Last week, I argued in a TAP Online piece that the main danger of school vouchers is their potential to undermine American unity: With Christians likely to flock primarily to Christian schools, Jews to Jewish schools and Muslims to Muslim schools, America's pluralistic melting pot could eventually start to splinter along religious lines. Yesterday, National Review Online proved my case.
In a piece contending that such religious splintering would not be a mere by-product of school choice but rather part of the point, Seth Leibsohn and Chester E. Finn Jr. argue that Jews should embrace vouchers as a vehicle for reducing assimilation. "School choice would confer many benefits on America," they write. "One of them is helping to solve the problem of declining Jewish-American identity." They note the success of Orthodox communities in using Jewish day schools to ward off assimilation, and predict that school vouchers will entice less devout Jews to flock to similar schools. They then go on to ridicule the secular Jewish establishment for publicly worrying about assimilation while opposing a major policy initiative -- school vouchers -- that would help keep assimilation at bay.
So there we have it: The purpose of vouchers is to help religious groups -- and here we are talking primarily about Christian fundamentalists -- withdraw themselves and their offspring from American pluralism, and do so with help from taxpayer dollars. That a few conservatives have now decided to give their antidemocratic designs the veneer of multiculturalism by encouraging Jews to do the same doesn't make their mission any less scary -- or any less un-American.
But there's a deeper problem with the analysis offered by Leibsohn and Finn: They have badly misread American Judaism. They assume that American Jews see themselves as a primarily inward-looking community -- that is, a community much like Christian fundamentalism, one concerned primarily with its own preservation and expansion, the larger world be damned. Of course, that's not the case at all. Except for the ultra-Orthodox (who are, in some ways, quite analogous to Christian fundamentalists), secular Jews in America have long perceived themselves as thriving on pluralism. This sentiment is borne out in Jewish attitudes toward vouchers. For example, in California's 2000 referendum on the issue, Jews voted in greater percentages against vouchers than the overall population did, while Catholics and Protestants (though still overwhelmingly in opposition) voted "yes" at slightly greater rates than the population as a whole. From their prominent involvement in the civil-rights movement to their generous representation in numerous facets of public life, American Jews have long shown themselves to have a great deal invested in the American multicultural experiment. Indeed, a historical argument can be made that Jews in the Diaspora have fared best in comparatively open, pluralistic societies -- Muslim Spain and 20th century America being two of the obvious examples.
Israel may appear to be the great exception to this rule, but it is not. As Yossi Klein Halevi eloquently pointed out in a recent New Republic cover story, Zionism's intention was to make Jews a "normal" nation among nations: to give them the confidence to participate fully in the larger world by assuring them the security of their own survival. The point of Zionism has long been that Jews should live in the world, not at arm's length from it; that Jews should live neither in a ghetto imposed by anti-Semites nor in a ghetto of their own making. In recent years, right-wingers and religious zealots have sought to pervert Israel's mission, selling it as an opportunity for Jews to shut themselves off from the world at large. Increasingly we are seeing Christian fundamentalists in America aid and abet that perversion (maybe because it suits so well their own rejection of democratic pluralism -- or maybe because they simply want Jewish votes). But the prospect of self-ghettoization was never meant to be part of Zionism's allure.
The promise of American Jewish life has long been similar, in that respect, to the promise of Zionism. America was the first modern country to offer Jews the opportunity to be secure in their identity while participating fully in an open, democratic, pluralistic society. That is why since 1948, Jews have immigrated to Israel en masse from Europe, Russia, the Arab world and Africa -- but not from America. It's not that American Jews don't support Israel; they do. But America in 1948 was already offering what Zionism was promising: a normal life among nations. And one could argue that America was offering a better version of it: For Zionists, a normal life among nations meant the ability of Israeli Jews collectively to play a role in a pluralistic world, but it still meant living their physical lives primarily among each other. In America, a normal life meant Jewish children going to school and sitting in classrooms alongside Catholics and Protestants, Asian Americans and African Americans.
To be sure, American Jews have always believed that Israel needs to exist; but they also believe that to be Jewish while being fully, unapologetically and patriotically American is to participate in the greatest experiment in pluralism the world has ever known. So yes, there are Jews who would like to shut themselves off from the rest of America and live in places such as Kiryas Joel and Borough Park and send their children exclusively to Jewish day schools. But they mangle the spirit of Judaism as surely as Christians who seek to withdraw from American life mangle the spirit of their own faith. And if National Review and friends think the path to secular Jewish votes lies in lining the pockets of Hasidic schools with taxpayers' money, they should think again: Most Jews are pluralists at heart.
That's why conservatives are going to continue to experience frustration with mainstream Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, both of which oppose vouchers. Leibsohn and Finn lay into these groups, but they fail to understand how deep the American Jewish commitment to pluralism runs. Having Ralph Reed as a temporary ally on Israel may be convenient enough, but that does not undo decades of Jewish experience in America and centuries of Jewish experience in the world. This experience teaches Jews that they benefit from living in pluralistic societies. As a result, they are likely always to see the defense of pluralistic principles as being in their self-interest, broadly defined.
Still, you have to give conservatives an "A" for effort. In the early days of school vouchers, Christian fundamentalists were merely seeking a way to reject American pluralism for themselves. Now, buoyed by the Republican fantasy of luring Jews permanently to conservatism, they are at least opening the game to others as well. (You too can reject American pluralism!) Conservatives should just go ahead and take the logical next step of encouraging American Muslims to send their children to madrassas. Then we will begin to see the outlines of what they really desire: a wholesale dismantling of the American experiment in pluralism. Some American Jews may go along with this scheme. Most will not.
