Contemporary Anglo-Jewish community leadership: coping with multiculturalism1

The British Journal of Sociology 2012 Volume 63 Issue 1

Contemporary Anglo-Jewish community leadership: coping with multiculturalism1

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Ben Gidley and Keith Kahn-Harris

Abstract In this article, drawing on qualitative interviews and documentary analysis, we argue that the Jewish community in Britain has undergone a fundamental shift since 1990 from a ‘strategy of security’, a strategy of communal leadership based on emphasizing the secure British citizenship and belonging of the UK’s Jews, to a ‘strategy of insecurity’, where the communal leadership instead stresses an excess of security among Anglo-Jewry. We demonstrate this based on two case studies: of the Jewish renewal movement in the 1990s and the ‘new antisemitism’ phenomenon of the 2000s. We conclude that this shift is tied to the shift from a monocultural Britain to an officially multicultural one, and that therefore there are lessons that can be taken from it for the study of British and other multiculturalisms. Keywords: Anglo-Jewry; multiculturalism; assimilation; ethnicity; insecurity; community

The Jewish community is one of the oldest ethnic minorities in Britain. At the community’s peak, it had nearly half a million members (Neustatter 1955).Yet, in contrast to American Jewry, there have been few sociological accounts of Anglo-Jewry. While there have been many prominent Jews working in the academic social sciences in the UK (including, for example, Zygmunt Bauman, Morris Ginsberg and Stanley Cohen), they have tended to avoid sustained empirical and intellectual engagement with the British Jewish experience. Bauman is the only major UK-based social scientist who has discussed Jews extensively – but not British Jews (e.g. 1988, 1990). Since the 1970s there has been an explosion of academic interest in immigrant groups in Britain; some of the most important British social scientific scholarship has concerned the sociology and culture of British Asians and African-Caribbeans. Yet there has

Gidley (Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford) and Kahn-Harris (Centre for Religion and Contemporary Society, Birkbeck College, University of London) (Corresponding author email: [email protected]) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2012 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2011.01398.x

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been no Jewish Stuart Hall or Paul Gilroy to demonstrate how the British Jewish experience might reveal the dynamics of British society and culture. There is an earlier body of social research on British Jewry, associated with figures such as Joseph Jacobs, Francis Galton and Moses Gaster. However, this activity died down after World War I. More recently, social research on AngloJewry has largely been confined to policy-oriented reports commissioned by communal organizations, largely but not exclusively based on quantitative research (e.g. Neustatter 1955; Kosmin and Levy 1983; Miller, Schmool and Lerman 1996; Cohen and Kahn-Harris 2004), together with a very few PhD theses (e.g. Ash 2000). Although much of this research has been conducted according to the highest standards of social research, it is narrow in its focus and tends not to intervene in wider social scientific debates. This absence of sociological reflection stands in contrast to the vibrancy of historical research on Anglo-Jewry (e.g. Cesarani 1990, 1994; Alderman 1998; Williams 1985). Our Turbulent Times: The British Jewish Community Today, published in 2010, was the first sociological monograph on contemporary Anglo-Jewry in living memory. This absence has not merely been a loss in terms of a sociology of British Jews; it has also meant that the potential insight that a study of Anglo-Jewry could have provided – into the contours of minority life in Britain, into the study and practice of British multiculturalism, and into the sociology of ethnicity and ‘race’ more broadly – has also been lost. In this article, we provide an account of one of the most significant features of Anglo-Jewish social and cultural life, based on sociological research. Specifically, we focus on how communal leadership has defined the community and used this to legitimate its authority. We conclude by drawing out the wider sociological significance of this account.

Security, insecurity and community Our argument is that the discursive repertoires used by the Anglo-Jewish communal leadership in order to legitimate its authority have shifted significantly over time.The shift in the discourse, we argue, reflects wider shifts within British society, from an official monoculturalism to an official multiculturalism (and beyond) and towards a growing societal concern with security as part of the ‘risk society’ or ‘liquid modernity’. The meaning and uses of community have been reconfigured in British society at large as a result of these shifts, and the smaller changes in Anglo-Jewish communal life usefully illuminate these changes. Insecurity has become a dominant theme in the social sciences in the last two decades. As Mythen writes, ‘. . . increasing portions of our everyday lives are spent negotiating change, dealing with uncertainty and assessing the British Journal of Sociology 63(1)

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personal impacts of situations that appear to be out of our control’ (2004: 1). Jasanoff comments: ‘Just as a century ago, the idea of “progress” helped to define and optimistic era, so today “risk”, by its very pervasiveness, seems to be the defining marker of our own less sanguine historical moment’ (quoted Mythen 2004: 2). For Bauman, the ‘liquid modernity’ of our age means living ‘under the constant condition of anxiety’, prone to become ‘neurotic about matters of security’ (1992: 697). For Ulrich Beck, the risk society contrasts with the earlier industrial society. Where industrial society was concerned with the distribution of ‘goods’ (wealth, health and welfare), risk society is concerned with the distribution of ‘bads’ (risk, infection, disease). Consequently, the problem of industrial society was scarcity (the shortage of goods), while the problem of risk society is insecurity (the proliferation of bads). Industrial society was concerned with dividing up the cake; risk society sees the cake as poisoned. Thus, the task of governance becomes addressing ‘safety needs’: monitoring, minimizing and preventing risks (1992: 19–38). We argue that the dominant strategy that Anglo-Jewish communal leadership used to legitimate its authority changed to reflect this historical shift: from a strategy concerned with demonstrating Anglo-Jewish entitlement to the ‘goods’ of liberal democracy (the rights associated with citizenship) to a strategy concerned with making a claim to safety needs. As we shall show, in the earlier twentieth century, communal leadership minimized safety needs, publicly downplaying concerns with antisemitism , while in the last two decades it has emphasized safety needs, in particular fears about antisemitism and the internal threats of declining observance and increasing out-marriage. Jane Franklin describes the predominant response to liquid modernity’s proliferation of insecurity as the ‘defensive . . . politics of nostalgic community’, seeking to preserve that which once provided a secure backdrop to life. This ‘appears to be a resistance to change. It builds on an idealized notion of community and encourages efforts to bring back the traditional family . . . and reassert a kind of commonsense morality to hold it all together. It offers a way of imagining a secure society’ (1998: 2). We will argue that while the politics of Anglo-Jewish communal leadership in the 1990s onwards appeared as nostalgic and conservative, they also engendered a reflexive introspection that radically changed certain aspects of communal infrastructure and Anglo-Jewish culture. The relevance of the story that we seek to tell is that it sheds light on how community works in practice in the period of the shift to liquid modernity. Much contemporary social thought highlights the decline of community and stresses the need to nurture it as a central task for policy (e.g. Putnam 2000). Sociology has a long history both of interrogating concepts of community and in using them as the basis for specific research agendas (e.g. Bauman 2001; Bell and Newby 1971; Cohen 1985; Park 1952; Tönnies 1955). Recently in the UK, © London School of Economics and Political Science 2012

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concepts of community cohesion, community empowerment, faith community and the ‘Big Society’, simultaneously bear the imprint of sociological thinking and call for sociological scrutiny (Dinham 2009). Community has a particular resonance for Jews. It is within the community that Jewish practice becomes possible.This is true for religious reasons (such as the preference for prayer within a group of ten or more adult males); but also because Jewish institutions are needed to enable Jewish practices such as ritual slaughter and ritual bathing. For much of Jewish history, Jews were organized in largely autonomous self-governing communities, within which Jews had little choice but to remain, but emancipation opened up the possibility of Jews leaving Jewish communities. The creation and sustaining of Jewish community therefore became a pressing matter in modernity (Elazar 1995) and Jewish thinkers who have sought to maintain Jewish life have often turned to community as the source of Jewish reconstruction. Since Jews returned to England in the seventeenth century, the community has constituted itself through a complex network of communal institutions. A central priority of these has been maintaining and ensuring its intergenerational perpetuation. This has been seen both externally, through building forms of collective representation and defence to address anti-Jewish prejudice; and internally, through developing educational strategies against the perceived threat of assimilation. Because of this history, the Jewish experience throws light on the concept of community as such. In the following, we draw on a two-year sociological research study on the British Jewish community to examine these questions.The data we draw on here was based on analysis of an archive of documentary sources reflecting the diversity of and the debates within what we conceive of as the contemporary Anglo-Jewish public sphere alongside seventeen semi-structured interviews with key figures in the AngloJewish community. These were especially important, as, with the exception of Lambert (2007), who included a UK case study in his research on communal leadership in Europe, there has been no previous interview-based study of Anglo-Jewry communal leaders.

The liberal Jewish compromise: Anglo-Jewry and monocultural modernity Anglo-Jewry was shaped by the nature of the unwritten contract established by the Jewish community which developed in England in the period after 1656. The model associated with this settlement has been defined as ‘deferential anglicisation’ (Williams 1985) or ‘the Jewish liberal compromise’ (Levene 1992): Jews defined themselves as a community of faith and not a race or nation apart; they understood themselves as differing from their fellow citizens by virtue of their religion alone; they learned the manners and mores of the dominant culture. British Journal of Sociology 63(1)

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When mass migration of Eastern European Jews took place, after 1870, the existing acculturated community was confronted with the presence of poor, culturally different co-religionists, speaking a different language, Yiddish, and visibly different on the street. The communal leadership provided welfare for the immigrants internally, to avoid placing a burden on the wider nation, while seeking to assimilate them speedily into British culture, by sponsoring a web of institutions for learning Britishness, including Jewish day schools, and by the marginalization or suppression of alternative sources of cultural authority, such as the emerging ultra-Orthodox movement or Yiddish-speaking anarchist and communist movements (Fishman 1975; Williams 1990; Gidley 2003). Communal leaders emphasized the secure British belonging and citizenship of England’s Jews. Thus, for example, the Jews of Russian origin who resisted military service during World War I were condemned within the community, while the exemplary service of those who did sign up was proudly emphasized (Gidley 2003). During the 1930s, when fascism and antisemitism menaced Anglo-Jewry, communal authorities minimized the problem, advocated leaving it to the authorities, cautioned against public responses, and even blamed the ostentatious behaviour of some Jews (Rosenberg 1985). During the Nazi period, the communal response to the destruction of European Jewry was again to counsel quietism and caution (Sompolinsky 1999). The ultra-Orthodox and the Yiddish anarchists found different ways of opposing cultural assimilation; both Communists and Zionists forcefully argued for action against fascism. But such dissent was consistently pushed to the margins of the community. These moments do not demonstrate that British Jews were or even felt secure in Britain. Rather, we argue, they demonstrate that the Jewish communal leadership strategically articulated, both in its representations to wider society and in its internal public debates, a discourse of secure British citizenship and belonging. This discourse drew from an assumption of a monocultural Britain, an understanding of the terms of the liberal contract whereby Jews were tolerated as individuals of the Jewish faith, not collectively as Jews. Assimilation – conformity to bourgeois English values combined with unflinching loyalty to the British state – was the result of this strategy. Two paradoxes emerged. First, within sociological accounts, assimilation is often seen as breaking down communal authority (e.g. Bauman 1990). Certainly, the assimilationist logic, in which Jewish difference is dissolved at the individual level, has a tense relationship with the logic of the communal. However, under the logic of the communal, Jewish difference is re-inscribed at the level of community, as the ground for the legitimacy of the leadership, despite its adherence to the politics of assimilation. Thus, even as communal leaders minimized Jewish difference in stressing secure British belonging, their insistence on policing the behaviour of community members enacted an ethos of communal conformity. The second paradox is that, as British Jews came to feel more secure, this strategy of security began to break down. © London School of Economics and Political Science 2012

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The silence was audible: From assimilation to multiculturalism From 1967, the time of Israel’s Six Day War, we detect a major shift in the strategy whereby the Jewish communal leadership legitimated its authority. Rather than emphasizing secure British citizenship and belonging, communal leaders began to emphasize threats to the community. By this time, British Jews had generally acculturated into British society at large;the policy of assimilation had been broadly successful. Integration was demonstrated by upward social mobility, a move out of the ghetto and into the suburbs. Most UK Jews now did identify as white, British citizens. However, this created two disjunctures. First, it was out of step with the shift in wider British social policy, which was moving away from a monocultural framework of tolerance and assimilation. Against a backdrop of the intensified racism articulated by Enoch Powell in his 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, black Britons began to express themselves collectively and politically, no longer making polite representations as the Jewish community had been, but demanding recognition and equality (Sivanandan 1990). However, as Charikar wrote in 1985, looking back on Powell’s incendiary speech, ‘a specific Jewish response? . . . this silence by the Jewish leadership was audible’ (1985: 15–6). The dominant policy that cohered in this period was ‘integration’, defined by then Home Secretary Roy Jenkins in 1966 ‘not as a flattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity’ (Lester 1967: 267).This shift undermined the core tenets of the liberal Jewish compromise and its policy of deferential anglicization.This disjuncture was to be felt increasingly through the 1970s and 1980s, as Anglo-Jewry continued to define itself primarily as a community of faith and not of ethnicity, at a time when ethnicity increasingly became the grounds on which public goods and recognition were allocated (Kundnani 2007). The second disjuncture was that, with the success of assimilation and without the cultural differences that bound Jews as a collective, British Jews no longer had a cause to be involved in their community.The strategy of security could no longer ensure the legitimacy of the communal leadership. Leaders now increasingly emphasized assimilation’s downside, exemplified by declining rates of religious observance and increasing rates of out-marriage.The period from 1967 to the late 1980s, then, was a transitional period, with some communal leaders beginning to absorb the idea of ethnic community and the implications of pluralism. If the lingering assimilationist attitude was out of step with emerging multiculturalism, there was also a significant continuity. John Eade has described one of the features of 1970s–80s multiculturalism:‘the construction of unitary constituencies . . . partly encouraged by state policies and practices which led to the funding of specific organizations on an extensive scale during the 1980s’ (1996: 63). This kind of unitary constituency was precisely how most Anglo-Jewish leaders already imagined the community. British Journal of Sociology 63(1)

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Although some Jewish communal institutions and leaders, most notably the Board of Deputies and the Chief Rabbinate, have long treated and to some extent still treat Anglo-Jewry as such a unitary constituency, the community is better understood sociologically as a heterogeneous ‘community of communities’ (Commission on Representation of the Interests of the British Jewish Community 2000). Leaving aside its ethnic, class and geographic diversity, it is divided by religious affiliation (although affiliation and belief are not always coterminous ). The 2006 figures suggested that two thirds of Jewish households are affiliated with a synagogue (Hart and Kafka 2006). Of these, half belong to a centrist orthodox synagogue, the largest denomination being the United Synagogue – although they do not necessarily cleave to strict orthodox practice.2 One third belong to a synagogue affiliated to a non-orthodox body, the largest of which is the Movement for Reform Judaism. A tenth belong to one of the many small synagogues associated with the fast-growing ultra-orthodox minority. Official relations between denominations are tense, with orthodox bodies and rabbis largely refusing to accept the legitimacy of non-orthodox Jewish institutions. The legitimacy of communal representative and umbrella bodies is constantly in question. The Chief Rabbi is associated with the United Synagogue and his authority is not recognized by non-orthodox bodies and is viewed with suspicion by the ultra-orthodox. The Board of Deputies, the longestestablished representative body, is made up of representatives from orthodox and non-orthodox synagogues but not from ultra-orthodox synagogues and the unaffiliated are largely unrepresented.

Will we have Jewish grandchildren? Insecurity from within Despite the heterogeneity of Anglo-Jewry, individual leaders and institutions have still been able to set a community-wide agenda. One key intervention was made on 1 September 1991, by the new Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, in his induction address outlining the challenges he aimed to address. Sacks emphasized that Jews were ‘one people’, but ‘we are more deeply divided than at almost any time in our history’ and that ‘these are fundamental rifts which threaten the very integrity of Jewry . . . as a single people’. He concluded that ‘the Jewish people . . . has lost its way’ (Sacks 1991). Sacks’ address was characterized both by its willingness to spell out the weaknesses of the AngloJewish community and by its ambition in setting out its agenda. This duality was an important characteristic of a new strategy of insecurity that cohered in the British Jewish community in the early 1990s. Central to the unfolding of this strategy was what we see as a ‘reflexive turn’ within the community, a process in which the communal leadership came to scrutinize Anglo-Jewry and reflect on its practice with an unprecedented © London School of Economics and Political Science 2012

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rigour, reflecting and illuminating the reflexive turn within wider society identified in the sociological literature (Lash 1994). It also reflected another wider social shift in the 1990s, of ‘faith-based’ groups and identities being given an increasingly prominent role in social provision, education and policy, despite declining rates of affiliation across most faiths (Dinham 2009), creating a powerful impetus for communal professionalization and self-reflection. Selfreflection in the Jewish community was characterized by the use of research to identify the sources of internal insecurity. A sophisticated series of demographic studies in the 1970s and 1980s (e.g. Haberman, Kosmin and Levy 1983) had estimated the Anglo-Jewish population at a third of a million, a massive step down from the figure of 450,000– 500,000 that had for a number of years been in common use by communal leaders. This picture jarred with the discourse of secure British belonging that the communal leadership still, to some extent, espoused. In an interview we conducted, the leading British Jewish demographer of the time, Barry Kosmin, recounted a discussion with a Jewish MP and communal leader: [He] said ‘we’ve got half a million Jews, politically I’ve always said we have half a million Jews, I need to have half a million Jews’ and all the rest of it . . . He said that we can’t have a declining Anglo-Jewry, and I said well how can you do it? You can’t explain, you know, that you have half the number of marriages now as in 1945. And he said it doesn’t really matter. This denial of decline represents the lingering power of the strategy of security into the 1980s. A turning point was 1990, when, in the USA, the Council of Jewish Federations sponsored the National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS), led by Kosmin who had relocated there (Kosmin et al. 1991). The headline finding was a 52 per cent out-marriage rate. This figure was to be much quoted in US Jewish policy-making as a communal ‘wake-up call’– a concern echoed in Britain, quoted in speeches by the Chief Rabbi through the 1990s, and remarked on by some of our interviewees as a key moment of change in communal policymaking in the UK. For instance, one senior communal figure remembers: I’d been following Barry’s work very closely throughout the 80s. It was really Barry’s findings in the 1991 NJPS that finally made the thing click for me. The NJPS engendered a dramatically increased respect for and investment in social research in the UK. For a decade from the mid-1990s a series of rigorous research reports were conducted, oriented towards strategic planning in the community (Kahn-Harris and Gidley 2010: chapter 2). By 2007, when a demographic analysis of the UK Jewish population was published, based on the 2001 Census (which had included a religion question for the first time) (Graham, Schmool and Waterman 2007), the community had significantly changed. British Journal of Sociology 63(1)

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Despite the finding that the community had dropped well below 300,000, the publication did not trigger the soul-searching that had been seen in the early 1990s, as a process of institutional and communal transformation was now well underway. In contrast to the 1980s when research on Anglo-Jewry was a marginal activity, communal leaders had used research to develop a more sophisticated self-understanding. Research had subjected communal practices to unprecedented scrutiny and allowed the concerns of Jews of a variety of kinds to be shared in communal debates. In short, by the end of the century the Jewish community had become more of a ‘reflexive community’ (Lash 1994). This reflexivity had significant limits: it was suspicious of qualitative research, of the possibility that out-married Jews or their children could develop new forms of Jewish identities, of talk of multiple and hybrid identities. But it helped to ground a period of increased communal dynamism and institutional transformation, under the rubric of ‘Jewish continuity’. The concept of Jewish continuity was developed from the late 1980s in the USA and Israel by a cluster of organizations and individuals involved in Jewish education. These emphasized that the survival of Jewish community could not be taken as a given, but must be worked for. This survival, they argued, was not about specific elements of Jewish culture, but of the community as a collective. At the heart, for them, was the Jewish family; out-marriage was seen as danger to survival. Alongside this was the sense of a need for strong, unequivocal, situated Jewish identities – not for free-floating multiple ones. And, finally, action was required to ensure this survival, principally in the field of Jewish education. Paradoxically, then, the communal leadership understood that dramatic institutional innovation was required, while the discourse was frequently a defensive one, emphasizing the reconstruction of the traditional family. This discourse was articulated by the new Chief Rabbi. It lay at the heart of his Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve it (Sacks 1994), which amplified the demographic ‘wake-up call’ by emphasizing internal sources of communal insecurity. It was embodied in a new communal organization launched under Sacks’ direction in 1993, Jewish Continuity. Jewish Continuity sought to act as a catalyst for communal innovation and renewal, through funding new initiatives and through developing its own. A double page advert in the Jewish Chronicle announced the launch, unambiguously emphasizing Jewish insecurity, drawing on the demographic data generated during the community’s reflexive turn: Every day for the last forty years, we have been losing ten Jews a day. From a community of around 450,000 in the 1950s, we now stand at less than 300,000. And it’s getting worse, much worse. Today, more than half of young Jews are not marrying, are marrying out, or are leaving the community in some other way. Jews are not dying but Judaism and Jewish identity are . . . © London School of Economics and Political Science 2012

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Is this the end then? Having survived exile, expulsion, pogroms and genocide, are those the last throes of the Jewish people in the diaspora?3 The organization’s significance lay in its reflexive attempt to use the strategy of ‘insecurity from within’ to engender communal change, pioneering the reflexively-grounded attempts at Jewish renewal that became a feature of a wave of new and rejuvenated communal institutions. But Jewish Continuity was marked by two tensions: between religious orthodoxy and cross-communal pluralism; and between communal conservatism and communal innovation. The first tension related to Sacks’ role. He aspired to be the Chief Rabbi for the whole community – to practise what he called ‘inclusivism’ towards every Jew, without practising a pluralism that recognized the validity of their denominations (Sacks 1993). But he regularly deferred to the ultra-orthodox clerics at the right end of the communal theological spectrum. His desire to placate the ultra-orthodox resulted in repeated conflict with the non-orthodox. Most notoriously, he caused outrage when, following the 1996 death of Hugo Gryn, UK Reform Judaism’s most respected rabbi, Sacks tried to justify speaking at Gryn’s memorial service (although he did not attend the funeral) in a private letter to a senior strictly Orthodox cleric, subsequently leaked to the Jewish Chronicle. In rabbinic Hebrew, he wrote of his ‘pain’ in being obliged to praise ‘one of those that destroy the faith’. The letter’s publication caused enormous controversy and deep offence to the non-Orthodox and undermined Sacks’ credibility in working cross-communally (Alderman 1997; Persoff 2010). Jewish Continuity embodied the tensions in Sacks’ attitude to communal pluralism. It sought to rejuvenate the entire British Jewish community. Yet it initially resisted funding non-orthodox run programmes, eventually compromising by setting up an ‘arm’s length’ fund open to all while continuing to exclude non-orthodox denominations from the main body of its work. This ambiguity was never resolved. Remarkably, in separate interviews we conducted, the Chief Executive of Jewish Continuity, Clive Lawton, and its lay Chair, Michael Sinclair, continued to disagree on what the organization was set up to do. Sinclair remembers: This was an initiative of the Chief Rabbi, and it was an Orthodox organization. It was going to, all of its programmes and activities were going to be available to everybody. So, in that sense, it was cross-communal than it was, I mean it was for everybody, and so it was available equally to all Jews, but it was an Orthodox organization that would be run in accordance with the Normative Judaism; In contrast, Lawton remembers: What I found very attractive about Jewish Continuity was in all its public articulation it was cross-communal. It was divergent, it was interested in British Journal of Sociology 63(1)

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different ways of doing things, it was not insistent on a definition of how one ought to be Jewish or any of those things. The second tension, between conservatism and innovation, occurred within the organization itself. Jewish Continuity sought to challenge and even shock the community into doing things differently – but it also sought to work with existing institutions. It was funded via a grant from the Joint Israel Appeal (JIA) but did not see itself as accountable to that organization or its funders. It sometimes funded creative, innovative, even anti-establishment initiatives – but it did so with money that came from the communal establishment and thus was continuously scrutinized. Some of the more unconventional programmes that it funded – a Jewish puppet theatre and a Jewish group in Argyll, Scotland – were mentioned by a number of our interviewees as undermining the organization’s credibility. Ultimately, in 1997, Jewish Continuity was merged with JIA to form a new organization, the United Jewish Israel Appeal (UJIA), which would be explicitly pluralist and have no association with the Chief Rabbi. Although a much more disciplined organization than Jewish Continuity, UJIA went on to become a catalyst and funding source for educational initiatives across the community. Although short-lived, the legacy of Jewish Continuity is significant. Powered by the fear of a declining community emphasized in the discourse of insecurity, it profoundly affected a generation of communal leaders and helping to effect a new communal prioritization of Jewish education, at all levels and for both children and adults; it kickstarted a proliferation of new communal institutions and fundamental changes in the practices of old ones. Its agenda has been mainstreamed within the community, sometimes termed ‘Jewish renewal’. The Jewish renewal agenda, as articulated in communal documents and our interview data, emphasizes the practical ways in which Jewish continuity might be achieved, through effective organization, planning and leadership, and through education. The number of children attending Jewish day schools expanded: no longer conceived of as institutions for anglicizing Jewish children, as they had been during the period of the strategy of security, but now as spaces in which Jewish children could be protected from the insecurities of multiculturalism to develop strong and unified Jewish identities to ensure communal survival But renewal also occurred in the fields of arts and culture and adult education with initiatives such Simcha on the Square, a major public (and publicly funded) celebration of Jewish London; the Jewish Community Centre for London with its rich programme of cultural events; and Limmud, a cross-communal conference and community of learning. It is striking therefore that many of our interviewees who were pivotal in the development of the strategy of insecurity were, in the late 2000s, extremely positive about the changes that have occurred in Anglo-Jewry. Chief Rabbi Sacks for example, summarizes how the community has changed as follows: © London School of Economics and Political Science 2012

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It is very, very much more creative, and in many ways more creative than any other Diaspora Jewish community. I mean no other Diaspora community created something like Limmud. . . . We have built more schools faster pro rata than any other Diaspora Jewish community. Now, how good is that? So I think Anglo-Jewry is so much more energetic and creative, and I don’t know what a member of high Victorian Anglican Judaism would make about today’s laid-back, thoroughly alternative, diverse and extremely creative community. The insecurities emphasized in the 1990s came to anchor a new legitimacy for the communal leadership. The emphasis on insecurity and the reflexivity which flourished in the wake of the NJPS did not open the way to postmodern multiple identities, but instead strengthened the idea of community. This resonates with the wider sociological literature: Sennett, for example, argues that one of the unintended consequences of contemporary insecurity is that it has ‘aroused a longing for community’ (1999: 138), while Bauman has suggested that the uncertainties of liquid modernity have stimulated a desire for community as ‘like a roof under which we shelter in heavy rain’ (2001: 1).

A Tsunami of antisemitism: insecurity from without4 In the current century, the Anglo-Jewish emphasis on communal insecurity continued, but now the main threat identified was external: anti-Semitism. While, in private and in public, Anglo-Jewish leaders have in recent years praised the renewed confidence and dynamism of the community, paradoxically, our interviewees and a great weight of texts circulating in the Jewish public sphere also emphasized a renewed danger to the Jewish community: ‘the new antisemitism’. There are a number of overlapping definitions of ‘the new antisemitism’: hatred of or discrimination against Jews as a nation (rather than as a religion, as in Christian antisemitism, or as a race, as in modern racial antisemitism), or hatred of Jews disguised behind a non-racial language of anti-Zionism, or a globalized rather than a nationalist form of antisemitism, or an antisemitism that draws on leftist, anti-imperialist and indeed anti-racist, rather than reactionary themes (Ignaski and Kosmin 2003). Other commentators, especially on the left, argue that there is no such thing as a new antisemitism, or that those who use the term tend to exaggerate its importance (Lerman 2003). Identification of the factors that are now understood as the new antisemitism go back to the period of the 1967 Six Day War (Forster and Epstein 1974; Wistrich 1990), but the present discourse began to get widespread traction in the Jewish public sphere after the beginning of the Second Intifada in Israel/Palestine in 2000, a moment marked by the first of a series of spikes in violent antisemitism British Journal of Sociology 63(1)

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in Britain, France, Canada and elsewhere (Laurence and Vaisse 2006; Whine 2003), as well as by the emergence of increasingly strident criticisms of Israel within left and liberal opinion (Hirsh 2007), leading to Chief Rabbi Sacks to talk of a ‘tsunami of antisemitism’ (2006). While more sophisticated theorists of the new antisemitism (Taguieff 2004; Harrison 2006; Hirsh 2007) are very clear about what was qualitatively different about the new antisemitism, the discourse that circulated in the Jewish public sphere tended to emphasize its continuity with the old, seeing it as ‘old poison in a new bottle’ (Foxman 2007: 39). The discourse circulates in widely different contexts, from academic and policy circles to the mainstream Jewish press: it travels, with issues highlighted in American, Israeli or continental European context being picked up in the UK. As with insecurity from within, the Institute for Jewish Policy research was important in developing new antisemitism discourse as part of a new strategy of insecurity, publishing in 2003 one of the first works on the new antisemitism in the UK (Ignaksi and Kosmin 2003). New antisemitism discourse is operationalized by communal leaders and has motivated support for a variety of organizations in Anglo-Jewry focusing on combating this threat, particularly including the Community Security Trust, which monitors and protects against violent threats. Just as the statistics of demographic decline were invoked in the 1990s, antisemitic incidents statistics are invoked now. The development of new pro-Israel campaigns and institutions was also strongly connected to the strategy of insecurity from without, such as the British Israel Communications and Research Centre (which advocates in Britain for the state of Israel). The insecurities emphasized by in this discourse have also mobilized large numbers of British Jews to pro-Israel rallies in London and Manchester, most notably in Trafalgar Square in May 2002. Again, a discursive emphasis on insecurity was matched by confident, public displays of Jewish presence that would have been unthinkable in an earlier period of official monoculture. Many of our interviewees perceived the rise of new antisemitism as part of a shocking and unpleasant new development linked to the rise of Islamic terrorism. One communal leader said: I have notes from the conversations we had on the 12th and 13th and how we realized that something was happening here and nobody knew what it was Mr Jones, and there was a seismic and paradigm shift taking place on the World stage and that something had to be done to sort of reconceptualize what was going on. The emergence of what are seen as antisemitic tropes in the mainstream media were also seen as shocking and as a betrayal from the liberal left. As another communal leader recalled: I was surprised at the callous indifference to the feelings of Jews. I don’t mind them turning round and saying well the bloody Israelis are a bunch of © London School of Economics and Political Science 2012

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colonialists, they’re no better than the Belgians were in the Congo or the French were in Algeria or the British were in India or Ireland. But you don’t accuse fifty years after the war Jews of being Nazis. It’s a completely different kind of thing. When you accuse Jews of being Nazis, it means you’re either uncaring or you’re deliberately trying to provoke and hurt. Defending British Jews from these sources of insecurities from without has become a key source of the legitimacy of communal authority. Communal leaders who express doubts about the centrality of these issues to Anglo-Jewry are often condemned in the Jewish public sphere, as when the president of the Board of Deputies suggested in 2009 that criticism of Israel in Britain was not ‘novel, unique or endemic’.5 Other communal leaders argue that antisemitism, while a problem, is under control because of the efforts made by communal institutions: Look, you will have the CST report for last year. The number of antisemitic attacks is too high. But it’s actually relatively low, thank God, and I hope it remains that way. Yeah, we’ve become used to having security outside synagogues and schools and Jewish buildings but it hasn’t affected the way that we live our lives other than the acknowledgement that when you go to a synagogue, you’re going to see a security guard or drop the kids off at school, there’s going to be a security guard there. The way in which the new antisemitism is inextricably bound up with the politics of Israel/Palestine has led to many Jewish people criticizing the communal leadership on this issue, claiming that the new antisemitism is exaggerated and/or that new antisemitism discourse is mobilized to defend Israel and suppress dissent. The high profile launch of the Independent Jewish Voices group in 2007 declared a ‘time to speak out’ against the official leadership. Although most of these attempts at dissent were relatively small-scale, dominated (although not exclusively) by secular Jews marginal to the mainstream Jewish community, part of the motivation for some activists is the creation of a democratized and more pluralist community (Lerman 2007). But it is ironic that the communal leadership, which from the 1930s to the 1980s, as we saw above, consistently downplayed and denied the risk of antisemitism, is now highlighting it, while the community’s dissenters, once insistent on putting the issue on the table, now downgrade it, prompting Hirsh (2006) to describe them as ‘the new conservatives’. This shift indicates the distance travelled in the journey from the assimilationist discourse of security to today’s discourse of insecurity. The dignity of difference: Jewish community and the politics of multiculture This article has argued that the last century has seen a shift between two strategies used to legitimate Anglo-Jewish communal leadership, from a British Journal of Sociology 63(1)

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strategy of security to a strategy of insecurity. We have detailed complex institutional changes that, while they may have had wide implications within the British Jewish community, were conducted with little apparent reference to wider circumstances. As we have argued, not only have Jews often been suspicious of multicultural discourse, scholars interested in multiculturalism and minority issues in Britain have rarely considered the Jewish experience. We would contend, though, that our research has raised issues that have important implications for multiculturalism in general and for other minorities in particular. The politics of security – the insistence on secure British citizenship and belonging – came with a heavy price: the hasty death of Yiddish culture and of the cultural vitality of those groups in the community who would not or could not assimilate. Multiculturalism, in some ways, stems from the refusal from other minorities to pay that price. For a brief moment at the turn of the century, multiculturalism was seen in a positive light in the British public debate. Jonathan Sacks’ book The Dignity of Difference, published in 2002 but written largely between 1998 and 2001, resonated well with this moment. It argued that the classical liberal ideal of toleration was no longer enough; instead, a positive theology of difference was required, a more fundamental respect for the diversity that makes us human. This sort of multiculturalism was challenged in the early twenty-first century by a series of events that appeared to highlight some of the dangers of diverse society, most notably the disturbances in northern towns in the summer of 2001 and the 7/7 bombings by British-born Muslims in 2005. These events led to the articulation of a critique of multiculturalism from both the left and the right. A series of reports called for ‘community cohesion’ as a way forward (McGhee 2008). The new cohesion literature attacked what it described as a form of de facto apartheid generated by municipal multiculturalist strategies. The new emphasis was on common bonds and the obligations, rather than rights, of groups. Within the Jewish community, this position was strongly argued by Melanie Phillips (2004), who claimed that ‘If citizenship is to mean anything at all, minorities must sign up to an overarching set of British values rooted in the culture of the majority . . . The phrase “multicultural society” is a contradiction in terms because multiculturalism is a recipe for social disintegration’. Rattansi (2002) and Back et al. (2002) have characterized this new consensus as a ‘new assimilationism’, while Kundnani (2007) has called it ‘the end of tolerance’. Jonathan Sacks reflected this shift, turning away from the position he had taken in The Dignity of Difference (2002). In The Home We Build Together (2007) he argued that multiculturalism was divisive and that common culture and common values are needed to glue a diverse society together. Drawing ‘lessons’ from the Jewish experience for other minorities is fraught with difficulty. Jews can at times be treated and may see themselves as a ‘model minority’ to which other groups should aspire, which may ignore the specificity of different groups’ experiences and their different exposure to racism and © London School of Economics and Political Science 2012

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discrimination (Goldstein 2006). Nevertheless, there remain some aspects of the British Jewish experience that may suggest lessons for others. One of the most important lessons is that the communal leadership strategy that aimed to ensure the security of British Jews was in a fundamental sense too successful. While it helped the British Jewish community became a prosperous and wellintegrated one, the strategy also took a heavy toll on the community’s intellectual and cultural vitality. The ethos of assimilation, for example, left Jewish writers working in the Yiddish tradition marginal in the community, and the rich cultural heritage of Yiddish modernity faded more quickly in the UK than elsewhere in the diaspora. Assimilation, reducing Jewishness to private faith, diluted the motivation for identifying with Jewishness in a period of secularization. This downside of assimilationism, which contributed to the demographic decline of the community that became so visible in recent decades, should sound a note of caution about a return to an officiallysanctioned strategy of assimilation in British society at large. The second wider lesson for sociology that is that ethnic community is not a given. As Harris (2001) and Alleyne (2002), among others, have argued, many versions of multiculturalism understand cultural difference in terms of a patchwork or mosaic of different cultural or ethnic ‘communities’, each homogeneous and discrete. The centrality of ‘community’ in ethnic studies today can sometimes reinforce the notion of unalterable difference between and sameness within ‘ethnic communities’. For Harris, this model cannot always accommodate the notion that differences within may be of greater significance than differences between; the notion of ‘ethnic community’ can obscure the complex social networks or webs of social relations, and conjunctures of the local and global, which make up diasporic peoples. Anglo-Jewish community has been messy, contingent, fluid, evolving and contested. Communal leaders have had actively and artfully to create community, mobilizing the membership through a discourse first of security and then of insecurity. And at each moment, this has been resisted, by immigrant radicals and Zionists in the age of assimilation, by anti-racists in the period of transition, and by the critics of the ‘new antisemitism’ in the current moment. These facts undermine any essentialist account of homogeneous ethnic communities, and caution against essentialist forms of multiculturalism. Third, tracking these changing strategies and discourses illuminates wider changes in British society – from an official monoculture to an official multiculturalism and from a cultural orientation, alongside the emergence of reflexivity and risk society – and shows how these changes impact on minorities. Under conditions of official monoculture, Jewishness was reduced to private faith and Jews were encouraged to demonstrate their secure British citizenship and belonging in order to demonstrate their entitlements to the goods of liberal citizenship. Only with the emergence of official multiculturalism were British Jews able to understand themselves as an ethnic community rather British Journal of Sociology 63(1)

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than a community of faith. In the context of a wider concern with insecurity, the leadership in this later phase emphasized risks and security needs rather than entitlement to goods. This enabled innovation in communal infrastructures, as the leadership harnessed wider society’s emphasis on insecurity in order to legitimate their authority. (Date accepted: November 2011

Notes 1. The research and writing was completed with the assistance of grants from the Rothschild Foundation Europe, the Memorial Fund for Jewish Culture and the Economic and Social Research Council, for which we are grateful. We are also very grateful for the generosity of our interviewees in giving us their time and valuable insights. 2. Orthodox Judaisms are based on a commitment to following the precepts of Jewish law, treated as delivered to Moses by God on Mount Sinai. Centerist or ‘modern’ orthodoxy believes that orthodox practice is compatible with a full engagement in modernity, whereas ultra-orthodox (or ‘charedi’) Jews, distance themselves from other Jews and from non-Jews as far as possible. The various progressive or nonorthodox Judaisms are based on belief in varying degrees of mutability of divine revelation and Jewish practice. 3. Jewish Chronicle 17 December 1993, pp. 8–9. 4. We have devoted more space to the reflexive turn and concern with ‘insecurity

from within’ than we will to the new antisemitism and ‘insecurity from without’. This is because in the former period saw intracommunal debates that left relatively little trace in the historical record. In the later period, partly because of the greater communal confidence ultimately generated by the reflexive turn, the debates spilled out from the Jewish public sphere into wider political discourse and will therefore be more familiar to readers. 5. Vivian Wineman, ‘Right of Reply: British criticism of Israel is nothing special’ Jerusalem Post 27 July 2009 http://www.jpost. com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1248277904878& pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull. See also: Jonathan Hoffman The status of Israel and of Jews in the UK: ‘Darkness closing’ or ‘business as usual’? Jerusalem Post 1 August 2009 http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite? cid = 1248277944837 & pagename=JPost / JP Article/ShowFull; Simon Rocker, ‘Deputies in row over how to treat hate’ Jewish Chronicle 6 August 2009 http://www.thejc. com/news/uk-news/deputies-row-over-howtreat-hate

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