What is the San Francisco Jewish community going to look like halfway through the 21st century?
Maybe we can find a clue in the fact that this Jewish community looks much different from the way it did halfway through the 20th century, yet it has something of the same essence that it did then.
Before I came to San Francisco 50 years ago, the editors of the magazine Commentary had commissioned me to write an article on this Jewish community. In their eyes, it was the country’s least-Jewish community.
In a way, they were right. This was perhaps the most integrated Jewish community in the country. By strict formula, one-third of major appointed city agencies such as the board of education and the police commission were Jewish, one-third Protestant, one-third Catholic. Such a high level of integration bespoke a low level of anti-Semitism — at least as compared with the rest of the country.
As a result, the intensity of Jewish identity had clearly suffered. Some people had disappeared entirely from our ranks.
Jewish religious life was not on prominent public display. San Francisco had also been one of the chief centers of the anti-Zionist Council for Judaism.
But beneath all that, there was at mid-century a stubborn if quiet insistence on Jewish identity among the core of both the leadership and the general Jewish population. It was like a stubborn seed lying in the ground, waiting for spring to bring it to life.
It was, of course, Israel, which initially brought it to more active life. As one former leader of the Council for Judaism told me, “The state of Israel touched a nerve I never thought I had.” But that impulse was also quickened by a generation of Jews who joined a general American search for group identity — which had been dissipating for most Americans.
By the middle of the 1960s, the San Francisco Jewish community was not all that different from Jewish communities in the rest of the country.
The first group in the nation calling itself a regional office of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee was formed here. So was one of the nation’s most active groups on behalf of Soviet Jewry. Jewish clubs popped up in public high schools. Although Orthodox institutions were not as prominent here as in most of the country, for reasons of history, more traditional observance and youth education began to flower, including in the community’s Reform and Conservative circles.
My article had called San Francisco a “laboratory” in which one might find out what integration and the relatively low level of animosity would eventually do to Jewish identity. Now, after 50 years — and over a million words written for Jewish Bulletin columns — I find that was one of my better calls.
By the next mid-century, the affiliated and avowed Jewish population in both San Francisco and the nation will be lower than it is now. Aside from a low rate of fertility, a significant number of Jews are moving away from their identity.
However, a significant number of Jews, among all movements, are seeking to intensify their identity. There will again be that core, that stubborn reproducing seed of the kind that was here in San Francisco, more quietly, 50 years ago.
The Jewish community will be smaller, but more potent. That core will continue to provide strong advocacy for the Jewish community and Jewish causes. That advocacy has been effective not primarily because of the size of the passive Jewish electorate but because of active Jewish participation in the public arena.
All we can do is take hope from the history of the San Francisco laboratory and make sure we keep strengthening that stubborn core.