Births of a Nation
By Jeffrey Goldberg
The Forward, November 7, 1997
We were an hour into a discussion about the war in Rwanda and the future of Africa when the President of Uganda, the dome-headed capitalist Yoweri Museveni, invited me to sit with him under an acacia tree and talk cow-talk. Mr. Museveni is the owner of a stupendous herd of Ankole cattle, and in the course of conversation I couldn’t help but mention my own kibbutz-acquired calf-birthing skills — one of the only real practical skills this Diaspora Jew possesses.
The mention of kibbutz gave Mr. Museveni pause, and he narrowed his already narrow eyes and asked: “Are you Jewish?” It is my policy never to deny my Jewishness except to tefillin-bearing pubescent Lubavitchers and so I answered yes, even though I worried about the arc of this conversation: Mr. Museveni knew me as a representative of The New York Times Magazine, and Third World intellectuals believe certain things about the leanings of The New York Times.
“Tell me,” he continued, “How many Jews are there in America?”
“Around five-and-a-half, six million,” I answered.
He started to laugh.
“Did I say something funny?” I asked, the president getting my hot Jewish blood up.
“Fifteen years ago, I met another Jew from America, and I asked him, how many Jews are there, and he said, ‘five and a half or six million.’ What is the problem with the Jews? Why is it always six million?”
“Well,” I began, “there’s assimilation, and a lot of Jews marry Christians and get absorbed into the larger culture…”
“This is not good,” he interrupted. “You should have more Jews. In Uganda we now have 20 million people and just a short time ago we were only eight million.” Mr. Museveni wouldn’t let this subject go until I swore to him that my wife was actually pregnant at the time, and that she was, indeed, Jewish.
It’s been several months since my conversation with Mr. Museveni took place, but it raised two questions that endure: One, how did the Ugandan presidency arrive in the apparently philo-Semitic hands of Yoweri Museveni after being held by the famed Lover of Zion, Idi Amin; and two, why is it that I have never heard these thoughts so plainly expressed by any of the putative leaders of the American Jewish community?
I do not include in the category of American-Jewish leaders the wonder rabbis of Williamsburg and Borough Park; I mean the men and women who run the organizations that make up the Conference of Presidents of Increasingly Minor American Jewish Organizations. I mean the pulpit rabbis, too.
Two years ago, the Hadassah-convened Commission on American Jewish Women released the terrifying piece of information that the majority of Jewish women surveyed did not believe children were essential to marriage. The survey also found that — and this is no stunner — many women viewed organized Jewish life as overly materialistic and devoid of meaning.
When these findings were announced during a panel at the annual general assembly — that money-wasting gathering where the goal, one professional Jew told me unironically, was to “shmooze” with other professional Jews — the writer Anne Roiphe, in a spasm of candor, told an audience of Jewish women that “If we don’t have more children, we are going to have fewer and fewer Jews.” It is a mathematical certainty that Ms. Roiphe stated (unless the Reform movement, which has lost most of its own children, succeeds in proselytizing Mormons, or whatever self-preservation scheme the Reformers are cooking up). Yet, according to Ira Stoll of this newspaper, she was greeted by a certain amount of cringing and derision. The Jewish sage Letty Cottin Pogrebin, for one, denounced attempts to turn Jewish women into “breeders.”
Ms. Roiphe, who was a member of the commission, told me last week that although many women distanced themselves publicly from her frank assessment, even more agreed with her in private. “It was hardly a startling statement,” she said, but “the illness of political correctness affects Jews the way it affects everybody else.”
Ms. Roiphe, who holds the position that women might be better off having children first and then pursuing a career, says she does not back off her previous statements. She also says she has never heard the subject raised again in the national conversation over Jewish “continuity,” the anodyne euphemism for getting Jews to marry Jews and make Jewish babies. There are two problems with Ms. Roiphe’s position, though: It takes two people to make a Jewish baby - - a Jewish woman and a (preferably) Jewish man. The second problem is tougher: What does the Jewish community do with this gift of fine Jewish babies when it gets them?
The Jewish community does many things well: It builds nice Holocaust museums; it counts swastikas on mailboxes better than anyone. Another thing Jewish people do well is raise money from other Jewish people who want to see swastikas counted and Holocaust museums built (with their names adorning the gift plaques, of course). Celebrating victimhood is the all-American thing to do, but it doesn’t pay tuition at Jewish day schools, and it doesn’t send children to Israel.
A recent study of Jewish day schools found tuition to be a barrier to enrollment and also found, unsurprisingly, that Jewish federations have not, to put it charitably, made the funding of Jewish day schools a priority. Leaders of the day school movement are predicting bankruptcy for some schools in the next decade if new funding sources aren’t secured.
During the same week in which I was reading about the crisis in Jewish day schools, an announcement from the American Jewish Committee’s Asia and Pacific Rim Institute, an organization which, as I understand it, handles Jewish relations with not only South Korea but also Thailand, crossed my desk. The press release made me ask the following question: If the Asia and Pacific Rim Institute of the American Jewish Committee didn’t exist for the next 20 years, would the Jewish people still survive?
Then I asked this question: If the Jewish day school network, such as it is, shut down for the next 20 years, where would the Jewish people be?