Politics & Power Quote by Arthur Hertzberg

Hertzberg is trying to puncture a community lullaby: the comforting narrative that American Jewish life is a triumphant arc from immigrant hardship to suburban safety and elite acceptance. By calling it a "success story with which they've cheered themselves up", he frames that narrative as self-soothing, not simply celebratory. The verb choice is doing the work. "Cheered" implies an audience clapping for itself; "look away" suggests not denial but deliberate reorientation, a refusal to let a flattering mirror become the whole picture.

The subtext is a warning about assimilation as amnesia. If American Jews anchor identity primarily in social mobility, institutional influence, and relative security, Jewishness risks becoming a lifestyle brand: philanthropic, civic-minded, a little nostalgic, but untethered from its deeper intellectual and moral demands. Hertzberg, a theologian steeped in Jewish history and political controversy, is pushing against the postwar mood in which prosperity and integration could be mistaken for arrival - and therefore for meaning.

His most provocative move is the coyness of "the classical tradition, whatever it is". That phrase sounds almost impatient, like he's pre-empting intra-Jewish squabbles over which canon counts: rabbinic law, prophetic ethics, Zionism, Yiddishkeit, modern philosophy. The point isn't to crown one faction's syllabus; it's to insist that a tradition exists precisely as a discipline of memory, argument, and obligation - the opposite of a complacent success narrative. Hertzberg is asking American Jews to trade the warm glow of achievement for the harder light of inheritance.