October 8, 1999   28 Tishrei 5760

Jewish Intellectualism In Jeopardy
Where have all the thinkers gone?

Adam Katz-Stone and Dana Dratch

Nu, so who's an intellectual?
For Emory University's David Blumenthal, it's the student sage. For local
author Doris Goldstein, it's "a Renaissance woman."
"When I hear the word, I think of someone whose interests are wide
ranging, someone who is thoughtful, someone who expresses his or her
thoughts or opinions in articulate, intelligent ways," says Goldstein. "A
person who's not in some intellectual box."
So where are today's out-of-the-box thinkers? Atlanta's last great
intellectual debate was touched off way back in the 1960s when Emory
University religion professor Thomas J.J. Altizer, holding forth in the
back room of Manuel's Tavern, declared that "God was dead" and wound up in
The New York Times and in the lyrics of an Elton John ballad.
Of course, Jewish intellectuals are alive and well. Jews think and write
books and hold university chairs. Jews shape public policy and play leading
roles in nearly every aspect of American cultural and artistic life. But
what of Jewish intellectualism, the robust movement that in the 1930s and
1940s inspired American liberal thinking, and in the 1960s and 1970s
defined the neo-conservative movement?
Some contend that the movement is alive and well - although in an altered
form. Others say it's dead and gone.


Old world ambiance
"It's here," says Beatrice Gruss, a Buckhead businesswoman, who is part of
a group of 50-something professionals and scholars, who strive to keep the
intellectual ambiance of Old World salons alive in the sunny South. "It's
probably not thriving as it was decades ago in Europe. It's a different
time, a different place. Jews are intellectual. They like to have their
little gray cells worked."
Rabbi Michael Broyde agrees. An associate professor at Emory University
School of Law, Broyde believes Atlanta is in better shape intellectually
than it was 20 years ago. "As more people with better skills come into the
community, it builds a stronger community."
Clearly, though, in these bottom-line times, there is less demand for what
intellectuals produce. "It's not that what is being produced is necessarily
less interesting," suggests Steven Zipperstein, director of Jewish studies
at Stanford University. "But the readership today hungers less for what
these writers have to say."
Among our parents and grandparents, "there was a sense that books could
explain for you something really basic about why you live, about how to
live. Books represented a basic, essential guide. You needed books as much
as you needed air," Zipperstein says. "The loss of that hunger is poignant
and sad."

Trading ideas for ambition
Oded Borowski, who teaches biblical archeology and modern Hebrew at Emory,
has found that while his students are intense and ambitious, they are
driven toward practical goals: diplomas, graduate programs and careers.
They are, for the most part, not interested in knowledge for the sake of
knowledge.
That attitude has been building since the 1980s. "It's something that's
characteristic of this generation. Borowski says. "And Jews are no
different than anyone else. It's, 'Do I have to know that- will it be on
the test?' Rather than, 'Wow, that's interesting-where can we learn more
about it?' "
Philip D. Wendkos, an Atlanta book distributor and teacher, has noticed the
same attitude in the Jewish community. "We're back to the basics, that's
my feeling," Wendkos says. "The avant garde kinds of movements from the
1960s and the 1970s are not really active anymore."

Out of poverty
If today's Jews are less passionate about the ideas that shape the social
and political fabric, it is hardly surprising. After all, the secular
brilliance of early and mid-20th century Jewish thinkers grew out of a
particular set of circumstances. It grew out of poverty and of yearning and
a sense of not belonging.
"In the 1930s and 1940s, you had the children of immigrants who were the
first members of their family to go to college, and they had a sense of
ambition, a burning desire to make it in the world," explains Joseph
Dorman, a director whose film "Arguing the World" documents the history of
Jewish intellectualism in America.
Shut out of mainstream cultural life, Dorman explained, immigrant Jews made
their own world of ideas. Turning their backs on the synagogue, they
discovered a secular world that exploded like a bomb in their brains.
"Whether it was Nietzsche or communism or modernist literature, none of
this had been discussed at home, so there was a tremendous excitement that
came with being freed from one set of circumstances and coming upon
something new," Dorman says.
Many of those challenges have gone away. Jews are Americans now, and the
acceptance of Jews into mainstream culture goes a long way toward
explaining the demise of the movement that was Jewish intellectualism.

Holocaust and migration
"In Europe, intellectualism was one of the main ways of being a Jew," says
Blumenthal, a rabbi and the Jay and Leslie Cohen professor of Judaic
studies at Emory University. "It was very much alive earlier in the
century. The Holocaust wiped out much of it."
As for America, it was much better earlier in the century. "After the
Holocaust, many people turned to political action instead of
intellectualism because we felt we had to protect the Jewish people," says
Blumenthal.
Holocaust survivors streamed to the United States after World War II, an
immigration that inevitably changed the intellectual movement.
"When you have a mass-migration, scholarship is discarded because of
pressure to adjust," says Rabbi Binyomin Friedman with the Atlanta Scholars
Kollel. "Now [that] there is affluence, we are at the point of returning
back to our natural roots [in intellectual pursuits]."
So, in the plus column: acceptance into society, a comfortable life. The
trade-off: less fire, less buzz. Less pilpul - the heated back-and-forth
debate that once was the hallmark of Jewish thinking.

To think, to talk
That being said, one may ask: Isn't there anything left? The answer is a
tentative yes. The passionate political exchanges in the bookstores may
have passed, and the all-night conclaves in college cafeterias are behind
us. Yet there still are occasions when Jews come together to think, to
talk, to try and change the world or at least to understand it a little
better.
Marjorie Agosin, a Chilean-born Jewish poet now teaching at Wellesley
College, recalled a recent gathering of Jewish women thinkers. After a day
spent in passionate discussion of political, religious and gender issues,
the participants gathered for a celebratory dance. "It was a way to combine
the life of the mind with the life of the body," says Agosin, whose book of
poems "Dear Anne Frank" was published last year by Brandeis University
Press.
Agosin says the dance helped the thinkers forge a sense of physical
togetherness that is a crucial component of intellectual life. "In order to
have true dialogue and an intellectual life you cannot do it alone," says
the 44-year-old. "A writer who only sits in his computer room without any
connection to the voices of others, this person cannot bounce ideas off
anyone. You need to see the face of the person. You need to yell at one
another. You need to embrace. There is a whole physicality to the life of
the intellect. You need the voice. You need the hands."
To some extent, then, television is to blame for the decline in personal
connection. Confining us to our living rooms, the magic box pulls people
apart where bookstores and parks once brought us together. Suburban
distances likewise divide, where urban proximity once forced us in upon one
another.
"Because people don't have the opportunity to engage with each other as
they once did, the flow of ideas has declined," says Arthur Magida, a
Baltimore author and a contributor to the PBS program "Religion and Ethics
Newsweekly."

The joy of ideas
"In the past, the joy of ideas was expressed partly in the way people
engaged with each other," adds Magida, "and now that engagement has
narrowed to a tremendous extent. What conversations there are today are
brisk and fleeting."
Doris Goldstein, who wrote "The Jews of Atlanta: 150 Years of Creating
Community," agrees that the old-style give-and-take of the salon is
probably a thing of the past: "I don't think the society is geared that way
anymore. There are too many distracters, too many things that are pulling
on each other. I don't know if that kind of conversation exists."
But there are still remnants.
"The biggest conversation going on among people I know is over the dinner
table," Goldstein says. "Three or four couples having Shabbat dinner
together and trying to talk about things rather than people. It's a more
informal thing."
Vida Goldgar, editor emeritus of the Jewish Times, has been a member of
"The Bagel Bunch" for more than 20 years. Once a week, she and a group of
friends gather on Sunday mornings to chew on bagels and big ideas. And
while she's hesitant to label the group intellectuals, members are bright,
articulate people accomplished in the arts and sciences. One point that
adds fuel to their discussions is that the group draws from across the
religious spectrum - from atheists and agnostics to observant Jews and
non-Jews. "We have various opinions," Goldgar says. "We argue and fight in
good spirits."
In his travels around the city, author/historian Ken W. Stein says he has
seen real evidence that the flame of intellectualism still burns bright. "I
can go some place and give a talk," he says, "and someone will come up to
me with a new comparison that I've barely thought of."
That unexpected spark is a kick. "I'm always surprised by what I find
exists in the corners," says Stein, an Emory professor of contemporary
Middle Eastern history and Israeli studies. "And the corners continue to
fascinate me."

Cyber salons?
The Internet sometimes serves a forum for serious exchanges, as Stein
observes. The "rjmag" discussion group, for instance, offers a place to
debate current topics in Reform Judaism (visit
http://uahc.org/rjmag/rjmag.html to subscribe).
At http://www.utoronto.ca/wjudaism/ visitors will find a refereed journal
on gender-related issues in Judaism. The online news magazine www.jcn18.com
offers discussion forums on topics such as "Gentiles and Jews," "Who Owns
Judaism?" and "Talking About the News."
"The difference now is we don't need people to be next door," says Stein,
refuting Magida's claim that proximity needs to be part of the formula.
"The new intellectualism is not bound by geography."


Shift to the spiritual?
At Baltimore Hebrew University, scholars, students and the casually curious
often gather to exchange ideas. But while such groups used to focus on
political subjects, today's emphasis has shifted toward the spiritual.
"Jews are increasingly coming back to deal with their Jewish roots," says
BHU President Robert O. Freedman. "There is a revival of interest in Jewish
sources, in classical sources."
Still, Freedman is concerned that, lacking a vibrant culture of ideas, the
present wave of interest could easily peter out. "We as a society are
educating many more people than we used to," he says, "but there are
questions about the depth of the education people are getting. Is this the
show-of-the-week kind of thing?"
In Atlanta, the Jewish community prides itself on ever-increasing offerings
for Jews of all ages to further their knowledge of Judaism. Many believe
that this surge also will invigorate intellectual yearnings.
"If Jewish intellectualism is the end result," says Bob Cook, director of
Tichon Atlanta, "then I think we've created some fine stepping stones."