Free When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry by Gal Beckerman

they "have strong proud-to-be-a-Jew feelings, but the feelings are without content and in fact are more attached to civil rights rhetoric than to Jewish religion, education or culture—rhetoric, because in the lives they lead they are not different from the rest of the Jewish middle class."
    This was a patently conservative critique arguing that the values of these middle-class American Jews actually worked against their own interests, against Jewish continuity and internal cohesion. In the eyes of the critics, this liberal worldview would tear apart, piece by piece, the foundations that girded traditional society. This creative destruction was everywhere, from the explosion of literary form that was the Beat poets to the introduction of the birth control pill to the quagmire in Vietnam and the ensuing mistrust of all government. But for American Jews, these upheavals came at the same time that they were losing the one element that had always helped to bind Jewish identity in the Diaspora: otherness. With the absence of persecution—the forced apartness of the ghetto no longer an issue—the young Jew coming of age in those years of tumult and transition grew more and more alienated from his own background.
    Even the Conservative rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, who believed in the liberalization of American society, who was at the March on Washington, and who would be present with King on Bloody Sunday in March of 1965, came to the conclusion in the summer of 1964 that, as the title of his essay in the
Jewish Frontier
put it, "America Is Galut [Diaspora]": "The Jew cannot settle down in freedom to be himself, 'just like everybody else.' When in his own inner consciousness he begins to approach a real feeling of at-homeness within the larger society, what remains of his Jewish identity is too little and too personalized to sustain a community. It inevitably follows that there is only one possible mode for the survival of a Jewish community in a free society. It can live only by emphasizing what is unique to itself and by convincing its children that that uniqueness is worth having."

    When Lou Rosenblum first arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, to work for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), few Jews lived in his part of town. German Jewish merchants from Bavaria had moved to the midwestern city in 1839 and built the ornate, domed Reform synagogues of Anshe Chesed and Tifereth Israel. Many more Eastern European Jews followed at the turn of the twentieth century. But they always lived east of the Cuyahoga River, which split the city in two. And the Jews kept moving even farther east as the century progressed, eventually settling in the suburbs of Cleveland and in Shaker Heights. By the early 1960s, this community had firmly established itself. The Jews of Cleveland numbered seventy thousand and had an active federation that included branches of all the major national Jewish organizations; a collection of well-attended synagogues; and even a famous national Jewish leader—Abba Hillel Silver, the Zionist defender and brilliant orator who as chairman of the Jewish Agency had stood before the United Nations in 1947 and argued the case for Israeli independence. Although by 1963 he was aging and sick, Silver still preached every Friday night from the pulpit of Tifereth Israel, as he had since 1917.
    All this was in the east, while NACA's lab was in the far west, near the city's airport. This part of the city contained only one small, ailing synagogue; it had been around since 1910 but had suffered during the Depression and never recovered. Its walls were peeling, and the congregation could hardly afford to pay a rabbi's salary.
    Rosenblum moved to the city in 1952, hired by the government to work in the fuel research department of the NACA lab. He had grown up on the distinctly Jewish streets of Flatbush, Brooklyn; barely survived the battle of Okinawa in the Pacific; eventually graduated from Brooklyn College; and then went to