The Case for “Assimilation” and Diaspora

IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE, reading Gerson Cohen’s brilliant, provocative essay “The Blessing of Assimilation in Jewish History,” that fifty years have passed since its delivery as a commencement address at the Hebrew Teachers College in Brookline, Massachusetts.1 Cohen’s challenge to widespread assumptions remains as relevant as ever in 2016; the communal dilemmas that he identified continue to engage and divide Jewish leaders; and the agenda that he implicitly and explicitly set for American Jewry is still largely unfulfilled. “I do not feel that our values should in any way interfere with our sense of objectivity,” Cohen asserted in blatant understatement, on the way to marshaling the considerable authority of his historical scholarship, in “Blessing” and a number of essays that followed, to challenge a variety of contemporary orthodoxies. If only Jews paid more attention to history, Cohen lamented time and again; if only they would allow the lessons of the past to bridge “the chasm that exists between Jewish assessments and what should long have been recognized as the real state of affairs.”2 The historical case for assimilation’s indubitable blessings seems ever stronger, fifty years after Cohen presented it, even as the evidence for the high cost that assimilation exacts from Jews, likewise a prominent theme in Cohen’s work, seems ever more irrefutable. The argument for blessing was straightforward. Contrary to the wellknown saying that attributes Jewish survival over the centuries to the fact that our ancestors did not change their names, their language, or their distinctive dress, Cohen notes that Jacob’s grandchildren in Egypt, according to the Torah’s own account, took Egyptian names such as Aaron and Moses. Hellenized Jews later adopted Greek names like