by Zev Chafets
When we arrived at the Hebrew school I found about forty people eating bagels and sipping coffee around long tables. Most of them were men in their forties, fifties, and early sixties. They wore conservative business suits and serious expressions. There was only one woman, Jane Sherman, the daughter of multimillionaire philanthropist Max Fisher; and only one of the men wore a yarmulke. In Detroit and other cities around the country, federation leadership is mostly in the hands of Reform and Conservative Jewish men with a lot of money.
“How rich do you have to be to join this club?” I asked Joe, and he winced at my crassness.
“Put it this way,” he said. “There are three W’s—work, wisdom, and wealth. To be involved in the campaign, you need two of them.” A man sitting nearby overheard the answer and laughed. “Right, two W’s are enough—provided one of them is wealth.”
The cochairman of the campaign, a supermarket mogul, called the meeting to order. The first item on his agenda was a report on a recent UJA junket to Israel. He called on the group’s leader. “We had thirty-nine people on the mission,” the leader said, “and it was a fantastic experience. The total pledges came to, ah, approximately two hundred thousand dollars.”
The room erupted in applause. “Tremendous,” said the cochairman, “that’s just wonderful.” The leader sat down beaming, but the cynic sitting nearby snorted. “Two hundred thousand from forty people? Chicken feed.”
There was a little more old business, and then the chairman gaveled the room to attention and began to discuss the upcoming precampaign. The federation’s computers list approximately ninety percent of the city’s Jews, and there is a special file for eight hundred or so who have given $5,000 or more in the past.
The eight hundred are the primary targets of the precampaign. The chairman called their names out from index cards and people raised their hands, claiming them like bidders at an auction. The idea is to match solicitors with friends or business associates. This makes for a more personal approach; it also makes it harder for solicitees to bluff their way out of contributing. In addition, campaign volunteers pool information about the financial condition of potential donors. In a close-knit community like Detroit, it’s not too hard to come up with this sort of intelligence.
The next order of business was a report on the series of open-house meetings scheduled for the late fall. The first—and by far the most prestigious—is held by tradition at the home of Max Fisher, the godfather of the Detroit Jewish community. To have a successful campaign you need a trickle-down effect, with the richest people providing a yardstick for the rest of the community. In Detroit, the big givers give big; a ticket to the Fisher reception would be a minimum pledge of $100,000, and about thirty people would pay the price of admission.
Joe Cohen’s notions of good citizenship aside, there are a number of reasons people give large sums of money to the campaign—egotism, social climbing, and self-interested public relations are mixed with altruism and a sense of community responsibility. But the motives are of no concern to the federation. People are expected to do the right thing. Those who do are given the benefit of the doubt; those who don’t are punished.
Sanctions take varying forms. Some are social—you cannot, for example, join a Jewish country club in Detroit without making a respectable contribution to the campaign. And for those who don’t care about golf, sterner measures are available.
That morning a man mentioned the name of a large firm whose principal partners—Jews—had refused to give to the campaign. There were angry murmurs. “Does anyone here do business with them?” someone demanded, and one of the others nodded. “I’d like to discuss this with you after the meeting,” he said grimly. It was not difficult to imagine what that conversation would be like. There are, after all, plenty of other firms in Detroit, not all of them Jewish by any means, that know how to do the right thing for the campaign and the community.
As the meeting progressed, I noticed a small group of young lawyers and businessmen who were sitting together. In their late thirties or early forties, they were easily identifiable as Young Leaders, an elite that has sprung up in every American city with an active federation.
The Young Leaders are a conscious creation of the United Jewish Appeal. The question “Who will carry on?” is a constant refrain in Jewish history; but about a decade ago, the UJA realized that for this generation the question has a special acuity. The baby boomers have no personal memories of Eastern Europe, the Holocaust, or the founding of Israel. They are not assimilating into American life—they are already assimilated. Unlike their grandparents, membership in the Jewish community is neither necessary nor automatic; they have other options. Raised on the words “cool” and “relevance,” many of them find the bourgeois world of federated Jewry stodgy, parochial, and somewhat embarrassing.
The old-line community leadership, composed mostly of businessmen, looked at the problem in entrepreneurial terms—how to sell Jewish involvement to a new generation of picky consumers. As David Hermelin, a leader of the federation in Detroit, told me, they realized that they would have to make the community “the in place to be.” It is hard to sell B’nai B’rith softball leagues and sisterhood kaffeeklatsches to kids who grew up in the sixties; but Israel is something real and concrete and it has become the primary marketing tool for selling Jewish community involvement to the yuppies.
In the 1970s, the UJA began to run tours and “missions” to Israel designed especially for the young Americans. They attracted—and were meant to attract—mostly nonreligious professionals and businesspeople with some money and the prospect of earning or inheriting a great deal more.
The UJA Young Leader missions are aimed more at consciousness raising than fundraising. There is a whole generation of Americans who feel Jewish (or can be made to feel Jewish) but don’t know why. A UJA mission—which often begins with a visit to Polish concentration camps and culminates in Israel, at Masada and Jerusalem—is a crash course, Judaism 101. By offering it, the UJA—nominally a fundraising organization—has become one of the dominant groups in American Jewish life, primarily through its ability to play on the strings of Jewish emotion. A typical mission begins with a visit to Poland and the concentration camps and then proceeds to Israel and the symbols of survival and sovereignty—Masada, an Israeli army camp, a kibbutz, Soviet immigrants, and the like. Usually the trip culminates in a ceremony at the Western Wall or some other symbolic site.
Over the years, UJA groups have become an easy target for Israeli satirists. No one is more aware than Israelis—who live with the crushing burdens of Jewish state building—of the inherent fraud of the UJA slogan—“We are one.” It is easy to resent the wealthy, secure young Americans who want to share in the drama and romance of the contemporary Jewish struggle without paying a price higher than a tax-exempt donation.
And yet, it is hard to deny these missions are an effective way—perhaps the only effective way—of attracting yuppies to the Jewish community. Israel, a place where Jewishness is relevant and cool, a country that can provide a powerful emotional experience, has become the recruiting ground for the next generation of community leaders.
Not incidentally, this form of training and selection ensures that the leaders of federated Jewry will continue to be Israel-oriented. Many of them try to re-ethnicize themselves along Israeli lines—using little Hebrew phrases, hanging Israeli paintings in their living rooms, and serving humos and felafel at their cocktail parties. They take a keen interest in Israeli politics, send their children to Hebrew day schools, and generally visit Israel once a year or more.
These Young Leaders are the fruit of fifteen years of patient labor. They are made Jews: sincere, committed, but not quite authentic, even to themselves. Their presence at the campaign meeting that morning in Detroit was a message to the other Jewish yuppies of the city: It’s hip to be Jewish. You can have it all: Jamaica and Jerusalem, Harvard and Hebrew school, Porsches and Passover. Israel as the Jewish state, and suburb
ia as the Jewish state of the art.
Federated Judaism is strongest in the American hinterland. New York and Los Angeles—the two biggest Jewish concentrations—have notoriously weak organized communities. Middle-sized cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland are far more cohesive. But the highest levels of affiliation and Jewish activity are often found in places where Jews feel most isolated—places like Waco, Texas.
“Small towns make good Jews,” said a friend who drove me down to Waco from Austin on a rainy Saturday morning in January. My friend was originally from Massachusetts, and he has a keen eye for the various peculiarities of Texas Judaism.
“Jews down here tend to assume the characteristics of the general population,” he said. “Take Dallas, for example. The worst thing that can happen to a father in North Dallas is to have an ugly daughter. It’s the world’s plastic surgery capital. And a certain amount of that rubs off on the Jews who live there, too. Or Laredo, for example, down near the Mexican border. I went there once to address a Hadassah meeting, and probably a quarter of the women were Mexican converts. When I went in the temple I didn’t know whether to put on a yarmulke or a sombrero.”
Waco, according to my companion, is one of the best communities in the state—well organized, generous, and active. “Young Judea was founded there, of all places, and it still produces a lot of national Jewish leader types,” he said. One of them, Dr. Stanley Hersh, was scheduled to meet us out in Downsville (population 130) at the farm of Justin “J.R.” Rosenfeld.
Rosenfeld and Hersh are a sort of Texas-Jewish odd couple. When we arrived at his spacious brick farmhouse, J.R., a powerfully built man in his late sixties, had just come in from chores. He was dressed in a flannel shirt and suspenders, faded jeans, and worn, hand-tooled Justin cowboy boots.
Hersh, a transplanted Cleveland ophthalmologist in his late forties, was a city slicker by comparison. Dressed in a cashmere sweater, worsted slacks, and polished pennyloafers, he looked like the kind of man somebody like Rosenfeld might run off his property with a twelve-gauge shotgun.
Justin Rosenfeld was born and raised in Germany, where he was a teenage soccer star before Hitler forced him to flee in the late 1930s. Like many other German refugees, his first stop was Washington Heights. But Rosenfeld wanted to be a farmer, and there were no cows in New York City. He worked his way west instead, and wound up in Waco, where he was welcomed by the Jewish community. At the time, there were almost two thousand Jews in town; today, the number is closer to six hundred.
It took me a minute to realize that Rosenfeld does not have a speech impediment; he has two accents. One is a thick Texas drawl, the other a Germanic hiss, and they are laid one on top of the other, like simultaneous renditions of the same song by Waylon Jennings and Henry Kissinger.
“Ah vas vatchin’ TV the othah day,” he told me, “an’ ah saw dem ole boys mit the fur hats ovah in Jerusalem, raisin’ a ruckus an’ all jus’ becauss some folks vas a-drivin’ on Shabbes.” The accent is a fair representation of Rosenfeld’s life, divided into two unequal parts by his flight from the Nazis.
J.R. follows the news from Israel, but he has a limited familiarity with Jewish politics. He admitted being baffled by a recent midnight phone call from New York, in which someone solicited his vote for the Labor Party slate in the upcoming Zionist Congress elections. “Ah don’t know nothin’ about no Zionist elections,” he told the caller, and then he hung up.
Dr. Hersh laughed fondly at the story. He is an insider, one of the leaders of the Waco Federation and a national UJA activist. He began to explain the complicated web that links Downsville, Texas, to the World Zionist Congress, but Rosenfeld waved his hands in mock protest.
“Now, ahm very Jewish in mah vay,” he said, “but ah just don’t care nothin’ about no organizations. I’ve been to Israel and I giff a little to hep out; but the truth is, I’d rather travel around the U.S. with another dairy farmer who’s a gentile. I can talk to Jews for about a day or two about Israel and whatnot, and then I’m plumb out of conversation. But if I’m with another farmer, I don’t never run out of things to talk about.”
Rosenfeld knows a great deal more about the Dairy Farmers Association than about the Jewish Agency, the Council of Jewish Federations, or any of the other national organizations that his friend Stanley Hersh belongs to. “But ahm right proud to be a Jew,” he said, “and if something comes up at a dairyman’s meeting, vell, I let them know vere I stand right quick.”
“Let me tell you something about Justin Rosenfeld,” said Hersh. “He’s the kind of man who’s there when you need him. He may live way out here and spend his days with cows, but he’s a member of the community. You want to know my definition of a Jew in a small town? Somebody who affiliates, who gives money to support Jewish causes and fellow Jews.”
Hersh is a very smart, articulate man who takes a hard line on Jewish slackers. “A few years ago I was president of the Conservative synagogue here in town, and one day I got a call from someone I had never heard of, asking if he could bury his father in our cemetery. It turned out that he and his family had been in town for years, but they had never bothered to make contact with the community or to join any kind of Jewish institution. I said, ‘Sure we’ll bury him, it’ll cost four thousand dollars.’ The son almost blew up. ‘Four thousand dollars for a funeral is outrageous,’ he said. I told him, ‘It’s one thousand for the funeral and three thousand for the back dues you owe us for keeping up the cemetery all these years.’ You know what? He paid the money.”
Hersh, a Jewish political sophisticate, is well aware of the controversy surrounding Reform and Conservative religious legitimacy in Israel. But in Waco, criteria for affiliation are somewhat less rigid. When I asked him if the Jewish community ever checked into anyone’s Jewish credentials, he seemed surprised by the question.
“Actually, I don’t think anyone has ever been checked. If somebody says he’s Jewish, that’s good enough,” he said.
And what, I wondered, would get somebody kicked out of the community? Again, Hersh seemed puzzled. “Kicked out? Frankly, I can’t think of anything,” he said.
“What if someone got up in shul and said he believed that Jesus Christ was the Messiah?” I asked.
“Well, in that case, I’d send him over to the Reform temple,” he said, laughing.
As a community leader, Stanley Hersh is primarily concerned with consensus and unity. When he saw me jotting down his joke about the temple, he quickly pointed out that he had been kidding.
“As Jews, we should avoid the issues that divide us, and concentrate on the ones that unite us, especially in a small town like Waco,” he said. “And Israel is the great unifier, the cause that every Jew can rally around. I happen to be a Republican, but I support liberal Democrats who are bad for my interests as a physician if they are good for Israel.”
For Hersh, who grew up in Cleveland in the 1950s, Israel is more than a tool for achieving Jewish solidarity. “It made us acceptable in this country as Jews,” he said. “The Six-Day War was the turning point, wouldn’t you say, Justin?”
Rosenfeld nodded emphatically. “Yup, Israel’s wars haff changed mah image here in Waco, no doubt about that.”
The federated Jews of Waco, like federated Jews everywhere, express support for Israel primarily through fundraising. In 1985, the community collected $650,000, not including a special appeal for Ethiopian Jewry. “On that one, we got everybody together at the synagogue and said, ‘You can save a human life for $6,000. We raised $70,000 in one night,” Hersh said proudly.
“Yeah, this Hersh is tough,” said Rosenfeld with an affectionate grin. “Every year he comes by for the UJA and if you giff him five dollahs, he asks you for fifteen. Then, ah come around for a contribution for the fire brigade dance, and the Jews in Waco make a beeline in the other direction.” It was an old joke between friends. The Jews of Waco are civic-spirited, and contribute to any number of local causes, including the Downsville volunteer fire briga
de dance. And J.R. Rosenfeld, despite his lack of interest in New York Jewish organizations and the intricacies of national Jewish politics, gives a great deal more than fifteen dollars to the community each year.
We sat around the massive wood table in Rosenfeld’s kitchen, sipping coffee and eating huge slabs of pumpkin pie. Although both Hersh and Rosenfeld are transplanted Texans, they have a native love of anecdote, and they swapped tall tales about life in Waco.
“Justin, you remember that convert we had, the one who had ten kids?” asked Hersh, and Rosenfeld grinned, anticipating a well-known story. Hersh turned to me. “See, there was this guy, a real hillbilly, he converted to Judaism. He was sort of strange and he never had a job, but he had ten kids and he was a Jew. So we helped him out, gave him food packages and money to tide him over. And then, one day he got himself a job as a truck driver. And do you know the first thing he did after he got his paycheck? He quit the synagogue and joined the Reform temple.” Both men laughed and I joined in, remembering Vernon and Mary Lou, the converts of my boyhood.
“Yeah, ah remember that feller,” said Rosenfeld. “Wonder whatever happened to him?”
Hersh shrugged. The man eventually resigned from the temple and is no longer a member of the Jewish community. And for Dr. Stanley Hersh—a federation man in a small town—a Jew without a paid-up membership is no more real than a tree falling in an empty forest.
The day after my visit to Downsville I flew out of Dallas to Las Vegas in the company of two hundred more-than-usually-optimistic Texans. The sky, rainy all weekend, was suddenly blue, Bloody Marys flowed; and the hopeful, many of whom seemed to know each other, hooted and hollered across the aisles in a camaraderie of shared expectation and greed. Some would return in an even better mood; most would lose a little and enjoy the trip; and an unlucky few would tap out and come home to Texas by Greyhound.