SAM LIPSKI
WHO remembers Joseph Gentilli’s prediction about the Jews of Australia? Who recalls the riddle of the lily pond? And what’s the connection between the two questions and Australian Jewry in 2020?
Gentilli was an Australian-Jewish demographer who, in 1945, and in the shadow of the Holocaust, predicted that by the 21st century there would be virtually no Jews in Australia.
I thought of Gentilli and demography last year on March 12, the day the Australian Parliament passed a resolution congratulating Israel on its 60th anniversary, and the Duntroon Military College band played Hatikvah and Advance Australia Fair in the Parliament House foyer.
Watching the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition move the pro-Israel resolution from the visitors’ gallery, I was sitting near a Holocaust survivor. He had lived to see his committed Jewish great-grandchildren participating fully in the Australian mainstream.
And I agreed with him that this was a “goldene medinah” -– the golden kingdom of Oz. What the United States was for Jews in the 20th century, Australia could be in the 21st. A heady thought.
But now for the riddle. A pond has a potentially toxic lily that doubles in size each day. If the lily grows unchecked, it will cover the entire pond in 30 days, eventually choking off all other forms of life. So on what day will the lily cover 50 per cent of the pond?
If you don’t know the riddle, you have to think a moment about the answer. It’s the 29th day. And by then, it’s too late to do something to save the pond. Thus what seems like incremental change, a bit each day -– or in the case of the Jewish community, a bit each year for the next 10 years -– can also become exponential change.
But by the time we realise that the changes are serious, they may be irreversible.
That sounds ominous, I know, and I don’t mean to sound pessimistic about Australian Jewry. On the contrary. I’m a paid-up member of the “Oz for goldene medinah” society.
Indeed, the Monash University Centre for Jewish Civilisation’s groundbreaking Jewish Population Study, released just four months ago, confirms the mostly good news.
By any Diaspora measure, the survey shows that globally, we’re one of the few growing communities, and that we have a strongly committed Jewish citizenry. We’re very pro-Israel, pluralist, yet increasingly drawn to religious tradition, and supportive of Jewish education and our welfare services.
Despite some unease about anti-Semitism, we’re generally content and confident about our place in Australian society. Moreover, we expect these positive indicators to continue into the foreseeable future. Certainly, we’d expect, for the next 10 years.
And yet. A closer reading of some of the survey’s key findings points to some concerning trends; just small clusters of potentially virulent lilies on the otherwise very pleasant pond.
So to try to avoid the pitfalls of journalistic prediction, I recruited Monash University’s Professor Andrew Markus, who led the survey team, to enjoy a cup of tea and help me read the leaves.
For Professor Markus, the drivers shaping our Jewish future in the decade ahead are demography, geography, immigration, education, Israel, intermarriage and the economy (general and communal).
Looking ahead at the next decade, each of these drivers could justify a separate article. My first thought, in fact, was that I’d write, yet again, about the elephant and the Jewish schools.
But Professor Markus drew my attention to an issue that seems to have slipped under, or away from, the communal radar. And that’s intermarriage. At one level, it sounds all too familiar. But we seem to have missed something.
Although the overall rate is now 30 per cent and rising –- in itself a significant increase during the past decade -– the most critical figures are in the 25-35 year age group. There, Professor Markus notes, the rate is now 42 per cent.
We can expect that rate to grow by one per cent a year. By 2020, therefore, one in every two young Jews who marries will have a non-Jewish spouse.
That may not be news to some. But I think it will be to many. And as Professor Markus points out, the seemingly incremental annual increase in intermarriage actually has an exponential impact that will affect many key aspects of communal life. From attendance at schools and synagogues, to the available pool of donors to Jewish causes.
Here’s my one prediction. Whereas Australian Jewry on the eve of 2010 is much like we were on the eve of 2000, intermarriage means we’ll be noticeably different in 2020 from 2010. Just how, I don’t know. But very different.
One way to think about it is to recall that American Jews went from barely 10 per cent intermarriage rates in the early 1960s, to 50 per cent in the late 1980s. Just two decades. Barely one generation. I don’t know if that’s where we are at.
But for all this time, and to the degree Australian Jews considered the intermarriage issue, the markedly lower rates and our self-image told us that we weren’t like our American cousins, that we had some generations to go yet before American-style “assimilation” arrived here. Well, maybe time has caught up with us.
Yet, there’s one thing we can learn from the Americans. Although it took them awhile, every sector of American-Jewish life -– the Orthodox nowadays nearly as much as the Conservative, Reform and secular streams –- has recognised that the old answers, which focused only on “prevention”, aren’t enough.
True, the more Jewishly educated they are, the less likely young Jews will intermarry. That was, and is, axiomatic.
But the overall attrition rates were, and are, just too great to ignore. So now American Jews are devoting large resources to encourage, welcome and support those intermarried families who may want to connect with Jewish communities and with the Jewish experience.
Such “outreach” after the event, after the bride and groom have bolted, isn’t a quick fix. Nor is it meant to be. But at least many American-Jewish communities, for all their past failures to take preventive action when the lilies were gradually covering the pond, are now grappling with a real feature of modernity and Jewish life in open society.
What, I wonder, will we be writing about Australian Jews and our pond in 2020?
Sam Lipski is the chief executive of The Pratt Foundation and a former editor-in-chief of The AJN.
