Jews and the American Public Square is a three-year project of communal dialogue, research and publication devoted to exploring the relationship between the faith and culture of American Jews and their civic engagement. Initiated by a major grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts, the project seeks to foster greater public understanding among both Jews and non-Jews of the role of religion in America's ongoing public conversation.

OBSERVATIONS, the project's occasional newsletter, offers insights and comments on religion and public life. In this issue, project director Alan Mittleman reflects on the impact of Sen. Joseph Lieberman's public advocacy for an expanded role for religion in American life. In a piece published shortly before his death and reprinted here, project founder, Daniel J. Elazar discusses the complex issue of tuition vouchers. For more information, visit the project's website at www.cjcs.net.

Back Issues:
Newsletter #1
(June 2000)

December 2000 Number 2

Disturbing an Orthodoxy

As the dust settles on campaign 2000, American Jews will not soon forget Senator Joseph Lieberman's unsettling utterances about the role of religion in the public square. Lieberman's advocacy of an expansive public role for faith played well among American Christians. Jews, however, found the candidate's approach troubling. According to a survey fielded by this project in September 2000, 75% of non-Jews, as compared with only 44% of Jews, thought that, “religion should play an important role in shaping American values.” 62% of non-Jews, as compared with only 26% of Jews, “would like to see the influence of religion in American life increase.” Over half of the non-Jewish public (52%) approved of politicians speaking about their faith and quoting scripture. Only 16% of Jews agreed, while the vast majority (62%) disapproved. When the question became personal and respondents were asked how they felt about Lieberman's references to God and scripture, 52% of Jews disapproved as compared to only 29% of non-Jews. The most revealing finding may be this one: while 84% of Jews were happy that a Jew was nominated for high office, the figure went down to 55% when the candidate was referred to as a “religious Jew.” This contrasts strikingly with non-Jewish opinion. 45% of non-Jewish respondents reported that they were happy that a Jew was nominated, 39% that he was a religious Jew. The Jewish community's happiness over Lieberman was far more compromised by his religious observance than was that of the general community.
Early after Lieberman's nomination, the Anti-Defamation League sent him an open letter, urging him to de-emphasize the religious content of his speeches. The ADL believed that Lieberman had passed the point where “an emphasis on religion in a political campaign becomes inappropriate and even unsettling in a religiously diverse society.” Appeals to shared religious faith, they cautioned, risk alienating “people from different backgrounds and different faiths – including individuals who do not believe in any god – and none of our citizens, including atheistic Americans, should be made to feel outside of the electoral or political process.” Although Lieberman himself was careful to include everyone under his big “core values of America” tent, the ADL was nonetheless convinced that public God-talk can “unsettle many Americans” and make religious minorities “feel inferior.” Now that the campaign is over, Leonard Fein, writing in the Forward, claimed that Lieberman sounded like “a candidate of the Christian Coalition might sound, as a man who appeared to regard his religious convictions as worthy of repeated reference.” Fein went on to imply that American Jews were palpably hypocritical: “Had a Lieberman type been the candidate of the Christian right, we'd have been appalled. We heard the critique, but in our excitement at the breakthrough we chose to ignore it.” Now, he suggests, “it is time to grow up” and to reject Lieberman's views, including those on religion and the public square, as “too conservative to elicit our enthusiasm.” (Forward 11/24)
Lieberman responded to such criticisms in an address at Notre Dame in October. Like Mario Cuomo before him, he sketched out a role for religion in public life in broad strokes. While avoiding specifics, he argued that American society has fallen into a troubling “values vacuum.” How did this presumptive slide into amoralism occur? The Founders “knew that our experiment in self-government was contingent on our faith in the Creator who endowed us with those inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They also knew that in a democratic state, with limited power, that religion, while not the only source of values and good behavior, surely is a most important source of values and good behavior.” The fundamental American values “clearly had their roots in the Judeo-Christian ethic and faith of the founders.” As examples of such values, Lieberman offered family, freedom, equal opportunity, and respect for the basic dignity of human life and the tolerance for individual difference. Over the years these values “evolved into what became known as an American civic religion—deistic, principled, purposeful, moral, public and, not least of all, inclusive.” The civic religion “cemented our bonds as Americans for generations and made real the ideal of e pluribus unum: from many one.”
The civic religious consensus, in Lieberman's view, has deteriorated in recent decades into “ambivalence.” Although most of us have not abandoned our individual belief in American values and the correlative “principles of faith…we have grown increasingly unwilling to embrace and act on them publicly and collectively.” Our “moral muscles” have atrophied. “More and more people shrink from drawing bright lines and making moral judgments which are critical to the functioning of a free society.” Lieberman charges that this deterioration of civic religion has aided and abetted an overly sharp separation of church and state. In recent years, “we've gone far beyond what the framers imagined in separating the two. So much so that we practically banish religious values and religious institutions from our public life.” To his critics' charge that his own view erases the line between church and state, he answers that “these people have forgotten that the Constitution promises freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. We Americans are, after all, not just another nation, but by the specific words of our pledge, we are one nation under God.”
Lieberman argued that religion, although it does lead to important and sometimes divisive moral disagreements, is primarily a force for commonality and community. The public articulation of faith can “remind us of how much we have in common.” Furthermore, the common faith can restore sanity to a “secular society [that] has lost its moral bearings.” Lieberman pointed to reducing violence and vulgarity in entertainment and in the culture at large as a common project for Americans of faith. The “current spiritual awakening” must be harnessed so that it “not only inspires us individually and within our separate faith communities, but also renews and elevates the moral and cultural life of America.” He saw encouraging signs of this happening. Because of the good works of people of faith, “we have made real progress in reducing teen pregnancy… youth violence, and drug abuse. Charitable giving is up. And more and more of the young are turning to community service.”
The dividing line between Lieberman and his Jewish critics is clear. His critics believe that public piety is inherently divisive. Religious minorities and non-believers must be shielded from elected officials and civil servants - whose job it is to represent all of us - who indulge in religious rhetoric. Lieberman, although he shows concern not to exclude those “who do not share our beliefs,” clearly believes that public piety should not be muzzled out of solicitude for the non-religious. He believes that the good that religion returns for the commonweal outweighs the discomfort of those who do not approve of it. Speaking on behalf of religion, therefore, is necessary and prudent.
Neither position is without its flaws. The secularist view, represented by the Jewish critics, is too thin-skinned. It underestimates the capacity of our democracy for civil public discourse about contentious, perennial issues in our common life. It excludes religion from its proper role as a source of moral energy and a form of “social capital.” Religion is not just a private phenomenon. It is the most significant dimension of the nation's moral life and there are appropriate, principled, responsible ways for public figures to discuss and affirm it. My guess is that most religious minorities (such as Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims) would not feel excluded by a bit more emphasis on faith and traditional morality. They might well find it conducive to the survival of their own cultures on these shores. Indeed, American Jews might be the only group who find Lieberman's appeals threatening, insofar as survey evidence suggests that secularists are much more accommodating of public religiosity than Jews are. We ought to think twice before we position ourselves yet again on the fringes.
Lieberman's view, although it has much to commend it, is short on details. Other than offering a broad affirmation of religion's sanguinary effects on American culture, it provides little or no guidance on the hard issues, both policy and legal, of the day. Furthermore, its implicit call for a return to “civic religion” based on “deism” is out of touch with both the contemporary debate on civil society and with the resurgence of orthodoxy. Rather than reassert a bland, common-denominator American civic religion, we need to find a way to celebrate substantive particular religions and to discern and support the contributions of their communities to the public square. Despite these problems, Sen. Lieberman has made a vital contribution to both our national and our Jewish communal conversation. By disturbing the policy orthodoxy of the organized Jewish community, Lieberman has helped to bring us into the mainstream of the current American reassessment of religion in the public square.

- Alan Mittleman

Although overlooked in the drama of the presidential election, school voucher initiatives were on the ballot in both Michigan and California. Both proposals would have provided direct public funding for parents of children in failing schools (Michigan) or in all schools (California) to attend the public or private school of their choice. Michigan voters rejected the proposal two to one. Seventy percent of California voters rejected it as well. (This was largely because the proposition was poorly drawn. Even voucher advocates failed to support this particular initiative.) Nonetheless, the issue will not soon go away. Voucher systems have sustained state Supreme Court scrutiny in Wisconsin and Florida, and are still functioning in Cleveland. George W. Bush made voucher plans a central thrust of his educational reform agenda. Joseph Lieberman, reflecting a viewpoint still in the minority among Jews, endorsed voucher experiments while a senator. He backed away from them as a vice presidential candidate, however. Surveys suggest that voucher plans are supported by majorities of Catholics, black Protestants, and white Evangelicals. Jews and secularists, as well as mainline Protestants, oppose them, Jews overwhelmingly so. According to this project's September 2000 survey on the attitudes of American Jews, only 18% of the Jewish community supports government aid to families for tuition in private, including religious, schools. The major Jewish organizations echo the Jewish majority's suspicion of voucher schemes. Nonetheless, prominent voices within the Jewish community such Prof. Jack Wertheimer, Rector of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the late Daniel Elazar, founding president of the Center for Jewish Community Studies/Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, have called for a reassessment of American Jewish attitudes. The presidents and executive directors of two major Jewish federations have also expressed discomfort with the majority position. Should voucher plans proliferate and withstand an expected challenge before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Jewish community will be forced to decide how to balance the advantages that vouchers may provide for day school education with its traditional reluctance to tamper with church-state separation. In the following piece, published in Sh'ma a year before his death, Daniel Elazar sounds some of the main themes of the debate about vouchers. - Editor

Tuition Vouchers

Daniel J. Elazar

Like the overwhelming majority of Americans of my generation, I was raised on the idea that one of the greatest achievements of American society was the American public school, a common school for all of the American people that educated their children to be Americans, taught them the skills they needed to survive and prosper in the American economy, the ways of democracy and patriotism, socialized them into the patterns of American life, and, if they were the children of immigrants or other deviant populations, acculturated them to the American way of life.
As a Jewish child in the 1940s, I was taught by my parents and the Jewish community around me that we owed a special debt of gratitude to the United States because of the public school which opened up all vistas before us. Only a handful of yeshivas existed in New York and one or two other cities around the country. Even the most ardent supporters of Jewish survival and continuity concentrated on educating the new generation through afternoon Hebrew schools supplementary to the public school and, indeed, for those who sought a serious Jewish education those Talmud Torahs succeeded far more than is recognized. We are just now coming to the end of the generations of rabbis, teachers, and scholars they provided for American Jewry.
I was a product of the Hebrew-national movement in Jewish education and its afternoon Talmud Torah. Founded by students of the European Maskilim, this movement saw the primary goals of Jews education to be Zionist and Hebrew oriented, to teach Jews tests, history and culture so as to perpetuate the Jewish national heritage. Today I support day schools to achieve the same levels as were achieved in the Talmud Torahs. As my interest in day schools grew, I had many arguments with my father, Albert Elazar, a Jewish educator and perhaps the leading exponent of Hebrew-national supplementary education in his generation. My father had difficulty accepting that times had changed, that the day school was needed not only to teach Jewish subjects but also to provide a Jewish environment lacking with the demise of the Jewish street in the United States.
In those days, just about the only educational challenge to the public schools came from the Roman Catholic community. Coming to the United States in substantial numbers in the mid-nineteenth century, the Roman Catholics discovered that the "neutral" American public schools essentially were teaching an ecumenical brand of Protestant Americanism which left Catholicism out in the cold. Hence, the Church found it necessary to promote separate schools for their children. This was reinforced in the first generations by the desires of mostly Catholic immigrant groups to preserve their languages and cultures and to pass them on to their children.
Today the situation is entirely changed. Surveys show that the public schools have lost the confidence of at least half of the American people and perhaps as many as three-quarters. The combination of the professionalization of educational personnel accompanied by the spread of "progressive" education and its offshoots, the massive school consolidations which have reduced the number of school districts to less than one-fifth the number of those that existed in my childhood, and the consequent removal of the public schools from the kind of control by parents and neighbors that had been a major feature of their earlier success, has completely transformed the public school.
Rather than serving as a common school for the community, advancing community goals which, in their essence, were also national goals, in all too many cases the public schools have become partisan and bureaucratic in the sense that, in the place of a benign Protestant Americanism, they now teach "scientism" (the new religion of the public schools) and reject virtually all teachings associated with the great monotheistic religions, allowing only the teaching of traditional pagan religions as "folklore." Admittedly, this sea change was stimulated, if not provoked, by U.S. Supreme Court decisions eliminating the earlier Protestantism of the public schools. It has also been fostered by professional educators in the schools of education. The impact of the latter two groups, however, is most intense in connection with teaching methods which many American parents have come to believe have robbed the public schools of serious intellectual content in the name of child-centered education.
Moreover, the Americanizing tasks of the public schools have passed into other hands, in part because the overwhelming majority of Americans are native-born and do not need to be "Americanized." As well, recent multicultural understandings of what is "American" no longer enables the possibility of the homogenized Americanization of the past. The rise of the mass media (TV, radio, movies) has provided a set of far more powerful socialization and acculturation tools which "Americanize" in their own way in a manner that has far greater influence than the public school and which is not only accessible to everyone but sought by everyone.
As a consequence, an increasing number of groups (religious, cultural, ethnic, ideological, and class-based) have developed their own schools to transmit the knowledge, norms, and attitudes which they wish to foster among their young. They hope to offer their children a better version of American society, or, perhaps, just a more effective method of teaching that shared version. They have raised a claim on public resources to support their efforts. As we all know, today every taxpayer contributes to the support of the public schools, whether he or she uses them or not, and not even tax exemptions are available for those who seek alternative education. The idea of school vouchers was developed as a means to remedy that situation.
Today, approximately 10 percent of American elementary and secondary schools are defined as "private," that is to say, outside of the public school system. The U.S. Department of Education has a division to service them even though the U.S. Supreme Court has prevented the states and localities from aiding them in similar ways. With the spread of fundamentalist and evangelical Christian schools, both nondenominational and for various denominations, and the struggle of the Catholic schools to survive now that their costs have gone up so greatly, much of the support for vouchers seems to be coming from the religious community - Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish - like in an earlier time when Protestants and Jews were strongly supportive of the public schools.
There are those who oppose vouchers on behalf of the maintenance of national unity. There are others who support vouchers with the expectation of finding panaceas for what they view as the weaknesses of contemporary public education. There are still others who see vouchers allowing them to educate their children along their particular religious or ideological lines, and there are those who see vouchers as introducing an elementary fairness into the financing of the American education system.
Nowhere in the United States has the school voucher idea aroused more controversy and opposition than in the Jewish community. The Jews have been among the very strongest proponents of the public schools and at the forefront of this effort to make those schools "neutral" with regard to the monotheistic religions. Often we seem to have done so without weighing the consequences to our own desires for continuity.
We came to day schools relative late in the game. To the best of my knowledge, the first truly non-Orthodox Jewish day school was founded at Anshe Emet Synagogue in Chicago in 1946, but the big push did not come until the 1960s, often reinforced by less than the highest motives of Jewish continuity. Today, a majority of Jews still fervently support the public schools but a growing minority are seeking alternate strategies for the education of Jewish children and many of them, having come to recognize the costs involved, have become supporters of voucher plans that will enable the schools they support to benefit from public assistance. So the issue has been joined, with many clinging to the old arguments and others claiming that those arguments are no longer valid, a new situation prevails, and new remedies are needed.
Daniel J. Elazar was Founding President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (Israel) and the Center for Jewish Community Studies (USA). This article first appeared in Sh'ma.

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