Outside of Israel, too, the Six Day War had a significant impact on Jewish
life, particularly in the United States. As in Israel, the Six Day War acceler-
ated certain developments in American Jewish life that had been unfolding
for several years prior to 1967. For many young American Jews, the cultural
revival of the 1960s led, often tortuously, to a reconnecting with Jewish roots,
not unlike that experienced by other Americanized ethnic groups such as
African-Americans, Native Americans, and Latino-Americans. For Jews, this
reconnecting was often facilitated by neo-Hasidic spiritual revival move-
ments led by rabbis such as Shlomo Carlebach and Zalman Schacter-Shalomi,
who fused the Hasidic upbringing that had eventually alienated them with
the bohemian culture and eastern religion that they had embraced during the
1960s. The resurgence of messianic fervor after 1967 spurred the popularity
of these spiritual movements.
More important, perhaps, Israel’s victory over its seemingly unconquerable
adversaries instilled American Jews with the confidence and willingness to
speak out with more proactively on behalf of Jewish causes such as the plight
of Soviet Jewry, and to defend themselves actively when necessary. The gener-
ation of American Jews that came of age after 1967 combined the
self-confidence born of economic prosperity with a new-found sense of pride
and courage that emanated from Israel after 1967.
This sense of comfort and confidence ironically did not always result in a
stronger sense of Jewishness. On the contrary, the mainstreaming of Judaism
and Jews in American culture often reflected the extent to which American
Jews opted for American over Jewish identity. Indicative in this respect is the
rapid increase in the intermarriage rate after 1967. Beyond the quantitative
increase in intermarriage, for Jews and non-Jews alike intermarriage seemed
commonplace and unremarkable. To cite an example from the world of
American popular culture: during the early 1970s, a short-lived television
comedy series called Bridget Loves Berniecentered around an intermarried cou-
ple. Their intermarriage, though treated in comic style, was nonetheless the
subject of tension and angst over questions such as “how will we raise the
children?” A generation later, intermarried couples abound on television
shows, often with no mention that they are intermarried.
In the end, the growing complexity of Israeli and American Jewish society
has provided world Jewry with a tension between its two postwar demo-
graphic and cultural centers. As in generations past, this tension is at times a
source of disagreement and conflict between Jewish constituencies, but more
often than not a source of dynamism.
240 Jews in the postwar world