I grew up in the 1960s as an Orthodox Jew in a semi-parochial community in Brooklyn, New York, a neighborhood tucked between Flatbush, Flatlands, and Canarsie. Although very few of our neighbors were Orthodox, the community must have been 95 percent Jewish. Kathy was the one Catholic kid on the block. Hers was the only window in a half-mile radius that did not display a menorah kindling in December. Since she was the only non-Jew in our world, we assumed all non-Jews were Catholic. Protestants were exotic. There were Italian Catholics, Irish Catholics, Polish Catholics, and Kathy.
All we knew about Catholics — i.e., Christians — was that there had been Crusades in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries assembled to liberate the Holy Land from Muslims, but somehow the English, French, and German Crusaders always managed to get detoured along the Seine or Rhine rivers and end up instead massacring whole Jewish communities. Some communities had outposts that hid Jews, and some bishops risked their own safety to offer Jews sanctuary. But these massacres became indelibly impressed on the Jewish consciousness. To this day, Ashkenazic Jews (descendants of Northern and East European Jewry) recite a prayer every Shabbat morning to remember the martyrs of the Edicts of 4856 (the Hebrew year coinciding with the 1095–1096 First Crusade). A direct cultural and sociological line connects that Holocaust with the one that returned to Germany a millennium later.
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In time, we also learned about the Catholic Church’s Spanish Inquisition, which was established by Spain’s Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand II. It spread on the Iberian Peninsula to Portugal in 1497 when Portugal’s king, Manuel I, married their daughter. The Inquisition tortured and burned Jews. As those two world powers explored the New World, they brought the Inquisition with them. That drove Jews out of South America and into solidly Protestant New Amsterdam. That’s why so many American Jews ended up in what became New York.
Accordingly, like my classmates, I grew up unsure about non-Jews. Did they all despise us, dating back to the biblical Esau’s hatred for his brother, Jacob? Did they really believe the worst canards? I could never ask Kathy. I was six or seven, and so was she. No way to know.
I attended yeshiva Jewish parochial school. As in the movie Hester Street, I wondered a bit, as did the newly immigrated Yiddish-speaking Jewish woman protagonist from Russia, who found herself in the almost exclusively Jewish Lower East Side of Manhattan, “Where do the Goyyim keep in this country?” Everywhere she went — Delancey Street, Rivington Street, Hester Street — all she saw were Jews. “The Goyyim must keep in a different place, no?” she asked. Likewise, I just did not know where I stood with non-Jews. In an abundance of caution, I always assumed the worst. It is easier to be pleasantly surprised than to be crushed with disappointment or, even worse, blindsided.
I experienced my first full encounter with non-Jews when I attended Columbia University, but I knew that was not exactly real life. Even more strangely, I ran for one of three seats to represent the entire undergraduate student body in the University Senate, and I got elected. Everyone at that leftist mecca knew they were voting for a yarmulke-wearing anti-Communist activist for Soviet Jewry. But they liked my gumption. The key issue of the day was tuition increases, and the feeling was: “If this guy can put up half the fight for us that he does for Russian Jews, he’s our guy.” But I still knew I was not living in the real world.
I got another wake-up twenty years later when, as a law student, I was elected to be chief articles editor of the UCLA Law Review. I later learned confidentially that I had been one of the two finalists for the role of editor-in-chief but had been voted down over concerns that I would not be able to fulfill the role because I do not work on Friday nights and Saturdays, the Jewish Sabbath. So there was that. Ultimately, that number two slot served me well these past thirty years, as it helped me win one of the most coveted federal appellate judicial clerkships in America — I would say the best — as well as adjunct professorships. Indeed, my ultimate moment of Enlightenment came while clerking in Louisville.
Federal appellate judges each get to hire three clerks, and Judge Danny Boggs had selected two superstars (plus me for entertainment). One of them, a non-Jewish lady from Knoxville, Tennessee, whose family grew tobacco, one day was bantering with me at a coffee shop: “Y’knoowe, Dowve,” she said in her Southern twang, “until y’all came into my life, I never gave a thote about Jews.”
Wow! I followed up: “Not at all, Kae? Not in Sunday school? Nothing bad about us at all?” And she said: “Dowve, I hate to disappoint yew, but Jews don’t matter in Knoxville. Only one thing matters.”
Me: What’s that?
She: Gradin’ backer. (Brooklyn translation: grading bundles of tobacco for auction.)
The years have marched on. Something has been changing theologically in post-Obama America. I don’t know what tomorrow may hold, and we Jews always have an eye gazing toward Zion, partly from biblical affinity, partly because Israel is to us what Italy is to Italian Americans and Ireland to Irish Americans, and partly because Israel is all we have when the party ends elsewhere. But America no longer is about Christians on Team A and Jews on Team B. Rather, in today’s America, G-d-fearing and Bible-believing devout Christians and Orthodox Jews stand on one side, astride the abyss of secularism and atheism on the other. That is the new landscape.
In 2008, I finally first encountered a Protestant minister. We each were in transition; he was building his new church, and I was establishing my new shul (synagogue). We met at the kosher coffee shop in Irvine. We turned out to share a great many values, with but one stereotypical nuance worthy of a “three-clerics-walk-into-a-bar” joke: he, the Gentile, had been an NHL goalie, and I had been a law professor. But we shared common concerns about Barack Obama’s efforts to erode America’s religious fabric. Our mutually cherished values were under siege given the rise of abortion on demand, homosexual “marriage,” and public cursing, as well as the breakdown in the social order. Pastor John spoke his blessing on Israel and the Jews, and I reciprocated. We bonded, and we have been friends now for sixteen years.
And then I had another revelation. Orange County religious leaders held an urgent meeting to discuss Obama’s efforts to force Catholics and others to insure employees’ birth control costs. As we discussed the Obama blight, a Catholic lay leader invited me to confer with the bishop of the 1.3-million-strong fifty-eight-church diocese in Orange County. And so I met with the late Bishop Tod Brown. It was quite something.
Bishop Brown explained that he knew most heterodox rabbis in Orange County but that never before had he encountered one of me: an Orthodox rabbi. We talked. I shared that we Orthodox Jews believe that every word of the Torah is true. He asked, “But Jews do not literally believe that the Red Sea split or that everyone stood at Mount Sinai and G-d spoke the Ten Commandments, right?”
I answered, “Well, actually, we do.” He continued, “But you believe abortion is a woman’s choice, right?” I said: “Well, actually, we believe our bodies are on loan from G-d, not ours. We may not tattoo them. Assisted suicide is forbidden. We may not cremate them. And the life of the unborn is a life.”
Hmmm.
He asked, “Well, what about gay marriage?” I answered: “Forbidden. And we don’t use the word ‘gay’ for ‘homosexual’ and ‘lesbian.’”
Then, he finally asked it. And though it was a strange question, I understood. “Rabbi Fischer, does your denomination really believe these things, or do just you?”
We Orthodox Jews indeed believe all these things. We have grown to nearly a million in America and another two million in Israel. For the first time in Israel’s history, for example, a majority of the governing coalition’s Knesset members are Orthodox. Those personal exchanges with Pastor John, Bishop Brown, and Bishop Brown’s successor, Bishop Kevin Vann, brought home that Orthodox Jews, devout Catholics, and Bible-faithful Protestants all now speak a similar language. We practically can complete each other’s sentences. On the question of gender, the Bible speaks only of man and woman. It says in Genesis: “And G-d created humankind in His image. In the image of G-d He created him. Male and female He created them.” None of us believe that gender is susceptible to reversal by a surgeon’s scalpel, implanted contrivances, and some stitching.
Art by Bill Wilson
Likewise, Bible-faithful Catholics, Protestants, and Jews are as one unable to consecrate same-sex “marriages.” We are bound by a shared belief that the world was called into being by a Creator Who bestowed on His creation guidelines for conduct. Civil society may legislate as times, social pressures, and political calculations dictate, but His law is eternal, a compass that always points true. Homosexual behavior cannot be shoe-horned into Leviticus 18 and 20, just as prostitution cannot be sanitized as a libertarian value while its immorality is denounced in Deuteronomy 23:18.
We do not believe in assisted suicide. Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who killed many of his patients, was convicted of second-degree murder in 1999 and served eight years in prison. It was murder then, and it is murder now, even if the secularist forces that dominate and manipulate our tools of mass persuasion conspire to redefine murder as though it were life-affirming.
And we are in harmony on our generation’s signature religious-cultural controversy: abortion on demand. For all of us devoted to G-d’s Word, the life of the unborn is precious. While Bible-believing Catholics, Protestants, and Jews may encounter nuances of difference on fine points of interpretation, we share a common horror over the thirty to forty million lives snuffed out during the half a century since Roe v. Wade.
In 1955, Marshall Sklare, the “father of American Jewish sociology,” predicted the demise of Orthodox Judaism in America, calling it “a case study of institutional decay.” Orthodox Jews were not much on the national horizon even a quarter of a century later. Senator Joseph I. Lieberman (D-CT) was quite the anomaly when Al Gore selected him as his 2000 running mate. But the landscape has changed. The Coalition for Jewish Values, founded in 2017, now speaks on public policy for 2,500 Orthodox rabbis in America and is consulted by political figures from both parties. The Orthodox Union, National Council of Young Israel, and Hasidic movements like the Chabad and Satmar number many hundreds of shuls, while the Rabbinical Council of America and the Rabbinical Alliance of America each count close to one thousand Orthodox rabbis in their fraternal associations. Beth Medrash Govoha of Lakewood, New Jersey, alone boasts eight thousand students. In all, Torah Umesorah numbers more than 760 Orthodox Day Schools educating more than 250,000 children.
Orthodox Jews now are ubiquitous throughout American secular opinion journalism. They include Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe, Joel Pollak at Breitbart and Sirius XM, Seth Mandel at Commentary magazine, and even our own Shmuel Klatzkin and me at The American Spectator. Ben Shapiro, with his famous black yarmulka, answers the call too. And newly married Josh Hammer, the opinion editor at Newsweek, speaks proudly of having gone completely “legit kosher,” donning tefillin every morning, studying Maimonides Mishneh Torah, and planning to embrace complete Orthodox practice when he has kids b’ezrat Hashem (with G-d’s help).
Orthodox Judaism has come of age in America.
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