunted by religion, universalist but marked by the experience of Jewish difference.

These figures had little in common. Lionel Trilling examined liberalism’s blind spots and the unruly parts of human nature that respectable opinion preferred to ignore. Leonard Bernstein combined artistic ambition with a deep confidence that serious music could reach a broad public. Mark Rothko used abstraction to evoke tragedy and transcendence. Philip Guston brought politics, grotesque humor, and the morally compromised self into modern painting.

Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Susan Sontag, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, and later Michael Chabon used Jewish experience to explore modern life, memory, ambition, exile, and the struggle to create a self. Steven Pinker represents a very different tradition: secular, scientific, rationalist, and committed to arguing important ideas before a wide audience.

They did not form a single school. Their religious views, politics, and attitudes toward Zionism varied widely. Some felt strongly attached to Jewish life; others were atheists or sharp critics of Jewish institutions.

What they shared was the belief that Jewishness could shape art, thought, and public life without being confined to religion.

That form of Jewish culture is now in danger. This is not the same as the future of Judaism as a religion, and the distinction matters throughout this essay.

A Historically Unusual Configuration

This culture was not timeless nor did it reflect a Jewish essence. It grew out of a particular historical moment. Large numbers of Jews left the close-knit religious communities of Europe without leaving Jewish identity behind.

They brought into secular life habits of reading, argument, self-questioning, and close attention to language. At the same time, they entered universities, journalism, publishing, music, theater, and the arts just as those institutions were expanding and older barriers to Jewish participation were beginning to fall.

New York made this possible. It was not simply a city with a large Jewish population. It was the center of the publishing, journalistic, theatrical, musical, and artistic worlds in which this culture flourished.

These institutions were concentrated within a few miles of one another. Critics, novelists, composers, editors, and performers could know one another, work together, and argue in the same rooms.

It is telling that so many major Jewish writers and intellectuals attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and wrote for its student magazine, The Magpie, which James Baldwin also edited for a time.

Jewish New Yorkers founded Knopf, Random House, and Simon & Schuster. The Yiddish theater on Second Avenue fed actors, writers, and audiences into Broadway. Partisan Review and Commentary emerged from the same city whose tenements and garment shops had shaped many of their contributors.

This was not simply a collection of talented Jews succeeding wherever they happened to live. It was the result of a unique concentration: the country’s largest Jewish population living alongside the institutions that shaped American cultural life, just as those institutions were growing and their old gatekeepers were losing control.

This intellectual world was never remotely where most New York Jews actually lived their working lives. The overwhelming majority were shopkeepers, salesmen, and professionals — in the garment trade, jewelry, and general retail, all fields that, like the intellectual world above them, were relatively open to Jewish entry precisely because established industrial capital and the great corporations had shut Jews out of more prestigious avenues to wealth.

They gravitated as well toward the newer, less socially fortified sectors of a growing consumer economy. They went into marketing built around their own firms rather than the old-line agencies that would not hire them.

They entered the manufacturing niches that had not yet acquired the prestige, and therefore the exclusionary habits, of heavy industry — toys, cosmetics, costume jewelry, and similar goods where a family firm could still be built from nothing within a generation.

Mattel, Hasbro, Revlon, and Helena Rubinstein’s cosmetics empire all trace back to exactly this pattern. This broader economic base is not a footnote to the story of Trilling and Bernstein. It provided the economic base the smaller cultural elite floated on, supplying the tuition, the patronage, the readership, and — in writers such as Kazin and Bellow, whose fathers and neighbors were exactly these shopkeepers and salesmen — a great deal of the literature’s actual subject matter.

The same mechanism, exclusion from the established corporate and industrial elite, explains both phenomena at once. It pushed one part of a generation toward ideas and one part toward business, often within the same extended family. New York was the one place dense enough to hold both parts close enough together to keep shaping one another.

American liberalism gave them room to do this. It promised that individuals could enter public life without surrendering every inherited attachment — that Jews could become fully American without becoming Christian, could criticize Judaism while remaining recognizable as Jews, could treat Jewish history as a source of insight rather than merely a set of obligations.

Their success changed American culture. It also transformed Jewish identity, which became, for many, less a comprehensive religious way of life than an intellectual and ethical orientation: an alertness to exclusion, a distrust of absolute authority, an attachment to learning, and an uneasy combination of ambition and outsider consciousness.

There was always an element of myth in this self-description. Jewish intellectual life could be insular and status-conscious, and the prominence of a relatively small number of writers and artists should not be confused with the texture of most American Jewish lives.

Still, the culture was real. What is in danger now is not Jewish creativity as such — Orthodox and Israeli culture will keep producing writers and scholars, and secular Americans of Jewish ancestry will keep contributing to national life.

What is endangered is a particular ecology connecting Jewish memory, liberal universalism, artistic ambition, and a specific experience of marginality — one that depended on people close enough to Jewish tradition to be shaped by it but distant enough to argue with it, excluded enough to retain an outsider’s eye but accepted enough to work at the center of American culture.

This culture rarely expressed its Jewishness directly. Bernstein’s educational mission, Rothko’s abstraction, Sontag’s criticism, and Trilling’s account of liberalism cannot be reduced to ethnic content. None of these figures was chiefly “writing about” being Jewish.

Their Jewishness appeared instead in how they approached language, exile, authority, and the uncertain line between belonging and estrangement. It shaped their perspective without prescribing a political program.

Today, institutions increasingly expect identity to be openly declared and tied to a clear political position. That leaves less room for Jewish intellectuals whose identities are ambivalent, internally divided, or resistant to easy political classification.

That loss cannot be measured simply by counting Jewish faculty members. Jews may remain well represented on campus even as the distinctive intellectual position described here becomes increasingly difficult to express.

The Jewish Making of an Intellectual America

For much of the nineteenth century, the United States was culturally lively but not especially intellectual. Jewish immigrants and their descendants helped change that, alongside Black artists and writers, European émigrés, Catholics, women, and gay creators.

These groups shared a belief that ideas mattered, that art could carry moral weight, and that accepted assumptions should be questioned.

Jewish intellectuals helped bring Marx, Freud, and European modernism into American public debate. The New York intellectuals treated literature, politics, and culture as subjects for serious argument.

Trilling wrote about liberalism’s moral limits; Howe connected literature and democratic socialism; Kazin joined criticism to autobiography; Arendt rethought evil and authority; Sontag made interpretation itself a public issue. They disagreed fiercely because they saw intellectual life as an argument among competing ideas, not a search for approved opinions.

Jewish artists and performers also transformed American culture. Bernstein brought serious music to a mass audience. Rothko, Guston, and Helen Frankenthaler helped make New York the center of postwar art. Bellow, Roth, Ozick, and later Chabon made the conflicts of modern identity central to American fiction.

Jewish composers, writers, and performers helped create Broadway and Hollywood, shaping how Americans imagined love, success, and belonging.

Jewish comedy—from the Marx Brothers to Woody Allen and Larry David—brought a sharp, self-mocking, argumentative voice into popular culture.

Jewish social scientists such as Robert Merton and David Riesman brought the same habits to academic life: broad theoretical ambition and a readiness to challenge accepted ideas.

This prominence grew out of a particular history: a tradition that valued literacy and argument, the outsider’s habit of viewing institutions from both within and without, and exclusion from established professions, which pushed talent toward more open fields such as journalism, entertainment, science, and the arts.

American liberalism later opened more doors. For a time, Jews occupied a productive middle position—accepted enough to participate, but still distant enough to remain critical. That balance did not last, and the rest of this essay traces what happened as it disappeared.

What Was Built: The Jewish Presence in American Reform

The culture now at risk was political as well as artistic. American Jews were heavily involved in the labor movement, socialism, civil liberties, Black civil rights, opposition to the Vietnam War, feminism, and gay and lesbian liberation. They did not create these movements, which belonged above all to those directly seeking freedom, but they often served as organizers, lawyers, writers, and theorists in numbers far greater than their share of the population.

Many Jewish immigrants entered the garment trades carrying traditions of socialism, Bundism, and political debate. Unions such as the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union offered not only bargaining power but also a secular language of justice and collective redemption.

Some of that energy flowed into the Communist left during the Depression and the anti-fascist years. Its loyalty to the Soviet Union and its evasions about Stalinism were serious failures, but it also trained organizers and civil-rights lawyers whose influence lasted long after the party declined.

Jewish participation in the civil-rights movement became central to postwar liberal Jewish identity. Rabbis, lawyers, and students joined the struggle, and the murders of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner alongside James Chaney became an enduring symbol of the alliance.

That alliance was never simple. Black Americans led the movement and bore most of its risks, while conflicts over housing, schools, business, and admissions created real tensions. Even so, many Jews came to believe that the security of one minority depended on the security of all.

The same impulse shaped Jewish opposition to the Vietnam War. Some activists drew on memories of persecution and state violence. But for many younger Jews, the antiwar movement also became a path away from organized Jewish life. The New Left they helped build increasingly viewed Israel through the language of colonialism, creating an estrangement that would deepen decades later.

Jewish women also played an outsized role in American feminism. Betty Friedan gave the movement a mass public language, Gloria Steinem became its most visible organizer, Bella Abzug carried it into electoral politics, and Adrienne Rich transformed how poetry addressed sexuality and power.

Many Jewish women occupied an uneasy position: accepted as white, yet still subject to antisemitism and patriarchy. Feminism gave them a language for the tension between family obligation and intellectual ambition.

Feminism also changed Judaism itself. Women became rabbis, challenged inherited laws and liturgy, and reshaped Reform, Reconstructionist, and eventually Conservative Judaism. Jewish activists were similarly prominent in gay and lesbian liberation, often drawing on memories of stigma and exclusion.

Across these movements, the same pattern appeared again and again. The memory of Jewish exclusion became opposition to racism. Statelessness encouraged sympathy for refugees. The prophetic tradition became a language of social justice. This was never universal, but it became one of the most influential moral traditions in modern American life.

That tradition reflected a choice. Jews could have responded to recent persecution by turning inward. Many instead treated their own vulnerability as a reason for solidarity with others.

The current rupture is painful because Jews did not stand outside American liberalism, feminism, and civil rights. They helped build them, often seeing that work as an expression of Jewish ethics. To be recast later as simply white, privileged, or complicit felt like an erasure of that history.

This does not place Jews beyond criticism. Jewish landlords, opposition to busing, and unease with Black political power also belong to the story. The deeper problem is that the political culture Jews helped create now has difficulty recognizing their contradictory position: successful yet vulnerable, included within whiteness yet still targeted by white nationalism.

October 7 exposed how unstable that position had become.

October 7 and the Collapse of Confidence

October 7 did not create the crisis described in this essay. It exposed it.

The first shock was the attack itself: the murder of civilians, the taking of hostages, and the targeting of people as Israelis and as Jews.

The second shock, for many American Jews, was the response from parts of the political world they had helped build. Before Israel began its campaign in Gaza, some activists and institutions were already describing the attack as resistance or judging the victims mainly by their place in a system of power. Their suffering seemed to require political approval before it could be recognized.

For many liberal Jews, this violated a basic principle: sympathy should not depend on whether the victim belongs to a favored group.

The language of privilege became part of the problem. It remains useful for understanding real inequalities. But antisemitism does not usually portray Jews as weak or inferior. It portrays them as secretly powerful, disloyal, and dangerous.

A political language designed mainly to recognize prejudice against the visibly powerless can therefore miss a hatred directed at people imagined to possess too much power. Jewish success could be used as evidence that Jews were not vulnerable, while Jewish claims of vulnerability were dismissed as complaints from the privileged.

Intersectionality was meant to show that people can occupy several conflicting social positions at once. In practice, it often hardened into a fixed ranking of groups. Jews fit that ranking poorly: historically persecuted yet often successful, treated as white yet targeted by white nationalists, and attached to a homeland that many now described as colonial. October 7 revealed how little room this framework had for such complexity.

The pressure came from both right and left. The MAGA right strongly opposed left-wing antisemitism and supported Israel, but its nationalism, hostility to independent institutions, and frequent identification of America with Christianity threaten the pluralistic order in which Jewish life flourished. Support for Israel does not necessarily mean support for Jews as a minority in a religiously neutral republic.

The activist left posed a different challenge. Its critique of liberal neutrality and entrenched power identified real failures. But once privilege became the main lens, and once Israel itself was treated as an illegitimate colonial project, many Jews found that participation required silence about a central attachment or its rejection altogether.

Liberal Jews could oppose Netanyahu, support Palestinian statehood, and still find themselves unwelcome because the demand was no longer criticism of Israeli policy but rejection of Jewish national self-determination.

Universities became the clearest site of this conflict. They are supposed to protect free expression, individual responsibility, and debate across deep disagreement. They also increasingly see themselves as moral actors. Pro-Palestinian protest is protected speech, and universities have sometimes applied rules unfairly against it.

But criticism of Israel can be protected without tolerating intimidation, disruption, or the treatment of Jewish students as representatives of a foreign government. Many campuses struggled to maintain that distinction.

The evidence suggests that this was not a passing reaction. Surveys found that many American Jews changed their public behavior because of fear of antisemitism and reported exclusion from social, professional, or educational settings because they were Jewish. The deepest wound often came not from old enemies but from colleagues, friends, and political allies.

Jewish responses were far from uniform. Some moved toward stronger support for Israel. Others became more critical of the war in Gaza, embraced anti-Zionism, or withdrew from politics. But even Jews who opposed the war could be shaken by the readiness of former allies to treat murdered Israeli civilians as morally unimportant. That injury was not the same as disagreement over Netanyahu or Israeli policy.

The crisis therefore joins four separate concerns.

One is political: liberal constitutionalism is weakening on the right and increasingly dismissed as inadequate on the left.

A second is social: many Jews discovered that sympathy for them was conditional.

A third is demographic: intermarriage and secularization continue to raise questions about Jewish continuity.

A fourth is institutional: there is no convincing communal home for Jews who reject both unquestioning support for Israel and a progressive politics that treats Jewish particularity with suspicion.

These problems cannot all be answered with the same call to support Israel and oppose antisemitism.

Many liberal Jews still hold a clear and coherent position. They oppose antisemitism from both right and left. They support Israel’s existence while criticizing Netanyahu. They are horrified by Palestinian suffering and by the celebration of Hamas’s atrocities. And they remain committed to a society in which people with different loyalties can live under common rules without first passing an ideological test.

That position rejects the shared assumption of both illiberal camps: that society consists of one authentic people and everyone else. Its problem is not confusion. It is that American politics now offers it very little institutional space.

Is This the Fate of Congregationalism, or of Quakerism?

A harder question follows: was secular Jewish liberal culture built to last, or was it a temporary product of immigration, exclusion, upward mobility, and partial assimilation?

American religious history suggests two possible outcomes.

Congregationalism, the religious tradition of colonial New England, helped produce generations of reformers, including the Beecher family. Over time, however, its theology faded into a broader moral seriousness. In 1957, it merged into the United Church of Christ and ceased to exist as a separate denomination. Yet its moral outlook survived. The “New England conscience” lived on in elite universities, public service, and American liberalism long after regular churchgoing declined.

Quakerism followed a different path. Quakers were never numerous, but they played a major role in abolitionism, prison reform, and the peace movement. Their values spread far beyond the small number of practicing Friends.

Unlike Congregationalism, however, Quakerism did not disappear. It remained a small but stable religious community and extended its influence through schools such as Sidwell Friends and Swarthmore. Many students absorbed its ethical style without ever becoming Quakers.

These examples suggest two possibilities for secular Jewish culture: it may dissolve while leaving behind a lasting moral influence, or it may survive through a small set of institutions that continue to transmit its values.

Liberal Jewish culture does not map cleanly onto either precedent. Both Protestant cases declined through peaceful absorption into an already sympathetic American mainstream. Nobody was ever asked to stop being Protestant to be accepted as fully American, whereas the Jewish configuration this essay describes always operated at a certain angle to the Christian majority, which is part of what gave it its critical edge.

The Jewish case carries two further complications with no equivalent in either Protestant story.

The first is demographic: intermarriage and low fertility are thinning the secular, culturally engaged population at the same time Orthodox communities, with far stronger transmission mechanisms, are growing.

The “remnant” scenario available to Quakerism is complicated by an internal split rather than simple shrinkage, since the two halves of American Jewry are coming to hold different and sometimes mutually uncomprehending conceptions of what being Jewish requires.

The second is political: the rupture over Israel is actively fracturing liberal Jewish identity rather than merely diluting it, which has no parallel in the New England cases at all.

In 1964, E. Digby Baltzell warned that any elite which stops recruiting fresh talent curdles into a closed, self-defeating caste. He made that argument partly to insist Jews be absorbed into the establishment his own book diagnosed as endangered. Ironically, it is now liberal Jewry whose vitality is fading.

I have no idea what will happen to liberal Judaism. It could dissolve like Congregationalism, leaving behind an ethical residue, or it could follow Quakerism into a smaller, stable remnant. Or it could simply polarize into a more religious and communally bounded Jewry on one side and a large population of Americans with Jewish ancestry and little remaining cultural content on the other.

What Reconstruction Would Require

Reconstruction, if it happens, cannot consist mainly of better synagogue marketing, Holocaust education, antisemitism awareness, or subsidized trips to Israel. Jewish institutions have already invested heavily in all four, and they have not been enough.

A renewed liberal Jewish culture would have to offer something more substantial: Judaism as a civilization of texts, arguments, art, and competing ideas of the good life. It would ask what biblical narrative, rabbinic debate, Jewish mysticism, and the Jewish encounter with liberalism have to say about law, exile, obligation, difference, transcendence, and redemption. It would address people who may no longer accept the authority of these traditions but could still find them intellectually and morally compelling.

It would also need to recover qualities now in short supply in American life. One is a serious intellectualism that cannot be reduced to a political program or a set of approved opinions. Another is a humor that exposes vanity and hypocrisy without becoming merely crude or cruel. A third is a deep commitment to literature, music, theater, film, and the visual arts—not merely as forms of entertainment, but as central ways of exploring human experience and moral conflict.

Liberal Jewish culture took ancient Jewish longings for revelation, transcendence, and redemption and redirected them toward the world as it is. Those longings found secular expression in art, criticism, psychoanalysis, political reform, and the pursuit of justice. The sacred did not simply disappear; it migrated into culture and politics and the social and natural sciences.

Any reconstruction would therefore require institutions in which religious and secular Jews, Zionists and critics of Zionism, could argue seriously without first passing an ideological test. It would also require cultural ambition. The twentieth-century achievement described in this essay did not arise from communal loyalty alone. It came from Jews taking part in the largest intellectual, artistic, and political arguments of their time.

That is much harder than preserving group identity. It requires institutions willing to judge themselves by the seriousness of the thought, art, humor, and public life they help produce—not simply by attendance, fundraising, or demographic continuity.

I am not confident that such a reconstruction will occur. More observant communities have much stronger ways of transmitting belief and practice. The Jewish establishment has increasingly organized itself around security, antisemitism, and Israel rather than culture and argument. Progressive institutions often treat Jewish particularity with suspicion. And many secular Jews no longer possess the knowledge or communal structures needed to pass on more than a faint sense of ancestry.

The likely outcome is not disappearance but division: a more religious and tightly bounded Jewish community on one side, a large population of Americans with some Jewish ancestry on the other, and the Judaism of Trilling, Bernstein, Rothko, Ozick, Bellow, Sontag, and Howe surviving mainly as an inheritance—read, performed, exhibited, and admired, but no longer sustained as a living culture.

What would be lost is not merely a form of Jewish identity. It would be a way of being in the world: intellectually serious without being doctrinaire, morally ambitious without being humorless, skeptical without becoming cynical, and drawn to art because art could reveal truths that politics alone could not.

What Would Be Lost

I remember a time, not so long ago, when many of my non-Jewish friends admired Jewish culture much as many liberal Jews admired Black culture. They were drawn to Jewish intellectualism, political seriousness, humor, and love of life. My Jewish peers, in turn, admired the dynamism, emotional depth, poignancy, and artistic power of Black culture. Neither admiration was free of romanticism, but both reflected a real sense that these cultures had something distinctive to teach the larger society.

If liberal Jewish culture disappears, the loss will not be limited to Jews. It made America more self-critical and intellectually ambitious. It helped a practical, commercial society take ideas, criticism, artistic experiment, and irony seriously. Jewish humor was part of that achievement: skeptical of pretension, alert to hypocrisy, and able to turn anxiety, marginality, and contradiction into collective recognition.

The same habits that shaped literary criticism, comedy, and psychoanalysis also produced union organizers, civil-rights lawyers, feminist thinkers, and antiwar professors. In each case, inherited arrangements were treated not as fixed facts but as subjects for argument and reform.

That sensibility—argumentative, universalist, historically aware, self-mocking, skeptical but still committed—was one of liberal Jewish culture’s major contributions to American life. It joined seriousness to vitality. It could be morally demanding without becoming solemn, politically engaged without reducing everything to politics, and deeply attached to Jewish history without withdrawing from the wider world.

This is not to say that no other group can make comparable contributions. Black writers and artists, Asian American scientists, new immigrant communities, and intellectual movements not yet visible will continue to reshape American culture. No group has a monopoly on criticism, humor, artistry, or moral seriousness.

But historical cultures are not interchangeable. Secular Jewish liberalism grew out of a particular combination of textual tradition, migration, exclusion, urban life, and partial acceptance. Its humor came from that same position: close enough to American life to know it intimately, but distant enough to see its absurdities.

Other groups, shaped by different histories, will create different sensibilities. They will not simply reproduce this one.

The real question is whether Jewish life can still produce people who are at once particular and universal, secular and historically conscious, skeptical and attached, artistically ambitious, intellectually independent, and able to laugh at themselves as well as at the world around them.

That culture helped build modern America. It also gave many Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, a model of how a minority culture could remain distinct while enriching the common life. It is no longer clear that modern America—or American Jewry itself—can still sustain it.