Since the 1940s, at least, American Jews have conceived of religion and public life as being rigidly separate areas. They have been, for the most part, strict separationists, committed to the proposition that the First Amendment was intended to erect an absolute wall of separation between church and state. According to the prevailing liberal Jewish consensus, it has often been assumed that only strict separationism could ensure the kind of free society wherein Jews, and Judaism, could flourish.
And yet, it’s important to remember that the separationist position has not gone unchallenged in the Jewish community. Already, in the 1950s and early 1960s, the Jewish theologian Will Herberg—the author of Protestant, Catholic, Jew and other major books— had begun to call for a reassessment of the prevailing Jewish consensus that religion should play no role in American public life. More recently, other prominent Jewish thinkers began to eschew their earlier liberal faith in separationism, and call for an abandonment of the liberal Jewish separationist agenda in favor of a more pro-religion stance, warning that an American moral culture uninformed by religious beliefs and values undermined the position of both Jews and Judaism within American society.
One issue that has forced this reexamination is whether the government should give aid to parochial schools, Catholic and Jewish alike. Beginning in the 1950s, demands for a reassessment of the prevailing Jewish communal policy of opposition to government support for parochial schools were increasingly heard within the American Jewish community. In 1962, the American Jewish Year Book, reviewing the events of the previous year, pointed out that “unexpectedly strong support for the Catholic position [favoring state aid to parochial schools] appeared within the Jewish community, especially among the Orthodox.” As the number of Jewish parochial schools began to proliferate during the 1960s and 1970s, Orthodox Jews abandoned their earlier opposition to state aid to parochial schools in the hope of obtaining funds for their own Jewish religious schools. They began to argue persuasively, as Catholics had before them, that education in a religious setting benefited not only members of their own faith, but also the nation as a whole, and that money used to support secular studies at these schools should not be denied because the schools happened to teach religious subjects on the side.
As more and more private Jewish parochial schools were established during the 1970s and 1980s, and their costs continued to escalate, a growing number of Jewish religious leaders began to recognize the justice of the Catholic claim to public support of parochial schools, and the merits of their argument against double taxation. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, moreover, the growth of Jewish day schools outside the Orthodox community prompted a growing number of Conservative and Reform rabbis and educators to rethink their earlier opposition to state aid as well. As Jewish parochial school tuition has increased enormously in recent years, government support for private religious schools, in the form of tax credits and vouchers, has emerged as a public policy alternative that more and more Jewish leaders (albeit, still a minority) have begun to support.
The issue of government support for Jewish parochial schools is only one of many that have forced liberal Jews to reassess how high the so-called wall of separation should rise. Throughout the American Jewish community in recent years there has been a growing recognition that the triumph of strict separationism as a legal doctrine may actually infringe upon the free exercise of religion so cherished by American Jews. No longer can it be said, as it could in the 1940s and 1950s, that American Jewry speaks with one official liberal voice on all issues of religion and public life. A growing minority of American Jews, who are increasingly uncomfortable with at least some aspects of the strict separationist position, seem to have rejected the secular view that their interests are best served by “the naked public square.” They believe that religion has a legitimate place in American public life, and that the once virtually unchallenged liberal Jewish alliance with strict separationists should be abandoned, to be replaced by a new coalition with groups seeking to shape government law and policy in a more pro-religion direction. Such views, though they cannot yet be said to represent a new mainstream Jewish consensus, command greater intellectual force than ever before.