Second, both the Arab world’s chaos and its battles with Iran and jihadism point to improved relations with Israel. We see this happening already, and over time it can expand. The Palestinian issue is now page-10 news, not a headline and not something that much moves Arab governments. And I believe that the status of the Palestinian West Bank population will have changed in 50 years, from subjects of Israel to those of Jordan. Israelis want to separate from the Palestinians but need security, and the long-term solution is the Jordanian army and police. Perhaps the structure 50 years from now will look like something that disappeared 100 years ago, the Austro-Hungarian empire—with one king (by 2065, Abdullah’s son Hussein) and two prime ministers—one for Jordanians and one for Palestinians. Once the Palestinian issue has a different diplomatic face, other Arab governments will be freer to do what Jordan and Egypt have done: make peace with Israel. Relations with Gulf oil producers, who are also potential investors, will be helpful to Israel’s economy. And that will be a richer economy in 2065, benefitting from Israel’s huge gas discoveries.

Just which Arab states will exist in 2065 is harder to predict, but Israel will probably have decent relations with Jordan, Lebanon, Kurdistan, and the independent Druze areas of what used to be Syria.

Israel will find American interest in the Middle East diminished due to North American energy independence, and interest from Asia increased—especially from China and India. While threats to the Persian Gulf and its oil will have lessened with the demise of the Islamic Republic, Israel will still find that the Chinese and Indian navies are patrolling those waters and occasionally visiting the Mediterranean. But its own relations with the world’s two most populous nations will be, as they are now, friendly and economically beneficial.

So 2065 will bring all sweetness and light? No. The American Jewish community will have declined as a percentage of the U.S. population, reducing its clout. And the American left, in whatever party represents it, will be as anti-Israel as the parties of the European left. Support for Israel will remain a divisive issue between left and right. Hatred of Jews in the Muslim world will remain a dangerous virus. Europe will be an increasingly hostile place for Jews, for political and demographic reasons. European Jewish populations will be small, especially after the French Jewish community begins to leave in large numbers. Israel and the United States will form the two poles of the world’s Jewish population, with everyone else playing a very minor role.

With the Holocaust an event more than 100 years in the past in 2065, its role as a cement of the American Jewish community will have dried up as well. Nor will Israel, per se, play that role as it did in the half century after 1948. The cement will be Judaism. Those Jews practicing it, in whatever form, will naturally be attached to one another and to Israel; those Jews not practicing it will drift away from the community and the Jewish state. Even more in 2065 than in 2015, Jews will be thankful for the support of American Christians in sustaining the ranks of the pro-Israel community.

Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Tested by Zion, among other books.

Peter Berkowitz

Of the multitude of factors that shape the Jewish people and that will determine their condition 50 years from now, few are more significant—and more in their hands—than education. Precautions can be implemented to protect against natural disasters, fanatical and ruthless adversaries, and massive disruptions to world markets, while preparations can be undertaken to exploit unexpected windfalls and favorable headwinds. Yet prudent precautions and sensible preparations will be for naught unless Jews understand their tradition and the moral and political conditions that in the 21st century will enable them to preserve it.

Current trends in Jewish education—or, more precisely, in how Jews are educated—are troubling. If these trends persist, the condition of the Jews in 50 years could well be dire.

Educational priorities in Israel and in the Diaspora may differ somewhat, but the education of Jews in both is crucial. A flourishing Israel and a flourishing Diaspora—which increasingly means a flourishing American Jewry, as approximately two-thirds of Jews who live outside of Israel live in America—are inextricably intertwined. While Israel has become the capital of Jewish life to which American Jewry turns for inspiration, Israel depends on Jews in America not only for economic aid and political support in a dangerous world, but also for models of the varieties of Judaism.

Neither the education of Israeli Jews nor that of American Jews, however, is adequate to sustain their flourishing and maintain their alliance.

Israeli Jews grow up informally educated by speaking their native tongue, Hebrew, the language of the Bible and of Jewish liturgy; by a calendar whose rhythms reflect the Jewish year; by living the clash between secularism and Jewish Orthodoxy; and by bearing arms to protect their lives and the Jewish state. At the same time, secular Israelis are deprived by their formal education of access to the riches of the Jewish tradition. Many will graduate from college knowing little of the Bible and the Talmud; the philosophical achievements of Maimonides and Spinoza as well as those of Herman Cohen, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig; the classics of Hebrew literature; and, not least, the roots and major strands of Zionism.

In addition, Israel does a poor job of providing students—secular as well as religious—with a solid grounding in the tradition of freedom. Few college graduates in Israel are conversant with the intertwined moral, economic, and political principles that put into practice the belief—inscribed in the Declaration of the State of Israel as well as in America’s Declaration of Independence—in the equality in freedom of all human beings.

The education of American Jews is in still worse condition. As a consequence of the decline of liberal education in the United States, most American Jews will also graduate college without a basic knowledge of the virtues that underlie free societies; the institutional arrangements through which constitutional government secures liberty and equality under law; and the assumptions, operations, and achievements of free markets. Most American Jews, moreover, will graduate from college, like their Israeli counterparts, unaware of the beauty and wisdom of the Jewish tradition. But unlike young Israeli men and women, most American Jews will, in addition to their other educational disadvantages, lack even minimum competence in Hebrew, which furnishes a gateway both to the study of the Jewish tradition and to the experience of the many dimensions of Israel’s marvelous vitality.

It would be foolhardy to count on reform of public schools in Israel or America. The damage wrought in both countries by the progressive aversion to disciplined transmission of knowledge and the politically correct war on liberty of thought and discussion will take a generation or more to repair.

To protect their long-term interests and to heighten the prospects that in 2065 the condition of their people will be good, Jews in America and in Israel must do what Jews have done throughout their history: reinforce, expand, and, where necessary, build from scratch educational institutions independent of government, in some cases as a supplement to public education and in others as an alternative.

But now Jews—in America and Israel—must go beyond what they have done in the past. It will not be enough for Jews to make sure that their children receive a Jewish education. Because of the sad state of liberal education, Jews must also construct private educational institutions that teach students the principles that support free and democratic government.

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Paul Berman

In epilogue to his wonderful novel from 1930, Jews Without Money (how’s that for a literary reference!), the proletarian writer Michael Gold pictured his poor and oppressed father on the Lower East Side in 1899 looking up from a Yiddish newspaper and saying to his mother: “Great news, Katie! The 20th century is coming next Thursday night!” And Gold remembered his mother’s reply: “Whatever it is, it probably means more trouble for the Jews.” Such is my prediction for 2065.

But will the Jews of 2065 bear up under their difficulties? I remind them (I am assuming that readers in 2065 will be paying attention to our long-ago symposium) that Jewish well-being ought to mean something more than success in the oddly linked fields of demography and military affairs. And it ought to mean more than religious survival, though you would never know this from looking at the question that Commentary’s editors have posed. Jewish civilization is larger, after all, than Judaism the religion. There used to be something called liberal civilization, and, during the century-and-a-half between, say, the 1840s and these latter months of 2015, the civilization of the Jews contributed massively to it. Dear Jews of 2065, there used to be a natural and civilized dedication to universal human rights. Also a commitment to economic progress and equality, not just for Jews. Those are political themes. Something deeper: There used to be a certain Jewish feeling of being at home in the world of philosophy and the arts.

Will a proper and Jewish recollection of those sundry commitments and appreciations and ways of being survive and thrive, amid the glooms of 2065? Dear Jews of the future, some of you, the contented Americans, will disappear into the semiliterate and all-accepting maw of American mediocrity, where your Jewish memory will lose its textures and grandeurs, even if you continue to observe a few rituals. Some of you will disappear into rabbinical fantasies of ancient times, where you will steep in memory unto madness, you and your Islamic counterparts together, alas. But will there be somebody, anybody at all in America or Israel or France or someplace else, who will continue to uphold the broad and generous Jewish-inflected liberalism, cultural and political, of the past? There will be somebody. I squeeze that person’s hand. To that very old-fashioned person I say, “Chin up! Mother Gold’s worries apply to you especially! You had better work up a positive program to guarantee the hardiness and prosperity of your own principles!”

Paul Berman is a columnist for Tablet and the author of Terror and Liberalism, The Flight of the Intellectuals, and other books.

David Brog

The Jewish people and the West are at a crossroads. We are at the same crossroads. We’ve arrived here at the same time.

The timing is not coincidental. The interdependence is not new. The future of both civilizations depends upon the choice each makes today.

One road leads to assimilation. Diaspora Jews who forsake their faith will become Westerners—Americans, Europeans, Argentinians—with little to distinguish them from their neighbors. Israeli Jews who abandon their ancient traditions will become the Hebrew-speaking gentiles of which so many early Zionists warned (and some dreamed).

But the Jews no longer face this dilemma alone. The entire West now confronts the same stark choice. Western man is once again slipping the bonds of the Judeo-Christian culture that undergirds his civilization. Yes, pleasure and ego have always beckoned. But only now do we find increasing numbers of our greatest minds telling us that resistance isn’t merely futile, it’s evil.

As the Jews and the West contemplate the way forward, they confront steadily rising stakes. At one time, a bad decision would have merely jeopardized our culture. Today, the wrong choice will endanger our lives.

This physical threat comes from an ascendant radical Islam. We mustn’t be fooled. Those chanting death to the Jews on Europe’s streets are not the descendants of Christian supremacists. They are almost always the cousins of those currently killing Christians in the Middle East in the name of Islam. We mustn’t be naive. The only reason such slaughter remains largely confined to the Middle East is that radical Islam lacks resources, not will.

The answer to these joint threats—cultural and physical—is the same. It is to turn our backs on the road to assimilation and embark down that other road, the one that leads us home. The answer is for Jews to engage with Judaism. The answer is for the West to embrace its Judeo-Christian roots.

Such return to tradition need not be reactionary. As radical Islam demonstrates daily, faith unchecked by respect for human dignity and reason quickly turns toxic. Happily, respect for both human dignity and reason is a core Judeo-Christian value. And besides, the root of the West’s current crisis is not hubris but low self-esteem.

A West reconnected to its Judeo-Christian roots will overcome its sophomoric spasm of multiculturalism. A West so educated will both acknowledge the reality of evil and recognize the evil of our time. A West so schooled will rediscover the will to fight this evil.

The Jews and the West stand together at the same crossroads. The road toward assimilation looms before us both. It’s a road we have taken before. And we’ve forgotten that it’s a dead end.

Without Judaism, Jews disappear. Those who abandoned their dusty desert rituals for Greek or Roman ways certainly had physical progeny. But these children ceased being Jewish centuries ago.

Fortunately, not all Jews chose to trade the Bible’s blazing moral code for nude olympics and vomitoria. Some clung to their ancient ways. Thanks to them, there are both Jews and a West today.

We mustn’t forget that the West we inhabit is far more than classical civilization electrified. Athens may have been a democracy, but almost every Athenian owned slaves taken from neighboring tribes. Romans may have developed advanced technology, but they also unceremoniously drowned their baby girls in rivers.

The ancients were nice Nazis who elevated their own race—and only the supposedly productive within their race—above the rest of humanity. Modern Nazis, Fascists, and Communists did the same thing with their own race, nation, and class, respectively. And when the West abandons its Judeo-Christian values, the Jews are almost always the ones who perish first.

Where will Jews be in 50 years? The answer depends on the path both the West and the Jews choose today. If the West chooses poorly, Israel and the Jewish people will face an increasingly hostile world with fewer and fewer friends. We’ve already seen enough early signs of this possible future to understand how badly it will end.

If the Jews choose poorly, they will disappear even more quickly. But the West will certainly pay a price for Jewish folly. It will lose its stubborn conscience, its living connection to its most nourishing roots. A West without Jews will more readily revert to the ways of its classical predecessors and become societies less human and less humane. It’s happened before, and not as long ago as we’d like to think.

David Brog is the executive director for Christians United for Israel and the author of Standing with Israel: Why Christians Support the Jewish State and In Defense of Faith: The Judeo-Christian Idea and the Struggle for Humanity.

Angela Buchdahl

In our collective Jewish memory, we came out of Egypt an erev rav, a mixed multitude. As we fled, we accepted like-minded people of all kinds who wanted to join us in this journey to freedom. They were not all Hebrews, but this scrappy, diverse group that stumbled through the wilderness was brought together by the shared and sacred purpose of redemption. And for the first time we were called Am Yisrael: the nation of Israel.
The Torah reminds us that when we came out of Egypt, we were scared, afraid of our own freedom. So many choices. We began to romanticize what it was like to be enslaved: “Do you remember all the leeks and fish we used to eat when we were slaves?”

It’s the most human of impulses. Even today, in an era of unprecedented Jewish freedom, we Jews look back at times of more limited choice with nostalgia: “Do you remember when Jews all lived in the same neighborhood, ate the same foods, joined the same law firms and country clubs, and followed the same rules in the same way?”

But none of us wants to go back to Egypt. Or the ghetto. Or the shtetl. If Judaism can endure only under the physical danger and emotional pressure of enslavement and anti-Semitism, we are not yet redeemed.

It took 40 years for the generation that was enslaved to be replaced by a generation that no longer yearned for Egypt. Fifty years from now, the Jewish people will only know complete freedom: freedom to choose how we want to observe the mitzvoth. Freedom to choose whom to love and marry. Even the freedom to choose whether we will be Jewish at all. So many choices. It is both frightening and a tremendous opportunity.

In 50 years, Jews will be Jewish because they choose Judaism—for its profound meaning and purpose. We will have multitudes of others, like-minded people of all kinds, who will choose to join us as gerei tzedek, righteous converts to Judaism, or as gerei toshav, non-Jews who become part of our community and raise Jewish families. Am Yisrael will still be a nation set apart, but it will be forged together in our freedom, not thrust apart by our enemies.

In 50 years, we will have eradicated Jewish diseases. Not only Tay-Sachs and Gauchers. But our racism. And narrow tribalism. And other diseases resulting from generations of insularity and inbreeding. No longer will you be able to identify the Jews in a room by their “Jewish” last names or “Jewish” appearance.

But you will remain able to recognize your fellow Jews—because you will recognize them from Sinai, when we all stood together, all men, women, children, and converts, woodchopper and water-drawer alike, and accepted Torah and our covenantal relationship with God. Our kinship will run deeper than ethnic identification, and we will have a broader understanding of Chosenness—because in significant part, the choice will have been our own.

In 50 years, we still will be the Chosen People. Chosen to pull ourselves and others out of mitzrayim, the narrow places. Chosen to share our particular light with all people. Chosen to help shape a redeemed world. But in 50 years, when we truly know what it is to be free, we will be confident enough to welcome anyone who wants to choose us. Confident enough to allow their unique cultures and perspectives to etch new crowns of Torah on our Jewish practice and observances. Am Yisrael will again be a mixed multitude.

And we may just look over Nebo and glimpse the Promised Land.

Angela Buchdahl is senior rabbi of Central Synagogue in New York City.

Shalom Carmy

My father, an immigrant factory worker who studied Talmud and sacrificed to keep Shabbat, would have been satisfied to know, 60 years ago, that his son would uphold his religious standards. Had he known that I would spend my life with hundreds of first-rate students, living for the study of Torah and religious observance, even while vigorously engaging Western culture, and that I myself would feel at home among non-Jewish intellectuals who respected Shabbat, honored kashrut, and valued Torah, he might have thought the Messiah was nigh. Had I told him that support for Israel, in 2015, would be an acrimonious issue dividing liberals and conservatives, he would have been puzzled and dismayed, but not wholly incredulous. Had I suggested that the cultural elites would despise people like us for professing traditional family ethics, he would have accused his bright boy of arguing for effect. Such is the fate of prognostication.

How many contemporary Jews have genuinely encountered a religious individual, meaning a person whose life is centered on the service of God? I don’t mean well-informed Jews, even those plugged into Jewish practice and organized religion. Those who know saintly men and women in their sober joy, their undistracted attentiveness to their fellows, who are swept up in the passionate intellectual precision of their quest for God in Torah, and infected by the sheer matter-of-factness of their uncompromised and undivided commitment to God, are driven and inspired to live and transmit their vision, as best as we can.

Can this make a difference for a larger public? Everything militates against it: the weakness of religious institutions, the trivialization of religious language, the ascendancy of relativism, utilitarianism, and entertainment as lifestyle axioms. Why should spiritual life be less commodified and impersonal than the rest of late capitalist culture? If these trends reign, external religious observance may yet survive; age-old rituals continue to fill psychological needs and enact ethnic pride or political pageant; charismatic leaders, harmless or malignant, will still attract followers; and a lush variety of superstition may proliferate where living models of service to God are absent or invisible. But the lines of communication between the un-extinguished and indomitable pockets of God-anchored life and mass society will have been severed.

Burke’s great secular wisdom: The stock of reason of each transient coterie is small; we must draw on the “general bank and capital of nations, and ages.” It goes without saying that the dominant dogma of “presentism,” which for current “enlightened” opinion makes truth, cuts off communication with previous generations and with all ways of thinking that are not aligned with the political correctness of the moment. That includes revealed religion. And so the resonance of traditional Judaism within the broader society depends on our success in countering the narrow parochialism that asserts its dominance in the public square and private psyche. I suspect that will require personal education. The mere conveying of information will not suffice. And that will also require vital, mutually fructifying encounters between us, the pillars of Orthodoxy, and those thinking individuals for whom those lines of communication still matter.

In 50 years, the fate of the Jewish people will appear to have been determined by many macro and micro developments we cannot foresee: the accidents of military technology and political fashion, the effects of environmental change, the vicissitudes of economic and social progress or degeneration. Within those limits, our destiny is what we make of it.

Shalom Carmy teaches Jewish studies and philosophy at Yeshiva University and is editor of Tradition, a journal of the Rabbinical Council of America.

Phyllis Chesler

Those who still believe that Jewish history can never again repeat itself must dispense with that illusion. Jewish history has always repeated itself and may continue to do so until the coming of the Messiah.
Fifty years from now, despite the cognitive war against the Jews—a global campaign whose big lies far overshadow all previous blood libels and which has accomplished a “perfect storm” alliance between Holocaust-denying Islamists and a politically correct Western intelligentsia—Israel, the world’s Jew, will still be here, a shining beacon of humanity.

In 1980, on the front pages of the Israeli media, I declared that anti-Semitism was on the rise; that anti-Zionism would be central to the new anti-Semitism; that politically correct Westerners, employing the left’s language of liberation, would lead the unholy charge. Israeli and Diaspora Jewish organizations did not listen. By the early 21st century, Zionism was considered a “Nazi, apartheid, colonialist” conspiracy; human bombs were “victims”; and Israel, who defended rather than endangered both her own and “enemy” civilians, was the “aggressor.” Anti-Zionism allowed anti-racist racists to enjoy their Jew-hatred without guilt.

In the past, local blood libels led to pogroms, massacres, and exiles. It is unlikely that Israel and Jews will totally escape the consequences of a defamation campaign gone viral.

Unlike other countries, however, Israel has been forced to become the world’s leading expert in counterterrorism because of continual and intolerable attacks. In response to the slow-motion Holocaust launched against it in 2001–2002, Israel stanched the flow of blood by building a much-maligned security wall and utilizing the Iron Dome. At high cost, Israel will continue to defend herself—even as other nations fall to ruin.

Prime Minister Netanyahu is fighting for the survival of Western values. Most European and American leaders are not.

Unchecked, Islamic barbaric atrocities will escalate, and nuclear catastrophes could be inevitable. This will affect many nations. The question is whether the Jewish state will be spared.

History teaches us that Jews have survived and flourished even after the gravest of devastations. Thus, the promised “remnant” of Jews will endure. Israel will continue making unexpected allies: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, India.
Diaspora Jews—not Israel—are spiritually endangered by their abandonment of Israel. Fifty years from now, secular, assimilated, anti-Zionist Jews—indifferent to or hard-hearted toward the fate of Israel—may disappear without a trace. As individuals, they may find themselves as vulnerable to anti-Semitic persecution as Jews were before 1948.

Can our Judeo-Christian civilization be saved? Its ideals and values are being vanquished in the Muslim world—and Europe is under siege.

Perhaps Europe has reaped a terrible, karmic destiny. The continent that repeatedly massacred millions of nonviolent and assimilated Semites (the Jews) has now reaped the whirlwind of 40–50 million hostile, unassimilated Semites (the Muslims) who are determined to destroy post-Enlightenment Europe.

A half-century from now, Europe will no longer be an enlightened, Judeo-Christian civilization. The Jews of Europe will have gone elsewhere.

America’s fate hangs in the balance.

Under Barack Obama, we have lost our standing and our soul. America has made common cause with Islamist barbarians who behead, stone, crucify, and publicly gang-rape the innocents, both Muslim and infidel.
America may be in for some terrible times—Israel is used to dealing with that as a given. America is not.

Judaism’s children (Christianity and Islam) mounted a bloody rebellion against Judaism’s parental authority. Historically, Christians worshipped a dead Jew whose crucifixion redeemed them; they continued killing Jews who denied this, repeating the patricide. Muslims felt theologically offended, dishonored, by anyone who did not convert to Islam. After 21 centuries, Christianity began to change. Islam is only 13 or 14 centuries into the game and may need another seven centuries before it initiates reforms.

Until then, do not expect those Muslims who are consumed with infidel hatred and jihad compulsions to renounce their views of Western-style freedoms, infidels, apostates, dissidents, women, or the “wrong” kind of Muslim.
Since Jews have always been travelers, perhaps Israel should invest in space travel and make preparations for lift-off in the event of nuclear holocaust. Let it lift the nation, holy unto God, its plants, animals, people, cities, archeological levels—the very earth itself—aloft, as in a Chagall painting, until it is safe to return.

Phyllis Chesler, professor emerita of psychology at the City University of New York, is the author of 16 books, including The New Anti-Semitism.

Ben Cohen

Had the keenest Jewish minds of 1945 been asked to imagine the Jewish future 50 years thence, it is likely that their predictions would have been distinctly cautious. All around them was the dawning realization of the Holocaust’s scale, the continuing persecution of Jews in the Communist and Arab countries, and, above all, the absence of a sovereign Jewish state. How many would have ventured that, come 1995, a nation called Israel would be on the cusp of its jubilee, with a stable population and a dynamic economy? Or that the Jews living outside its borders would do so with full civil rights, widespread affluence, and a comparative absence, by today’s standards, of mainstream anti-Semitic expression?

Yet hindsight reveals that there were reasons to be positive even in the dark aftermath of World War II, among them the confirmation that America’s exceptionalism applied to its treatment of the Jews too, and the renewed drive of the Zionist movement in Mandate Palestine to achieve Jewish statehood. Out of these combined nation- and community-building efforts, the age of Jewish empowerment was born—a period of Jewish history that, in the experience of the majority of Jews, has been more benign and more encouraging than anything that has gone before.

Still, the angst remains. Every debate, it sometimes seems, is accented by an unarticulated fear of what the future holds. Every challenge, from intermarriage, to the destiny of Jews in Europe, to the form and content of Jewish education, carries a barely disguised warning that failure to resolve the problem under discussion will erase the Jewish people from existence.

No apocalypse awaits the Jews: That much I will predict. But how we manage a future that is still to be made will be determined, in the last analysis, by how we use the modern freedoms—national self-determination, full civil rights—that earlier generations secured for us.

In that regard, we would be wise to assume that the Jews will continue to face enemies and adversaries in 2065, just as we always have. True, anti-Semitism in this century is turning out to be far less violent than during the previous 200 years, and no Jewish community of significant size currently suffers from legalized discrimination. That, however, does not tell the whole story.

The sources of anti-Semitism in our time are multiple and overlapping. In Europe, electoral successes on the extremes of left and right, along with more frequent instances of anti-Semitic thuggery, contribute to an insecurity that calls into question the long-term ability of Jewish communities to remain in places such as France and Hungary. In the Middle East, the rise of Iranian power poses the destruction of Jewish sovereignty as a genuine threat, and not the mere slogan our current crop of Western leaders pretend it to be. In America, the political center of Diaspora Jews, the whispers of “dual loyalty” are growing louder and more impatient, particularly from the citadels of progressivism.

Hostility to the existence of the Jewish state has, since the Holocaust, established itself as the principal vehicle for anti-Semitic agitation. This development was certainly not unexpected because, ironically, Zionism enabled the Jews to be the masters of their own future for the first time in more than two millennia. Resentment toward this reality runs deep and wide—a discordant chorus of languages and accents, cutting across a range of cultures, instantly available through myriad virtual communities, and embedded most of all in those Muslim countries where there are barely any Jews left. The anti-Semitism of the future will be shaped from this present context; the more we understand it now, the better positioned we will be to contain and perhaps, dare I say, substantively defeat it by the time 2065 rolls around.

Ben Cohen is senior editor of the Tower and the author of Some of My Best Friends: A Journey Through Twenty-First Century Antisemitism.

Eliot A. Cohen

From a secularist’s point of view, this is the first period of Jewish history in which the Jews’ fate is in their own hands; from the believer’s point of view, in some measure it always has been. I incline more to the latter.
The rough shape of Jewish demography in 2065 is clear: two large, thriving communities in North America and Israel, with smaller Diaspora communities that will be at best static, at worst shrinking or disappearing, but in any case dependent on the two greater communities. The first problem the Jews will have to address is how those two poles of Jewish life will deal with each other.

That relationship, even now, is built on false premises. In the United States, there is a hard core of Zionist true believers who think of Israel as an imperiled little pioneering experiment or the earthly paradise where they aspire to live; there is a much larger group of Jews who have either modest interest or none at all in the Jewish state, or they are embarrassed by it. On the Israeli side, there is a pervasive dismissal of American Jews as being simply too lazy or comfortable to join them—mixed with a not always subtle envy centered on studying, working, or transplanting here.

Both sides need to renegotiate the relationship. Israel is no longer a poor and struggling Sparta in the Middle East but rather the “start-up nation,” in mortal danger, to be sure, but prosperous, armed to the teeth, and self-confident. It no longer needs bond drives and the saccharine Zionism they signify, but it does need the perspective of Jews who are wholly at home in a much larger world. For that, Israelis will need to develop an understanding of and respect for their American co-religionists that most of them do not have.

American Jews, for their part, will neither move en masse to Israel nor assimilate away (although many will drop out), but they need the vibrancy of Hebrew and Jewish culture emanating from Israel, which will in many ways become the center of the Jewish world. Working out a new relationship will endanger the prestige and power of existing Jewish elites and institutions, and undermine the self-confidence and influence of not a few intellectuals and leaders on both sides. It is overdue by some decades.

The second great challenge is one of faith, the reshaping of Jewish practice and beliefs. Particularly in the United States, the problem will be keeping together the major sub-sects of the Orthodox, Reform, and the dwindling Conservative community. It will mean accommodating some of the newer movements (partnership minyanim being a prime example). It will mean tackling both the absurdities of some Orthodox practice (my candidate for a quick win would be the second day of the holidays) while deepening knowledge of Hebrew, Jewish literature, and respect for traditional practice in the less observant community. The most serious issue is conversion: Without some accommodation by both sides—modifying Orthodoxy’s absurd restrictiveness on the one hand, without succumbing to laxity on the other—the Jewish community in the United States will continue to shrink, and to miss a demographic opportunity.

The Jews are peculiar, because they are a people and a faith, an ethnicity and, as Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik often put it, a covenantal community. Today, they are hemmed in, to some extent, by ossified institutions and habits of thought across the spectrum of observance. They are, as they have ever been, vulnerable to mere indifference about the deeper meaning of their pact with the Almighty. But I do not for a moment doubt that 50 years hence, the Jews, having survived for this long, will, with their perseverance and genius for creativity and the help of Providence, find a way.

Eliot A. Cohen is professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

Eric Cohen

Many years ago, Irving Kristol gave a lecture in Jerusalem on the “political stupidity of the Jews,” whom he accused of being misguidedly committed to economic socialism and naive internationalism. His solution: Jews need to go to school with Thucydides to learn about the realities of power, with Adam Smith to learn about the nature of economic liberty, and with Edmund Burke to learn about the complex relationship between tradition and politics.

The Jewish tradition probably has more political wisdom to offer than Kristol acknowledged. But he was basically right in pointing to the need for a Jewish political reformation as the only route to Jewish success or even survival. That reformation, alas, has not yet come.

In the ultimate sense, the fate of the Jews is probably in divine hands. And the genius of rabbinic Judaism—both in perfecting the God-seeking moral life and in preserving the earthly Jewish community through exile—deserves the greatest respect. The heart and soul of Judaism remains the distinctively Jewish way of sanctifying sex and family, eating and time, welcoming into life and mourning in death. If Jews forget this, all is probably lost, and the struggle against the potential sources of Jewish demise, whether via destruction or assimilation, loses its deepest purpose.

But rabbinic Judaism has little to offer, alas, when it comes to the current political crisis of the Jews. And in the realm of politics, Jews seem pathologically silly, despite the fact that the creation of the Jewish state is arguably the most impressive political founding of the past century. In America, Jewish liberalism is an old story, and in Israel the polity seems to oscillate between triviality and crisis management with a leadership deficit that should frighten us.
So what would political success look like in the decades ahead, and what would a bright future for the Jewish community look like 50 years hence?

In America, Jews should be focused on promoting school vouchers, the only hope for expanding the day-school movement and unleashing a new generation of Jewish educational entrepreneurship; on fighting to defend religious liberty, the only hope for ensuring that traditional Jewish beliefs and institutions are not marginalized by a hostile secularist culture; and on electing political conservatives, the only ones who still believe that Jewish nationalism is a noble cause and that American power is necessary to preserve decency and order in the troubled Middle East.

Yet whatever we might achieve in America, the fate of the Jews will probably depend on the fate of the Zionist project. And in Israel, we must acknowledge a very hard truth: Even the greatest Israeli political leaders, even an Israeli polity with otherworldly political courage, even the strengthening of the already impressive Israeli military force—all that might not be enough. Navigating a nuclear Middle East, as a tiny and hated nation, might simply be impossible.

But it is sinful, especially in politics, to give in to despair. And so what is needed, instead, is the birth of a true Israeli conservatism and a reinvigoration of Jewish nationalism. This means fighting preemptive wars to clean up the neighborhood, ideally before the Iranian nuclear umbrella is built; reforming, in a dramatic way, the Israeli economy, which is bogged down by regulation, high taxes, and the legacy of a socialist ideology that nearly every Israeli knows doesn’t work but feels obliged to support; promoting conversion for those who seek to tie their fights to the Jewish people; and doing everything possible to facilitate a mass exodus of Jews from Europe to Zion, where they will live or die with the dignity of national self-respect.

Horrible as it is to say, war in the past century has been good for the Jews: victory in World War II, rather than being slaughtered by the Nazis; victory in 1948, when a new state was born; and victory in 1967, when Jerusalem was retaken. Jews have fought bravely and reaped their just rewards. Yet the kinds of wars that might be required to establish some measure of peace in the Middle East over the next 50 years will probably require America’s moral will and military might. On the other side of those wars, I hope for a million circumcisions, and an eternity of children dancing with Torahs, and the restoration of Jewish holiness in the holy land. This is too much to expect in a mere 50 years, but one hopes that by then all hope will not be lost.

Eric Cohen is executive director of the Tikvah Fund.

Steven M. Cohen

The past 50 years, as seen in 2065:

In September 2011, during the run-up to the Israeli elections, political newcomer Yair Lapid generated a good bit of favorable attention by informing Haredi higher-education students that their sector had “won” and secular Jews had lost:

We lost and you won. It’s a fresh victory, just a few years old, but it’s already here. And the initial significance of this victory is that we, the secular Jews, have to admit that our vision, the vision of a state that we run without you and in which you’re only guests, was a failure.

Just two years later, the Pew Research Center’s Portrait of Jewish Americans 2013 delivered essentially the same message vis à vis American Jews. Demographically, if not in other ways, Orthodoxy was in ascendance while other American Jews were poised for decline. At the time, Orthodox Jews made up only 10 percent of American Jewish adults but as many as 27 percent of Jewish children and 35 percent of Jews younger than five. In New York City, a 2011 study showed that three-quarters of Jewish children were Orthodox.

Among the non-Orthodox, non-marriage, late marriage, intermarriage (running about 80 percent among Reform-raised Jews), and low birthrates (an average of 1.7 births per woman) were working to diminish their numbers in coming generations.
At the same time, ever-expanding Israeli settlement in the West Bank, ongoing friction with the Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and even Israel proper, combined with the turmoil in the Middle East, all worked to perpetuate the occupation and make withdrawal from the West Bank undesirable, if not unthinkable, to the increasingly nationalist and beleaguered Israeli public. In the years to come, Israel would be militarily strong enough to ensure its security, but its ceaseless rule over another indigenous people would provoke isolation from much of Europe and condemnation by liberal sectors in the United States. Commercially, Israel would increasingly rely upon China, India, and a host of nondemocratic states.

The demographic forces in the United States and the rest of the Diaspora combined with the political dynamics related to Israel increasingly alienated erstwhile liberal Jews from Jews, Judaism, Israel, and other things Jewish. Either culturally liberal Jews produced few, if any, Jewish grandchildren, or the small numbers who were born Jewish saw a Jewish community with which they could not engage, and an Israel which they did not love. And those who tried to participate were in effect driven out by conservatives who relentlessly and repeatedly accused liberals of…naiveté, disloyalty, subversion, transgression. Where few, if any, liberal Jews sought to prevent their conservative counterparts from participating in Jewish life or questioned their Jewish bona fides, quite the opposite is true of the way conservatives often (typically?) relate to Jewish liberals.

While liberals constituted half the American Jewish population in 2015, and their counterparts were sufficiently numerous to make the 2015 elections in Israel something of a horse race, the political divisions in 2065 became lopsidedly conservative—in both countries and even around the world. Not only had conservatives expanded their numbers, Jewish liberals and their descendants essentially dropped out of the Jewish population or, in like fashion, emigrated in droves from a more and more militant and theocratic Israel in which Haredim, ultra-nationalists, and wealthy plutocrats increasingly asserted their values, interests, and agendas.

The summary above is offered more as a cautionary tale than a confident prediction. It presents an extreme version of a reasonable worst-case scenario that builds upon and extends current and genuine socio-demographic, religious, cultural, and political trends in Israel and the United States.

George Santayana is thought to have said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Similarly, those who cannot anticipate a tragic future and work to counteract it are doomed to confront it.

Steven M. Cohen is research professor at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion and director of the Berman Jewish Policy Archive at Stanford University.

To live Jewishly today is a willed choice. Marrying a Jew, affiliating as a Jew, and practicing an engaged Jewish life are decisions we can make without fear of damning (or any) social consequence. In such a climate of radical autonomy, two markedly different communal roles have emerged, both claiming to be most able to secure the Jewish future: “gatekeepers” and “agents.”

The “gatekeepers” are guided by the belief that the Jewish future is best assured by holding the lines of Jewish practice, Jewish communal boundaries, and rabbinic authority. Only by tightly defining the who and the what of Jewish life will there be a Jewish future worthy of preservation. Small, fervent, and loyal to the tradition, 50 years from now, the network of these insular communities will constitute the right wing of Jewry.

Facing the same landscape, the “agents” of the Jewish present seek a language of inclusion whereby the practices of and participants in the Jewish experience are defined as broadly as possible so as to “meet Jews where they are.” The portals of entry to Jewish life must be sufficiently wide, creative, and varied if one hopes to attract and retain the would-be members of our people’s future. Fifty years from now, this porous, mixed multitude, guided by the belief that Jewish identity is asserted, not assigned, will constitute the other segment of Jewish life.

Sadly, such a future will yield at least two divergent Jewish communities, fracturing our people, already small in number. The Diaspora Jewish community will be divided between Orthodox and “everyone else,” two communities that, while both bearing the title “Jewish,” will have very little to do with each other.

In Israel, I suspect a similar split will take place, intensified by the toxic interaction between church and state that has characterized Israel since her founding. How the Jewish state will negotiate its secular–religious divide while maintaining its democratic character (and tending to its existential threats) is a mystery to me. Given the unsustainable nature of Israel’s present circumstance, a more likely outcome will entail a radical break from the status quo, hopefully (but not necessarily) leading to a stronger Israel.

As for any interconnectedness shared among world Jewry, the future will yield an impoverished notion of peoplehood as Diaspora and Israeli Jews find themselves with less and less in common. Such an outcome does not bode well for either community. Beyond the inherent merits of Jewish peoplehood, Israel and Diaspora Jewry depend on each other for their respective security. Whatever external threats await our people’s future, it will be our internal divisions that will be responsible for our much weakened position.

Somber as the above predictions might seem, it is a future entirely contingent on the continuation of “present trends.” Unlike the weather, however, we need not be resigned to any particular forecast. Rather, this exercise should prompt us to identify and implement the interventions needed to draft an alternative narrative. After all, far more interesting than predicting the future is building it, and it is to that task that all should be committed.

Elliot J. Cosgrove is the rabbi of Manhattan’s Park Avenue Synagogue.

Joshua M. Davidson

Two centuries ago, when emancipation unlocked the ghetto gates welcoming our great- or great-great-grandparents to fields of endeavor previously inaccessible and the Enlightenment shined the light of historical criticism on biblical texts, tremors of secularization began that for many shook Judaism’s foundations. One hundred years ago, Franz Rosenzweig lamented what had befallen the Jewish home as a result: “The mezuzah may have still greeted one at the door, but the bookcase had, at best, a single Jewish corner.” And today, “Secularization…continues to erode the religious basis of American Jewish life,” writes Rabbi Lance Sussman. “Every major historical study of Judaism…indicates that American Jews are comfortable with their ‘Jewishness’ but increasingly distant from Judaism as a…faith.”

According to the Pew Research Center, 94 percent of American Jews take pride in their Jewishness, but 22 percent also label themselves “not religious” (sociologists call them “nones”). Jewish life defined by worship, study, and membership will not engage a generation for whom affiliation no longer represents their primary vehicle of Jewish expression. Growing numbers of Jews, some single and others with young families—including the grown children of many devoted (often bewildered and disappointed) synagogue members—now join Jewish institutions only if they find them personally meaningful. So the burden rests squarely upon us to prove our relevance.

Mordecai Kaplan, a Russian-born Jew who immigrated to America at age eight, wrote his most influential work, Judaism as a Civilization, in response to a similar situation in which American Jews were living in the 1930s. Then, too, Jews were assimilating. Kaplan understood that Judaism encompassed not only ritual, but also the cultural and social aspects of communal living. Kaplan’s response was therefore to reconstruct American Jewish life so that it included additional outlets through which communities naturally express themselves, which for us include literature, the visual arts, theater, music, food, philosophy, history, and politics.

But Kaplan also understood that in the heart of every people, there is a set of beliefs without which they cannot endure the passage of the generations. For us, that spiritual center is Torah, deep and profound. We survive only if it does. To the Jewishly sophisticated, we must teach Torah steeped in two millennia of scholarship. To the Jewishly searching, our Torah must be relevant and accessible.

The journey of each Jew is unique, shaped by one’s passions and interests as well as by one’s starting point. Increasing numbers appear regularly on our doorstep seeking to learn more about the traditions their parents or grandparents once set aside. And countless non-Jews are also looking to explore the beauty of Jewish life. We must embrace them, as we must embrace non-Jews who support their spouses’ Jewish lives, and non-Jewish parents who are creating Jewish homes and raising Jewish children.

We live in an age of increasing personal empowerment and diminishing communal commitment, but the threat of assimilation need not spell the end of a vibrant American Jewish community. Around the country, even in a widening sea of disaffection, exciting new currents of Jewish creativity are flowing—in music, in art, in theater, in social action, in alternative minyanim, in discussion groups face-to-face and online—often the innovations of the very individualists who won’t join our institutions as currently envisioned but who may well hold the key to our future.

The centuries have taught us the resilience and adaptability of our people, our fire that will not be extinguished—one that when exposed to the fresh air of new ideas blazes with even greater brilliance. But in an era when individuals, including Jews, can choose Judaism or reject it, Judaism’s survival depends on our relevance, our warmth, and our creativity.

Joshua M. Davidson is senior rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in New York City.

Alan Dershowitz

There is no longer a “Jewish community”—if there ever was one. There are numerous Jewish communities and individuals. There is no one thing that holds Jews together—not religion, not politics, not persecution, not even Israel.

Even when there was a common religion, it was practiced differently by Sephardim and Ashkenazim.

Even when Israel was a uniting force, there were different brands of Zionism.

Even persecution had a different influence in different places.

All these differences are now exaggerated as religious antagonisms have been exacerbated, particularly by the rabbinate in Israel and elsewhere. So, too, with Zionism, as political views have become more extreme on all sides. As to persecution, it has disappeared in the United States just as it has gotten worse in Western Europe and somewhat better in Eastern Europe. It is a function of our maturity that we are a divided community—divided by tactics, by strategy, by religion, by ideology, by status, by politics, and by our levels of security and fear. Our divisiveness is a reflection of our power and a source of our vulnerability.

Alan Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard. His latest book is Abraham: The World’s First (But Certainly Not Last) Jewish Lawyer.

Arnold M. Eisen

The impossibility of predicting the long-term Jewish future in America or anywhere else was highlighted for me recently by the announcement of a scholarly conference devoted to the question of whether the world’s food supply would still be adequate in 2030—a mere 15 years from now. Commentary’s questions implicitly assume, among other things, that solutions will have been found to global warming (or that the ecological disasters currently forecast prove false alarms); that China will not have supplanted America as the dominant economic and political power in the world (a development that would curtail the influence of American Jewry and threaten the security of Israel); that Islamic terrorism will have been eliminated or contained; and that Israel will have found a way to live peaceably with the Palestinians inside its borders, with Arab and Islamic neighbors, and with the diverse, contentious groups of Jews who comprise the majority of its citizenry. All these variables bear directly on the Jewish future. They greatly disturb one’s sleep in 2015 and make it difficult to dream about better days.

Asked to look far ahead nonetheless, a Jew like me cannot but look back. It gives one comfort, as well as a measure of humility, to recall three millennia of near constant Jewish anxiety about the Jewish future—and to reread the Commentary symposium of 1966, “The State of Jewish Belief,” a mere 50 years ago. Both the Holocaust and Israel, which a decade later would assume centrality in Jewish thought and communal activity, are barely mentioned in its pages. Three of the most influential rabbinic figures of the generation—Heschel, Soloveitchik, and Schneerson—are absent. So are women, whose entry into lay and rabbinic leadership positions would soon prove decisive, and ultra-Orthodox Jews, whether Hasidic or “yesheivish,” without whom one can no longer assess the Jewish present or limn the Jewish future. The 1996 Commentary symposium—“What Do American Jews Believe?”—did include women’s voices (though not many of them). It gave due attention to the outsized role of Israel in shaping and sustaining American Jewish commitment and evinced near total consensus that “Auschwitz” posed far more of a problem to belief in humanity than it did to belief in God. Contributors expressed appropriately deep concern over whether a larger portion of the Jewish community would ever be interested in becoming what one called “serious Jews.”

That remains the question on which our future hangs. The well-being of American and world Jewry does not depend on mass return to punctilious observance or the adoption of this or that belief concerning creation, revelation, and redemption. Nor will that future be secured by mass efforts at outreach or more creative programming and marketing (though these would certainly help). It depends, rather, on two things: deep and sustained engagement by a critical mass of Jews with the texts, practices, norms, and sensibility of past Jewish communities; and experiences of face-to-face community—whether in a summer camp or congregation, gathered around an adult study table or a home Shabbat table—that convince individual Jews they are not alone in the world. These things persuade them to take part in the age-old story going back to Abraham and Sarah and the responsibilities bound up in the Covenant since Sinai.

Will a majority of Jews, in Israel or North America, sign on to such a commitment in the first half of the 21st century? I doubt it. Will our people retain sufficient critical mass of “serious Jews” to guarantee a collective future both for Jews and for Judaism? I believe that we can and will. The intellectual and emotional satisfactions of this tradition are so great, its rewards for family life so palpable—especially at critical moments of transcendent joy or sadness—the pride in individual and collective Jewish achievement so widespread, the talent and dedication of the emerging generation of lay and professional leaders so impressive, and the depths of encounter with the Holy One, the Source of all Being, the Master of the Universe made possible by Judaism are so priceless—all these gifts recognized and appreciated by far more Jews than are accounted for by the surveys—that Jews need have no fear concerning our imminent disappearance.
We Jews have been wrestling with God, Torah, the world, and one another for many centuries, and we are not likely to stop any time soon.

Arnold M. Eisen, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, is the author of Rethinking Modern Judaism: Ritual, Commandment, Community and Conservative Judaism Today and Tomorrow.

David Ellenson

Futurology is at best a hazardous enterprise. Human conduct is changeable, and events have a way of altering the course of reasonably anticipated communal, political, cultural, religious, and social outcomes. In short, history is cunning, and the future frequently unfolds in unexpected ways.

With this caution in mind, I will respond to the question posed by the editors of Commentary in this symposium and offer the following observations about what I think the Jewish condition will be in the United States in another half-century. I will leave other venues of Jewish life—including Israel—to others.

I believe that in 2065 the American Jewish community will look different than it does today. More than a century will have passed since the vast waves of German and Eastern European Jewish immigrants first came to these shores, and the historical contexts and forces that led to the creation of the institutions, attitudes, and patterns that marked the 20th-century American Jewish community will have faded into the past. The Jews of 2065 will have been accepted into American society for so long that they will no longer even remember—unlike many Jews in 2015—that there was ever a time in American history when Jews had to struggle for entry and acceptance into the larger American society. The American Jewish community of 2065 will be even more ethnically and racially heterogeneous than it is today, and the phenomenon of Jewish-gentile intermarriage will perhaps be even greater. The 20th-century religious divisions of American Jewish life into Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative denominations will also be less significant in 2065 than they are now. I suspect that there will instead be a tripartite division in American Jewish life, segmenting into a large separatist Haredi Orthodox enclave, a group of “Open Orthodox” and traditionally oriented religious Jews, and a vast array of non-Orthodox Jews ranging from renewal and religiously liberal Jews to secular ones. Let me elaborate briefly.

The ever-growing strength of Haredi institutions in this country and the massive birthrate of the Haredi community today bode well for Haredi strength in 2065. The economic pressures this segment of the Jewish community will confront, however, and the ongoing openness and virtually infinite choices and temptations available in American society pose potential dangers to the success of their insular mode of sectarian Orthodoxy.

In contrast to the Haredi group, the “Open Orthodox-Traditional” group and the religiously and secularly liberal non-Orthodox Jews will be linked in major ways, because all these Jews have in common a celebration of the open society and its universal values. Clearly, the more traditionally religious Jews in this group will have different emphases and sensibilities. The commitments of all these Jews, however, to gender equality, secular education, social justice, acceptance and inclusion of Jews who intermarry, an embrace of LGBTQ persons, and an emphasis on a democratic Israel that strives for equality for all its citizens cause me to place these Jews under one rather large umbrella. Nevertheless, I still recognize that these groups will not be identical. This is because the large number of non-Jews and their progeny who will surely be within the non-Orthodox sector of the community will pose a problem for the adherents of “Open Orthodox-Traditional” Judaism. These Jews will have to balance their affirmation of liberal values against their strong commitment to the traditional membership norms and definitions of classical rabbinic Judaism. This will be no easy task.

Among the non-Orthodox Jews, there will surely be great pockets of ongoing Jewish creativity, commitment, knowledge, and renewal. At the same time, these non-Orthodox Jews have a strong propensity for individualism. They will probably create institutions and rituals that will be—from a traditional Jewish standpoint—highly eclectic and somewhat idiosyncratic. How to avoid the fragility such privatization poses for communal cohesion will be the great challenge this segment of the Jewish community will face.

The dilemmas the American Jewish community will face in 2065 are obvious. The promises 2065 offers are also great. It has always been so for Jews, and the determinations and commitments of the Jews of 2065—their acts and deeds—will forge the Jewish community they deserve.

David Ellenson is chancellor emeritus and former president of Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion. He currently serves as acting director of the Schusterman Center of Israel Studies at Brandeis.

Michael Freund

The Jewish people are in the initial stages of a demographic revolution, a change so profound and historic in nature that it will reshape the contours, character, and even the color of Jewry.
Around the world, an unprecedented awakening is taking place. Descendants of Jews from all walks of life are looking to return to their roots and embrace their heritage.

For the past 15 years, through Shavei Israel, the organization I chair, I have come to discern that there are multitudes of people whose forefathers were once part of us and who now seek a way back into the fold.

From the Jews of Kaifeng, China, whose Sephardic ancestors traveled along the Silk Road, to the Bnei Menashe of northeastern India, who claim descent from a lost tribe of Israel, and to the Hidden Jews of Poland from the Holocaust, there are multitudes with a historical connection to the Jewish people.

Perhaps the largest of them all is the Bnei Anousim, whom historians refer to by the derogatory term Marranos and whose forebears were Spanish and Portuguese Jews forced to convert to Catholicism in the 14th and 15th centuries. Scholars estimate their numbers worldwide to be in the millions, and genetic tests have revealed that 10 to 15 percent of Hispanic Americans have Jewish roots.

If we are prudent enough to seize the opportunity and extend a hand to these communities and strengthen our connection with them, then in the coming decades we will witness the return of hundreds of thousands, and possibly more, to our ranks.

After all, size does matter, whether in basketball, business, or diplomacy. To make a difference in the world and to live up to our national mission as Jews, we need a much larger and more diverse “team” at our disposal, one with an expanded roster and a strong bench.

Historians estimate that during the Herodian period two millennia ago, there were approximately 8 million Jews worldwide. At the same time, the Han Dynasty conducted a census in the year 2 c.e. which found that there were 57.5 million Han Chinese. Jump ahead to the present, and the numbers are of course quite different, with China home to 1.1 billion people, even as world Jewry barely numbers more than 13 million souls.

During the past 2,000 years of exile, we lost countless numbers of Jews, whether through assimilation or oppression. Many of their descendants are now clamoring to return. This development is testimony to the power of Jewish history and the triumph of Jewish destiny.

The world, it has been said, is growing smaller by the day thanks to the processes of globalization and growing economic and strategic interdependence. In order to thrive in this global village, the Jewish people will need Chinese Jews and Indian Jews no less than American and British Jews.

This means that we not only need to do more to keep Jews Jewish, but we must also begin to think outside the box about how to boost our numbers. We need more Jews, so why not reach back into our collective past and reclaim those who were torn away from us due to exile and persecution? Many descendants of Jews are already knocking on our door, asking to be allowed in. All we need do is turn the knob, pry open the entrance, and they will come.

This nascent process is already under way, and I call on Israel and Jewish leaders worldwide to recognize this salient development and to act.

Five decades hence, the Jewish people will be one nation with many faces, far more numerous and diverse than anyone could possibly have imagined at the start of the 21st century.

People will gaze back and see the turning point that we have reached, as we stand on the cusp of a tidal wave of return, one that will see millions of Jewish descendants reconnect with Jewry. Demographically and spiritually, the Jewish people will be stronger for it.

Michael Freund, the founder and chairman of Shavei Israel, served as deputy communications director during Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s first term of office. His syndicated weekly column appears in the Jerusalem Post.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

Death, taxes, and anti-Semitism. Whatever else may change for Jews and non-Jews in the next 50 years, anti-Semitism will afflict the former and be harbored by many of the latter. This has been the case for 2,000 years. As there is some reliable prediction in social science, this world-historically most potent of all prejudices will surely continue for another 50.

Anti-Semitism is not grounded in reality, but neither modernity nor even globalization has put an end to this deep-seated animus against Jews. In fact, its scourge is more widespread, powerful, and insidious than ever. I say this as an expert on Nazism and the Holocaust. The recent Anti-Defamation League Global 100 Index of anti-Semitism determined that 26 percent of the surveyed population, roughly 1.1 billion adults in the countries investigated, are anti-Semitic. If that percentage obtained all over the world and included teenagers, it would total on the order of 1.5 billion people.

This survey, moreover, considerably underreports the extent of anti-Semitism. People had to hold at least six anti-Semitic views for the study to deem them anti-Semites. Five were not enough. One thoroughgoing anti-Semitic belief, even one such as “Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars,” should have been, but was not, sufficient. The survey also did not tap those religious beliefs, whether Christian or Muslim, that are profoundly anti-Semitic and that drive so much additional animus toward Jews. The survey did not ask, for example, whether people agree that all Jews are guilty for the death of Jesus or that Jews are the children of apes and pigs. When applying more reasonable criteria, such as asking whether a person holds any serious anti-Semitic beliefs, the study finds that only about one-third of those living in the ADL’s least anti-Semitic countries are free of this most pernicious prejudice.

The outlandish views about, and profound hatred for, Jews among this vast number of anti-Semites vary widely in content. Some anti-Semitic themes are age-old, such as the Christians’ demonizing deicide charge and the Muslims’ dehumanizing claim of the Jews’ animalic parentage. Others are centuries old, such as the widespread notion that Jews wield and abuse great financial power. Still others are of recent vintage, such as the twin fantasies that Israel, the country of Jews, is the greatest threat to world peace and the perpetrator of “a war of extermination,” a genocide, against Palestinians.

All these various accusations, and the various historical and contemporary forms of anti-Semitism, are grounded in the foundational anti-Semitic paradigm, which consists of the following core notions:
Jews are fundamentally different from non-Jews.

Jews are noxious or pernicious.

Jews willfully wish or do harm to others.

Jews are powerful.

Therefore, Jews are dangerous.

The conclusion drawn by ever more people is that Jews or their alleged power must in some way be eliminated from the anti-Semites’ ranks, from their countries, or from the earth. The foundational anti-Semitic paradigm—the soul of anti-Semitism—gets passed down through the generations and underlies the vast anti-Semitic barrage that courses through the public spheres of so many countries. Anti-Semitism has endured through the ages in its essence and been malleable in its particular accusations because this core paradigm, which is deeply rooted and deeply felt, lends itself to all kinds of demonizing and dehumanizing beliefs about what sets the Jews apart, what makes them noxious, the nature and expression of their power, and the particular types of threats they pose to non-Jews.

In the past two decades, anti-Semitism has remade itself. Its constituency now spans the globe, reaching deep into every continent. Its orientation is primarily international. The means for its spread now includes the Internet. Its focus centers on the globe’s putative predatory country and people exceeding all others: Israel and the Jews. The various historical streams of anti-Semitism—Muslim and Christian, the political left and the political right, the downtrodden and the well-off—have been brought into the new global anti-Semitism.

In its new global form, anti-Semitism is a powerful engine that will keep driving forward—spreading its reach, and threatening Jews’ well-being and safety for the next 50 years and beyond.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, a former professor in Harvard’s government and social-studies departments, is the author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners and The Devil That Never Dies.

Eric S. Goldstein

My long-term vision for our community and our people is impossibly hopeful. It has to be. For if we allow ourselves to be defined solely by today’s challenges and do not actively hope for a better future, it would be difficult to make it through the day, let alone the next half-century.

As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks notes: Hope is not the same as optimism. “Optimism is the belief that the world is changing for the better; hope is the belief that, together, we can make the world better. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one. It needs no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to hope.”

So, let us be courageous and hope.

In the year 2065, UJA-Federation of New York is nearing its 150th anniversary. Its mission endures: serving as a global Jewish safety net, caring for the needs of all New Yorkers, inspiring a passion for Jewish life and learning, and strengthening Jewish communities around the world.

More hopefully, our 1 million supporters represent the entirety of Jewish New York—every background, ethnicity, and denomination. And beyond annual support for UJA’s work, they perform at least 180 hours a year of volunteer service at UJA-supported agencies across the region—a communal norm.

Every Jew, irrespective of age and affluence, has the opportunity to experience Israel. Every Jewish child is able to attend Jewish summer camp and day school. No financial barriers exist, as community-wide endowments we’ve helped create have changed the landscape, allowing everyone to experience Jewish life in all its breadth and beauty.

America has had a Jewish president; she held office for eight years. Bringing together political, religious, and ethnic leaders from across the spectrum to tackle persistent problems plaguing our country, she presided over a period marked by peace and prosperity. There was a sukkah on the White House lawn . . . and presidential Passover dishes.

Now, daring to hope even more . . . in 50 years we’ll be telling our great-grandchildren that there was once a time when a Jewish State of Israel neighbored by a Palestinian State didn’t exist, and peace between Israel and other countries in the region seemed all but impossible. They will turn to history books to learn more, never knowing the fear and uncertainty of war and terror.

The millennials of 2015 are in their 80s, now in retirement. Tired of posting their lives online, they regularly meet in person at our community centers and synagogues. They talk about their first experience at a UJA-supported Jewish environmental summer camp and how it helped shape their Jewish identity. They remember when supporting Israel on college campuses made them feel vulnerable. They recall the crises that brought them closer to the Jewish community—and how they stayed after the crises receded because they wanted to be part of something bigger than themselves.

Poverty in New York has sharply declined. Joining forces with every ethnic and religious group in our city, UJA helps develop policies and programs to ensure that no New Yorker goes to bed hungry. New York is heralded as the city that broke poverty, a model of collaboration and generosity that is being replicated globally.

Israel at 117 is a world leader, not just in technology and science but also in delivering humanitarian aid and brokering peace among other nations. UJA and its global partners invest together in helping to ensure the strength of the Jewish community for the next 50 years. Thanks to our support, our great-grandchildren travel frequently to Israel and are deeply connected to their brothers and sisters there, and across the globe. The Jewish community has no borders and boundaries. We are not all the same and have many diverse views, but we are more united than ever.

All this might seem impossible today when we as a Jewish people are confronted with so many challenges. And yet, in the words of Rabbi Lord Sacks, we must hope—for ourselves and for generations not yet born—that we can exceed our own expectations and realize our vision for the Jewish future.

It is the courage and resolve of a people who, even in the worst of times, continue to say, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

Eric S. Goldstein is chief executive officer of UJA-Federation of New York.

Micah Goodman

The search for the roots of the spiritual, cultural, and communal flowering of contemporary world Jewry leads to a particular conceptual shift that occurred in the second decade of the 21st century. According to the prevailing sentiment of the time, Judaism was withering, aging, shrinking. Many saw in Judaism’s waning appeal proof that it had become anachronistic, lagging behind modernity. This belief fueled attempts to modernize Judaism and update its ancient traditions to reflect the times. Yet the new interpretations accorded to Judaism failed to renew its appeal. The turning point came only when modern disappointment in Judaism gave way to disappointment in modernity itself.

This phenomenon can be understood by revisiting two lines of thought prevalent in various versions at the start of the 21st century.

The first posits that Judaism engenders in believers a deep sense of guilt. Halakha sentences adherents to a perpetual guilty conscience. Judgment is the natural corollary to this persistent guilt, with religiously observant Jews often being highly judgmental. Guilt and judgment go hand in hand, as Judaism generates societies steeped in judgment and cultivates individuals laden with guilt. Judaism exacts a further, greater sacrifice from the religious—intellectual integrity—with religious Jews versed in modern science and criticism often forced to suspend critical thought upon entering the synagogue or Beit Midrash.

It is possible that Yeshayahu Leibowitz was correct in saying that religion is not measured by what it gives people, but by what it takes from them. While Leibowitz referred to the weighty efforts required to observe the mitzvoth, perhaps more than time and energy, Judaism exacts from people a piece of themselves. An observant Jew sacrifices parts of himself for the sake of his religiosity. According to the modern, enlightened worldview, the only path to liberation from the costs of religious observance is through liberation from religion itself.

Many young Jews at the start of the 21st century found this line of thought persuasive. Yet they found the following one persuasive as well: The birthrate in the Western world is in decline. In the United States, and even more so in Western Europe, people are reproducing at declining rates. The pursuit of a high quality of life reduces the desire to reproduce. As a result, rational modern Europe is aging and shrinking. What is more, the Western family is falling apart. At a time when more than 50 percent of couples divorce, the nuclear family is no longer a stable foundation in many people’s lives. Family life, with its demands of sacrifice and surrender, is not appealing to people who have internalized, consciously or not, the aspirations of modern individualism. The Western ethos that remade a person’s desire into the central compass of his life eliminated room in his life for others.

Alexis de Tocqueville articulated the threats posed by modern individualism, foreseeing that individualism would evolve into egoism. A culture that calls for people to be unique, in his view, would give rise to people who are indifferent to others and focused on themselves.

Add to this the technology of virtual reality through which people can endlessly document their lives. The Internet accelerates the process through which the modern call to self-actualization ultimately leads to self-worship.
It is difficult not to recognize the realization of Tocqueville’s prophecy; the impetus of the Enlightenment, which called people to be unique, rendered them solitary. The idea that there are no beliefs that are larger than life actually contracted life itself.

As strange as it sounds, these two opposing lines of thought captured the minds of many young Jews at the same time. At the start of the 21st century, young Jews experienced a double disappointment, in modernity and in Judaism. This double disappointment gave birth to a new inquiry. In addition to asking how modernity might heal Judaism, people began asking how the Jewish tradition might heal modernity.

Judaism began being relevant again not only through rabbinic persuasion regarding its compatibility with modernity, but through a realization of its ability to guard against modernity’s dangers. The halakhic tradition, for example, provides for periods of time free from technology and for spaces that protect family intimacy. It also cultivates a connection to something larger than the individual, softening Western narcissism and its accompanying alienation and isolation. The Judaism of the 21st century is blossoming thanks to its bi-directionality: It seeks modern solutions to Jewish problems while seeking Jewish solutions to modern problems.

Micah Goodman is an Israeli philosopher.

Daniel Gordis

Will a flourishing, sovereign Jewish state exist in 50 years? That is the question most likely to shape the nature and quality of Jewish life half a century from now.

Israel faces sobering, existential challenges. Barring a dramatic change in American and European policy, Tehran will almost certainly acquire a nuclear weapon. Jewish history suggests that when a sworn, ideologically driven enemy of the Jewish people declares that it will kill Jews, Jews ought to listen carefully. Our dismissals of similar threats in the past—in retrospect, a grotesque abdication of moral responsibility—have come at great cost.

Iran’s bomb will probably unleash a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, a region devoid (with the exception of Israel) of democracies and prone to coups and religious extremism. Such an arms race—and the use of the weapons to which it leads—could easily catch Israel in its crosshairs.

Israel’s increasing international isolation is no less a threat. The UN’s 1975 assertion that “Zionism Is Racism” had nothing to do with Israeli policy. It was then simply the clearest indication that the world cannot abide the Jewish flourishing that Israeli sovereignty makes possible. A deadly virus, anti-Semitism simply morphs over time. Once theological or biological, it has now re-emerged in post-nationalist form. To imagine that returning to the 1967 lines (more accurately, the 1949 Armistice Lines) would mollify Europe is to consciously embrace naiveté and is thus utterly immoral.

Sadly, the Western world, sans moral compass, no longer advocates for democracy over despotism, women’s rights over family honor killings, intellectual pursuit over an embrace of medieval barbarity, and religious freedom over governmentally sanctioned murderous fanaticism. Yet while Europe’s renewed anti-Semitic rant is not fundamentally surprising, what is inexplicable—and what will undoubtedly eventually be recalled as a moment of utter Jewish disgrace and sickness—is the degree to which a wide swathe of American Jewish leaders have bought in to the European idea.

So deeply have American Jews adopted the universalism now in vogue that they are among the leaders of the assault on the very state that gives them the confidence they need to take the international stage in the first place. Further fueling their discomfort with Jewish sovereignty—and thus contributing to their abandonment of the Jewish state—is the longstanding fear of being tarred with the “dual loyalty” brush, a fear that Barack Obama has knowingly and successfully exploited.

The resulting Jewish abdication of responsibility to defend Israel against a worldwide tide of unbridled hatred might make it impossible for Israel to survive. Israel’s collapse would require no bombs and no invasion. It would take only increased isolation, a sense of precariousness in which Israelis do not wish to raise their children, an economic downturn resulting from international sanctions that make life in Israel even harder than it already is. Then, many of the best-educated and most mobile Israelis would make their homes elsewhere. Slowly, Israel would weaken. Arabs would assume a greater role in setting the tone of the state, or Israel would find itself under international jurisdiction. Either situation would mean a return to the Yishuv—a Palestine with a large number of Jews, but without the independence that has breathed new life into the Jewish people everywhere.

For all its many warts, though, the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty has afforded the Jews a means of reclaiming their prophetic role, coupling to the clarion voice that has always been Judaism’s raison d’être the possibility of actually forging a society framed by Judaism’s values. That change has infused Jews worldwide with a sense of normalcy and pride that they now take for granted. Without their state, Jews would be reduced to the nervous rabble about which Zionism’s founding intellectuals wrote so compellingly just a century ago. Without Israel, the optimism and confidence that characterize Jews everywhere will evaporate almost immediately.

The good news is that we can still avert this eventuality. But resisting the tide will require fortitude and pride, a yearning for peace as well as a renewed sense of realism—about the West and about our enemies. Can contemporary Jews, particularly in America, muster what it will take? We must hope that they can, for what is at stake is not just the Jewish state but the very nature of Jewish life as we know it.

Daniel Gordis is senior vice president, Koret Distinguished Fellow, and chair of the core curriculum at Shalem College in Jerusalem. His latest book is Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel’s Soul.

Evelyn Gordon

Today’s Jewish world has two main centers: America and Israel. But by 2065, if current trends hold, it will have only one—Israel.

One reason is simple demographics. Today, the two communities are of similar size. Israel, according to its Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), has 6.3 million Jews. America, according to the Jewish Virtual Library, has between 5.4 to 6.8 million, depending on whether you count only “core Jews” or the “enlarged” population, which includes “persons of Jewish parentage” and “non-Jewish household members.”

But America’s core Jewish population has barely grown over the past half-century. True, in 1960, the “enlarged” population was only 5.4 to 5.5 million. But since intermarriage was much less common then, this population—identical to today’s core Jewish figure—primarily comprised core Jews. Its subsequent increase has thus come mainly from counting non-Jews as Jews.

Israel’s core Jewish population, in contrast, has more than tripled, from 1.9 million in 1960.

This divergence will only increase. According to a Pew Research study released this year, American Jewish fertility is below replacement rate, at 1.9 children per woman. Israel’s Jewish fertility rate, according to the CBS, is a robust 3.05. Thus, while America’s Jewish population is suffering natural decline, Israel’s benefits from strong natural growth. And though European Jewish emigration may bolster both, past experience indicates that any large-scale exodus would disproportionately benefit Israel.

Thus 50 years hence, Israeli Jews will far outnumber their American kin, which alone would ensure Israel’s predominance. But Israel will also probably have the more Jewishly committed community.

American Jews are increasingly opting out. In a 2013 Pew poll, 32 percent of those born after 1980 defined themselves as “Jews of no religion,” compared with only 7 percent born in 1914–27. And compared with Jews “by religion,” Jews “of no religion” were more than twice as likely to intermarry, almost seven times as likely to raise their children non-Jewish, more than five times as likely to deem being Jewish of little or no importance, more than twice as likely to feel no attachment to Israel, and less than a third as likely to care about belonging to a Jewish community. In short, their contribution to American Jewry is almost nil.

Only 28 percent of all American Jews, moreover, deemed “being part of a Jewish community” essential to their Jewish identity. American Jews’ outsized impact on world Jewry has stemmed largely from their capacity for collective action both at home and abroad. But organized communities are important vehicles for mobilizing collective action; as more Jews shun such communities, American Jewry will inevitably be diminished.

In Israel, by contrast, opting out is hard to do; like it or not, you’re part of an enormous Jewish collective—the State of Israel—whose decisions affect everyone. And perhaps partly in consequence, Jewish engagement is booming.

A 2007 Guttman Center study found that while 68 percent of Israeli Jews over 60 years old defined themselves as secular, only 37 percent of adults under 30 did so; the rest placed themselves on the broad spectrum from traditional-but-nonobservant to ultra-Orthodox. And even secular Israelis rarely abandon Judaism entirely. In another Guttman Center survey, from 2009, sweeping majorities of Israeli Jews deemed it important to observe Jewish lifestyle rituals such as circumcision or shivah (over 90 percent), celebrate Jewish holidays “in the traditional manner” (85 percent), keep kosher at home (76 percent), and have a special Sabbath-eve meal (more than two-thirds).

More than two-thirds also attributed importance to studying classical Jewish texts such as the Bible and the Talmud. Study options for secular Jews have mushroomed accordingly, from jam-packed Shavuot learning sessions to full-year pre-army programs.

Thus by dint of both size and commitment, Israel seems set to become the world’s predominant Jewish community, replacing the current American–Israeli parity.

Of course, this assumes Israel’s survival. American Jews increasingly seem to doubt such survival is possible unless the intractable Palestinian conflict is somehow resolved. As one distinguished American Jew warned: “Regardless of what the United States does, Israel’s diplomatic isolation will increase unless there is a general settlement. Without a fundamental change, Israel could wind up in an international diplomatic ghetto, with the United States her only friend. Even in the United States, Israel’s position will not be secure unless she changes her policy.”

Actually, that’s from December 1973; it’s New York Times journalist James Reston’s summary of Henry Kissinger’s views. Since then, Israel’s Jewish population has more than doubled, its GDP has quintupled, and it has opened diplomatic relations with dozens of additional countries.

The future contains no guarantees. But previous rumors of Israel’s impending demise have proved greatly exaggerated.

Evelyn Gordon is an Israeli journalist and commentator. Her proposal for a new Israeli strategy on the Palestinian–Israeli conflict appeared in the September issue of Mosaic.

In such circumstances, few of the dynamics that have been shaping Jewish life for millennia can be counted on to continue for very long. External to Judaism is the accelerating pace of philosophical, technological, political, and societal change that creates tremendous pressures on societies to adapt. Just consider the dramatic changes in Europe and the Middle East over the past 50 years, which affected the lives of most Jews, to see how much drama the future holds.

Yet the Jewish people have proven their outstanding capacity to adapt, and key characteristics that have allowed them to do so in the past will continue to serve them in the future. First, Judaism will continue to hybridize four founding stories—as a religious community, a nation, a people, and a light unto the nations. Second, the “architecture” of the Jewish people as a global web of communities will remain exceptionally resilient and responsive to change. Third, Judaism and the Jewish people will continue to balance innovation and tradition, flexibility and rigidity, insularity and openness.

The confluence of these fundamentals establishes a few certainties about the future of Diaspora Jewish life in 2065. Judaism will have evolved communally, even among the Orthodox, with new types of communities, new forms of organizations, and many new and different institutions. Furthermore, Jews will continue to wander in search of security, freedom, and prosperity. Thus, a vibrant Diaspora will persist alongside Israel, not only in the United States; and the likely imminent decline of European Jewry may be offset by the rise of Jewish life in East Asia, particularly in China. The movement of Jewish populations will continue to follow the rise and decline of global power and prosperity. Paradoxically, these dynamics of adaptation are the constant of the Jewish people, and they will persist in ways that are both predictable and surprising.

By 2065, the real drama will have unfolded in and around Israel, where Zionism’s quest to establish the nation-state of the Jewish people will have been tested. The Jewish state will be judged on the manner in which it ensures its survival; on its ability to combine democratic and Jewish values throughout the entire population of the country; on its progress in resolving the predicament with the Palestinian people; and on its capacity to nurture a model society of economic growth and social justice, stemming from a healthy political system.

Amid all this, Jews will continue to provide leadership in humanity, armed with the Torah and with the power of the Talmudic process to create original interpretations to meet radically evolving conditions. In fact, as the world changes and faces a mix of ethical, societal, and environmental challenges, the unique voice of Judaism may be even more pronounced. With an ancient mission to be a light unto the nations, the global movement of Jews committed to tikkun olam is likely to grow—and might even lead Judaism.

Finally, leadership will remain crucial, but it will need to be qualitatively different. Leaders who respond to big-picture challenges and opportunities will determine the fate of the Jewish people in 2065. This will be a dramatic time, perhaps as dramatic as the decades that followed the destruction of the Second Temple. Only then, Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai needed to reinvent Judaism in a condition of powerlessness; now we must do so while being a superpower.

Gidi Grinstein, the author of Flexigidity: The Secret of Jewish Adaptability and the Challenge and Opportunity Facing Israel, is founder and president of the Reut Institute.

Tom Gross

In 1898, not many people would have predicted that by 1948, 6 million Jews would be intentionally wiped out. Or that a Jewish state with international recognition would exist in the Jews’ ancestral homeland.

It has always been hard, of course, to predict what might happen in 50 years. But it is even harder to do so today, because the world appears to be speeding up at an ever-increasing pace.

I suspect that many of the political and security problems now facing the Jewish people will become much worse over the next 50 years. The Iran deal, foolishly agreed to by world powers, might lead to a nuclear arms race in the Middle East that will make Israel’s position considerably more precarious. The Islamic State (or similar organizations that might come after it), which like other fascist regimes includes a core component of anti-Semitism in its ideology, will spread beyond its Middle Eastern and North African base. Anti-Semitism in Europe will continue and possibly become worse as memories of the Holocaust fade. And extreme anti-Israelism—that vicious offshoot of traditional anti-Semitism—will spread further among Western liberal elites (and among radical Jews).

Yet in spite of this, I remain an optimist. After all, for thousands of years Jews have survived occasionally genocidal aggression directed against them, forces that some other nations might not have had the resilience to endure.
And Jews are much better equipped to survive over the next 50 years than they were in the past. This is largely thanks to a strong and prosperous Israel, which knows how to defend itself and provides a haven for other Jews should they wish to live there. Indeed, in some ways, Jews are now in a better position to handle future dangers than many others are. It is a complete reversal of the previous situation. The Jews of France can go to Israel, but where can the French go?

Israel has a growing population and vibrant economy. One recent survey rated it the fourth-best country in which to raise a family. Another survey found it to be one of the world’s happiest countries. Most of all, it has a remarkably resilient democracy with a fiercely independent judiciary, media, and NGO sector. As for the military, there has never even been the hint of a coup—as there would have been in many other countries in Israel’s position. As the Middle East disintegrates, Israel will eventually be recognized internationally as a stable force. America and other Western countries may even draw closer to Israel and turn to it for advice and help as the problems of radical Islamism spread.

But if (heaven forbid) future American presidents continue the policies of Barack Obama and distance the United States from Israel, Israel will form closer ties to other world powers, notably China, India, South Korea, and Japan—a shift that is in fact already beginning.

As long as Israel remains strong, and I believe it will, the Jews of the world will be in a much better position in 50 years than they have been in for most of their history. Look at the plight of today’s Kurds or Yazidis, and think of the Jewish past.

Tom Gross is a British-born journalist and foreign-affairs commentator specializing in the Middle East.

Michel Gurfinkiel

I can think of two authors who discerned the future with stunning accuracy. One was Jan Gotlib Bloch, aka Ivan de Bloch, a Polish banker and peace activist, who foretold in Is War Impossible? (a book first published in French in 1898) the chain reaction that was to take place in 1914: a global European war turning into a lethal stalemate, social upheaval, and revolution. Another one is the French right-wing historian Jacques Bainville, who predicted in Les Conséquences politiques de la paix (The Political Consequences of the Peace), an essay published in 1920, why and how the Versailles treaty would lead to a second world war one generation later.

The key to both Bloch’s and Bainville’s effectiveness was that in order to understand how the world might turn in the ensuing years or decades, they devoted much attention to the world as it was in their own time. If we are to apply a similar approach to Jewish life in the coming 50 years, either in America, Israel, or elsewhere, we would be well advised not to ignore some crucial changes that are already under way—especially in the interlinked matters of demography and lifestyle.

In 1939, the population of the world was 1.6 billion, and there were about 17 million Jews: In other terms, Jews accounted for approximately 1 percent of the entire human population. In 1970, 25 years after World War II and the Holocaust, the world population was 3.6 billion and the Jewish population over 12 million: Jews accounted for 0.3 percent only. Today, the world population is estimated at 7.5 billion, and the Jewish population is at 16 million at best: The ratio is only 0.2 percent.

The demographic decline is even more marked in Europe and North America, the two areas that, until now, have been both the major centers of Jewish life and the leading actors in world politics and economics. The global European population, Russia included, was 470 million in 1939, and the Jewish European population was about 10 million: Jews thus amounted to 2.1 percent. Today, the respective figures are 740 million and 1.5 million: The ratio is 0.2 percent. In the United States, where the global population doubled, from 133 million in 1939 to 320 million today, the Jewish population seems to have remained almost at the same level, from 5 million then to about 6 million today: Jews dropped from 3 percent of the American population to less than 2 percent.

Indeed, the spectacular demographic rise of Israeli Jewry, from 600,000 in 1948 to more than 6 million today, has compensated in some ways for the decline elsewhere. On the other hand, much of Israel’s strength and resilience has derived, to this day, from the strength and resilience of the Jewish elites in the West, above all in the United States. It is not clear whether Jewish life in the Diaspora, and Jewish American support for Israel, are sustainable in a dwindling demographic environment.

Which brings us to the even more far-reaching issue of Jewish identity and lifestyle. The Jewish people is currently splitting into sub-currents that have less and less in common. According to a 2013 Pew survey, 9 million adult Americans claim a Jewish heritage, but only a bit more than one half of them (5.3 million) fully identify as Jews, and an even smaller group (4.2 million) identify as Jewish by religion. Then the latter group splits again between a Reform-Conservative majority (about 80 percent of the religious affiliated American Jews) and a small but growing Orthodox minority (20 percent).

According to a 2015 Pew survey, there is a sharp divide between Orthodox and non-Orthodox American Jews on almost every issue, including the actual practice of religion, support for Israel, and American politics. The main difference, however, is in intermarriage. Among the Orthodox, it is still an exception. Among the non-Orthodox, it tends to be the rule. Since only 20 percent of the intermarried Jews are raising their children in the Jewish religion, one wonders whether American Judaism as we know it today is not going to collapse and vanish, to be replaced by a much smaller but much more Orthodox Judaism. Some Orthodox Jews may see it as a blessing in disguise. The overall loss for Jewish life could, however, be unfathomable.

On the face of it, the situation is much more secure in Israel. Most Israeli Jews take their religious affiliation for granted, and one Israeli Jew out of two is following an Orthodox or semi-Orthodox lifestyle. Intermarriage in Israel is low and confined, more often than not, to marriage with Russian Israelis of patrilinear Jewish descent.

But things are actually more complex. If the old divide between secular and religious Israelis tends to recede, new divides are emerging among the Orthodox, between non-Zionist Haredim and Zionist Orthodox, and even between Haredi-leaning Zionist Orthodox and more liberal-leaning Zionist Orthodox. These developments are compounded by the growth, and the growing Israeliness and assertiveness, of non-Jewish groups in Israel—Druze, Israeli Arabs, non-Jewish Asian or African immigrants, non-Jewish Russian immigrants—who by now amount to more than 20 percent of the 8.3 million Israeli citizens.

It is not unlikely at all that Jewish and non-Jewish subgroups in Israel will enter into strange new alignments in the coming decades. Some Haredim are considering a complete secession from the present Israeli society and tactical alliances with the Israeli Arabs. Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home Party is explicitly advocating a closer alliance between religious and secular Zionists, but he is also supporting a more thorough integration and Hebraization of the Israeli Arabs. The center and left parties think of even more diverse coalitions.

Indeed, trends can be adjusted or reversed. And the Jewish people have usually been very good at that. Still, one should heed some warnings.

Michel Gurfinkiel is the founder and president of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, a conservative think tank in France, and a Shillman/Ginsburg Fellow at Middle East Forum. He sits on the board of governors of Consistoire, the National Union of French Synagogues.

Yossi Klein Halevi

Fifty years from now, the Jews will either become a God-centered people again or Judaism will be a dying faith.

One of the great Jewish casualties of modernity has been Judaism. The God-centered faith of the Jewish past has scarcely survived the combined onslaught of the European Enlightenment, the Holocaust, Americanization, Soviet Communism, and secular Zionism. Today Jewishness is about peoplehood, ritual observance, Torah study, tikkun olam, Zionism, defense against anti-Semitism—everything but God. Each of those facets of contemporary Jewish life is worthy in itself. None of them—including ritual observance and Torah study—necessarily involves a conscious relationship with God.

Re-sacralizing the Jewish people—restoring God to the center of Jewish life—involves two simultaneous processes. The first is placing God back at the center of our communal religious life, so that the primary purpose of prayer, for example, will no longer be strengthening Jewish community but establishing a living link with God. The second is defining the goal of a religious Jewish life as the creation of a personal connection with the Divine. In other words, Judaism would become religious again.

Jewish religious institutions of the future will be centers for spiritual growth, focusing on the refinement of one’s personality and traits, with special emphasis on Jewish meditation techniques. The explicit goal will be attaining a direct experience of the Divine Presence. Such institutions existed throughout premodern Jewish history—in ancient times as schools of the prophets, in medieval times, as schools of the kabbalists.

The Judaic schools of the future will produce an old/new kind of religious leader, whose authority will come from his or her ability to speak from personal spiritual experience. The emphasis will no longer be on faith but knowledge—no longer believing in God but knowing God.

Unlike previous Jewish schools for mystical development, the new schools will include exposure to the wisdom of other faiths. The next step in the evolution of the interfaith encounter will be shifting from dialogue to shared spiritual experience. Interfaith will become a great spiritual adventure, providing access to one another’s inner worlds.

The future schools of Jewish wisdom will produce leaders able to both teach the seekers of other faiths and learn from them.

The schools will most likely be based in the land of Israel. The Jewish return home has created both the need and the possibility for a deep renewal of the Jewish spiritual tradition. Students will come from the Diaspora and return home to energize their communities. In that way the prophesy will be fulfilled: “From Zion will come forth Torah and the word of God from Jerusalem.”

Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, where he co-directs the Muslim Leadership Initiative. His book Like Dreamers won the Jewish Book Council’s 2013 Everett Book of the Year Award.

David Harris

Let me be honest. I have no clue what the Jewish condition will be in the year 2065. In fact, I am hard-pressed to predict what things will look like tomorrow.

Indeed, had I been asked to participate in a similar Commentary symposium in 1965, could I have foreseen the Six-Day War only two years later, and its aftermath?

Or the astonishing success of the Soviet Jewry movement at a time when the word emigration was absent from the Kremlin’s lexicon?

Or the downfall of the USSR and its satellites, and the rebirth of Jewish communities in places where Jewish life was assumed to be nearing its end? Or, on a related note, that nations such as Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania would one day speak of Israel as a “strategic” partner?

Or that Germany would become the home of the fastest-growing Jewish community in the world?

Or that Israel would sign peace treaties with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994?

Or the remarkable flourishing of U.S.-Israeli relations, even as France’s close ties with Israel withered?

Or the recrudescence of anti-Semitism in Western Europe, fueled principally by elements of a growing Muslim presence and an extreme right-wing backlash to this immigration?

Or Israel’s population more than tripling from 2.5 million to more than 8 million?

Or the rescue of tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews, who for centuries dreamed of Zion but, in their isolation, thought they might be the only Jews on Earth?

Or the toppling of the remaining barriers to full Jewish participation in American life, with Fortune 500 executive suites, Ivy League presidencies, and presidential candidacies now wide open to Jews?

Or Israel’s foreign-policy pivot to Asia, with India as a showcase of new friendships?

Or the emergence of the Internet, creating previously unimaginable forms of Jewish connectivity, JDate among them?

Or the ordaining of women rabbis, the establishment of LGBT-friendly congregations, or the development of Chabad’s worldwide outreach network?

No, I could not have foreseen these startling developments in 1965.

So what is even remotely foreseeable from today’s vantage point?

First, Israel will continue to grow and thrive. True, the religious, social, and ethnic fault lines in Israeli society will not suddenly disappear. But the state will somehow manage them and blaze a trail in the 21st century as a global, sought-after leader in entrepreneurship, cybersecurity, water management, counterterrorism, renewable energy, medical research, and breakthrough technologies.

Second, while Israel’s neighborhood might possibly improve one day, affording new opportunities for regional cooperation, in the meantime the Jewish state will be ready for whatever ominous new threats surface from both state and non-state actors. As the story goes, God was so angry with the world that he announced, in two weeks’ time, a massive flood as punishment. On hearing this news, the French president told his citizens that the world would come to an end in 14 days, so there would be no more work, just joie de vivre, until the last minute. Meanwhile, the Israeli prime minister informed the Israeli people that “we have exactly two weeks to learn how to live underwater.”

Third, the universal vaccine against anti-Semitism is unlikely to be discovered by 2065. For a while, many thought that post–World War II liberal democracy was the antidote, but the rise of Judeophobia in several Western countries, abetted by the receding memory of the Holocaust and its lessons, means that all bets are off.

Fourth, America’s special ties with Israel will come under increasing challenge. There are seismic demographic changes happening in the United States, many college students are being exposed to the BDS movement on campus, and, with the passage of time, fewer Americans are able to recall the events of 1967 and how Israel unexpectedly became an “occupying power.” Absent an Israeli–Palestinian peace accord, the battle for American public opinion will grow still more intense.

Fifth, even as Jews confront the inevitable external challenges, there will be no shortage of internal debates and divisions that stretch the notion of am echad, “one people,” to the breaking point. To cite just one telling example, the fast-growing Haredi population at one end of the spectrum will be matched by the equally fast-growing population of Jews with an attenuated identity, two groups with essentially nothing in common. Then again, we’ve just about always been an argumentative and fractured people, sometimes, alas, to the point of self-destruction, so why should that suddenly change?

And sixth, in 2065, Commentary will hold a symposium on the next 50 years of Jewish life, and the magazine will have no difficulty identifying another group of contributors willing to ignore the late Yogi Berra’s sage words: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

David Harris is executive director of the American Jewish Committee.

Richard Joel

Prognostications can be alarming or comforting. No one wants to say “it depends.” But increasingly, I believe that “it depends” is the only meaningful answer to the question of where the Jewish people will be in 50 years. It depends upon how we answer a different question: “What transmits?” What of how we define our community can and will transmit to our children and to theirs? In my experience, what transmits is a sense of community propelled by shared values centered around the guiding principles of Torah. But in order to create this Jewish future worth having, we must renew our commitment to mutual respect and tolerance. Differences will abound, including differences on principle. Debate and even schism will continue. But the prerequisite for peoplehood requires that we practice respect and tolerance. This commitment doesn’t happen by itself but is one that we strengthen and nurture together. We Jews are a family whose ideologies and passions differ tremendously on matters of policy, politics, social issues, and even faith. But we must learn to disagree agreeably. Our sense of peoplehood depends on it.

The age of diversity is upon us. We needn’t debate whether it’s a value or a condition; it is a reality of the current state of Western civilization. While there are goods that come from it, challenges also abound. It is harder to make peoplehood meaningful without education leading to a shared sense of history and (I daresay) destiny, language, values, practice, and faith. It is important for organizations such as Yeshiva University to continue to produce leaders of texture. It is also important that Jewish education, both formal and experiential, be proffered to Jews of diverse backgrounds, leanings, and aspirations. Birthright is a valuable inoculation of peoplehood, but not sufficient to sustain it. Jewish camping, in whatever type of program, is important. Day schools, a renewed congregational-school structure, and continuing education are simply necessities. Israel, the idea and reality, must remain a core element in the story of the Jews.

I believe that in the future modern Orthodoxy will have to play a larger role in working for and with the broader Jewish community. In all denominations, those who are learned and passionate must seek to accept greater responsibility for serving and leading our community in all its dimensions. We are increasingly a community of communities and should treat that as a strength.

Finally, the federation system remains a necessary organizer of the community. Beyond a community chest, it needs to be the skeletal structure of the body politic of the Jewish people.

I know we always look for radical solutions. Perhaps it’s radical to restate truths that are difficult but truths nonetheless.

But I must return to my premise: We need to behave civilly, to disagree agreeably, and to accept people as created in the image of G-d. It can’t go without saying, because it all too often does.

Our sages in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Yoma, teach that the First Temple was destroyed because of the three cardinal sins: idolatry, immorality, and bloodshed. The story of the second destruction, in this oft-quoted Talmudic passage, is more complex. It attributes this destruction to sinat chinam, or “baseless hatred.” Of course, we disagree with one another over what we believe are causes of principle. But how do we disagree? Hatred is baseless. It is cynical, it destroys, and it suffocates the light. Disagreement can be in the name of Heaven. Our differences are no excuse for the disdain of others. We can disagree agreeably.

The answer that our condition in 50 years will be self-determined is not wholly true, but it is largely so. Will we be a people divided by our politics, our religious views, and our backgrounds, or will we be a people of diversity and common commitment, with some common boundaries? I hope and believe we can be the latter. We strive not for uniformity but for unity. Uniformity is not achievable and is not the goal anyway. Unity, on the other hand, is not just a nicety but our oxygen. Without it we choke; with it we stride purposefully into the future.

Richard Joel is president of Yeshiva University.

Jeremy Kalmanofsky

Contemporary trends might not persist, and all bets are off in the case of plague or nuclear holocaust. But, barring such a disaster, I expect that in 2065 our international Jewish community will be fragmented among three sectors: the Amish; Jewish human beings; and descendants of Jews, who sporadically use Jewish technology. Each group will articulate a unique approach to what Judaism means.

You can’t miss the Amish. Ultra-Orthodox Jews will continue to reproduce at very high rates and reproduce their culture both among the home-born and others attracted to their all-consuming way of life.

Amish life requires ever more rigid enclaves, which will be partly physical and concentrated in homogenous neighborhoods. But the most important boundaries are ideological, walling off “authentic” Judaism from society’s contaminating influences. Being an Amish Jew means not only wearing the uniform and speaking the language, but also greatly, exclusively valuing Jewish tradition, which is by definition the only right way to live. The Amish don’t waste time on goyish books when there is Talmud to be studied, and don’t apply goyish values to inherited norms, putatively unchanged since God gave them. Perfect Jewish life cannot be attained in the diverse world; it requires retreating to a monochromatic micro-community. Fifty years hence, a huge percentage of those remaining Jews will join them behind these walls. But they will be irrelevant, since they will obsess over halakhic minutiae, like microscopic biota in the water, but have nothing to say about the wider world beyond Jewish observance.

Next will be the Jewish human beings. This demanding path aspires to remain faithfully Jewish by recognizing that our tradition is one particular response to universal questions. Jewish human beings know that Judaism is not the world’s only religion, yet it is the only one they follow; that Am Israel is not the world’s only nation, yet it is their family.

Jewish human beings will actually practice Judaism, behaving along a spectrum stretching from liberal Orthodoxy to reasonably traditional Reform. They will mark Shabbat and holidays, perform ethical commandments, and eat with discipline. They will study Jewish texts and worship in Hebrew. They will belong to Am Israel globally and locally. They will share memories of a past and a vision of the future, or in Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s terms, “covenants of fate and destiny.” The next decades will be religiously fruitful for Jewish human beings, as they apply inherited religion to changing society. Because this path is intellectually and spiritually demanding, there may not be too many Jewish human beings, at least in North America. But it is the only path worth walking.

Finally, there will be descendants of Jews, people with a Jewish grandparent or two, who sporadically use Jewish technology. Massive exogamy and defections of the home-born prevent me from being too sanguine about how many Americans will identify as Jews in 2065. Already more than 2 million have a Jewish parent but do not consider themselves Jews. Presumably that number will grow.

I envision the descendants of Jews espousing two values I find difficult to affirm. First, Jewish identity will be increasingly post-ethnic. Twenty-first-century Americans will consider identity an evolving and malleable mélange of influences, something we adopt, reorient, and shed, not something stably ascribed based on one’s ancestral culture. Descendants of Jews—especially those who also have grandparents from other cultures—are unlikely to feel that they share a “covenant of fate” with other Jews. As Shaul Magid argues in his book American Post-Judaism, many won’t consider themselves members of an ethnos at all.

But—thanks to the pintele yid within and the inherent power of this magnificent tradition—many will still behave as Jews, at least sporadically. Some will eat matzah at seders with (deracinated) Jewish themes. They’ll do tikkun olam. Some will be moved to tears by the shofar. Many will marry beneath a chuppah, perhaps in ceremonies combining Jewish elements with other faith traditions. But probably they will view these as—in a phrase we hear nowadays—“spiritual technologies.” As with Yelp or WhatsApp, a great app can enhance your life. Judaism’s best apps will inspire, illuminate, and challenge, like a Thich Nhat Hanh book or a meditation. But using awesome technology is probably insufficient to structure a textured identity or connect people to a “covenant of destiny.” I expect most descendants of Jews will not choose to be Jews themselves. But at least some will be Jew-ish, which is better than nothing. So we Jewish human beings will leave the light on for you.

Jeremy Kalmanofsky is rabbi of Congregation Ansche Chesed in Manhattan.

Asa Kasher

Jewish life, whether in the general community of Jews or in any particular community of Jews, takes place under the roof of an “existential triangle.” In its vertices are the three major ingredients of contemporary Jewish existence: people, religion, and the State of Israel. Each vertex of the existential triangle is a whole world, but at present we are interested in just two of its components, namely its ideals and its present historical processes. The logic of our brief discussion will, then, be this: Given the present historical processes that take place under a vertex of the existential triangle, to what extent will its ideal be significantly implemented during the coming 50 years?

We start our survey near the vertex of the State of Israel, which is the youngest among the three vertices and in a sense the clearest. The independence of the state was proclaimed in 1948, but it is still in the process of being established as a fully fledged state. The ideal is fourfold: (1) to take the Jews out of Exile; (2) to take the Exile out of the Jews, i.e., to instill into the practices of Israeli Jews a sense of responsibility, not only to what happens in the natural self, family, and community spheres, but also in the national one; (3) to establish the internal constitutional, institutional, and cultural framework of the democratic nation-state of the Jews; and (4) to establish the external conditions of peaceful coexistence with all neighboring states and peoples.

Israeli society has been undergoing three important historical processes, among others. On a societal level, there have been integration processes of significant minorities into many parts of Israeli society. The Druze are almost fully integrated, whereas the ultra-Orthodox minority and the Arab minority have already made large steps in their integration processes. On a cultural level, the borders have been blurred between religious and nonreligious forms of life.

Elements of religious traditions are in the process of becoming natural elements in the culture of nonobservant persons. On a political level, a mixture of views, previously ascribed either to the left or to the right, is in the process of becoming dominant for most of the left, the center, and the right: The two-state solution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is the only justifiable and reliable one, and the future borders are not going to be those of 1967 but ones that include settlement clusters within Israel.

Given these processes, a 50-years extrapolation will give us reasons to assume that part four of the ideal, peaceful coexistence, will be significantly closer to having been obtained. As a result, Israel will become more attractive than it was, and part one of the ideal, taking the Jews out of exile, will be significantly closer to a satisfactory level, which has never meant full implementation.

The historical processes of minority integration and cultural mixture facilitate a process of shaping the nature of Israel as both a full democracy of high moral and ethical standards and a nation-state of the Jews, which takes on the responsibility to secure Jewish existence, continuity, and cultural advancement everywhere. Part three of the ideal of Israel, shaping the internal framework, will thus be practically completed. Part two of the ideal, instilling a sense of national responsibility, will probably stay the way it is, kept intact by the historical processes we mentioned. Many men and women shoulder the State of Israel, in a most impressive manner, while many confine their national responsibility to being law-abiding citizens. This probably, but unfortunately, seems to be the natural distribution of responsibility among citizens of any new state and society.

What will happen in the existential triangle under the vertex of Israel will have much impact on what happens under the vertex of the Jewish people. It may be assumed that the historical developments of Israel will significantly weaken Muslim anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiments. The Jewish life everywhere will thus be less problematic in major respects. The people’s ideal of survival and continuity will obtain.

Nothing much happens under a religious vertex during a half-century, all the more so when under consideration are denominations of entrenched defensive conservatism. One may assume that most religious denominations, particularly those whose major residence is in Israel, will get rid of much of their defensive nature and get used to the idea that by and large they do not have real enemies, but only well-meaning neighbors who insist on having their own different Jewish identities. The religious ideals will remain the same, secure, and unfulfilled.

Asa Kasher is Laura Schwarz-Kipp Professor Emeritus of Professional Ethics and Philosophy of Practice and professor emeritus of philosophy at Tel Aviv University.

Garry Kasparov

Ibelieve Judaism will be thriving in 2065. I say this not because of any profound analysis but because I cannot bear to imagine what it would mean for our lives if it is not. Perhaps it is better to say that Jews should be thriving, as Judaism means so many different things to different people. My own background and beliefs lead me away from institutions and faith and to dream of a 2065 in which every individual who identifies as a Jew, and who is identified as a Jew, is treated with respect and lives in peace.

Of course this is also my desire for everyone, Jew and non-Jew alike—to have the individual freedom and rights modern society has struggled to attain. But to say that Jews will have obtained freedom from hatred and prejudice by 2065 means that our world will have come very far toward our goals as a society. For if Jews are thriving and living without fear everywhere in 2065, then democracy and liberty are thriving everywhere.

This equation is based on the simple and terrible fact that Jews have long been the canaries in the coal mines of human rights, dictatorship, and war. Jews and Israel are still primary targets of terrorists and dictatorships, from supermarket murderers in France to the brutal authoritarian regimes across the Middle East and all the way to the Kremlin. Anti-Semitism today, whether religious fundamentalism or cynical political exploitation, is rife among the forces of anti-modernity, the “time travelers” who wish to turn back the clock of human progress.

The ongoing resurgence of violence against Jews in supposedly liberal and free Europe indicates the dangers of complacency even in the most unlikely places. The Obama White House is more hospitable toward the sworn enemies of Israel (and of America) than any U.S. administration in history has been. The accelerating trend is to move away from the values of liberty and the policies of strength and deterrence that won the Cold War. Into this vacuum have stepped the dictators, the radical mullahs, and the proverbial barbarian hordes of ISIS—along with their acolytes and admirers in the free world. As just enough U.S. senators lined up along partisan lines to support Obama’s terrible Iran deal against a veto, the Democrats need to ask themselves if they are going to step into this historical turning point as the party of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton or of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy.

It is no doubt as politically incorrect to openly correlate the principles of modern civilizational progress with the success of Judaism as it is to call them “Western” values, but I’m afraid we cannot withstand much more correctness at the expense of these principles. The only way to reverse our dangerous course is to speak out and fight without quarter against the moral equivalence that is as much an existential threat as guns and bombs.

As for the question of whether or not Judaism may suffer defeat through victory via assimilation and harmony, I have trouble seeing this as a threat. If the forces of modernity and freedom triumph, leaving the Jews of 2065 no longer targets of a unifying hatred, should we object? The ideas of man are not eternal, not even the oldest and most powerful ones. Judaism is not a mathematical truth that will outlive our species. The negative pressures of ignorance, bigotry, and violence can be replaced with the positive forces of education, community, and tradition. If the victory of tolerance and democracy comes at the cost of losing that part of one’s identity associated with prejudice and the threat of genocide, then I look forward to celebrating my 102nd birthday in such a world.

Garry Kasparov, a former world chess champion, is chairman of the Human Rights Foundation and the author of Winter Is Coming.

Morton A. Klein

Fifty years from now, the Jewish community will be thriving; Israel will be in the midst of a golden age. Israel and the Jewish people will have prevailed over threats experienced today and in the near future. Worsening anti-Semitism during the next half-century’s initial years will be followed by a stronger, more united Jewish community.

The Iranian nuclear threat will have been dealt with. During the first few years of the next half-century, Iran will continue moving toward nuclear-weapons capability and developing missile-delivery systems. But Israel will destroy Iran’s nuclear-weapons capability—something that Israel has spent years training for. A new U.S. president may assist this effort.

During the initial decades of this 50-year period, competing radical Islamic groups will wage internecine warfare, wreaking an enormous toll on the lives and economies of many of Israel’s neighbors, creating nightmarish conditions, and reducing these countries’ capacities to harm Israel. Arab nations and economies will collapse.

In Europe, the large influx of Muslim migrants will continue to bring instability, increased anti-Semitism, and economic weakness. These conditions will also cause a dramatic increase in aliyah to Israel (and result in smaller, weaker Jewish communities in Europe). Likewise, faced with growing anti-Semitism on U.S. college campuses and a weakening American economy, more American students will attend college in Israel, and more American families will make aliyah. The rise in aliyah will greatly strengthen Israel by 2065.

Israel will emerge as one of the world’s strongest, most stable economies. The world’s voracious appetite for Israel’s high-tech products will lead to greater reliance on Israeli inventions and industries. Haredi communities will continue joining Israel’s high-tech sector, becoming a positive economic force.

Current Jewish population trends will hold, significantly transforming the Jewish community’s composition. Orthodox Jews will continue having large families; by 2065, the Orthodox Jewish population will be proportionately and numerically far larger than it is today. By contrast, the numbers of secular and non-Orthodox Jews will decline, due to extremely low birthrates, intermarriage, and “drop outs” from the community.

This shift toward Orthodox Jews will ensure an increasing proportion of Jews who are highly committed to Israel. Orthodox army officers—who today already are 40 percent of Israel’s officers—will predominate. In the United States, increased Orthodox Jewry will change Jewish voting patterns. In 50 years, politically conservative and Republican Jews will have grown to be approximately equal in number to their liberal brethren.

Israel and the Jewish community at large will also have developed and enhanced important alliances by 2065. China will become an even larger trading partner with Israel. Alliances with moderate Muslim states that face common enemies will have continued to develop. Today’s small cadre of moderate, pro-Israel Muslim intellectuals, working to redefine Islam in a nonviolent manner, will have expanded their work and enabled new alliances to form.

And, in the wake of radical Islamic terrorists’ brutality toward Christians and others, Christians and others will increasingly see Israel as their only true friend in the Middle East, a beacon of tolerance, light, and stability in a barbaric world. After facing the reality of radical Muslim onslaughts that seek to destroy the Western way of life and impose Sharia on non-Muslim countries, non-Muslim nations will turn against radical Muslims and their states and recognize Israel as an important ally. BDS will collapse. The world’s Christians and Jews will enjoy an unprecedentedly strong alliance.

The Jewish people—and the world—will have also realized that appeasement of radical Islamic terrorists only encourages more terror. Israelis will better understand that concessions such as evacuating Jewish communities from Gaza, empowering and bringing the PLO into Judea/Samaria under the Oslo accords, releasing from prison terrorists convicted of murdering Jews, only led to more terror. Violence in Europe and elsewhere will lead to an appreciation of Winston Churchill’s warning: “Those who appease the crocodile will simply be eaten last.”

In every generation, as the Passover Haggadah foresees, enemies will rise up against the Jewish people, but each time we will overcome our enemies and prevail. We have always emerged to rebuild and become stronger than before. Fifty years from now will be a time of regeneration, hope, new opportunities, and stronger Jewish communities.

The Torah promises that the Jewish people will be an eternal people. Unlike politicians, G-d keeps his promises.

Morton A. Klein is national president of the Zionist Organization of America.

Moshe Koppel

Jerusalem, 2065. I’m surprised and grateful to still be alive.
The most dramatic change in Jewish demographics and culture during my lifetime has been the almost complete disappearance of Jewish communities outside of Israel. Europe went first. In the equilibrium between Christians and Muslims that emerged from the resurgence of Christianity in Europe in the 2020s, the right to persecute European Jews proved to be a negotiable commodity. By the time the Second Treaty of Westphalia (Faliyye al-Gharbiyye), dividing Europe into Christian and Muslim territories, was signed in 2048, the last remnants of Europe’s Jews had emigrated or converted.

The Jewish sojourn in the United States wound down in a somewhat different manner. Early on, the breakdown of traditional religion in most of the country presented increasingly significant challenges to the synthesis of Judaism and general culture. By the 2030s, all traditional sex taboos had been sublimated as food fetishes and public calls for restoring them had been criminalized. Loyalty to family, community, and nation had been replaced, for enlightened Americans, by devotion to a worldwide social network committed to patronizing the oppressed enemies of civilization and perpetuating the doctrines of the progressive faith. Since this new faith proved especially intolerant of the atavistic religious traditions it believed it was destined to supersede, those Jews who chose to maintain their distinct ethnic and religious identity were forced to build ever higher walls between themselves and their (real and virtual) neighbors.

As the social cost of self-segregation increased, the number of American Jews prepared to pay the price diminished accordingly. Many moved to Israel, and most of the rest assimilated, including those who had insisted that the new progressive faith was a purer expression of authentic Judaism than authentic Judaism was. These days the last remaining unassimilated Jews in the United States belong to several dozen Hasidic sects currently in litigation over the Satmar brand and a chain of messianic mega-shuls in the South founded by a philo-Semitic evangelical denomination that converted to Judaism en masse via an enterprising Chabad rabbi.

The Diaspora’s loss has been Israel’s gain. Islam’s struggle to destroy Israel has been largely defeated. Key contributing factors were the anti-Islamic awakening in Europe and the rapid emergence of algae as an inexhaustible alternative energy source. No less significant, however, was the ascendancy of technology as the decisive factor in warfare. Israel’s superiority in this area culminated in Iran’s bungled attempt in 2030 to detonate a nuclear device which resulted in a mile-wide crater where the city of Qom once stood, a failure widely attributed to Israeli sabotage and a great embarrassment to the Americans who had guaranteed they would prevent such sabotage.

But the difference between Israel today and Israel 50 years ago is not limited to the subjugation of kingdoms; indeed, it is mainly cultural. For the current generation of Israelis, Israel is a home, not a principle. As a result, they no longer expect the state to perform tasks better left to Jewish civil society. The state rabbinate, disbanded in the 2030s, is fondly forgotten. Judaism is the dominant culture in Israeli society, and consequently its practice is fluent and natural and less focused on exotic stringencies and haberdashery and other such costly loyalty signals. Jewish law is only lightly legislated, but widely studied and practiced. Jewish religious denominations no longer exist; individuals simply find their place along a continuum of options from deeply committed to slightly bemused. Non-Jews hold no special fascination for today’s Jews; they are neither feared nor envied.

It is the year 5825 and, in the eyes of this ancient Jew, the Jews are disconcertingly normal.

Moshe Koppel is a professor of computer science at Bar-Ilan University and chairman of the Kohelet Policy Forum.

Martin Kramer

The phrase “Jewish history” is misleading. There is only history, of which the Jews are a part, sometimes as movers, other times as objects, too often as victims. The Jews of Europe were destroyed because a force arose that nearly destroyed all of Europe in a total war. The Jews of America have prospered because America has prospered, thanks to its mastery of democracy and capitalism. The Jews of Russia were freed because all of Russia freed itself from Soviet Communism.

World-historical forces have made “Jewish history” as much as the Jews have made it, if not more.

Those forces made it in 1948 as well. The 600,000 Jews who created the State of Israel showed incredible grit. But they never would have succeeded had the Arabs not been debilitated and divided. Israel arose at an opportune moment, when the Arabs were still reeling from colonialism. That weakness has persisted to our very day and has manifested itself in our time in an Arab civil war. But by 2065, the Arabs will be a full century into postcolonial independence. Is it possible that they might finally be poised to destroy Israel, perhaps with the help of other Muslims, such as Iran?

“Israel is indestructible,” former Mossad head Efraim Halevy has said time and again. “I believe that Israel has a sufficient capability, both offensive and defensive, to take care of any threat, including the Iranian threat.” This is true—for now. But as Halevy has repeated again and again (in the debate on the Iran nuclear deal), “10 years is an eternity in the Middle East.” Israel has enjoyed a widening advantage over its adversaries since its establishment, especially since 1967. It is the inherent advantage of the West over the East. But might 50 years—Halevy’s eternity multiplied by five—be enough to erode or overturn it?

This is certainly the Palestinian-Arab view of Israel. According to a recent poll, more than half of Gazans and almost 40 percent of West Bankers think Israel will no longer exist at all in 30 to 40 years. They are about evenly split between those who think that Israel “will collapse from internal contradictions” and those who expect that “Arab or Muslim resistance will destroy it.” Ask them if Israel will exist as a Jewish state in a century, and the percentage of those who answer yes falls almost to single digits. This is the persistent idea of Israel as a Crusader outpost, fated to dissipate as a reunited Islam recovers and recoups its losses.

Over the next 50 years, Israel by its actions must show, decade after decade, that it is the Arabs, including the Palestinians, who have the most to fear from the future, unless and until they recognize Israel’s durable permanence. They are only halfway there. Two states bordering Israel have made a grudging peace, but Islamists, Sunni and Shiite, still think they can whittle down Israeli sovereignty by a thousand cuts. These are the people whom Israel must defeat and demoralize over the next 50 years. Forty years ago, in January 1976, Bernard Lewis accurately predicted “The Return of Islam” in these pages. The retreat of Islam as a radical political force is something that Israel must work to effect, by causing it to fail as thoroughly as Arab nationalism failed in 1967.

Because the Jews are now fully sovereign, they can act on history in ways once unimaginable, and Israel has the potential and the imperative to make history for others. It must plan to bend the arc of the Middle East yet again, in its favor. If Israel is to be secure, let alone flourish, it will have no choice.

Martin Kramer is the president of Shalem College in Jerusalem.

William Kristol

What will Jews, Jewry, and Judaism look like in 2065?

I’ll spare the reader the usual protestations about how difficult it is to make predictions and simply make them. Assertions as aids to thought are underrated.

In 2065, there will be enough Jews. It’s true that intermarriage and assimilation will continue on course, but two factors will more than compensate: a high birthrate among the religious and the emergence of a major phenomenon, the “New Jews,” reflecting a large number of conversions to Judaism from both the secular world and Christianity. And the newer Jews will on the whole be better Jews.

In 2065, world Jewry will be concentrated in Israel and America. America will be presiding over a “New American Century,” with a democratic China and India as key allies in maintaining a world order that is friendly to liberty. “New Israel,” freed of the delusions of utopian liberalism on the one hand and the dispiriting dominance of the rabbinate on the other, will be flourishing as a Jewish and democratic state. It will have successfully absorbed much of Judea and Samaria, enjoy strong regional allies in liberal democratic Iran and Egypt, and will have a not-too-dysfunctional Palestinian state existing next door in Jordan. The path to this happy outcome will not have been smooth, and the degeneration of much of Europe into an archipelago of well-preserved museum pieces amid a sea of low-grade chaos will be much lamented. But Western civilization will have learned to flourish without Europe at its center.

In 2065, Judaism will be strong, despite the fact that the two dominant Judaic strains of recent centuries, rabbinic and prophetic Judaism, will be in crisis. But thanks to a renaissance of several older Judaic traditions—biblical Judaism, historical and Zionist Judaism, and philosophic Judaism among them—what will be called “New Judaism” will be a vibrant and compelling force in the civilized world.

That’s my prophecy.

William Kristol is editor of the Weekly Standard.

Jay P. Lefkowitz

Predictions, especially those forecasting half-a-century into the future, should be made with great humility. On the day that Lord Balfour first expressed his support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, who would have predicted that 50 years later, a Jewish army would roundly defeat a coordinated attack on the Jewish state by Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq and recapture the Old City of Jerusalem for the first time in 2,000 years?

But with that caveat, here is my forecast: In 50 years, the American Jewish community will be much more divided, along religious and political lines, than it is today. As to religious life, we are seeing an explosive birthrate within the Orthodox community and especially among the ultra-Orthodox, who already constitute about 70 percent of Orthodox Jews, and whose population is expected to more than double in the next 20 years. Already, in New York City, more than half of Jewish children under 18 are being raised in Haredi homes. At the same time, the non-Orthodox Jewish community continues to shrink from a below-replacement birthrate (1.3 children per woman) and an intermarriage rate in excess of 70 percent. Thus, the center of gravity in the Jewish community will be significantly more observant. Most problematic, however, is that the two segments of the community are likely to grow further and further apart in the coming years because the ultra-Orthodox do not accept patrilineal descent and do not consider many of the secular Jews, especially those who are the products of intermarriage or non-Orthodox conversions, to be Jewish. Indeed, the oft-cited Pew report of 2013 observed that the second-largest-growing segment of the Jewish community is what it described as Jews of no religion—people who describe their religion as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular,” but who were raised Jewish or had a Jewish parent or grandparent and still consider themselves Jewish aside from religion.

The growing bifurcation of American Jewry along religious lines poses a serious danger to the fabric of the American Jewish community. For the past 150 years, American Jews have sustained a broad network of organizations that have supported local Jewish communities and provided assistance to Jews around the world. It remains to be seen whether the next generation’s American Jewish community will feel a similar sense of broad, communal obligation. The non-Orthodox are gradually melting into the mainstream of secular America. And the ultra-Orthodox might over time come to resemble the Amish, who live deeply religious lives in insular communities largely detached from the American mainstream. That’s a perilous situation for a minority community that has always benefited from a synergy between the Orthodox and the nonobservant secular or cultural Jews.

Just as there will be a growing divide within the Jewish community along religious lines, there will also be a growing political divide. The Jewish community has been highly influential in the United States in large measure due to its enormous success. Despite making up less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, American Jews account for a vastly disproportionate percentage of the Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans and Fortune 500 CEOs, a third of the current Supreme Court, about a third of American Nobel laureates. And for most of the last half-century, support for Israel was the dominant unifying force in the Jewish community, even as most Jews voted for Democrats. Today, however, support for Israel is beginning to fracture, with significant portions of the American left becoming decidedly less friendly to Israel. While the Pew survey showed that a clear majority of American Jews say they are committed to Israel (a statistic largely unchanged over the past 15 years), it is unclear whether this level of support will continue given that the Pew survey revealed that almost half of American Jews don’t believe Israel is making a sincere effort to make peace with the Palestinians. This political divide has ominous implications for Israel. An indication of the rough waters that lie ahead was AIPAC’s effort to persuade members of Congress to oppose President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, an effort that failed even among most Jewish members of Congress, as the New York Times gleefully pointed out.

I am confident my children and grandchildren will still have vibrant American Jewish communities in which to live in 50 years. After all, Jews have survived far greater depredations in nearly every century than I anticipate the next 50 years will bring, at least in America. But the character of American Jewry will certainly change significantly over the next 50 years. And the likely result is that even if the community is roughly the same size, it will be more fractured, less successful, and less influential.

Jay P. Lefkowitz is a partner in private practice in New York and a member of Commentary’s board of directors.

Jon D. Levenson

What will be different about Jewish identity in 2065?

In the premodern world, Jewishness exhibited a unity that modernity has fractured, raising the now familiar question of whether the Jews constitute a religion, an ethnic group, a nation in exile, a culture, or whatever. With the ostensible discrediting of traditional religion by modern discoveries (especially scientific, philological, and archaeological), the ethnic and national definitions of Jewishness increasingly came to the fore. The Holocaust, which targeted persons of Jewish descent regardless of their religious identity, seemed to add credibility to the perception that ethnic belonging was essential but religious belief and practice were matters of only private concern, as indeed they are in modern Western states. That the Jewish state is not (at least in principle) biased toward or against religious practitioners is further evidence of the same change.

Evidence is mounting, however, that throughout the West, ethnicity and nationalism in general are now themselves in sharp decline. In America, there has been a massive elision of ethnic demarcations, evident in the enormous increase in intermarriage of all sorts: The Melting Pot has never worked better. A number of trends now influential among intellectuals reflect and reinforce the same development: a high estimation of cultural hybridity, a loss of the sense of natural meanings, the assumption that one’s individual self-definition is beyond critique, and an instinctive equation of patriotism with jingoism and of most group identities with prejudice, to name a few.

The Jewish implications are clear. Just as modernity saw the perception of the reality of God and the authority of Torah dramatically recede, so are we now witnessing an analogous diminishment of the social and cultural force of various secular ideas of Jewish peoplehood. Considering the high degree of acculturation among American Jews, this is hardly surprising. There is only so far that the Jewish community can travel on the residual momentum of a thick culture that for most American Jews is now three or four generations in the past. Even the emotional impact of the Holocaust will decrease when the event will have occurred in the time not of one’s parents or theirs, but of one’s great-great-grandparents.

Some may argue that the State of Israel is immune to these trends, and it is hard not to be impressed by the intense patriotism and sense of collective purpose evident among most Israelis. I suspect, though, that such traits are most common when states are young or beleaguered, and Israel has always been both. When the country is well over a hundred years old and if its relations with its neighbors normalize—could there be a larger if?—it is not hard to imagine the same worrisome dynamics gaining ground there as well. The Israeli post-Zionists may be a harbinger of things to come.

One great challenge the Jewish community might face in 2065, then, is recovering an intellectually defensible and encompassing vision of truth manifested in a system of practice that reinforces a distinctive identity. Barring the always possible resurgence of racial anti-Semitism, it is unlikely that heavy reliance on an ascribed status based on family origin will bear much fruit. What is needed is the achieved status that comes from an active and transmissible life regimen. If the new focus is authentic to the larger Jewish tradition, it will result in a dramatic reconfiguration of the demographic profile of American Jewry. Those groups that have convinced American Jews that the Jewish ethical tradition largely coincides with the progressivist social agenda are likely to atrophy because of their phenomenal success at doing exactly that. In particular, those who have accepted the sexual revolution and its various ramifications will face one of its grimmer consequences: a birthrate ominously below the replacement level.

Analogously, Jewish conservatives who hold an instrumental view of religion, treating it as useful to their causes and avoiding the nettlesome questions of theological meaning and personal practice, may find themselves wondering why a disproportionate number of those who agree with them were formed in ritually observant households.

To a significant degree, a new holistic conception of Jewish identity would be a return to the premodern model, but the formidable intellectual and practical challenges that modernity poses will remain. For most Jews, avoidance of the issues, reinforced by social isolation, will not be an option. But neither the concept of tradition nor that of modernity is so fixed as to eliminate the possibility of a new and more creative engagement of the two a half-century hence.

Jon D. Levenson is the Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard. His latest book is The Love of God: Divine Gift, Human Gratitude, and Mutual Faithfulness in Judaism.

Hal M. Lewis

As Kohelet, the book of Ecclesiastes, teaches, “the making of books is without limit.” The same, it must be said, is true about the making of predictions. One speculates about something as suppositional as the condition of the Jewish community 50 years hence with great humility. Doing so, however, is not entirely creatio ex nihilo. Trends already in evidence provide useful insight as to where we could be five decades from now.

I study, teach, and write about Jewish organizational leadership. It is safe to say that in 2065 the world of Jewish organizations will be very different from the contemporary experience. Declines in affiliation, memberships, and denominationalism—which have been long apparent—will become the new normal. Indeed, Jewish life will no longer be conducted within identifiable single-purpose facilities focused around worship, education, or social service. Completing a shift already in evidence, people will connect with Judaism and Jewish life outside the context of formal institutions.

A porousness of boundaries will characterize the Jewish experience five decades from now. Definitions of who is a Jew and what Judaism means will move from a finite set of options to limitless and protean possibilities. Technological advances that enable individualized explorations and an expansion of do-it-yourself Judaisms will embolden those who wish the Jewish experience to be whatever their highly idiosyncratic desires prefer.

Along with organizations, congregations, and non-Orthodox rabbinic authority, what we currently consider as “mainstream” and “periphery” will be completely upended. Sustained rates of intermarriage, combined with dramatic growth in the numbers of Jews of color, will mean the end of Ashkenazi hegemony in American Jewish life. With its passing will be the demise of its greatest creation, the so-called organized Jewish community (singular), as if it were ever really one or ever really organized.

Five decades from now, there will be far fewer Jewish-community professionals, educators, and clergy. Not only will the number of Jewish organizations have declined, owing to the fact that Jews, then indistinguishable from the broader culture, will no longer feel the need for their own tribal agencies. But fewer and fewer talented individuals will look to Jewish enterprises as secure and satisfying places to work. As a result, the decline of non-Orthodox day schools, synagogues, Jewish community centers, federations, and social-service agencies seems a likely eventuality, if not a veritable certainty.

These shifts will be set against the backdrop of a demographic explosion among the religiously far right. Predictions of ruptures within the Jewish people (already evinced in 2015 divisions over Iran “deals” and competing domestic political agendas) will, in retrospect, seem jejune. These rifts will be particularly palpable in connection with the issue of support for Israel. Where once Jewish groups proudly defined their mission as standing with Israel, such solidarity will no longer be in evidence. More than a century after the Shoah, Jewish groups will not be driven by its memories or the post-1967 survivalist mind-set, upon which so many philanthropic agendas were predicated. Rightward demographic and political shifts in Israel, moreover, which have been alienating to many Jews, coupled with an expanded Israeli economy that attenuates the need for worldwide charitable support, will mean the evanescence of traditional affinities between Diaspora communities and the Jewish state.

To the degree that Jews will be informed by a communal agenda at all, we will see a flattening of organizational culture. Where top-down leadership models were once de rigueur, Jewish enterprises in 2065 will embrace far less hierarchical structures, consistent with the way business in general will then be conducted. While Jewish communal life, such as it will be, will continue to manifest aspects of oligarchy and the golden rule—those who have the gold, rule—organizational charts for both volunteers and professionals will reflect far more flexible and less rigid paradigms of leadership.

Finally, in a not insignificant reversal of current patterns, vestiges of male-dominated institutional leadership will vanish. Rabbinical schools, including those on the left wing of what is today centrist Orthodoxy, will ordain women at disproportionate rates. Volunteer boards will be overwhelmingly female, and women will be the dominant force and primary audience for Jewish religious, spiritual, and educational enterprises. While this is likely to have positive impacts on everything from leadership styles to conflict-management techniques, 50 years from now the challenge will be how to reintroduce men to Jewish life.

Change is rarely as discontinuous as its proponents like to claim. The seeds for a very different Jewish world have already been planted. The question facing this generation is whether to deracinate or nurture them.

Hal M. Lewis is president and chief executive officer of the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership. He is the author, most recently, of From Sanctuary to Boardroom: A Jewish Approach to Leadership.

Joseph I. Lieberman

Let me begin my answer to Commentary’s question with some very good news. Fifty years from now, and, for that matter, 500 years from now and 5,000 years from now, there will be a world Jewish community.

I believe that the Jewish people will exist forever. I hold this belief as a matter of faith based on divine promises, but also as a rational conclusion based on the multi-millennial history of Jewish survival. Jews are here to stay.

Ironically, I am more confident about making such a prediction about the eternality of the Jewish people than I am about predicting exactly where we will be 50 years from now.

Nevertheless, Commentary’s invitation to do so is irresistible, so here goes:

There are visible trend lines in the Jewish community, but recent history should make us modest about predicting whether they will continue. The worst period in Jewish history—the Holocaust—happened in our time and has been followed, miraculously, by arguably the best period in Jewish history. Israel was re-established as a Jewish state on its historic land, and millions of Jews live in America, which has given us more freedom, opportunity, and acceptance than we have ever received anywhere outside of Israel.

Now many people fear that this golden age for world Jewry may be ending and history is beginning to move in the wrong direction. In Europe, anti-Semitism is back. In America, assimilation is diminishing the Jewish population. In Israel, threats from foreign enemies—particularly Iran—are more realistically existential than they have been since the modern state was created in 1948.

I don’t deny these unsettling developments, but I believe we will overcome them. My vision of where the Jewish community will be in 50 years is optimistic, based on what I have experienced in my life and the strengths that I see in the Jewish world today.

Fifty years from now, Israel will be stronger in many important ways than it is today. There will be a coming together of Israel and its Arab neighbors, stimulated in the first instance by their shared fear of Iranian aggression but ultimately by their willingness finally to acknowledge their shared interest in peace and regional economic cooperation. At some point, there will probably be a major military conflict in the Middle East with Israel and the Arab world on one side and the Islamic Republic of Iran on the other. At the same time, or perhaps separately, the gifted and diverse people of Iran will rebel against their corrupt, fanatical leadership. The government’s response will be as ferocious as Assad’s has been in Syria. But having learned the dreadful consequences of passivity in Syria, the Western world, the Arab nations, and Israel will support the rebels in Iran, and ultimately they will succeed in overthrowing the old order and establishing a new Iranian government that respects the human rights of its people and enjoys peace with its neighbors.

This victory will enable Israel, the Arab world, and Iran to establish full, mutually beneficial diplomatic and economic relationships. It will also finally usher in the long elusive two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
The U.S.-Israeli alliance will continue to be strong, but with a changing base of support in America made up of more and more evangelical Christians, Orthodox Jews, and Hispanic Americans. The U.S. will not be Israel’s only good ally. There will be others, beginning with Israel’s regional neighbors and extending to some of the new superpowers, particularly India.

Inside Israel, the religious awakening that began in the Orthodox community will spread to non-Orthodox Israelis. They will express their natural yearning for spirituality and reconnection to biblical history by forming one or more new religious movements that will be uniquely Israeli, largely traditional, but decidedly egalitarian.

In America in 50 years, there will certainly be more Orthodox Jews. The birthrate-driven demographics are real. Orthodox Jews will realize, as their numbers grow and they are welcomed into all areas of American professional, business, political, and cultural life, that they have a responsibility to get involved and assume positions of communal leadership that they have traditionally shunned. Parts of the modern Orthodox community will join with parts of the traditional Conservative community to constitute, formally or informally, a new denomination between the Orthodox and Conservative movements. The Reform movement will find creative ways to engage more Jews—including those who have intermarried—and their children. Overall, the American Jewish community will be smaller in 50 years (but not that much smaller) and will continue to enjoy good relations with other Americans and the fullest range of opportunities for leadership in all segments of national life. Sometime in the next 50 years, there will be a Jewish American, probably a religiously observant man or woman and probably a Republican, who will be elected president or vice president of the United States. The ticket he or she is on will carry Florida without any problems with hanging chads. And that will make me very proud, happy, and patriotic wherever I will be.

One other prediction I make with confidence is that during the next 50 years, the Chabad movement will continue to grow in America, Israel, and everywhere else in the world, bringing more and more Jews into Jewish experiences, learning, and values.

In sum, I foresee a Jewish community centered in Israel and America that will be different in 50 years, more diverse and religious than it is today, and just as strong, dynamic, and influential.

For me, one of the best expressions of the Jewish view of history is still found in the closing words of President Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, which inspired me to enter public service: “Let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”

The long-range future of the Jewish community is guaranteed. It is between now and then that we all have a lot of work to do. Based on our past and present, I am confident we will do what has to be done.

Joseph I. Lieberman, a former U.S. senator from Connecticut, is senior counsel at Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman.

Perhaps a look back in history will inspire a degree of optimism for the future.

When Commentary first appeared on the literary scene, 70 years ago, the Holocaust was ending. The most horrific period of European Jewish history was also one of the saddest for American Jews. During the Holocaust, the Jewish community was disappointingly disengaged from the plight of their brethren overseas. Jews were frightened by a powerful anti-Semitism and anti-alienism, which swept the United States during that period. American Jewish organizations hesitated to speak out. Moreover, prominent Jews such as Herbert Lehman, Bernard Baruch, Felix Frankfurter, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, who had President Roosevelt’s ear, failed to urge him to act in support of European Jewry in any meaningful way.

There was one episode that starkly dramatized this failure. Here is the way it was described in the diary of a member of the White House staff who witnessed it.

October 6, Wednesday, 1943 . . . a delegation of several hundred Jewish rabbis sought to present (Roosevelt) a petition to deliver the Jews from persecution in Europe, and to open Palestine and all the United Nations to them. The President told us in his bedroom this morning he would not see their delegation. . . . Judge (Samuel) Rosenman, who with Pa Watson also was in the bedroom, said the group behind this petition was not representative of the most thoughtful elements in Jewry. Judge Rosenman said he tried—admittedly without success—to keep the hoard from storming Washington. Said the leading Jews of his acquaintance opposed this march on the Capitol.

Rosenman was in the right place at the right time and did the wrong thing. Contrast that with what is happening 72 years later, with AIPAC putting on a full-court press to oppose the Iran deal and standing up to a sitting president in the process. There was no AIPAC 70 years ago. There was only a loose confederation of Jewish organizations that were too frightened to engage in a political struggle to save Jews and that eschewed public demonstrations in support of Jewish causes.

As I write these words, I do not know the outcome of the struggle against the Iran deal. But it is clear that American Jewry today, with all its flaws and question marks, stands up like an exclamation point, defending its position and refusing to be intimidated by superior political strength in a struggle to support not only the State of Israel but the well-being of America. This is a day-and-night difference from 1945.

Another historical perspective concerns Commentary itself. I vividly recall Commentary’s format and contents when it first appeared. The back cover consisted of an advertisement for AMOCO, the American Oil Company. This reflected the mind-set of those who then led the American Jewish Committee. They were mainly interested in being American and only marginally concerned with being Jewish. The content of the magazine reflected that point of view. It was a journal of literary significance in which Jewish life and thought played a minor role. There could not possibly have been in its pages a symposium on the future of the Jewish people in the next 50 years.

Commentary and the AJC are dramatically different today from what they were 70 years ago. Commentary is still a very important literary journal, but many of its articles are devoted to Jewish life, Jewish history, Israel, and Jewish ritual and religion, subjects that were once absent from its pages. The AJC of today, moreover, is not the assimilationist organization that it was seven decades ago. It is at the forefront of the struggle to strengthen the Jewish people, the Jewish religion, the Jewish role in the world, and, of course, the security and success of the State of Israel.

Nobody would have predicted any of this 70 years ago. The 1945 publishers and the organizational sponsors of Commentary would have been mortified and somewhat frightened were they to have read the articles of the 2015 issues of Commentary.

It shows just how far we have come as American Jews. Not everyone will agree with the positions of this journal or the AJC, but everyone can admire the great strides that have been made by American Jewry over the past 70 years in standing upright as Jews and as Zionists, not without criticism of Judaism and Israel, but with love and loyalty to both.

Maybe our future isn’t going to be so bleak after all.

Haskel Lookstein is senior rabbi of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun and principal of the Ramaz School.

Bethany Mandel

Two years ago, in the Pew study on American Jewry we learned the sad truth about non-Orthodox Judaism in America: It’s dying. The only growing segment of the Jewish world in the United States is that of Orthodoxy, thanks to low rates of intermarriage and a high rate of fertility. The institutions of Conservative Judaism are disappearing: Every year more Solomon Schechter schools close and the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), the rabbinic flagship school of the movement, is facing deep budget cuts and layoffs. While the institutions of Reform Judaism are thriving, the children of its members are intermarrying at a frightening and growing clip with an increasing number not considered halakhically Jewish by the standards held outside of the Reform community.

What of Orthodoxy, the last great hope of survival for American Judaism? How is it handling the responsibility laid at its feet?

Not well enough.

With every passing year, an increasing number of sex scandals plagues its rabbinic leaders. These predatory rabbis target the most vulnerable: children and converts. The collective shoulder shrug from their peers and many members of the Jewish community is deeply disturbing. The rabbis keep their positions; they are quietly allowed to move to new communities; they are counted in minyans wherever they go.

The sex scandals are not merely objects of prurient fascination. They go to the very heart of Jewish continuity in America, because the institutions of Orthodox Judaism are weakened and undermined by them.

Those institutions are the day schools, which educate young minds and shape the future generations of Jewish leaders; the synagogues, in which Jews stand before God and gather for communal rituals, not the least of which is prayer; and the courts of conversion, in which the Jewish community has the chance to open its arms.

“There are commands that leap off the page by their sheer moral power,” Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks once wrote about the Torah. One such example? “Do not ill-treat a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in Egypt.” And: “Do not oppress a stranger; you yourselves know how it feels to be a stranger [literally, ‘you know the soul of a stranger’], because you were strangers in Egypt.”

Even wayward lay people, such as husbands who refuse to grant their wives a divorce (known as a get), are often still counted as members of their community. Although they are supposed to be shunned, the men who leave their ex-wives as agunot, or “chained women,” unable to remarry, often enjoy a degree of leniency that is technically not allowed within the context of Jewish law.

There is much that is beautiful and authentic about Orthodox Judaism. There is also much that is necessary, considering the demographics. But it must learn from the stumbles of the Catholic Church. Before the sex scandals involving priests during the 1980s, Catholicism was the most powerful organized religion in the world. It is now a shell of its former self.

If Orthodox Judaism can learn anything from the Catholic Church, it is this: Men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers will prioritize the safety and well-being of their families. If rabbinic authorities don’t take seriously the plight of agunot and sexually victimized women and children, Orthodox Judaism will squander its place as the last best hope for American Judaism. If the lesson of the Catholic Church isn’t heeded, American Judaism will face the same fate.

Bethany Mandel is a writer on politics and culture and a stay-at-home mother. She served on the Rabbinical Council of America’s committee to evaluate its Orthodox conversion protocols.

Michael Medved

There’s one bit of undeniably good news about the Jewish future: Fifty years from now, no one will face that perennial, and perennially annoying, question: “Is Jewish identity based on religion or ethnicity?”
In 2065, Judaism as a religion will survive in the United States. But Jewishness as an ethnicity most certainly will not.

This prediction hardly counts as bold or daring. Normal patterns of American life show ethnic identity inevitably dissolving within three or four generations of immigration. Nativists of 200 years ago worried that German newcomers would remain irreducibly different, and Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee became centers of German-American population and culture. But all that’s left of this once vibrant Kultur is historical monuments. In 1972, the great Michael Novak wrote the insightful book The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, focusing on the PIGS—Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slavs—who helped swing politics in more conservative directions. Forty-three years later, those once durable communities have largely melted away through the relentless processes of assimilation and intermarriage.

If anyone doubts that proposition, consider some of the presidential contenders for 2016. Chris Christie is the result of Irish-Sicilian intermarriage but enjoys no special resonance with voters of either heritage. Ted Cruz is arguably Latino, with a father who emigrated from Cuba, but in recent interviews he’s hard-pressed to say what that identity means to him. Donald Trump is German on his father’s side (the original family name was Drumpf) but lederhosen play no role in his wardrobe or his political appeal.

Meanwhile, Brooklyn-born Bernie Sanders may be recognizably Jewish, but he married a Roman Catholic, reveres Pope Francis as his spiritual inspiration, and he has never been affiliated with a synagogue—though the other recent presidential contender from Vermont, Howard Dean, has. Dean isn’t Jewish, of course, but his wife, Dr. Judith Steinberg is, and they raised their two children in the Jewish faith.

The point of this all-American mishmash (to cite a word with Yiddish and Middle English roots) is that the Deans, with two children exposed to Judaism as a religious tradition, have at least some chance of producing Jewish descendants, but the future Jewish identity of the Sanders family remains a far more questionable proposition. If his Vermont-raised offspring (three of them stepchildren from his Irish-American wife, Jane O’Meara, one of them the product of a brief nonmarital relationship) ever develop a meaningful, ethnically Jewish identity, it’s hard to imagine what it would look like.

Conversion to Judaism is a common occurrence, but in even the most liberal precincts of the Reform movement it requires some ritual religious practice—attending seders or celebrating a bar mitzvah.

What would an ethnic conversion demand? Studying Jewish cookbooks to learn to prepare kasha varnishkas? Immersion in Woody Allen films? Fifty years from now (and probably much sooner), these often entertaining artifacts will look like relics of a vanished past, based on the filmmaker’s Brooklyn upbringing during the heyday of secular Jewish ethnicity.

Even today, Brooklyn is hardly what it used to be: Far more residents define their Jewish identity as followers of prominent Hasidic rebbes than seek Jewish content through the holy works of Rabbis Woody Allen and Bernie Sanders. In August of this year, the Forward expressed shock at a Pew study proving that the Orthodox community is not only growing as a percentage of the overall Jewish population but, with high birth and retention rates, has been growing in raw numbers as well. A 2012 study for New York City’s Jewish Federation showed a heavy majority of Jews younger than age 18 already identify as Orthodox.

And what about the forlorn hope that a common commitment to liberal politics, or a deep connection with the State of Israel, will somehow preserve an ethnic identity despite all the pressures toward its dissolution? The bitter, well-publicized split over the president’s nuclear deal with Iran illustrates the folly of relying on a monochromatic political perspective to keep a purely secular sense of community alive.

Regarding the significance for American Jews of the (increasingly Orthodox) Jewish state, the Pew study shows 84 percent of the Orthodox believing that God gave Israel to the Jewish people, along with 82 percent of evangelical Christians. Among non-Orthodox Jews, only 35 percent accept that notion.

None of this means that we can’t look forward to a special celebration in 2065 for the 120th anniversary of Commentary. We’ll still be able to say L’Chaim, but the Jewish life we toast will include strong religious elements, or else offer nothing more than memories.

Michael Medved hosts a daily nationally syndicated talk-radio show. He is currently writing his 13th nonfiction book, God’s Hand on America.

Ruth W. Messinger

As the head of a Jewish organization with American roots and global reach, I find that Commentary’s big question begets familiar and more specific questions: Will Jews be viable in 2065? Will our community be more observant and more politically conservative? Will its signature institutions—federations, denominations, and congregations—still exist? Will today’s liberal majority drift away from Jewish community and identity? Or will new ways to organize Jewish life, express Jewish values, and shape Jewish identities emerge?

The answers: Of course, yes, no, maybe, some of each, all of the above, and a few things we never expected. While I do not have 20/20 vision into the future, I believe that in 50 years being Jewish will, more than ever, be tied to fixing what is broken in the world in partnership with others, so long as we allow Jews who are instinctively drawn to this work to do it as Jews.

Wishful thinking? I don’t think so. In the landmark Pew study, 56 percent of American Jews reported that social justice is a defining feature of what it means to be Jewish in the world. To put a fine point on it, an acute sense of social justice has tremendous staying power as a marker of American Jewish identity in the 21st century.

While the staying power of the Jewish commitment to justice is clear, the world is changing radically. Globalization and digital communication have made the world seem smaller. Increasingly, events anywhere have a direct impact on the lives of people everywhere. Our neighbors are no longer simply the people next door but also the Burmese refugees and Indian child brides continents away. As part of the most educated and affluent generation of Jews to ever exist, we—like other privileged Americans—understand that we are citizens of the globe. And the young Jews of today, who will be our future leaders, recognize this intuitively and want to take up responsibility for finding solutions. We need to do all we can to help them do this as Jews, or we will lose them.

The young people of our community understand that our world is terribly broken. Close to 1 billion people live with chronic hunger and malnutrition. Refugees are driven from country to country. Genocides and wars reign over millions. Local people lack control over land and water, and their natural resources are being exploited without their consent. Women and girls are second-class citizens with no control over their lives. LGBT people experience discrimination and violence that prevent them from living safe, productive, and dignified lives. Minorities and dissidents are denied basic civil and political rights.

I am encouraged because much of what young Jews believe today echoes the deepest beliefs of teachers of earlier generations. My teacher, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who shaped my thinking about the role of Jews in the world, observed: “In a free society where terrible wrongs exist, some are guilty but all are responsible.”

And Elie Wiesel wisely pointed out, “Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.” And as the German refugee and American rabbi Joachim Prinz said, “Neighbor is not a geographic concept. It is a moral concept. It means our collective responsibility for the preservation of human dignity and integrity.”

I have no doubt that the moral truths of these teachings will speak to who we are as American Jews 50 years from now because they are intimately tied to our values and history and because they resonate powerfully for young Jews today.
Together, we must make it possible for more Jews in the next generation, more rabbis of all persuasions, and many more others with Jewish identities of all kinds to see this as quintessentially Jewish work.

I believe and pray that in 2065 more and more Jews will build on our history and our values, take responsibility for our imperfect world, and work toward universal equity and justice—and that they will do so proudly as Jews. This can happen only if we allow them to shape Jewish spaces and identities of their own. If we want to look just as we do today, then we can say goodbye to the future. If we want a vibrant Jewish life in 2065, we must be wise enough to understand that we need to allow it to unfold. And when it does, I know that there will be continuity in discontinuity in the form of a deep moral and Jewish commitment to social justice.

Wishful thinking? I don’t think so.

Ruth W. Messinger is president of the American Jewish World Service.

Yehudah Mirsky

Who can be certain of anything about the Jewish world as it will be in 50 years, other than that we will be arguing with one another?

Argue we will, because the very constitution of Jewishness, mixing universal and particular, ethnicity and spirituality, family and free will, cannot but yield enduring debate.
What are the arguments that will sustain us? They are twofold—and both come down to faith.

Two things are necessary for Jewish flourishing, indeed, survival: political and social conditions that allow Jews to live in freedom; and Jews learning Torah, in the spirit of the Talmudic dictum “great is the study that leads to action”—namely, learning Torah in all its forms (but especially in Hebrew) as a guide to action, which in turn deepens our understanding of Torah.

The arguments that matter most are how to secure that survival, and how to understand and live that Torah. And they proceed in different settings, in fact, in different life-worlds: Israel and the Diaspora, a nation-state and a network of voluntary communities.

In Israel, the challenge facing Torah is that the particular will overwhelm the universal, by virtue of Jewish majority, and through the military conflicts besetting the state, becoming bitterly or even proudly chauvinistic, losing the ability to judge ourselves. In America, it’s the reverse, the universal overwhelming the particular, with Jewishness becoming synonymous with middle-class life, to the vanishing point, becoming just one more set of tiles in the great American mosaic. In that process, we lose the possibility of judging our American mores.

These deep questions about the meanings of Israel and Diaspora life have profound implications for the defense of the freedom that makes Jewish life possible, and that itself, without devout commitment, will not endure. This freedom is under siege by those who would undo it, for power or profit.

In other words, if we are still here in 50 years, it will be because we were able—through our arguments, through our living Torah—to maintain and renew faith, which I define as the faithfulness on which one can build.

What is the difference between faith and fanaticism? Both the faithful and the fanatics ask themselves whether they are living up to their ideals. The difference is that the fanatic knows that his ideals are perfect as they are. The person of faith, by contrast, is willing to question his or her own ideals in light of other, competing, or even superior ideals, and to question the form of life to which he or she is committed. The faithful never assume that the fact of commitment makes them qualitatively better than all the rest.

Faith is indeed a narrow step or, if you will, a narrow bridge. On one side of the gorge lies fanaticism, and on the other lies nihilism. Nihilism and fanaticism are, each in its own way, equally capable of crushing life. What keeps the person of faith from fanaticism is questioning; what keeps him or her from nihilism is the willingness to commit oneself and to act, in the teeth of questioning and doubt.

The fundamental question, as always, is how do we want to live? In trying to answer, we dig down to our deepest commitments—moral, social, political, communal—the commitments (and the corresponding institutions) without which we cannot live and for which we may indeed be willing to die. I believe that in this post-metaphysical age when, even if God is still with us, nobody can claim with a clear conscience to be His designated representative or spokesman—if indeed He could even have such a thing—it is by digging into those commitments that we can find the footing, the courage, to look at one another and at the universe and say, “You.”

And that “You” means answering to a truth beyond and outside ourselves.

That is where our commitments, our willingness to take responsibility, will begin. That is where Judaism will begin. That is where the dialogue of Judaisms, between Israel and America and the rest of the Diaspora, will begin—if it can begin at all. But then again, if we want to endure, it must.

Yehudah Mirsky, a former State Department official, is an associate professor at the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University and the author of Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution.

Joshua Muravchik

The future is easy to predict, and a 50-year leap is long enough so that I am confident I will feel no pain if I am wrong. Thanks to the Iran nuclear deal, when I peer into my crystal ball what I see contains a lot of darkness.
By 2065, the tripartite division of American Jews—those whose religion is Israel, those whose religion is Judaism, those whose religion is liberalism/leftism—will have reconfigured. The first two groups will have melded more tightly, impelled by a heightened sense of belonging to a tiny beleaguered minority. The third group will have shrunk but become more militant. Marxism will be largely passé, and adherents to this strain will mostly call themselves Obamaites, invoking not only, indeed not primarily, the presidential administration of Barack Obama but the activist movement he will have stoked and served as figurehead for 35 years after leaving office.

The mainstream of American Jews will feel beleaguered not only out of solicitude for Israel, which will continue to seem terribly vulnerable in a region that will have witnessed ceaseless warfare, but also due to increasingly free expressions of anti-Semitism flowing from the edges of the Obamaite movement. Oddly, this will feature frequent accusations of dual-loyalty, although those who make these accusations will not otherwise be conspicuous for their strong belief in the value of American patriotism. Some of the most telling jibes will come from Obamaites of Jewish heritage, a heritage they will recollect whenever it suits as a predicate to denunciations of Israel.

All of this will come in the context of a coarsening of American political discourse. During the second quarter of the 21st century, the country will have experienced a spike in violent crime and a prolonged stretch of economic stagnation while the international scene witnesses a frightening era of nuclear proliferation among unstable states. Barack Obama, setting a precedent for public advocacy by a former president far beyond even the example of Jimmy Carter, will take the lead in attributing these deleterious conditions to the policies of his Republican successors, noting that none of them had taken place while he still held office, which will be true except for the crime rate. Of course, Republicans will argue that these various ills can be traced to the policies of Obama’s presidency, but the Obamaite movement will relentlessly stigmatize any such claim as stemming from racism.

Israel, home by now to the substantial majority of the world’s Jews, will be flourishing in many respects primarily because of its astonishing ingenuity. But life will seem precarious, perhaps more than ever, as perpetual warfare convulses the Middle East. The dominant axis of fighting will be Sunni versus Shiite, but there will be many subplots involving mini-states and warlords, as Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen have broken into smaller units and insurgencies flare sporadically in Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. At some point in these long wars, Israel will have had a bloody confrontation with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iranian forces. It will have emerged victorious but with a heartbreaking loss of life. Subsequently, it will have kept itself mostly out of harm’s way through the combination of high-tech defenses and adroit diplomacy amid the inter-
necine broils among the region’s Muslims.

Internally, Israel will be more united than ever. The intensified turmoil swirling around it will lead Haredim to shoulder greater responsibility for the survival of the state and seculars to greater acceptance of the idea of divine providence. The new wave of immigration in the first half of the century, from Western Europe, will have been absorbed with relative ease. A greater challenge will have been presented by more exotic newcomers. Following the Beta Israel of Ethiopia, the Bukharans of Central Asia, and the Bnei Menashe of India, each of which had a proven oral tradition tracing its roots to one of the lost tribes before migrating to Israel in the late 20th and early 21st century, the descendants of the seven remaining lost tribes will have appeared. They will have been absorbed less smoothly but with ultimate success thanks in part to the lessons of the absorption of those earlier groups as well as vast numbers of homo sovieticus.

Joshua Muravchik is a distinguished fellow at the World Affairs Institute and the author of Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel.

Jacob Neusner

I am nearing the end of a scholarly career spanning more than six decades, but nothing in my scholarship—not the history of the Jews of Babylonia or the sages of Yavneh—speak meaningfully to the context of the United States. We as Jews have never lived so comfortably and freely. We have no historical analogy to draw on. And as a scholar of theology and history, I have no way to connect the challenges of the present to the trials of the past.

But this I know: Judaism does not depend on birthrates. The decline in our numbers—now foretold by demographers—does not foreshadow the decline in our faith. Far from it. Judaism as a system always finds a home wherever it answers the urgent questions of humanity. If American Jews today do not ask those questions answered by Judaism, that does not mean Judaism has lost its place in America, or anywhere else. Its moment will come.

For now, the Judaisms of Shoah memory and ethnic identity and Israel affinity are ascendant, but as we know, those Judaisms have limited appeal and they do not do a good job of answering the questions that create a religious system. Their failures are apparent and require no further comment.

The Judaism that endures is the one that exists wherever people seek to discover the answers to questions that run much deeper: What is a good life? How should we act? What is expected of us? These are questions that confident, prosperous people sometimes think they have figured out for themselves. But the Jews, for centuries, never took them for granted. That made them stubborn, willful, and questioning. It made them unruly even to their own community’s leaders. And to tyrants, it made them a target, because the Jews placed God above any man’s rule and any man’s judgment.

I don’t know when American Jewry will turn back toward Judaism for answers to those urgent questions, or when they will place the word of God above the judgment of any man, including themselves. But I am optimistic that such a Judaism will return—and may even be returning. A Judaism that is vital, that looks forward and inward, that depends not on political Jerusalem, or the vestigial memories of the Lower East Side, or the ashes of Auschwitz. Instead, it will be a Judaism rooted in spiritual purpose and textual depth, the questions that have shaped all human history and all theological experience. In the past 50 years, such a Judaism was a whisper in America. But tomorrow, it may be a song, and who can know who will sing the first chords?

Jacob Neusner is professor emeritus at Bard College.

David Novak

I don’t reasonably expect to be in this world 50 years from now, so this is only what I can hope for my children and my grandchildren—and for the Jewish people. (Hope begins at home.) My belief is that my descendants will be living the traditionally religious life they are now living.

Of course, many have argued that Judaism is not a religion because nonreligious or even anti-religious Jews are still members of the Jewish people. But by whose criteria are these Jews still considered to be Jews? Is it not the Jewish tradition that teaches it is God, not the Jews themselves, who chooses the Jews to be God’s covenanted people? Jews have the somewhat lesser choice of whether to identify as Jews religiously, nonreligiously, other-religiously (by conversion to some other religion), or not at all. I think that those Jews whose Jewish identity is lived religiously are leading a more coherent Jewish life than those who have chosen the alternatives, so my remarks are immediately addressed to them.

It seems to me that they will have three religious options, and these options are already with us. These are not connected to the nearly passé Reform/Conservative/Orthodox trinity. Instead, the new Jewish religious trinity is liberal–modern/Orthodox/ultra-Orthodox. Now “liberal” Judaism (including almost all those who still call their Judaism “Reform” or “Conservative” or “Reconstructionist”), on every major moral and religious issue, has clearly made liberalism its religion, with “Judaism” functioning as a very weak modifier. Think of the very public liberal Jewish support for President Obama’s position vis-à-vis Israel over that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Think of the liberal Jews’ public stance on same-sex marriage, or homosexuality in general, which is at odds with the normative Jewish tradition, halakha. As for the ultra-Orthodox (Haredim), they too seem to have questionable loyalty to the Jewish people. Think of their ambivalence toward the Jewish legitimacy of the State of Israel; and think of their willingness to effectively read out of the Jewish community many persons and groups who do not accept their authority. Also, their loyalty to the Jewish tradition seems selective, insofar as they wilfully ignore those aspects of the normative Jewish tradition that are more open-minded toward other Jews, let alone to the larger world.

Modern Orthodoxy, where one will find the most consistently Jewish Zionists, and which looks to modernity as an exciting challenge rather than a frightening curse, seems to be the best hope for the Jewish future, whether in Israel or in the Diaspora. Nevertheless, hope for the future that does not drive active planning in the present is but wishful thinking. So, if modern Orthodoxy is to survive, let alone flourish, it faces three challenges, which must be dealt with now.

The first challenge is developing an intellectual leadership that doesn’t “look over its right shoulder” (to the ultra-Orthodox for even tacit approval). That might require dropping the insistence on “Orthodox” credentials and acknowledging that the Orthodox community is already so fragmented that calling for its unity is like asking a long-separated couple to recover their youthful desire for each other. The second challenge is to develop teachers who identify with the religious positions of their pupils’ parents. (Today, most teachers in modern Orthodox schools are “moonlighting” ultra-Orthodox Jews. They often harbor poorly hidden contempt for modern Orthodox values.) The third challenge comes from Jewish feminism. It is well known that modern Orthodoxy’s most vibrant segment is made up of women who call themselves “Orthodox Jewish feminists,” and whose feminism modifies—perhaps enlightens—their Judaism, not vice versa. Accepting or rejecting the thoughtful, courageous attempt of these pious and learned women (among whom, I’m proud to say, is my own beloved daughter) to steer a middle course between liberal anti-nomianism and ultra-Orthodox authoritarianism is what will either make or break modern Orthodoxy. I hope it will be the former and not the latter.

David Novak teaches Jewish studies and philosophy at the University of Toronto and is president of the Union for Traditional Judaism.

Michael B. Oren

Some physicists say that the universe is simultaneously expanding and contracting, and the same can be said of American Jewry.

It is contracting through assimilation—a 70 percent intermarriage rate among non-Orthodox Jews and, even among Jewish couples, families far too small for sustained demographic growth. Membership in Conservative and Reform congregations is declining, as is participation in many American Jewish organizations. Overall, Jewish identity is waning. The image is one of a community on the verge of numerical and spiritual implosion.

But another segment of American Jews is flourishing. Intermarriage among the Orthodox is virtually nonexistent, while synagogue membership burgeons. Family sizes far exceed the national average. In result, the Jewish population of New York, which for decades suffered decline, is now registering yearly gains. Though roughly estimated at 10 percent of the community, the proportion of observant Jews will inexorably mount.

In 50 years’ time, the American Jewish community may be smaller in numbers but stronger in terms of identity. Though no less active politically, it is likely to vote more conservatively at the polls. Jewish literacy may reach an all-time high. And so, too, might American Jewish attachment to Israel.

I have seen this process unfolding. As a frequent speaker at American Jewish events—synagogues, federations, pro-Israel rallies—I look out at the audience and see ever-growing numbers of kippot. Most of these are of the modern Orthodox knitted type, but, increasingly, they are the even more traditional velveteen black.

This, I sense, is a glimpse of American Jewry circa 2065, contracted, perhaps, in size but expanded in terms of its connection to Israel and to Orthodox ways of life.

Michael B. Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the United States, is the author, most recently, of Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide.

Melanie Phillips

As we look back 50 years to those distant days of 2015, we can see that the signs were clear even then. The West was in the throes of an existential crisis, repudiating reason and truth and replacing God with worship of the individual. In this demoralized state, it was unable to fight the onslaught from the Islamic world. Along with everyone else, Jews were caught up in these dramas.

In 2065, Diaspora Jewry is now a fragment of its former self. Most Jews have fled Europe and the widespread social unrest that followed the mass-immigration emergency. Under cover of anti-Israel sentiment, the indigenous Europeans scapegoated the Jews for the continent’s social crisis, picking on them unless they renounced their attachment to Jewish peoplehood.

Whether through innate prejudice or fear, countries such as France, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands stood aside as their ever more numerous Muslim populations subjected Jews to more and more attacks. Squeezed between aggression and indifference, the Jews of Europe increasingly moved to Israel.

In Britain, the Jewish experience was different. The indigenous British did not resist the Muslims who colonized them, because they no longer remembered what Britain had once uniquely stood for. Newly independent Scotland, where Islamist radicals had long been embraced by nationalist politicians, became England’s Gaza and mounted a cultural and terrorist onslaught from the north.

England’s Marxist Labour prime minister Jeremy Corbyn, who transformed British politics by forging a huge constituency of the disaffected and the alienated and who tacitly backed the Scottish Islamists, weakened England still further by wrecking the economy and instituting thought-police patrols. Islamophobia became a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison. All this paved the way for an Islamist government to take control and fly the black flag of Islam from the roof of 10 Downing Street.

Now a special tax is levied on Jews, synagogues are restricted to a very low height, and microchips are implanted into Jews to record their individual identities.

With all this, the Anglo-Jewish leadership have pronounced themselves content. They say this is benign jihad. They welcome the chance to atone for the original sin against Ishmael, and they regularly declare that there has never been a better time to be a Jew in Britain than now: the very same words they used back in 2015.

Nevertheless, assimilation has slashed their numbers from 280,000 identifying Jews in 2015 to 80,000 now in 2065. The American Jewish community has experienced a similar decline. As in Britain, the collapse was caused by progressive Judaism, including the so-called conservative strain. This never understood that the inconvenient outer shell of rules, restrictions, and halakhic authority, which it so comprehensively undermined, was absolutely essential to defending and preserving the inner spiritual core.

The outcome in the United States has been the retention of a single, small community of the strictly religious. Beyond them, there has been a mass flight from Judaism into a sentimentalized and meaningless ethnic identity focused on the erroneous belief that “universal” values of human rights and altruism have nothing whatsoever to do with the Mosaic code—a view that has also grievously eroded America’s wider society. And Israel, among these Jews, is shunned.

Yet although in 2015 Israel had seemed besieged by delegitimization movements, terrorism, and war, it has confounded the rest of the world by prospering and growing in strength.

The genocidal nuclear threat from Iran was removed after Israel allied with President Rubio’s America to destroy Iran’s air force and navy through bombing raids, thus galvanizing Iran’s oppressed people finally to rise up and overthrow the Islamic regime.

With the collapse of the oil weapon as a result of Israel’s becoming a major exporter of natural gas, Saudi Arabia now has a solid, if guarded, relationship with the Israelis, who are showing the Saudis how to irrigate the desert and how to reconcile religion and modernity. With the neutralization of both their principal terror sponsors, the Palestinians finally abandoned their war against Israel and formed a confederation with Jordan.

And meanwhile, Israel’s Jewish birthrate continues to soar as the country not only outperforms every other economy in the world through the genius of its people but also, largely through the rise to dominance of the modern Orthodox, remains one of the happiest, most decent, and life-affirming places in the world.

In 2065, it would seem therefore that Israel is not only the last, and first, redoubt of the Jewish people; it is also Western civilization’s last man standing.

Melanie Phillips writes for the Times of London.

Dennis Prager

Forgive me, dear reader, but virtually all the trends are negative.

1. To understand Jewish life outside of Israel, it is crucial to first understand the most important development of the past hundred years: The most dynamic religion in the world has not been Christianity, or Islam, or even Mormonism, let alone Judaism. It has been a secular religion: Leftism—and its offshoots such as Environmentalism, Feminism, Socialism, and Egalitarianism.

Jews outside of Israel (and some inside Israel) have adopted Leftism as their value system far more often than Judaism. While individual Jews of all backgrounds have resisted converting to Leftism, the only Jewish group to do so has been Orthodoxy. And modern Orthodoxy has not been immune.

Most American Jews are far more influenced by, and far more frequently attend, the left-wing temple, the university, than their local Jewish temple; and far more seek guidance from the New York Times and other left-wing media than from the Torah.

Yes, there are left-wing Jews who are religiously affiliated. Indeed, they dominate non-Orthodox Jewish denominations. But their Jewish future is not bright. Most young Jews want authentic Leftism, and that usually precludes synagogue attendance, as Leftism is radically secular.

2. Israel will have to choose between doing what the world demands and becoming increasingly loathed and isolated. Either choice bodes poorly. The world wants Israel to give Palestinians an independent state. I have always supported a two-state “solution,” but an independent Palestinian state at this time can only lead to another haven for violent Islam, which would mean constant attacks on Israelis and the probable end of Jordan as an independent state.

3. Europe will have to choose between civil war and becoming increasingly Islamicized. The acceptance of more than a million Muslim-Arab refugees from Syria, Libya, and elsewhere—added to the 20 million Muslims already in the European Union—will only hasten this outcome. This will probably mean no more Jews in Western Europe.

4. One of the great falsehoods of our time is the line “Islam is a religion of peace.” From Muhammad’s time until today, Islam has almost never voluntarily been a religion of peace. How many people know, for example, that during their thousand-year rule over India, Muslims killed between 60 and 80 million Hindus? India doesn’t talk about this, because the Indian government fears Muslim–Hindu violence. And few in the West talk about it because Western academics and other leftists fear that talking about it would divert attention from their anti-Western narrative.

Needless to say, the ascendance of a virile Islam bodes poorly for Jews. The violent end of Christendom in the Arab world—which bothers Western elites far less than carbon emissions do—is what a vast number of Muslims seek for the Jews living in the Arab world, namely the Jews of Israel.

5. Outside the United States, Christianity has rarely been good for the Jews. The Christians (cultural and theological) who founded America and led the country from its inception have been a unique blessing to the Jews. But most American Jews, consistent with their left-wing faith, have joined and often led the left’s war on American Christianity. These foolish people think that a godless, Christianity-free America will be good for the Jews. They do not understand that America has been a unique blessing to Jews precisely because it has been the one truly Judeo-Christian country.

So, then, there is little reason for optimism. Will Jews be around on the 120th anniversary of Commentary? Of course. There may well be a Chabad House on the moon. But the purpose of Jewish life is not to survive, any more than the purpose of any of our own lives is to survive. Survival is a necessity, not a purpose.

The purpose of the Chosen People is to bring the world to the God of the Torah, more specifically, the God of the Ten Commandments. Unless we do, the future is bleak. But who will do this? The only vibrant Jewish group, the Orthodox, is still—Chabad and some Orthodox individuals notwithstanding—overwhelmingly committed to Jewish insularity, the preservation of the shtetl, and to religious laws designed to keep Jews insulated from non-Jews.
Is there a solution?

Yes. Above all, Jews need to abandon secularism and Leftism and return to God-based, Torah-based values—even without necessarily becoming Orthodox—and influence the world to live by the Ten Commandments. Imagine what would happen to Jewry and to society at large if left-wing Jewish professors abandoned Leftism and embraced ethical monotheism.

Admittedly, there are few examples of God-centered, Torah-based, non-Orthodox Jews. But unless this begins to happen, and unless the Orthodox become as preoccupied with bringing the world to the God of Sinai as they are with what’s kosher for Pesach, the future is bleak.

Dennis Prager, a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host, is the author, most recently, of The Ten Commandments. He is also the co-founder and president of Prager University.

Naomi Schaefer Riley

Iam not the first to observe that the demographic trends of Jews in America suggest growing polarization in the community. Thanks in part to rising (though perhaps now plateauing) rates of intermarriage, the Jews of 50 years from now will be divided largely among the Orthodox and the so-called nones, that is, the unaffiliated.

It is certainly true that interfaith couples are less likely to raise their children Jewish than same-faith ones are. But there are other related factors that are leading to the decline of Reform and Conservative families. First, like most of America, the young people raised in these denominations are waiting longer to get married. The average age of first marriage is now 29 for men and 27 for women in America—it gets higher if you have a college degree. This long period of time away from one’s religious and family roots not only makes it more likely they will marry someone of another faith. It also makes it more likely they will not marry at all.

And it will certainly limit the number of children one has. Again, like the rest of America, the birthrate for American Jews has fallen significantly. And more and more of the middle and upper classes in this country are choosing to have no children at all.

This will have a significant impact on Jewish institutions. The ones that are populated by the most committed (whether measured by time or money) will remain. And the rest will cease to exist. It’s hard to see how the suburban synagogues will survive in any great numbers. Not only do young adults seem disinclined to support them in any significant way, they also seem to prefer institutions within walking distance. (It is no small irony that the Jewish communities of old would have in some sense been much more appealing to twentysomethings than the ones built in the 1950s.) Many of these young adults want to relive their college years, when friends were nearby and Jewish experience was conveniently available across the street at Hillel. Whenever they wanted to take advantage, that is. But this is not how institutions in the adult world work. And if young adults don’t figure that out soon, many of our synagogues are not long for this world.

The other institutions whose future is uncertain are Jewish day schools. The Orthodox ones will continue—because they have to—but even that community will need to think about other financing models. Conservative and modern Orthodox communities are increasingly unable to afford day-school education for their children. They will either need to persuade politicians of the need for some kind of tax-credit plan to offset these costs, or the schools themselves will have to drastically change—using more technology perhaps. But it is hard to see middle-class Jewish parents settling for so-called blended learning when they can send their kids to what they view as good public schools. Even some kind of intensive supplementary religious education might need to replace the day schools.

There are those who will look at this picture and say that this coming religious polarization—the Orthodox on the one hand, the loosely affiliated or unaffiliated on the other—is unavoidable and even reasonable. That is, the people who care most about Jewish institutions and communities will be the ones running them.

But this kind of religious sorting is not a positive development. Our chattering classes might like to talk about a religious America and a secular America, but religion in America has long existed on a continuum, and I think that is healthy. In fact, individual religious congregations usually have their own spectrums. It is good for the more and less religiously observant to see and interact with one another. As individuals, our inclinations to be more or less religious may change over time, and it is good for us to see that religion needn’t be an all-or-nothing prospect. It would be a poor development if we came to think that once we had started to practice faith less frequently, we would have to give it up altogether. Or if we had to worry that we wouldn’t be welcomed back into the fold. A religious perspective on life can bring us great comfort and happiness and sense of purpose, even at times when we don’t expect it. And there is much to be said for encountering it regularly, even if we are not strong believers. Fifty years from now, that probably won’t happen.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is the author of ’Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage Is Transforming America.

Thane Rosenbaum

Throughout human history, Jews have endured the real-feel temperatures of a dystopian existence more so, and more consistently, than any other group. Paradoxically, the same people, throughout different periods, participated in humankind’s enlightenment and also, sometimes simultaneously, were its most tragic victims.

Crimes against humanity are fatefully part of the human condition, but Jews have suffered more than their fair share—and, in fact, it was at the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, which were established to bring justice primarily to Jews, where such crimes were first named.

What is movie science fiction for most people has often had the gritty reality of a documentary for Jews. Conquests, expulsions, inquisitions, forced conversions, blood libels, genocidal threats, and actual mass murders—you name it, and Jews have once lived it, or were killed on account of it.

Yet, most improbably, most survived it. In the grand and chaotic stock market of mankind, Jews are sometimes up, and at other moments they are free-falling into a devastating crash. Volatility is the defining word for a people who lack the optimism to be safe bets.

Who would have ever imagined that Jews would need to flee France in the early 21st century? Well, a century earlier, Captain Alfred Dreyfus would not have perceived France as being long for Jews. The Jews of Germany also, a mere 70 years after the Holocaust, are now contemplating emigration plans that a Berliner would not have dreamed of in 1932.

All of which is to say that Jews are not Okinawans—as if that wasn’t already stating the obvious. Historically, Jewish life spans vary for reasons having little to do with diet, genes, or disease. Jews are one tribe in which searching for family histories is nearly always a venture interrupted by cataclysmic events.

Predicting the future of the Jewish people, at any point in history, during the best of times and worst, is a fool’s errand, an exercise in advanced sorcery, the most speculative of all soothsaying—odds-making at the most fanciful.
The one sure thing is that 50 years from now, Jews will undoubtedly still be here in some form—predictably sturdy, overly principled, simply unwilling, or too brashly tenacious (a fancy word for chutzpadik), to disappear.

But during the last century, which was marked by a monstrous genocide, there were also examples of Jewish penetration into secular worlds that ultimately reduced the number of Jews in the process. Through intercourse and intermarriage, the pull of pluralism and the allure of openly liberal values, Jewish tribal existence diminished. Meanwhile, the Holocaust contributed mightily to the “God Is Dead” movement, which depleted synagogues even more. Jews were left without a map to return in case things didn’t work out in the wider world. And for many, they didn’t.

And still, many, eventually, came roaring back—with tefillin and tallisim in hand, kvetching about the food and the climate where they had just been.

Jewish flight is always accompanied by Jewish return. In a half-century, other Jews originating from somewhere else will replace the departing Jews of France and Germany. After all, many of the French Jews today are former Jewish Moroccans who were forced out of North Africa soon after the creation of Israel. Many of today’s German Jews are not old-school yekkes, but former refuseniks from the Soviet Union.

The wild swings in the marketplace of Jewish survival always return, reliably, to equilibrium.

And yet, despite their fall elsewhere, Jewish populations will grow larger in the United States and Israel. Jews have had quite a run in America. And the Start-up Nation beams along the Mediterranean like a true light onto nations—the purest example of what can happen when Third World regions truly wish to join the developing world. By comparison, Israel’s neighbors are depositories of sand and oil fields of hate—mixed in with medieval envy.

More so than Torah, the Jewish state will continue to unite world Jewry in a Zionism that is more than a mere idea. It is a common homeland, a destination that beckons and pulsates when the evils of anti-Semitism threaten to return. Such is the promise of the Promised Land. Regardless of whatever deals the Diaspora makes with its host countries, Israel will always be the ace in a Jew’s back pocket, a suitcase at the ready, family by his or her side.

Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist and essayist and a distinguished fellow at NYU School of Law, where he directs the Forum on Law, Culture, and Society. His most recent book is the novel How Sweet It Is!

Jonathan Rosenblum

Of the current focuses of world Jewish life—Israel and the United States—only one will remain vibrant 50 years hence. Non-Orthodox American Jewry will be largely a relic.

The Torah forbids all manner of foretelling. But American Jewry has already entered into a demographic death spiral. American Jews marry later, if at all, and have fewer kids than the general population. More than four out of five marriages involving non-Orthodox Jews today are intermarriages. The offspring of those marriages will be even less likely to seek a Jewish partner.

Ethnic identity has proven incapable of generational transmission. Less than half of self-identified American Jews under 35 recognize a special duty to help one’s fellow Jews. “Being Jewish” is an increasingly trivial part of their self-identity. According to the critical 2013 Pew study, a particular sense of humor or taste for certain foods plays a larger role in their Jewish identity than does Jewish practice or belief, identification with the Jewish people, or belief in a divinely given mission to the Jewish people—a belief almost inevitably derided as racist.

Prospects for a 21st-century Jewish Great Awakening appear slight. The coercive political correctness on the campuses where most Jews matriculate (and where overt anti-Semitism is the one acceptable “aggression”) is hostile to traditional religion. I am one of four brothers (out of five), raised in a highly Jewish-identified but not very observant home, who is today living a Haredi life in Israel. But our parents taught us that being Jewish was the most important thing about us, and we took them seriously by coming to Israel and following elite educations to find out what Judaism is. How many Jewish kids today have ever contemplated the survival of the smallest of peoples, removed from their land for 2,000 years, as the greatest miracle in history?

All the talk of a dynamic, eclectic Judaism evolving from the old is just whistling past the graveyard.

Matters look much brighter with respect to Israel, assuming Israel finds, with G-d’s help, a solution to a nuclear Iran.

The letters left behind by fallen soldiers in last summer’s Gaza war described their pride in fighting and dying to defend the Jewish people—with the Jewish people preceding homeland. Israeli Jews know what they are living for, because they know there is something worth dying for.

Living in a majority-Jewish state encourages Israelis to investigate at some point what it means to be Jewish. Repeated surveys show largely nonobservant Israelis drawing closer to Judaism.

The unparalleled multiplicity of threats Israel faces necessitates a degree of faith. And behold, Israelis are the most optimistic people in the world. If one forms a graph with suicide rates on the horizontal axis and fertility rates on the vertical axis, Israel stands alone in the upper left quadrant among the OECD countries.

The constant threats to Israel’s existence force most Israelis to deal with reality as it is, not as they would like it to be. I’m reminded of that hard-headed realism every time I leave the country without being forced to remove my shoes or clutch at my pants for want of a belt. Those threats to our existence also provide a degree of national cohesion and common experience, in the form of near-universal army service, unknown in the increasingly balkanized United States.

Israel is well poised to take advantage of the shift of the center of world economic activity from Europe, destined to become an extension of the Maghreb, to the Far East. Far Eastern countries are unburdened by a long history of Jew hatred, Holocaust guilt projected onto modern-day Israeli Jews in the form of accusations of committing genocide against Palestinians or large Muslim populations. The discovery of large natural-gas and oil deposits, after the development of a dynamic economy not dependent on natural resources, also bodes well for the future.

Finally, intra-religious tensions in Israel will decline without the defunct American heterodox movements to roil things. And the growing integration of the Haredi population into the general economy and some form of national service will tap some of Israel’s greatest human resources. That integration is dictated both by economic necessity and the realization within the Haredi community that a single social model of long-term Torah learning cannot suffice for a large heterogeneous population.

Life among co-religionists will prove increasingly congenial for identified Jews living in beleaguered communities around the world. And Israel will remain the greatest center of Torah learning since the great academies of Babylonia.

Jonathan Rosenblum is the author of seven biographies of modern Jewish leaders and a columnist for the Jerusalem Post, Mishpacha magazine, and Yated Ne’eman.

Jennifer Rubin

Charles Dickens did not have the Jewish people in mind when he penned the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness…”

Darkness pervades. Barack Obama is the most hostile U.S. president to Israel in its 67 years of existence. He has defamed its prime minister, blamed it for a breakdown in the “peace process,” condemned its self-defense in the Gaza war (which inevitably resulted in civilian casualties despite the Israel Defense Forces’s heroic efforts to spare civilians), threatened to leave it defenseless from the UN’s anti-Israel resolutions, and entered into a monstrous deal with a genocidal regime bent on Israel’s destruction. Obama and his allies then reconstituted anti-Semitic tropes in defense of his flawed Iran agreement. “Donors,” “foreign interests,” and “big money” were unmistakable throwbacks to ancient dual-loyalty canards, rhetoric so venal as to shock supporters and critics alike.

Meanwhile support for Israel among Democrats continued to decline in the United States. Polls confirm that the more liberal an American is, the more hostile to Israel he is likely to be. According to a 2013 Pew poll, the intermarriage rate is still rising (pegged at over 70 percent among non-Orthodox American Jews), while the percentage of Jews who travel to Israel and observe major Jewish holidays is shrinking.

There is Darkness aplenty around the globe. Violent anti-Semitism, culminating in the Paris slaughter of Jews in a kosher supermarket, is all too frequent in Europe. From France, some 9,000 Jews are expected to emigrate by the end of the year, up from 7,200 in 2014. At this pace, Islamic terrorists may finish Hitler’s work—effectively making France Judenfrei. Life for Jews elsewhere in Europe is also bleak. Anti-Semitic attacks in Europe rose in 2014 by 40 percent.
We should not despair, however. Consider four critical developments differentiating the 21st century from the first half of the 20th.

First, Israel thrives—despite wars, the BDS movement, overt hostility from the U.S. administration, and the constant drumbeat for Israel’s delegitimization from the UN. Israel is more prosperous, more militarily sophisticated, and more diverse than ever before, a beacon of democracy and tolerance in the Middle East. Its relations with Asian powers, African countries, and its Sunni neighbors have never been stronger while Jews from Europe, Africa, and South America find a haven there. Ironically, global dangers for Jews and the Obama administration’s unprecedented betrayal make the case for Zionism, the promise of an independent and strong Jewish homeland as a refuge for world Jewry.

Second, despite Obama’s presidency, U.S. support for Israel has never been higher. That support is seen in the houses of Congress, where keeping close ties with the Jewish state remains one of the few truly bipartisan issues.

That support is largely due to a third phenomenon: the overwhelming devotion of the evangelical Christian community to Jewry and to the State of Israel. In August, when anti-Semitic marauders terrorized Jews in San Antonio, Texas, it was Pastor John Hagee, founder of the 2 million–strong Christians United for Israel who rushed to the Jews’ defense. Support for Israel among U.S. evangelicals is off the charts, and given Christian conservatives’ strength in the Republican Party, they have made support for Israel a litmus test for national candidates. (Since the number of Christian conservatives dwarfs the number of Jewish Americans, the math is reassuring.)

And finally, any evaluation of American Jewry must recognize the Orthodox community’s tremendous demographic growth, intellectual vitality, and political influence. In November 2013, Pew reported that the Orthodox population gains 5,000 Jews a year while non-Orthodox Jews lose 10,000. A separate study showed 60 percent of Jewish children in the New York City area live in Orthodox homes.

The second decade of the 21st century, we can hope, is the Darkness before the Light. If fewer Jews live in Europe, the population of Jews in Israel and North America (at least among Orthodox) will grow. This administration may be unremittingly antagonistic toward Israel, but the Congress, the American people, and future presidential candidates (if 2016 contenders are any indication) will not be. If American liberals abandon Israel, legions of Christians will increase Zionist ranks. And if nonobservant Jews are declining in number, the Orthodox community, whose devotion to Torah and the Jewish state are rock-solid, will continue to flourish. Ken Yehi Ratzon.

Jennifer Rubin is author of the Right Turn blog for the Washington Post.

 

Scenario 2. The year is 2050. Jews in Europe are flourishing. Europeans finally realized that the threat of radical Islam was not just to Jews and Israel but to freedom itself. They took action, and now Jews feel safe. In the United States, Jewish life is on the rise, leaders having decided to subsidize Jewish education and invest seriously in Jewish continuity. Israel, meanwhile, having made strategic alliances with Egypt and Saudi Arabia in the face of a nuclear Iran and apocalyptic Islamism, has finally found in the Middle East de facto acceptance if not de jure legitimacy.

Either scenario is possible. Jews make prophecies, not predictions. The difference is that if a prediction comes true, it has succeeded. If a prophecy has come true, it has failed. We don’t predict the future; we make the future. Ours is the world’s most compelling faith in free will.

What is unique about the present moment is that Jews currently enjoy a situation they have never experienced in 4,000 years of history. We have independence and sovereignty in Israel, alongside freedom and equality in the Diaspora. There were brief periods in the past when Jews had one or the other, but never both at the same time.

Today Jews have overachieved in every field except Judaism. The most striking findings of the Pew study from 2013 were that 94 percent of American Jews are proud to be Jews, while 48 percent of American Jews cannot read an aleph-bet.

Meanwhile in Israel many find the public face of Judaism deeply alienating. Israel itself, a nation of almost miraculous achievements, has lost much of the support it once enjoyed. Jews were once the world’s great storytellers. Today our enemies are better at telling their story than we are at telling ours.

Our ancestors had a dream that sustained them through 20 centuries of exile. One day they would create in the holy land a society of justice and compassion, maintaining the dignity of the individual and the sanctity of human life, where love of God translated into love of the neighbor and the stranger and religion itself was the prime driver of social justice and inclusion. They dreamed of inspiring the world by the simplicity and grace of Judaism as a way of life. It was a utopian vision, but the mere act of aspiring to it lifted our ancestors to spiritual, intellectual, and moral heights. Bounded in a nutshell, they counted themselves kings of infinite space.

That is the future that beckons us now. Yes, there is anti-Semitism, yes, there is Iran, and yes, we have enemies. But we outlived them all in the past and we will do so again in the future. In the meantime, every dream our ancestors once had is today within our grasp. What we need is the courage to be unashamedly ourselves, to educate our children in Judaic literacy, and to create in Israel a society of such moral force and spiritual generosity that it speaks to all those whose minds are still open. The time has come to honor the trust our ancestors had in us, that when we had the chance we would light the dark places of the world with the radiance of the faith for which they risked life itself. The sooner we begin, the better.

Jonathan Sacks served as chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from 1991 to 2013. He is the author, most recently, of Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence.

Jonathan D. Sarna

Nobody in 1945 would have predicted that, 70 years hence, the State of Israel would become a significant economic and military power home to more than 6.2 million Jews; that well over 90 percent of the world’s Jews would live in just five First World countries; that the Jewish population of Eastern Europe would drop significantly below 400,000; and that the fastest-growing Jewish religious movement in the world would be Chabad. Prophecies about Jews, 70 years ago and throughout history, have been notoriously prone to failure. In looking ahead, there is therefore every reason to be prudent. “Prophecy,” an old adage wisely warns, “is very difficult, especially about the future.”

With that in mind, what do I think will be the condition of the Jewish community 50 years from now?

First, the Jewish community will continue to consolidate at an unprecedented rate, so that instead of being a worldwide people, an am olam, spread “from one end of the world even unto the other,” Jews will become an overwhelmingly First World people, living primarily in Israel and North America. Already, some 93 percent of world Jewry lives in First World countries—those with advanced economies, worldwide influence, high standards of living, and abundant technology. Half of world Jewry actually lives in just five metropolitan areas: Tel Aviv, New York, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, and Haifa. By 2065, I expect that almost all Jews will live in the First World, and as many as three-quarters of them will live close to one another, in a few sprawling metropolises.

The upside of consolidation is that Jews will be physically safer (there is security in numbers), and that it will be easier than ever for them to interact, learn from one another, and help one another. First World people, in addition, tend to share both common values and elements of a common culture. The downside is that Judaism will no longer be a world religion on par with Christianity and Islam. It will, at best, be a regional or First World religion. Those in the rest of the world—especially in Third World or so-called majority-world countries—will have no direct knowledge of Jews and Judaism at all. They will conjure up instead a mythical Judaism, and there will be no “Jews next-door” to set them aright.

Second, in 50 years, Judaism may well be experiencing a totally unexpected religious awakening. Every religious downturn since the 18th century, at least in America, has been followed by a “great awakening.” These cycles, historian William G. McLoughlin has explained, reflect the ebb and flow of culture: Periods of disruption (“crises of beliefs and values”) are followed by periods of reorientation and renewal. In our day, disruptive forces—new technologies, incendiary ideas, changing social mores, and the like—have plunged religion into a period of recession. Fifty years from now, if not sooner, the descendants of those who have intermarried and drifted off may be seeking to rediscover the spiritual heritage that their parents cast away. They will look to a renewed Judaism to provide them with meaning, order, and direction.

Jews in 2065, whatever their condition, will not likely be sanguine concerning the future of the Jewish community. Like so many before them, they will worry that theirs will be the last generation of Jews, that the Jewish community will disappear unless it changes. Paradoxically, the fear that Judaism might not survive will help ensure that it does.

Jonathan D. Sarna is the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University and chief historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History. His most recent book, with Benjamin Shapell, is Lincoln and the Jews: A History.

Jacob J. Schacter

The prominent Danish physicist Niels Bohr once said (or was it Yogi Berra or Casey Stengel?), “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” But, having been honored to receive an invitation to share my views about the Jewish future, I will proceed to do so, albeit with due diffidence and humility.

First, we should not under-appreciate the fact that there will be a Jewish community in 50 years. In spite of the fact that, throughout history, we have repeatedly faced demographic dispersion, political disintegration, economic dislocation, social alienation, psychological oppression, subtle as well as crude discrimination, and, at worst, brute physical annihilation, we have survived, and even flourished. This almost incomprehensible fact has confounded many throughout the centuries, some of whom have sought explanations for it. In the words of the 20th-century Russian political and religious writer Nikolai Berdyaev: “Indeed, according to the materialistic and positivist criterion, this people ought long ago to have perished. Its survival is a mysterious and wonderful phenomenon demonstrating that the life of this people is governed by a special predetermination.” Exactly what that is was made clear by Maimonides, who wrote: “We are in possession of the divine assurance that Israel is indestructible and imperishable, and will always continue to be a preeminent community.” And, in a most striking assertion, he continues: “As it is impossible for God to cease to exist, so is Israel’s destruction and disappearance from the world unthinkable.” We cannot take the survival of the Jewish people for granted. It defies logic. It is, simply, a gift from God.

But it is not for Klal Yisrael, the nation of Israel, that I am concerned. It is for “Reb Yisrael,” the individual Jew, that I am concerned, very concerned. What will that individual Jew who will still identify as a Jew in 50 years look like? I believe that only those for whom Jewishness is a central—if not the central—defining value of their lives will withstand the challenges of the most welcome and blessed freedom that Jews experience in America. Only those who are prepared to sacrifice for their Jewish identity—to pay (a lot) for day school and yeshiva education, to pay (a lot) to support schools, synagogues, mikvahs, and to live by the values they represent—will constitute the majority of Jews at the end of the next half-century.

The Torah (Exodus 34:29–30) informs us that when Moses came down from Mt. Sinai carrying the second set of tablets, he was endowed with a special radiance. In seeking the source for Moses’s radiance—and in providing for us a source for our own personal and national “radiance”—the Midrash (Yalkut Shim‘oni, Ki Tisa #406, end) writes that the tablets were six cubits long, roughly 21 inches. God, it continues, grasped on to the top two cubits and Moses grasped on to the bottom two cubits, and the radiance that emanated from Moses came from the middle two cubits. I understand this as follows: “Radiance,” or fulfillment, or optimism, for Moses—and for us—cannot come from the top two cubits held by God. They are too holy, too transcendent, too suffused with pure divinity, too otherworldly. It will also not come from the bottom two cubits; they are too earthly, too physical, and too mundane. Radiance and meaning for our lives will come from the middle two cubits only, the cubits that are neither heaven nor earth, that are, in fact, both heaven and earth. It will come from a sincere and serious effort to bring earth a bit closer to heaven and heaven a bit closer to earth, to extract ourselves from our physicality and strive to elevate ourselves to reach meaningful levels of spirituality and to grasp on to a piece of the divine and bring it a bit closer to us. For me this means living meaningful, serious Jewish lives, in practice and in spirit; this means deep and robust engagement with Torah and mitzvoth and hesed. Judaism will not survive for those who consider it a vague ethnic identity; it will survive for those who embrace it fully and passionately.
In the second half of his poem “Tourists,” the late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote:

Once I sat on the stairs at the gate of David’s Tower and put two heavy baskets next to me. A group of tourists stood there around their guide and I served as their orientation point. “You see that man with the baskets? A bit to the right of his head, there’s an arch from the Roman period. A bit to the right of his head.” But he moves, he moves!! I said to myself: redemption will come only when they are told: You see over there the arch from the Roman period? Never mind: but next to it, a bit to the left and lower, sits a man who bought fruit and vegetables for his home.

There is much wisdom here, of course, but I suggest that Amichai is wrong. At the end of the day, those who will constitute the Jewish people in 2065 will be those who recognize that both the “arch from the Roman period” (the tradition) and the “man who bought fruit and vegetables for his home” (the contemporary) need to be celebrated and affirmed.

Jacob J. Schacter is University Professor of Jewish History and Jewish Thought at Yeshiva University, where he is also a senior scholar at the Center for the Jewish Future.

Lynn Schusterman

The Jewish community is indeed experiencing the best of times and worst of times.

On one hand, the 2013 Pew study paints a picture of an American Jewish community in the throes of transformation: Jewish religious observance is on the decline, young Jews’ interest in traditional institutions is waning, and Israel’s standing within the Jewish community and on the world stage continues to face mounting challenges.

On the other, “Jewish” as a descriptor is on the upswing. Young Jews continue to identify as Jewish, even if “in name only,” and families of mixed faith are embracing their Jewish roots. A rapidly growing number of Jews, moreover, consider themselves to be a part of the Jewish people without devoting themselves to religious practices.

So what does this portend for the future? Challenges will remain, to be sure, but I believe the positive trends we see today will give way to a stronger, more vibrant, and sustainable community.

Even in a saturated marketplace of ideas, Jewish thought has demonstrated its extraordinary potential to speak to an increasing number of people. Many Jews—by birth, marriage, and, especially, choice—are weaving “Jewish” into their daily lives and drawing on their Jewish identities to inform who they are as global citizens.

The onset of this trend is spurred by the transcendence of Jewish values. Distilled from Jewish text and tradition, Jewish values are more relevant than ever. They call us to serve others, to build strong families and communities, to love and cherish Israel as a centerpiece of the Jewish experience, to defend justice, to ensure all have the opportunity to learn and treat everyone with mercy, kindness, care, and respect. They call us to play our part in making a positive difference in the world. Many of these are universal values, but it is their connection to Jewish thought and their call to action that serve as the strongest ties binding the global Jewish people together.

These values also create the basis of “conscious Judaism,” what I see as a rising form of Jewish expression. Conscious Judaism stems from the desire to live with Jewish intention. From Buenos Aires to Warsaw, young Jews are thinking critically, taking action, exploring their spirituality and finding solutions to complex problems through a Jewish lens. Their involvement in Jewish life is not cultural or habitual, but rather borne of an impetus to live with meaning in a community of others doing the same.

Fifty years from now, I believe the number of conscious Jews will vastly outnumber strict adherents of religious Judaism, redefining our concept of who is a Jew from one based solely on descent to one more broadly defined by connection and choice. In turn, there will be more opportunities for people to make Jewish thought and values part of how they live and love and engage with the world.

Admittedly, many questions remain. Just as the number of conscious Jews rise, the number of religious Jews outside of the ultra-Orthodox community will probably decline. If today is any indicator, there will continue to be tension between religious and secular counterparts, both of whom constitute the sum of the Jewish people. How will the two groups interact? How do we remain at once united and truly inclusive? And as a people who have been defined by our religion for millennia, how will we shape our role in the world moving forward?

We are headed for a new era of Jewish life, one in which individuals can express who they are and what they stand for in a way that is directly supported by their Jewish identities and a diverse global Jewish people.

This shift, however, is not inevitable. Our challenge over the coming years will be to ensure that all those interested have the opportunity to engage with Jewish tradition and peoplehood in meaningful ways.

It will take hard work to get there. It will require creativity, risk, and unprecedented partnership among emerging and existing institutions. It will require broad acceptance that there is no singular way to be or define Jewish.

But I also know that we have a choice. We can give in to the negative forces at play or we can use every opportunity to bring the positive forces to the fore. By choosing the latter, we can help more and more people embrace Jewish life and values and, in doing so, shape a brighter future for the Jewish people. Consciously.

Lynn Schusterman is founder and co-chair of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation.

Motti Seligson

To have the power of prophecy today, states the Talmud, is to be a fool or a child. So while I make no claim to prophetic powers, I’m confident regarding the future of the Jewish world.

On January 1, 2000, the New York Times printed a Millennium Edition featuring its front cover from January 1, 1900, the actual cover of that day’s paper, and a fictional one dated January 1, 2100.

For some time, the Times had been running a weekly ad each Friday on its front page. The little box—sponsored by Chabad-Lubavitch—noted that week’s Shabbat candle-lighting time and encouraged Jewish women and girls to take part. With the Times’s fictional cover a century hence falling out on a Friday, its editors included the same little box in the corner calling on Jewish women and girls to light the Shabbat candles.

Urban legend has it that it was an Irish-Catholic editor at the paper who pushed for its inclusion. “We don’t know what will happen in the year 2100,” he reportedly said. “But of one thing you can be certain . . . in the year 2100 Jewish women will be lighting Shabbat candles.”

This story illustrates why I’m optimistic about the Jewish future. Despite gloomy studies and predictions, I believe we will be strong as a people precisely because of the Shabbat candles and tefillin and the many other mitzvoth of the Torah. For the key to Jewish survival and continuity has been, is today, and will remain, our study of Torah and practice of mitzvoth. Quality Jewish education, Shabbat candles, kashrut, tefillin, these are the practices that connect us to G-d Almighty and sustain us as a nation. They always have, and always will.

A quick look at our history will prove as much. Movements within Judaism that parted with traditional practice did not survive the test of time; they are simply gone. Today, seeing their participation rates declining as members either drop everything or turn to more traditional options, liberal denominations have chosen to move closer to the traditional Jewish practices they wrote off as outdated and shunned for decades.

Jewish continuity has never been very far removed from practice, a few generations at most.

Torah and mitzvoth are the tools that we have to make the mundane around us sacred, to fulfill our missions as individuals and as a nation, and ultimately the only authentic way for us as Jews to connect to the Divine.

While the story of our survival is ultimately miraculous, we have always been an optimistic people. Centuries ago, Maimonides included the belief in the arrival of Moshiach and the messianic era in his Thirteen Principles of Faith, practically mandating optimism according to Jewish law. More recently, following the devastation of the Holocaust and a general malaise within the Jewish world, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, insisted that a bright future lay ahead for the Jewish people, and he worked incessantly to make it a reality.

It remains in our own hands to shape the Jewish future. We need to take responsibility for our future by acting now to increase our own Jewish practice, because if as individuals we are not growing as Jews, then we are receding. It doesn’t need to start big; it can begin with a single mitzvah. Take ownership of that mitzvah in a way that it becomes one with us and then share that mitzvah’s beauty with others. Inspire others to find their mitzvah. Then find another mitzvah and repeat.

It’s this small, step-by-step approach that has allowed the Jewish people to survive and ultimately thrive. Hand-wringing about the future and pouring millions of dollars into studies and committees—as well-intentioned as these efforts might be—will not find a new, shiny answer to the problems of continuity. We have the answer. Doing a mitzvah ourselves, encouraging our friends and families to do so as well, that’s what works.

Fifteen years have passed since the Times Millennium Edition, and the state of Jewish observance is strong and growing. The same can’t be said about the ad revenue for the New York Times print edition. The millions who once saw the candle-lighting notice in print in the paper of record have been replaced by millions more who find candle-lighting times on Chabad.org via their tablets, smartphone apps, and social media.

The condition of the Jewish people will only get stronger in 50 years, but it is up to us to accept the responsibility to make that the reality.

Motti Seligson is a rabbi and the director of media relations at Chabad-Lubavitch Media Center.

Dan Senor

Throughout history the Jewish people have had a disproportionate impact on the intellectual, moral, and economic development of civilization.

As a people, our greatest impact has often been through unpopular ideas. For example, in the ancient, pagan world, we stood against idolatry and child sacrifice. When we went into exile, we did not disappear like most defeated peoples but managed to preserve our identity over two millennia.

Can Jewish contributions to the world be sustained over the course of the next half-century?

They certainly can, but the key to sustaining Jewish exceptionalism is in sustaining Jewish continuity, particularly in the face of growing trends of assimilation. Outsized contribution to the world is not a sufficient condition for Jewish strength, but it is a necessary one. This means it’s impossible to imagine a great future for the Jewish people without the central place of Israel in Jewish life. Roughly half of our people live in the Jewish state, and the fate of Jews cannot be separated from the fate of Israel. Israel’s contributions to the modern world are countless, but perhaps the underappreciated story is its radiating effects on technological modernization and Israel’s penchant for solving complex global problems, such as water droughts, cyber insecurity, and widespread medical challenges. Israel may be shamefully vilified by other nations on security matters, but it is increasingly admired and sought after as a partner in innovation.

Fifty years from now, the developing and developed worlds will be unrecognizable. Health care, energy, education, employment, transportation, agriculture, and life-sciences sectors will be dramatically altered. And Israel and the Jewish people are perfectly positioned to lead this global transformation. The power of Israel’s innovation revolution, in turn, will strengthen Israel’s position in the world. We can already see how the early phase of this revolution directly affects the Jewish state.

Imagine you were told of a Western country whose population had the highest percentage in the West of those in the 20–40-year-old age bracket, among the highest fertility rates in the world, and skyrocketing rates of immigration, with most of the immigrants young and skilled, and entrepreneurial workers relocating from Europe. And imagine if this same country had one of the highest per capita GDPs in the world, the only Western economy with both falling debt levels and a rising labor-participation rate, and a growth trajectory immune to regional security threats and global economic crises.

These trends are exactly what Israel has been experiencing for some time—and it can be the future of the Jewish state for the next half-century. For Israel, economic success is a strategic—indeed, an existential—issue. Economic stagnation would make it impossible to sustain the national power necessary to deter and confront Israel’s enemies while exacerbating social tensions. Economic growth and widespread prosperity can cover a multitude of deficiencies.

The Israeli economy will continue to be largely immune to worldwide slowdowns because of the flexibility of its thousands of technology start-ups that export and are dispersed across many industries. Israel’s percentage of GDP that comes from exports is one of the highest in the world (more than 30 percent) and is not based on commodities exports, which can be volatile in times of global crisis.

Will Israel continue to attract talented and entrepreneurial immigrants? Absolutely. In addition to the spiritual, cultural, and Zionist attractiveness of building a life in Israel—which has always been a draw for Israeli immigrants—now and going forward there is also an economic pull. Israel’s economy is growing while most other Western economies are flat on their back. Indeed, Israel has overcome the 2008 crisis better than, and its population is younger than that of, any other major economy in the developed world. Israel’s GDP growth gap with the rest of the world—especially with aging populations in the West—will help Israel offer Jews around the planet work and prosperity that other economies are failing to offer.

Israel also offers a unique combination of technological and intellectual-cultural contributions. Silicon Valley has the former; many European capitals have the latter. But nowhere outside of Israel do technology, entrepreneurialism, history, and culture all thrive in one place. The Jewish state is home to both the highest density of start-ups in the world and the highest number of museums and world-class universities. All these aspects of Israeli life reinforce one another and turbocharge Israeli society. It is a nation distinguished by its dynamism.

The future belongs to nations that combine creative energy, talent, knowledge, and ability to get things done. This is Israel’s sweet spot. It’s what so many countries are trying to emulate.

If Israel is increasingly seen as a “light unto the nations” in innovation terms, Israel will be strengthened economically, diplomatically, in the quality of life it offers to its people and the example it offers to the world. As the basis for Diaspora engagement with the Jewish state becomes less about survival, less about Israel as a charity project and more about a bracing place to live and to build and to dream, the Jewish state will not only be a light unto the nations but to the Jewish people themselves, strengthening their attachment to and identification with their homeland.

Dan Senor is co-author of Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle. A former adviser to the administration of George W. Bush, he is currently an executive at Elliott Management.

Natan Sharansky

What will the situation of Israel and the Jewish people be in 50 years, when Commentary celebrates its 120th birthday? I can envision three possible scenarios, one utopian, one pessimistic, and one realistic.

Fifty years from now, the free world will have completed its first post-national, postmodern century. During this period, the liberal states of Europe, seeking to move beyond parochial nationalism, first deliberately weakened their religious and cultural attachments and opened their borders to throngs of outsiders, many of whom did not share their core beliefs. Having thus abandoned identity for the thin freedom of moral relativism, these societies will ultimately find that they lack a sense of purpose and the determination to survive as liberal states. Under threat of collapse from the weight of millions upon millions of new citizens and refugees, they will come to look admiringly or enviously at one nation—Israel—that took a very different path, proudly preserving its historical identity alongside its liberal commitments and thereby remaining a vibrant, modern democracy.

Meanwhile, the other nations of the Middle East will have undergone a catastrophe of even greater proportions, a result of their choice to eschew freedom for security and identity. For decades, secular dictatorships in the region sustained a form of stability by denying their citizens the most basic rights. Meanwhile, religious fundamentalism, operating in an ideological vacuum, grew by speaking to those citizens’ unfulfilled need for belonging and meaning. As the old dictatorships crumble and fall, the fundamentalism they helped stoke will completely destroy any chance of freedom. The desperate struggle between secular tyranny and religious extremism will erase borders and destroy entire countries, and will force those who desire liberty to flee or look wistfully at the one country in the region—again, Israel—that managed to support it.

It might seem, looking at this projected state of world affairs 50 years hence, that the two most basic human needs—to be free and to belong, to have a sustaining identity—are irreconcilable. Yet I believe that one nation will continue to successfully combine them despite innumerable challenges. The tiny Jewish state will not only continue to be a beacon of liberty, preserving fundamental rights for all its citizens, but will also stay true to its historical purpose as a home for the Jewish people and a guardian of its civilization. The increasingly acute failures of other nations to strike such a balance will, I believe, confirm to more and more Jews the distinct merit of Zionism and help strengthen their commitment to it.

The remaining question is whether other nations will recognize this merit as well. The ideal scenario, the first of three, is that the world will come to see Israel as a model for the successful union of freedom and identity, and regard the Jewish state with corresponding warmth and admiration. Alternatively, it is possible that our success will only grate, generating resentment and familiar arguments about the Jewish role in causing other people’s problems, from the loss of self-confidence in Europe (“Postmodernism was a Jewish-Marxist innovation!”) to the rise of fundamentalism in the Middle East (“The result of Zionist occupation!”). The third and most realistic scenario is that Israel’s steadfast commitment to its historical path will generate a mixture of respect and scorn, deep support and virulent criticism. And Israel, as it has already learned to do, will have to live with both of its roles: light unto the nations and global scapegoat.

Meanwhile, Zionism will continue to provide a bulwark against Jewish assimilation, as the unfolding of world affairs confirms time and again its necessity and virtue. The Diaspora will become smaller in absolute numerical terms, while the Orthodox sector within it grows proportionally larger. Those in the Diaspora who chose not to move to Israel yet whose commitment to the Jewish people is not defined solely by faith will become more closely connected to the Jewish state, finding new ways to be a part of life here or even splitting their time between Israel and homes abroad. Meanwhile, we will see the development of more streamlined institutions to allow cooperation between the two communities, including, I hope, a second chamber in the Knesset giving Diaspora Jews a voice and even a vote on certain issues, along with a more direct stake in the relationship.

In short, we have much to look forward to.

Natan Sharansky is Chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency. He was a human-rights activist and former political prisoner in the former Soviet Union and minister and deputy prime minister in four Israeli governments.

Dan Smokler

American Jewry feels like a community in decline. Lower birthrates, later marriage, and high rates of intermarriage are the norm among most American Jews. In the next generation, not only will there be many fewer Jews, but there will be fewer committed, educated, philanthropic, and politically engaged Jews. We are witness to a steady erosion in both the quantity and quality of Jewish life in the United States. Of course the exception to the grim demographic picture is the explosion of life in the Orthodox community. There, higher birthrates, earlier marriage, and negligible intermarriage are the norm. But Orthodoxy, no matter how robust its growth or how great its confidence, remains too parochial to take on the mantle of leadership for the whole of the American Jewish community. Reading today’s evidence, the question of the hour becomes: Can there be a viable non-Orthodoxy to serve future generations? If there can be, what would it look like and how can it be fortified and nourished to change this rather bleak future?

This year, I glimpsed such a Judaism, and I would like to offer a distillation of its essential elements. On Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the local Jewish Community Center hosts an annual gathering for the holiday of Shavuot. Traditionally, Shavuot is spent all night in the study of Torah, eagerly reenacting the anticipation the Jews felt before the revelation. At the JCC, there are such traditional classes, but there are also lectures, book readings, discussions, and all manner of dance, music, and poetry. The environment allows for a more traditional observance but is clearly pitched to a knowledgeable but more cosmopolitan milieu. All night, these thousands of people share time and space, experiencing a Jewish holiday, studying Torah (broadly construed) together.

These people seem to represent a Jewish life that transcends denomination but has a seriousness and depth of substance at its core. What brings such a huge, variegated swath of people together? Not politics or social causes. There is far too great a range of opinion on these matters. Nor are they unified by belief, philanthropic commitments, or ritual practice. There is no one common language spoken—I had conversations in Hebrew, English, and Spanish over the holiday. Here is what these people seem to have in common:

Jewish social networks. All the participants have Jewish friends. This is not to be underestimated. Young Jews are among the most hyper-social human beings to ever live on earth. And yet most young Jews today have one Jewish parent, not two, and two Jewish grandparents, not four. Most do not live in a Jewish neighborhood or go to a Jewish school. It is difficult to imagine how one builds a serious Jewish life without having a rich social network.

Jewish community. The Shavuot gathering is not a small subset of friends, but the interlocking of many, many groups of friends. These people chose to be in community together.

Jewish calendar. These people chose to celebrate a Jewish holiday on the traditional calendar rather than give Jewish flavor to more global, American values. This gathering was unabashedly Shavuot, on the correct day with its proper name and observances.

Love of Torah. This gathering demonstrated a voracious love of Torah study. An infinite variety of classes, lectures, study sessions—some traditional and some radical—nonetheless testified to a commitment to content. This was not Judaism-lite.

Rich diversity. The Shavuot gathering featured Hasidim and secularists, straight and queer, Israeli and American, Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox. It allowed for deep, rich encounters between Jews of different stripes.

I am arguing that these features constitute not only a description of the vibrant Jewish life of Manhattan, but that they can be a prescription for building a viable non-Orthodox Judaism in the future. What if we were to take seriously the priorities of social networks, communities, living the calendar, love of Torah, and rich diversity as the sine qua non of a flourishing non-Orthodox Judaism in the United States? A few policy implications might emerge. First, we would take seriously the idea of building rich Jewish social networks. Much of the Jewish community is animated by the idea that Jews will participate in community if it is meaningful. This is only half true. Judaism must be meaningful, but it needs social support. Second, we would internalize the idea that people want more content not less. Jews seek a serious, deep Judaism, not just a Jewish patina—a biblical verse here, a Talmudic quotation there—to plaster on their more worldly values. Third, we would recognize that living according to the traditional calendar provides a common framework that can be deepened or repurposed but should not be supplanted.

These principles could guide both the far left and moderate right. They could create a shared basis that could provide for both the continuity and cultural vitality of the Jewish people in North America. They could point to a future beyond the dark horizon before us.

Dan Smokler is a rabbi and the chief innovation officer of Hillel International.

Bret Stephens

December 1, 2065

Moab, Utah—Amid the natural arches, desert landscapes, and mountain views of the American west, Yoav Ascher is re-creating his homeland as a sprawling 105-acre resort, complete with its own River Jordan, Masada fortress, and Tel Aviv, the former name of the city known today as Tal Al-Rabia.

“I want to give Americans the full Israeli experience as I remember it,” says the Jerusalem (Al Quds)-born Ascher, 72, who came to Utah 14 years ago, shortly after the former Jewish state voted to nullify its own independence. “It had positive elements, too, you know.”

To that end, guests of the Holy Land Experience and Adventure, or HLEA, are greeted at his art deco–style village and hotel by a staff dressed in the olive-green fatigues of the old Israeli army. A large courtyard wall is designed to resemble a scaled-down version of historic Jerusalem’s Western Wall, complete with little cracks in which to stick scribbled prayers. Kosher wines from California are served at all three of the resort’s restaurants, each named after a former Israeli city: The Jerusalem (serving traditional Middle Eastern cuisine), The Herzliya (high-end European), and The Eilat (casual seafood).

Built on the banks of the Colorado River, the resort also seeks to capture the varied landscapes of Palestine. A specially designed high-salinity pool allows bathers to float in the water as if they were in the Dead Sea. A copse of trees by the river shades a natural baptismal pool, into which Ascher has built stone steps for religious occasions. The Masada complex, built on a flat hilltop across the river, “minutely reproduces the archeological site before its complete destruction in 2051,” Ascher claims. He is also planning a high-end shopping arcade that he says will capture the spirit of old Tel Aviv. “It’s hard to believe today, but it really was this modern, cosmopolitan, easy-going place.”

For more outgoing guests, Ascher offers the Negev Tour, which whisks them by zodiac boat up the river for two days of Bedouin-style luxury camping near Arches National Park. Camel-riding is a popular activity for clients of all ages.
Ascher was not always as enthusiastic about his native land as he is today.

“When I was young I thought that Israel was the source of the problem in our neighborhood, and therefore we held the keys to the solution,” he says. “I thought that if we could share the land, our problems would end, not begin.”
Ascher’s idealism was put to the test as a young diplomat when he served in the Israeli Embassy in Palestine—located in East Jerusalem, just a few miles from his childhood home on the western side of the city. Ascher was one of six diplomats rescued from the embassy massacre in July 2021, in which 43 Jews were killed.

Ascher later served as a diplomat in Stockholm, but left government service after the Scandinavian states severed relations with Tel Aviv at the outset of the second Israeli–Iranian war. The war, a pyrrhic victory for Israel, led to the first mass exodus of Jewish Israelis after a nuclear weapon destroyed the coastal city of Ashdod (known today as Azdud).

“Constantly having to fight our enemies in our neighborhood, constantly having to argue with our friends in the West, constantly wrestling with our own consciences, our doubts, our guilt—it just became psychologically exhausting,” Ascher explains. “After Ashdod, anyone who could find a way to get out took it. Anyway, the demography wasn’t on the Jewish side, even in our downsized state.”

In 2051, the Israeli parliament, by then evenly split between Arab members, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and a dwindling Zionist minority, voted to dissolve the state in favor of a union with its Palestinian neighbor. In a signature act, the U.S. Congress agreed to extend U.S. citizenship to any former Jewish-Israeli requesting it. Seven million Jews have now settled in the United States; another million went to Canada and approximately 500,000 to Australia.

As for historic Palestine, all that remains of the Jewish population is a small religious community in the historic town of Safed, under the formal protection of the Shiite Alliance of Galilee and the Beqaa.

Though Ascher misses his homeland, he is philosophical about its fate. “The Crusader kingdoms lasted for about a century, and we lasted about the same,” he says. “History has its logic. The small cannot survive the big. Smart people can’t outrun dumb facts. Could we have changed our destiny? Only by a little. At least most of us survived.”

Even today, the controversies of the past have not faded from the present. Hannah Levin, a graduate student in international relations at the University of Utah, led a small protest last Wednesday in Moab against HLEA. “Mr. Ascher’s fantasy hotel glorifies colonialism, it glorifies racism, it glorifies an aspect of Jewish identity which shames me and which I reject,” says Ms. Levin.

Most Moabians, however, seem pleased with Ascher’s resort and look forward to its expansion. “It’s a cool hotel, I love the food,” says local resident Brigham Johnson, 27. “And Utah is the promised land anyway.”

Bret Stephens, the foreign-affairs columnist of the Wall Street Journal, is the author of America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder, now just out in paperback.

Jonathan S. Tobin

The challenges facing world Jewry always make pessimism seem smart. Yet a sober look at Israel’s progress against the odds compels us to believe optimism is warranted. The same cannot be said about Jewish communities elsewhere.

As a nation that has been perpetually at war, Israel’s future has always been a function of crisis management. These crises will continue as the rise of ISIS and a nuclear deal that strengthens Iran are altering the strategic equation in the Middle East for the worse. When one considers the nonexistent prospects for real peace with the Palestinians, it becomes clear that Israel will have to be as heavily armed and on guard against external threats in 2065 as it is today.

Yet contrary to the laments from the Jewish left and the hopes of those who wish for Israel’s demise, that is no cause for pessimism. Israel has thrived under such circumstances throughout its history, and there is no reason to believe that this will cease to be the case. The 2014 war with Hamas proved again the cohesiveness of Israeli society and the willingness of its people to defend their country. The prospect of a continued stalemate with the Palestinians is a dismal one, but, as in the past, the coming years will show that Israelis have the ability to continue to wait until their foes give up the dream of their elimination and prosper as they do so.

From a historical perspective, Israel is an experiment that is still in its infancy. Its problems, though serious, will not sink it. It has gone from being an economic backwater burdened by socialist myths to a First World economic power. The exploitation of natural-gas and shale-oil reserves will, if properly managed, accelerate that transformation. And though the secular-religious conflict poses an existential threat, the assumption that Haredim are monolithic and will always resist modernity may prove mistaken.

The Israel of 2065 will be different from the one we know today, just as contemporary Israel is unrecognizable from the perspective of 1985, let alone 1948. But it is the future of the Jewish people, and the recent past compels us to have faith in it. Though new trials await Zionism in the next half-century, no one should doubt that Israelis will continue to meet those challenges.

But such optimism about the Diaspora is unfounded.

The rising tide of anti-Semitism throughout the world gives the lie to the idea that Jewish life can thrive in Europe. If even in the capitals of enlightened Western Europe, Jews are forced to give up identifying themselves in public, and to renounce support for Israel in order to retain their standing in elite circles, there is little hope that the reconstitution of Jewish existence there is viable.

As for the United States, I believe we can count on the persistence of American exceptionalism to ensure that the virus of anti-Semitism doesn’t take root here as it has elsewhere. But the demographic collapse of non-Orthodox Jewry that was documented by the 2013 Pew survey means that by 2065 the community here will be much smaller, less imbued with a sense of Jewish peoplehood, and no longer able to sustain its infrastructure or political influence. It might have been possible to halt or even to reverse the toll of assimilation and intermarriage had drastic measures been undertaken in the immediate aftermath of the release of the Pew report. But the shameful failure of the organized Jewish world to respond to this crisis with even a tone of alarm, let alone the necessary action, means this process will continue to its unfortunate yet logical conclusion.

A thriving Orthodox sector and the persistence of core groups of other denominations ensures Jewish life won’t disappear in America. But in 50 years a critical mass of those with Jewish ties will not be affiliated with the community or even be, in any meaningful sense, Jewish. In the past century American Jewry was an engine of Jewish revival. Its decline will have a negative impact on Jewish civilization as well as the security of the international community, making Israel and Zionism even more important to the Jewish future.

Jonathan S. Tobin is senior online editor of Commentary.

Avi Weiss

Although I am not an anthropologist or sociologist, as a rabbi for almost 50 years I have often reflected not only on contemporary Jewish life, but on what Jewish life could look like years from now. With this forward-looking attitude, I have always tried to be a step ahead, sometimes successfully, and sometimes not.

In short, I predict a reconfiguration of affiliated Jewry into three new camps.

On the right side of the religious spectrum, the various Haredi communities—Hasidim, Mitnagdim, Sephardim, as well as the more extreme wing of Chabad—will recognize that they have more in common than not. The “neo-Haredi” Roshei Yeshiva from RIETS (Yeshiva University) will find more common ground with this faction. United, their power will increase.

But with the world increasingly becoming a global village through the Internet and social media, we will witness a drop-off rate in these communities. Young Yeshiva students exposed to outside ideas and influences will in larger numbers abandon their insular worlds. The up-till-now astronomical growth rate of the Haredi community, moreover, will slow down as the Haredim will find it more difficult to sustain larger families in this economic climate. Finally, Haredi women employed in higher-powered jobs will be inspired to be more assertive and vocal in their respective communities.

On the other end of the spectrum, we will witness an amalgamation of the liberal communities. The Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and Renewal denominations will overcome their differences and unite. Among their followers we will encounter two strands: those in the Diaspora and those in Israel. Liberal Jews in the Diaspora will place a greater emphasis on ritual as the religious anchor of their community.

Despite the present ambivalence of many in the liberal community toward Israel, in the coming decades a dramatic shift will occur as thousands of liberal Jews who identify more nationally than religiously will move to Israel. This boon in non-Orthodox aliyah will occur because many liberal Jews will realize that Israel—whose very rhythm is Jewish—is a more conducive place to express their Jewish identity.

A third camp, in the middle of the spectrum, will be made up of a growing community of halakhically committed Jews. From this camp—one with which I identify—there will emerge an inclusionary Orthodoxy that empowers women to be more involved in Jewish ritual and spiritual leadership; invites religious questioning; promotes dialogue across the Jewish spectrum; welcomes people regardless of sexual orientation or level of religious observance; and looks outward, driven by a sense of responsibility to all people.

We are seeing the fruits of this growing camp already in the International Rabbinic Fellowship, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, Yeshivat Maharat, and JOFA in America. There are parallels in Beit Hillel, Yeshivat Ma’alei Gilboa, and Ne’emanei Torah Va’Avodah in Israel. I predict that we will also witness the more conservative wing of Hadar and the more progressive graduates of Chabad, Yeshiva University, and Yeshivat Har Etzion (the “Gush”) joining this community. Indeed, in my travels I have found that young Jews are searching for a Judaism that is rooted but not stagnant, open but with boundaries.

Among what may be the largest group of Diaspora Jews, the unaffiliated, I believe that, contrary to the pundits and the Pew-type reports of the death of the search for God among young Jews, in the next 50 years we will see a renewed search for God. In a world where technology has brought people closer together yet further apart, there will be a backlash as people will yearn to find meaning in their lives. Many more young Jewish men and women will be attracted to spiritual leadership to meet this desperate need.

In Israel, too, the emerging search for greater religious meaning beyond the Orthodox community will continue to spiral. This will be enabled by the dramatic dissipation of the centralized power of the Chief Rabbinate. Each community will be given the right to choose its own spiritual leaders.

The Jewish population in Israel will increase dramatically. In the short run, Israel will continue to face serious physical challenges, but in the long run, threats against Israel will recede. Jews worldwide will not be coming to Israel out of fear, but to live more meaningful Jewish lives. A significant number of these olim will come from the inclusionary modern and open Orthodox, cutting into the vibrancy of this community in America. In addition, third and fourth generations of Israeli yordim (émigrés from Israel) will return home. Finally, with the likelihood of shorter travel time between Israel and the United States, many more people will commute to work between the two countries. As this upsurge evolves, Israel will become more open to embracing converts, especially those born to Jewish fathers.

Whether there will be one or two states between the Mediterranean and Jordan River, Israel will continue to be a Jewish state, with Diaspora communities—much smaller in number than today, all over the world. Israel will be the place where the national destiny of Am Yisrael will be realized. It will be the only place where we, as a people, will have the sovereignty and autonomy to drive our own course, carve our unique path, and join others in bringing light to the world.
If someone would have asked me 50 years ago, after the Holocaust, when we stood with signs that read Never Again, whether Jews would face the challenges we face today, specifically a virulent anti-Semitism in the guise of anti-Israelism, I would have said “never.” And yet, here we are.

Despite our physical threats and spiritual challenges, I continue to remain optimistic.

I know I will not be around to see whether any of these predictions come true, but I offer the following blessing: God created a beautiful world, a world that too many are trying to make ugly. And we have been blessed with a Torah and a land of promise and hope.

And so, whether my predictions here come true or not, it’s our sacred responsibility to do all we can to light the darkness, for our people and the larger world.

Avi Weiss is the founding rabbi of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, founder of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School and Yeshivat Maharat, and co-founder of the International Rabbinic Fellowship.

Jack Wertheimer

The contours of American Jewish life 50 years hence are not difficult to imagine if we project current trends forward. A much smaller population than today will engage actively with Judaism and the needs of the Jewish people. Within this group, the Orthodox will play an outsize role. Owing to their strong pro-natal norms and commitments to perpetuating Jewish life, they will bear children well above replacement level and retain enough of their offspring to maintain strong communities. Alongside them will live the descendants of Conservative and Reform Jews, who will fashion eclectic Jewish identities from cultural, Hebraic, Israel-centric, and religious/spiritual elements. Whether most will identify with a particular religious denomination is an open question. But in any event, local cultures, not national movements and organizations, will prevail. Innovative and energetic communities will attract enough of the shrunken Jewish middle to sustain a vibrant non-Orthodox life in perhaps as many as a dozen urban centers.

There also will be millions of Americans of partial Jewish ancestry with no sustained connection to Jewish life. Like their counterparts in today’s Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, these descendants of intermarried Jews may attempt to reconnect with some aspect of Jewishness episodically, but only a minority will rejoin the Jewish people. A legion of outreach workers will strive to draw more of these people into Jewish engagement, probably with only limited success. At best, the descendants of most intermarried Jews might contribute to a philo-Semitic climate in American society, but they will not reverse the dramatic loss of Jewish political and economic influence once active Jews constitute less than half of 1 percent of the American populace.

Such would seem to be the future, assuming a straight-line evolution of current trends. Judging from the past, though, it is highly unlikely that anything of the sort will occur. We need only think of how even the most farsighted person living a century ago and projecting trends in Jewish life 50 years into the future could not have anticipated what remade the world between 1915 and 1965—the two world wars, the Communist oppression of Eastern Europe and much of Asia, the remarkable technological and scientific advances, the generally constructive leadership role of America on the world stage, and the attendant rise of its Jewish community as a force in international Jewish affairs, coupled with the miraculous establishment of a Jewish state for the first time in nearly two millennia.

Instead of imagining what American Jewish life will be like in 50 years, we might ask more productively: What is necessary to ensure that, come what may, Jews will have the means to persevere? Here the past may serve as a guide. Our ancestors prepared for the future by putting in place a number of essential building blocks. First, they regarded Judaic literacy among males as a fundamental birthright. We need to expand the range of thoroughly literate Jews to include females and males, older and younger people. Grounded in a deep understanding of Jewish civilization, these literate populations will develop creative and Judaically resonant responses to new circumstances. Second, Jewish life thrives when Jews inhabit communities infused with a “thick” culture. Socializing in extensive Jewish networks, engaging passionately in matters of concern, and contributing to Jewish conversations—these are all vital for sustaining Jews in good times and bad. And third, in order to bring meaning to the lives of Jews, Judaic culture must be understood as a counterculture, not merely a pale imitation of prevailing ways of thinking. To be Jewish means to view the world through a distinctive set of spectacles. And that requires Jews to ground themselves in the formative texts of their tradition and to find meaning in alternative ways of being and thinking offered by Judaism. Engaged Jews will not shrink from addressing the wider society unapologetically, even as they assert their special responsibility to one another.

American Jews can forecast their collective future no more than each of us can know the trajectory of our own lives. History will continue to unfold unpredictably, giving rise to both destructive upheaval and extraordinary human ingenuity. Our task is to ensure that 50 years hence, the engaged population of American Jews will have the tools to respond with confidence, common purpose, and Jewish understanding.

Jack Wertheimer is a professor of American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Ruth R. Wisse

When the 2065 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Israel Defense Forces, it merely confirmed what Israel had learned and tried to teach others for a half century: Democratic societies encourage peace by protecting whatever they achieve. Unless they invest in defense the same resources they do in self-improvement, they incite meaner cultures to target them for conquest.

The Jewish people had learned this lesson the hard way. As a self-defined minority, its need for acceptance by surrounding nations made it eager to compromise and reluctant to go to war. This reputation for acquiescence originally helped to foment Arab and Muslim ambitions against a country that had been under foreign occupation for 2,000 years and against a people that had not been able to recover its sovereignty, much less protect its members, for the greater part of its history. With such images of frailty in mind, the more Israel prospered, the more fanatically some of its neighbors determined to destroy it.

Indeed, in its early decades Israel fell back into familiar Jewish patterns of political accommodation. Forced into wars that won it sustainable borders, its leaders were lured into phony deals with catastrophic consequences. In 1993, when Israel conceded authority to Yasir Arafat, it became the first country in history to arm its enemy with the expectation of gaining security. Subsequent retreats from hard-won territory inspired the explosion rather than promised termination of Arab attacks. Sobered finally by the expansion of anti-Jewish hate propaganda, terrorism, and cyberwarfare, and Iran’s intention of making Israel a “one-bomb state,” Jews realized that God protects only those who do it themselves. The disciplined power of the IDF gradually damped down at least some of the region’s carnage, and only thus did hostilities begin to subside.

The 10 million Jews of Israel now living between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River do not yet equal and perhaps may never equal the almost 17 million of 1939, but they are far more secure in body and spirit than those of 2015. Although economic advantages were not enough to persuade local Arabs to accept the eternity of Israel, many Arabs were heartened by the establishment of the Jordan-Palestine Confederation that offered citizenship to those who preferred it to living in the Jewish State. There have been joint ventures between the two polities on water, transportation, tourism, trade, and industry. Educational collaboration, cultural interchange, and reciprocal diplomatic and security measures have been transforming the once suicidal-homicidal Palestinian-Arab population into a competitive-cooperative society.

None of this could have begun until Israel’s security was attained and acknowledged. It therefore augurs well for the international community to have the Nobel Peace Prize Jury recognize the merits of a soldiering democracy. Citing the high standards of Israel’s military code of ethics, the conduct of its soldiers in battle, and the crucial role of the IDF in protecting its citizenry, the testimonial affirms, “Discouraging aggression paves the road to peace.” Would that America had followed Israel’s example.

Ruth R. Wisse, a former professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, is a senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund and the author of Jews and Power and No Joke: Making Jewish Humor.

David Wolpe

The pincers of medievalism and defensiveness will continue to narrow the mentality of part of the Jewish people who mistake rigidness for faithfulness, copying the worldwide fundamentalist wave. Another coterie of Jews, prideful in their universalism that tosses aside the hard-hewn beauty of our ancestor’s legacy, will vanish.

God will bless those who hold the center. They are the future of the Jewish people. Neither Karaites nor Hellenizers, they represent the rabbinic tradition in its truest sense; firm but flexible, faithful but skeptical, genuinely modern Jews who disdain neither the insights of science nor the wisdom of Torah. Some will have been trained in old-style institutions (the faithful of Lakewood, New Jersey, are educating the next generation’s conservative Jews, after all), and others will come from nothing, the shofar having struck a deep and surprising note in the once secular soul. No matter their initial training—the desire to embrace an unblinkered but passionate Judaism will prevail. The rabbinic spirit will reinvigorate an ossified, over-institutionalized remnant, bringing new sparkle to the blank stare reproduced in a thousand religious-school classrooms.

Does that seem improbable? Modern yavnehs, pods cast from the mother ship, are incubating just such tough-minded Jews. The social movement is systolic and diastolic: The center is shrinking and then will expand. So long as Israel and the United States stay strong, Jews can revivify their inexhaustible texts, practices, theologies, and communal ties. It is unfashionable to be an optimist. But then, it is unfashionable to be a Jew.

Much of the Jewish world slips gently away, it is true. But faith in our tradition is not only faith in God, but in the self-renewing powers of our people. I may not live to see it, but “many that sleep in the dust shall awake” (Daniel, Chapter 12). Remember, as Rebbe Nachman teaches, the greatest sin is despair.

David Wolpe is the Max Webb Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. His most recent book is David: The Divided Heart.

Eric Yoffie

It is 2065, and the Jewish people are doing just fine.

The Jewish world is radically different from what it was a half-century before. America and Israel are the only Jewish communities of any consequence. About 100,000 Jews live in France, and nearly as many in both Great Britain and Germany, but Jewish populations elsewhere have dwindled into insignificance. The great Jewish Diaspora, outside of America, is no more, having given way to assimilation and aliyah to Israel.

But Jewish life in America flourishes. The Jewish community of 7 million souls is contentious and wildly diverse, but also Jewishly vibrant. Jews continue to do what they have always done in America: create a Judaism that works for them.

Orthodox Jews have more than doubled to 34 percent of the Jewish population. Almost two-thirds of these are Haredim, who live in enclaves apart from the American mainstream, mostly in the New York area. Their families are large and their devotion to Torah admirable, but the majority are quite poor and want mostly to be left alone.

Non-Haredi Orthodox Jews, modest in number, are split into two major factions and several minor ones. One major group ordains female rabbis, encourages conversion, finds a way to free agunot, and participates in theological dialogue with non-Jews. The other major group is uncomfortable with, but does not always oppose, each of these positions. Each faction has its own halakhic institutions, which disagree about almost everything, including about who can be called Orthodox.
Reform Jews are no less divided than the Orthodox. The “re-ritualization” of Reform, begun in the late 1900s, has continued unabated. In that sense, Reform Judaism is more “traditional” than it has ever been. Mikveh, kashrut, and tefillin have a place on the Reform spectrum, and serious Shabbat observance, liberally understood, is a central pillar of Reform life.

But Reform has also continued on a path of theological radicalism. Hostile to theological norms of any sort, it takes pride in its radical inclusivity. It is reluctant to define its borders and red lines, and who is in and who is out. Some Reform Jews are distressed by this absence of definition, while most are proud of the creativity and openness it engenders. Nearly 40 percent of American Jews still call themselves Reform, without agreeing on the meaning of the term.
American Jewry’s political clout has shrunk as its percentage of the general population has declined. It is no longer the political powerhouse it once was. But Jews are secure in America, and while their numerical growth is quite slow, the passionate pluralism of their religious life allows them to thrive.

American Jewish ties with Israel remain strong, due in some measure to Israel’s “Religious Revolution of 2025.” Prior to that time, religious turmoil was at its height; a third of Israelis left the country to have their marriages performed, and conversion to Judaism was essentially impossible. Finally, fed-up voters had had enough, a government was formed without the religious parties, and a far-reaching bill was passed that de-established synagogue and state. It called for each municipality to elect its religious leader and for the establishment of a single school system for the “secular” and “religious” populations.

Over the next 40 years, this law changed the face of Israel. Orthodox and non-Orthodox children came to understand one another, and hotly contested rabbinical elections pushed all candidates to moderate, centrist positions. When a Conservative rabbi was elected chief rabbi of Beersheba in 2031, it made headlines, but such developments soon became commonplace.

Orthodoxy, and especially the national religious camp, benefited most from the newly created “free market” in religion. Settler influence faded after the Saudis and the Arab league pushed the Palestinians into a two-state solution. But no longer held hostage by a coercive religious monopoly, national religious institutions flourished, contributing greatly to the spiritual vitality of Israeli life.

And the Reform and Conservative movements, while relatively small, shared in the general religious renewal, and all Israelis benefited from vigorous debates among the movements.

Israel today is not a religious utopia. But it is a country in which an end to Orthodox hegemony has produced a revived Orthodoxy, a growing progressive Judaism, broad pockets of religious commitment, serious Jewish education, and a major challenge to the spiritual emptiness that had so long characterized Israeli society.

Judaism is strong in 2065 in both Israel and America, and Jews in both countries look to each other for inspiration and spiritual sustenance.

Eric Yoffie, a lecturer and writer, was president of the Union for Reform Judaism from 1996 to 2012.