Kaplan’s solution of transcendence and integration, incorporating both Zionism and democratic nationalism into American Judaism, has not fared particularly well. While many American Jews profoundly identify with a democratic U.S. founded upon separation of church and state, some retain the concept of Jews as the chosen people, and some extend the idea to apply to the land of Israel, even at the cost of Jewish unity. Even as immigration has soared, introducing new forms of religious and ethnic diversity, scholars argue that we live in a post-ethnic America. While boundaries separating American Jews from their neighbors have attenuated, encouraging feelings of shared history and destiny, discord among Jews has sharpened. Jews have assimilated into American differences (as evidenced in rising rates of intermarriage, fundamentalism, and support for conservative Republicans), while claims to Jewish separateness and chosenness have increased.

So how might we as American Jews imagine oneness with both parts of our identity? For much of the past century Jews theorized concepts of American national identity to account for pluralism. From Israel Zangwill’s melting pot to Horace Kallen’s symphony orchestra, from imagining America as a house with many rooms to nominating a Judeo-Christian tradition to be America’s fundamental faith, Jews have tried to interpret Americans’ national self-definitions in ways that allowed themselves to feel at home. Even in this era of diasporic consciousness and transnational identities, Jewish terms of understanding have influenced conversations about similarity and difference, unity and pluralism, self and other. Yet within the Jewish world, a climate of fearfulness now seems to dominate discussion of Jewish apartness. At a time when record numbers of Americans desire to throw in their lot with Jews, to accept their history and destiny, Jews struggle to separate themselves not only from other Americans but also from other Jews. Rather than recognizing the new paths Jews are forging in creating living connections across national boundaries and ethnic and religious barriers, some Jewish thinkers emphasize the perceived need to reject American blandishments and wall Jews off from their neighbors.

Jews still face the challenge of transcendence and integration. Indeed, it seems impossible to achieve the former without the latter. Fortunately, most emigrating European Jews experienced their transformation into American Jews as the full emancipation they had been denied. Thus the promise of American freedoms meant opportunities to be equal citizens. Jews have held on to the language of immigration because this language of choice, of choosing America, encoded the basis of Jewish acceptance and integration. Viewing the United States as a nation of immigrants reaffirmed the legitimacy of Jewish participation. From that position, American Jews have sought a basis for unity with Jews around the world as well as with their next-door neighbors.

Recently an interviewer asked me if I felt more American or more Jewish. I was surprised at the persistence of the question, as if elements of identity had to be ranked hierarchically. In 21st-century America, as in Israel, one would think that we had transcended the either-or mentality — American vs. Jew, Israeli vs. Jew; that we could incorporate a non-exclusive understanding of self and peoplehood that inspired both transcendence and integration. Perhaps we need to adopt Kaplan’s suggestion that we jettison the concept of chosenness. Let us remember the model of choosing freedom implicit in the immigrant imagination, with its multiple identities woven into individual personalities. We would then find even more points of connection — of pluralism within oneness — with today’s Americans as well as with Jews around the world.