Rabbi Wolpe - What Happened to Jewish Peoplehood?

I'm curious about your sense of the state of Jewish peoplehood, and I'll kind of contextualize my question.

So I am a former Soviet Union Jew that was raised with this belief that being Jewish is being part of a people, that we're a distinct nationality.

And there are Jews that live outside of our nation, being Israel.

But they're

still Jews,

just like French living, I don't know, in America or somewhere else.

And in America, especially in the reform and conservative spaces, that's just not the paradigm in which Jews understand themselves.

For a long time, those Jews were raised on the belief that we go to a church, ours is called the synagogue.

We're just like you Christians in America.

We're just practicing our own kind of track tape.

And now we're seeing this evolution of really young Jews understanding that they're part of a people and what that entails and how it is not just...

We have the same type of church.

Ours is called a synagogue.

And I'm curious what your sense is

First, I want to make a distinction that I think is really important.

That was not at all the sense of the conservative movement.

It was the

sense of the reform movement.

The conservative movement was always a communal movement.

That's why if you look at the community leaders in almost every city in America, they were conservative Jews.

The Orthodox Jews weren't because they were primarily involved in the Orthodox community, and the Reform Movement was much more individual, social justice-based.

The communal Jews were the conservative Jews.

So I was raised as the son of a conservative rabbi.

Peoplehood was clearly my father's primary priority.

It's one of the reasons, by the way, why all of American Jewry mobilized for the Jews of the Soviet Union.

I'm curious about your sense of the state of Jewish peoplehood, and I'll kind of contextualize my question.

So I am a former Soviet Union Jew that was raised with this belief that being Jewish is being part of a people, that we're a distinct nationality.

And there are Jews that live outside of our nation, being Israel.

But they're

still Jews,

just like French living, I don't know, in America or somewhere else.

And in America, especially in the reform and conservative spaces, that's just not the paradigm in which Jews understand themselves.

For a long time, those Jews were raised on the belief that we go to a church, ours is called the synagogue.

We're just like you Christians in America.

We're just practicing our own kind of track tape.

And now we're seeing this evolution of really young Jews understanding that they're part of a people and what that entails and how it is not just...

We have the same type of church.

Ours is called a synagogue.

And I'm curious what your sense is

First, I want to make a distinction that I think is really important.

That was not at all the sense of the conservative movement.

It was the

sense of the reform movement.

The conservative movement was always a communal movement.

That's why if you look at the community leaders in almost every city in America, they were conservative Jews.

The Orthodox Jews weren't because they were primarily involved in the Orthodox community, and the Reform Movement was much more individual, social justice-based.

The communal Jews were the conservative Jews.

So I was raised as the son of a conservative rabbi.

Peoplehood was clearly my father's primary priority.

It's one of the reasons, by the way, why all of American Jewry mobilized for the Jews of the Soviet Union.