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We have seen the Jewish future, and it is all about choice
There was a young lady of title
Who insisted on wearing a sheitel.
She didn’t care much
For kashrut and such,
“But the sheitel,” said she, “now that’s vital!”
(JTA) — As the old limerick suggests, there has long been a tradition of picking and choosing Jewish observance in America, whether it involved keeping kosher or observing Shabbat, or, in this case, covering your hair with a wig (a sheitel) if you’re a married woman.
But in America today, choice has come to occupy a central place not merely in how Jews practice Judaism but in the very way they conceive their religious identity.
Over the past several decades, Americans have come to regard their religion less and less as an ascribed identity — as something they were born into — and increasingly as what they choose to be at the present time. This shift has had a particularly dramatic effect on Jewish Americans, in whose tradition religious identity had for millennia been ascribed at birth. The tension between ascription on the one hand, and choice on the other, informs American Jewish religion.
How is the Jewish community responding to this new regime of choice? That is the central concern of our new book, “The Future of Judaism in America.” Understanding religious identity as chosen is crucial to understanding the future of Judaism in the context of its denominations, its numbers, its relationships with other faith communities, its stance on public affairs — and, perhaps most important, its ability to renew itself in response to pressures from outside and from within.
Let’s consider the different denominational streams.
Reform, after steady growth in synagogue membership from the late 1970s until the new century, is no longer the fastest-growing movement. Still, Reform in America, while it struggles with the boundaries of “who is Jewish,” has lowered the barriers to participation in its brand of Judaism. “Inclusiveness” is the byword for contemporary Reform, both externally (outreach to non-Jewish spouses), and internally, by welcoming those Reform Jews who choose to embrace rituals — tallit and kippah and tefillin, mikveh, full synagogue services — traditionally considered outside the sphere of a movement that does not regard halacha, or traditional rabbinic law, as binding. “Reform Judaism teaches that each of us is an autonomous individual, able to make thoughtful, religious choices,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president the Union for Reform Judaism, at his installation a decade ago.
Have Reform’s accommodations worked? So far, the answer appears to be “yes,” as the percentage of Reform in American Jewry has remained stable at around 35-40% for decades.
For its part, the question for the Conservative movement is more about ascribed identity than about anything else. The movement is struggling with the question of how long it can sustain its policy of forbidding its rabbis from performing marriages between Jews and non-Jews. (The question is of a piece with the angst always felt by Conservative leaders when their commitment to halacha collides with the movement’s commitment to change.) The question of intermarriage is central to the future of Conservative Judaism, as its contemporary identity is defined and has always been defined by the clear line it draws between Jew and non-Jew. This dilemma, in addition to the host of serious issues that plague the movement — not the least of which is a precipitous decline in Conservative’s numbers, from 43% to 17% of those who identify with a denomination over some two decades — suggests that the future of the Conservative qua independent movement is highly uncertain.
Many analysts (including several authors in our book) suggest that Reform and Conservative Judaism will ultimately merge and become a single heterodox movement. That, or Conservative will remain as a smaller movement, concentrated in large population centers.
Orthodoxy, meanwhile, claims 17% of Jews ages 18 to 29, compared with just 3% of Jews 65 and older, according to Pew. If current trends continue, their proportion of the entire Jewish population in America will grow from a small minority to a dominant majority by the end of the century.
Yet there is no one “Orthodoxy” in America. Orthodoxy is expressed in Modern and Centrist forms, the many flavors of Hasidism, the numerous forms of non-Hasidic “haredi” Orthodoxy, Chabad-Lubavitch and the Orthodoxies that push the religious and ritual envelope in countless ways. It’s about choice.
But the price for Orthodoxy may be high, as the increased fractionalization of the movement demonstrates. Haredi groups (what we call Sectarian Orthodox, and others call “ultra-Orthodox”) operate by preventing choice, especially in some of the more sectarian Hasidic groups that create barriers to prevent adherents from leaving. More progressive Orthodox groups have adopted strategies that accommodate choice.
Orthodoxy will remain strong, but its future presents no consistent pattern.
Understanding Jewish Renewal is central to understanding the present and future of American Judaism. The varied expressions of Jewish Renewal that took root in the 1960s and ’70s — the havurah movement, Jewish feminism, practices that bear its spiritual approach — found newer expressions in communities such as Kehillat Hadar in New York; Yeshivat Maharat, which provides Orthodox ordination to women; The Kitchen in Los Angeles; “partnership” minyanim that maximize women’s participation within the parameters of traditional halacha, or Jewish law, and New York’s unaffiliated B’nai Jeshurun congregation. Indeed, while the formal structures that generated Renewal recede in memory, Renewal has had a broad and deep impact on American Judaism and on American Jewish life.
The impulse of Renewal, whatever its varied expression, was and is to create alternatives to the prevailing Jewish movements and forms. These alternatives are “chosen” ways of participation, and Renewal is yet vibrant.
The wildcard in American Judaism is, of course, the “nones,” those who identify as Jews of no religion. According to Pew, the percentage of U.S. Jews who do not claim any religion is 27% — higher among the young and going up. The future of Judaism in America will depend in part on the relative percentages of Jews with religion and Jews of no religion: Which will grow, and which will decline?
What has changed in American Jewish religious life? It is what Will Herberg, in his landmark book “Catholic-Protestant-Jew,” did not see in the 1950s: There is no longer any pressure to remain within any given religious community, nor in any movement or stream of Judaism, nor within Judaism itself (as the rise of the “nones” suggests). The American Jewish religious future — for all the movements, denominations and post-denominationalists — will be positioned in this dynamic.
When religious identity is increasingly seen as a matter of personal choice, groups that have depended upon ascribed identity to guarantee their numbers will be challenged to develop not only new means of keeping and attracting members but also new ways of conceptualizing and communicating who and what they are.
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The post We have seen the Jewish future, and it is all about choice appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The 2026 J. I. Segal Award for Yiddish literature is now accepting submissions
די יערלעכע פּרעמיע פֿאַר ייִדישער ליטעראַטור, אַ טראַדיציע פֿון דער מאָנטרעאָלער ביבליאָטעק במשך פֿון די פֿאַרגאַנגענע 50 יאָר, זוכט אָריגינעלע ביכער אָנגעשריבן אויף ייִדיש און אַרויסגעלאָזט צווישן דעם 1טן יאַנואַר 2024 און דעם 31סטן דעצעמבער 2025. די מחברים קענען זײַן פֿון אומעטום.
דער מחבר וואָס געווינט די „פּרעמיע פֿאַר ייִדישער ליטעראַטור אויפֿן נאָמען פֿון ד״ר הירש און דבֿורה ראָזענפֿעלד“ וועט באַקומען 1,000$.
אינטערעסאַנט איז וואָס מע האָט הײַיאָר צוגעגעבן אַ נײַע תּקנה: ווערק וואָס זענען טיילווײַז אָדער אין גאַנצן געשאַפֿן דורך „איי־אײַ“ וועלן נישט אָנגענומען ווערן.
פֿריִערדיקע ביכער וואָס האָבן באַקומען דעם פּריז זענען באָריס סאַנדלערס ראָמאַן „אַנטיקלעך פֿונעם סאַקוואָיאַזש“ און בער קאָטלערמאַנס ראָמאַן „דער סוד פֿון ווײַסע בערן“. די תּקנות אָנצוגעבן אויף אַ פּרעמיע קען מען געפֿינען דאָ https://www.jewishpubliclibrary.org/en/jacob-lsaac-segal-awards.
The post The 2026 J. I. Segal Award for Yiddish literature is now accepting submissions appeared first on The Forward.
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Cultural boycotts of Israel just reached peak absurdity
Nadav Lapid is a filmmaker whose work has become increasingly ferocious in its indictment of Israeli society, nationalism and moral self-deception. His latest film, Yes, is not a plea for Israeli innocence, but rather a savage, obscene, self-implicating reckoning with a country in which language, music, sex and grief have all been drafted into the service of monstrous affirmation.
That he was pushed out of a prestigious international film festival in the name of opposing Israeli state violence is not a victory for moral clarity. It is “an intellectual failure,” to quote an open letter that was published in Le Monde on June 9.
Here’s the backstory: Lapid, a dissident Israeli director based in France, was asked to serve on the jury of the international film festival FID Marseille. After his appointment was announced, the festival’s director, Tsveta Dobreva, started to receive phone calls objecting to the presence of an Israeli director on the film festival jury.
Dobreva initially stood by her decision, yet as pressure intensified, the festival and Lapid mutually agreed that he would give up the jury role. Instead, the festival envisioned a more limited role for Lapid in Marseille, in which he would present his first feature, Policeman (2011), followed by a public discussion. However, even this compromise continued to raise the hackles of those who felt that the mere presence of an Israeli filmmaker at FID Marseille was unacceptable.
After a dozen directors threatened to pull their films from the festival over his participation, Lapid exited — not, it seems, out of a desire to capitulate to his opponents, but rather because he felt insulted that so many in the global filmmaking community felt that his presence in Marseille was an instance of “artwashing” designed to deny, obscure or deflect from the crimes of the Israeli government and the IDF.
How does the presence of a dissident filmmaker make him the representative of the very state he critiques? One can argue about and with Lapid’s films. One can validly choose to love them, attack them or reject them. But first one has to watch them.
That point rests at the heart of the Le Monde letter defending Lapid, collectively signed by 10 prominent actors and directors including Natalie Portman and Jacques Audiard. The case against him is that for a blanket cultural boycott of Israeli artists, fueled by the fact that Yes received support from the Israel Film Fund.
What critics may miss: The Israel Film Fund operates independently of Israel’s government, albeit with taxpayer funding, and has supported films sharply critical of Israeli policy — including last year’s The Sea, an antiwar film about a Palestinian boy that won five Ophir awards, Israel’s equivalent to the Oscars. (After The Sea’s award night victory, Israel’s Culture Minister threatened funding cuts to the ceremony.) Le Monde even reported that the Israel Film Fund stepped in to provide 10% of Lapid’s budget for Yes after the European Union declined to support what they judged to be an anti-Israel project.
Lapid himself has not dismissed the boycott debate. He has called it serious, and has long supported political sanctions against the Israeli state. Nor does he appear to think of the filmmakers who oppose him as enemies. He has suggested that their actions come from powerlessness, anger and immense frustration at political inaction over Gaza.
But he understands that political frustrations can lead to censorship with far-reaching implications.“For a year, it was my film Yes that was being attacked,” he told Le Monde earlier this week. “And then, suddenly, my mere presence became unacceptable. I asked myself: What exactly do they want? That I stop making films? Should I leave France? How far will this go?”
Those are troubling questions. Answering them incorrectly — as Lapid’s critics have — risks turning film festivals into places to virtue signal and perform outrage, rather than opportunities to sit with art that fosters critical thinking and discrimination.
The most recent editions of the Berlin Film Festival illustrate that risk. Berlin has always been a deeply political festival, beginning with its Cold War origins. Since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, the festival has been convulsed by furious debates set off by Israel’s war in Gaza, and amplified by the German government’s iron-clad support for the Jewish state.
Accusatory speeches, open letters and political threats have frequently upstaged the actors and filmmakers on the red carpet. The festival has become political in the way that a rally is political. Instead of the films themselves provoking complicated political conversations, the focus has increasingly been on the inability of the Berlinale — one of Germany’s foremost cultural institutions — to issue a robust defense of freedom of expression while respecting Germany’s historic responsibility to Israel.
Marseille risked a similar mistake. Dobreva, the festival director, warned that the boycott threats over Lapid prevented the festival from programming freely and serving as a place of free thinking. She is absolutely right. A film festival should be able to screen Palestinian films, condemn state violence, interrogate potential moral compromises in film funding and still hold clarity about the fact that an individual artist’s value cannot be reduced to the birthplace listed on his passport.
The collective Palestine Will Save Cinema, which agitated against Lapid’s presence at Marseille, argued that placing Palestinian and Israeli narratives side by side risked turning the devastation of Gaza into a tidy exercise in balance, as if symmetrical programming could smooth away asymmetrical suffering.
That argument is guilty of its own kind of cultural flattening. Lapid’s films have been arguments with and against the country that formed him. In Synonyms (2019), an existential tragicomedy that is Lapid’s most incisive investigation into Israeli and Jewish identity, a young man moves to Paris after completing his military service. There, he tries — and ultimately fails — to transform himself into a Frenchman by repudiating the Hebrew language and severing ties with his family.
In Ahed’s Knee (2021) an Israeli filmmaker is incensed after being asked to choose from a list of approved discussion topics for a Q&A about his work at a community library. The filmmaker’s protest against government censorship swells into a scorching, self-destructive tirade against Israeli culture, with righteous anger warping into paranoia and cruelty.
When I interviewed Lapid about Ahed’s Knee in Cannes, where the film won the jury prize, the director told me that making the film had allowed him to think through a number of tough yet vital questions: “What does it mean to be good in a bad place? And what does being right matter when it detaches you from your most human instincts?”
He added that sick societies present people with bad choices, where “the normal option doesn’t exist.” Yes is the most extreme form he has given to that idea. In Munich, he said the film is vulgar, noisy and brutal because the “collective soul” it depicts is vulgar, noisy and brutal — and because he, too, is “part of the sickness.”
Rejecting false equivalences is not the same thing as reducing every Israeli artist to an emissary of state violence. Film festivals exist, in part, to teach us to see such distinctions. To exclude an artist of Lapid’s stature, temperament and talent is to admit that we no longer trust art, or ourselves, to withstand complexity and contradiction.
Lapid’s case reveals this category error with special force.
The post Cultural boycotts of Israel just reached peak absurdity appeared first on The Forward.
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The Jewish friendship that let David Hockney experience ‘dangerous perfection’
Think of the British painter David Hockney, who died Thursday at 88, and you think of color. 1967’s “A Bigger Splash,” almost certainly his most famous work, is a study in blue so profound that it’s nearly synesthetic: The pool is such a saturated cool that you can feel the water lap your feet, and the sky so rich with California sunlight that your shoulders burn. When Hockney turned more toward landscapes in later years, trees came in every color of the rainbow — here a pink trunk, there a purple — and roads were streaked salmon and teal.
Which makes it stranger that one of the works of his that I find most evocative has no color at all. It’s a 1975 pen and ink drawing of the American Jewish artist R.B. Kitaj, one of Hockney’s dearest friends, sitting on a bench outside an art school in Vienna.
Kitaj, head propped in his hand, looks out toward the left side of the page. His face is the lone area of detail in a scene thrown together with brisk, expressive lines. There is a sense of place around him, but that place is in the act of disappearing. As the scene spreads to the right and lower edges of the page — the areas that would fall outside Kitaj’s line of sight — it ceases to exist. Kitaj’s bench is slatted, rounded and real, but the bench abutting it is depicted in a few brief strokes. The buildings and street are sketched with light attention within what seems to be Kitaj’s periphery line, and are nonexistent beyond it.
The picture is a study of a man in deep focus. Hockney draws Kitaj’s head — and by inference, everything within it — as real and lifelike. But beyond the scope of Kitaj’s vision — the material the world presents him, possibly to be made into art — Hockney shows his surroundings as being valuable only as perspective lines, helping to situate the subject in space.
To be caught thinking is a vulnerable experience. To have someone restore your sense of your own physical self is a shock. By sketching Kitaj in his moment of remove, Hockney gave a renowned and somewhat glamorous friendship a sense of life. And he gave a sense of life, too, to the thing that made his own art so attractive: the impression of a rare and gorgeous intensity of vision, one that could draw a viewer’s attention so completely that it seemed what was on the canvas was the only real thing on earth.
In his drawing of Kitaj, the line is blurred between his subject’s concentration and his own. Is it really that Kitaj is so immersed in the act of seeing — or that Hockney is, his gaze so rapt upon his friend as to make him able to capture, briefly, what it was like to see through Kitaj’s eyes?
From the first days of their friendship at the Royal College of Art, Hockney and Kitaj existed on two planes for one another: human and artistic. As each worked to find the right way to reflect their own humanity in their art, their concepts of both themselves and their work influenced one another. “I was painting about my Jews and my books and Hockney was just coming out of the closet, so I said paint that,” Kitaj once said. And another time: “He switched to his gay culture as I began on my Jewish culture in its first forms.”
When Kitaj married the painter Sandra Fisher in 1983 — after Hockney introduced them in the 1970s — Hockney was his best man. “Those orthodox Rabbis had never seen such a gang under the chuppa,” Hockney told 032c magazine in 2025. At that moment, he said, “life for me had reached a dangerous perfection.”
A “dangerous perfection.” What did that mean? I see a glimpse of the answer in Hockney’s drawing of Kitaj — a sense of connection so complete as to threaten the boundaries of selfhood. At Kitaj’s wedding, Hockney experienced that threat as a kind of transcendence: Look, how wonderful being alive among other people can be. The experience captured in his drawing of Kitaj is different, but related. It’s that of a kind of looking, and seeing, that briefly gives total knowledge.
That kind of completeness is one of the aims of friendship, and also of art. There will be much to miss about Hockney, an artist who was easy to love. But the rare experience of absolute immersion that his best work gave its viewers may have made, out of all he accomplished, the biggest splash.
The post The Jewish friendship that let David Hockney experience ‘dangerous perfection’ appeared first on The Forward.
