by earl raab
“San Francisco has the most backward Jewish community in the country,” an editor at Commentary said in 1950. The PBS three-part series “The Jewish Americans,” which recently concluded, reminded me of the surprising way that editor turned out to be wrong.
As the series showed, America has been a laboratory for what happens to Jews in a free society — the good and the bad. The Bay Area has been a laboratory inside that laboratory. The experience here has often been out of synch with the national one, but for that reason, it has often foretold both the promising and scary “what’s next” in American Jewish life.
Take the matter of anti-Semitism. In early America, the first wave of Jewish immigration faced enough hostility, but the big bang of such hatred came with the turn-of-the-century arrival of millions of Eastern European Jews, who, in keeping with hallowed European tradition, became the favored scapegoats of the nation as the economy alternately boomed and busted. Mass moments of bigotry sprang up, the second Ku Klux Klan flourished outside the South, and brute prejudice flooded the country— but not San Francisco.
San Francisco was not free from anti-Semitism; well before the beginning of the 20th century, Jews were integrated in this city in a manner that, according to the PBS series, did not happen to American Jews until the 1950s. Long before that time, San Francisco had elected and appointed Jews to many political posts, including the mayoralty, and to the presidencies of many prestigious civic organizations, such as the Chamber of Commerce and the Community Chest.
For years, in this city in which Jews amounted to less than 10 percent of the population, the appointed Police Commission and the Board of Education both consisted of an equal number of Catholics, Protestants and Jews (although they always added a labor person to the Board of Education). The curve of Jewish integration was way ahead of the national curve. The apparent reasons had to do with the starkly frontier nature of the city and of its population.
But the main point of the TV series was that as anti-Semitism dwindled in the nation after World War II, and integration increased, so did Jewish identity. More Jews had to become “Jews-by-choice.” Indeed, the strength of Jewish identity diminished. In the late 1950s, the lead story in one national magazine was titled “The Disappearing Jew.” The rising intermarriage rate was cited as evidence.
The Bay Area Jewish community was ahead of the national curve on that score as well. Its intermarriage rate was higher, its facilities for Jewish education poorer. However, the editor of Commentary was mainly talking about this area’s lower level of support for the idea of a Jewish state. The American Council for Judaism, America’s organization of Jews against Zionism, was formed in 1943 with 2,400 national members, 1,400 who were from San Francisco. Of course, there were zealous Zionists here as well, but when some of them
picketed the British consulate to protest the blockade against Jews trying to go to Palestine, an influential local Jewish group issued a public apology.
That all changed after the Six-Day War in 1967. The San Francisco Jewish community became at least as supportive of Israel as the national body of Jews, by any measure. Also, when many younger American Jews began to seek a stronger Jewish identity, largely but not exclusively because of Israel, the same kind of Jewish renaissance surged dramatically in this Bay Area. The change is seen in the rise of Jewish education, and in an intermarriage rate — the recent surveys show — that is about the same as in the national body of Jews.
However, while one stream of American Jews, according to “The Jewish Americans,” is moving toward strong Jewish identity, another stream — at least as large — is slipping away from that identity. Both national and Bay Area Jewish communities face that reality.
Furthermore, the San Francisco area still has some “frontier” qualities. It is generally less traditional and more secular than most other areas. According to the PBS series, that is the kind of cultural climate that thins out Jews-by-choice. Nevertheless, this Jewish community and its leadership once surprised a lot of people by not disappearing, against the odds. If that Commentary editor had still been with us, he would have been astonished. Maybe we can astonish again.
Earl Raab is executive director emeritus of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Relations Council.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California