Teachers love gimmicks.

Even in the ethereal groves of Academe we professors cultivate a little shtick. How else to grab the attention of students nodding off into mid-afternoon dreamland in an over-stuffed classroom at an under-funded University? You look out at 100 pairs of droopy eyelids and, suddenly you’re trying to bring the house down like Lenny Bruce at the Village Gate. But you can’t use naughty words, and you have to tell the truth!

One year, I went so far as to smash an earthenware plate. Not in frustration, but with pedagogy in mind. My task in that lecture was to prepare students to grasp the complexity of modern Jewish culture. How did the more or less monolithic Judaism of the Middle Ages morph into Jewish Modernity? This confusing thicket of secular and religious Jews, religious Jews who disagree with other religious Jews and secular Jews who disagree with other secular Jews, each convinced that they alone represent the real essence of the Jewish soul!

So I took the plate, held it up and said: “See this plate? This is Judaism in 1789.” I hurled it to the ground like Moses dashing the first set of stone tablets, shattering the thing into dozens of pieces skittering around the floor. “And this,” I explained, “is Judaism today!” For that afternoon I had my class’s attention.

Today, over two centuries after the ideals of “Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood” first compelled France to hold its collective nose and invite its resident Jews into civil society, Judaism has still to recover from what tolerant, high-minded Europeans called Emancipation. The Jewish world—to steal a metaphor from the great Kabbalist, Rabbi Yitzhak Luria—still suffers from the aftershock of Emancipation’s shattering of its cultural vessels. And, to continue this Kabbalistic metaphor in the language of nursery rhyme, all the King’s horses and all the King’s men have yet to put the Humpty Dumpty of Jewish culture together again.

One of the great experiments in restoring pre-modern Jewish culture in a modern idiom was the effort, on many fronts and contexts, to create a secular foundation for Jewish cultural life. Not to belittle the equally-impassioned attempts to restructure Judaism as a modern European religion, including much of what today calls itself Orthodox Judaism. But, as recently as 60 years ago, the movements unleashing enormously creative Jewish energies were aggressively secularist—and realistically could imagine themselves as embodying the Jewish future.

Recall the Jewish “Bund”’s unbounded belief that revolutionary proletarian Jews would join all humankind in creating a world free from oppression. Consider the diverse strands of Zionism that sought to create a modern Jewish identity on the basis of political rebirth. Reflect on the grand tradition of secular Yiddish literature represented by luminaries such as Mendele Moykher Sforim, Sholom Aleikhem, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Isaac Bavel and many others who sought to integrate Jewish historic experience into universal literary culture. All these movements of mind and heart, and others spawned by them, hoped to secure a Jewish presence in the world that Modernity would accept and respect.

Where are they now? The Bundists, nebikh, were ground into dust in the 1930s by the unreconstructed antisemitism of the Stalinist State. The Zionists created the State of Israel which, thankfully, is still the center of renewed Jewish national life. But, among its citizens today Zionism (tziyonut) is commonly used as a synonym for “pompous ideological posturing.” And what optimist could imagine today that the fundamental goal of Zionism, to rid the world of anti-semitism, has been achieved? Finally, the complex culture and varied readership that supported secular Yiddish literature in genres from the novel to scientific treatises was brutally destroyed by the Nazis. Today, the supply of Yiddish authors and readers is expanding only among the decidedly unsecular communities of the Hasidic and Lithuanian Yeshiva world. And they’re not polishing their Yiddish on Mendele’s golden phrases! Take a look around: contemporary Jewish culture is as fragmented and broken as it was 200 years ago, perhaps even more so; and no redemptive rebirth has emerged from the secular Jewish revolutions of the past two centuries.

“Hold on a minute!” you say. “Sure, the founding movements of secular Jewish culture have exhausted their power, but a new generation of secular Jews with its own distinctive Jewish voice has arisen!” Let’s grant the dubious assumption that we know what a “distinctive Jewish voice” is and that it is emerging in a secular Jewish idiom. What does that voice stand for? What are its healing teachings?

If we cast our gaze longingly toward Zion, we encounter first the articulate secular academic culture of Israel. There we find, at its cutting “post-Zionist” edge, a political ideology that deconstructs the very conception of “historic Jewish identity” and imagines an “Israeliness” disconnected from Jewry.

But, living in the States, let’s look to our own garden, planted by Baby Boomers and tended by Gen-Xers. Their Jewish sensibilities are shaped by increasingly hazy memories of the Eastern European folkways, filtered through the nostalgic Fiddler on the Roof fantasies, and seasoned by the mixture of glib cynicism and profound ignorance that constitutes the Jewish themes of American comedians from Lenny Bruce, to Woody Allen, to Adam Sandler. Instead of the home-spun sekhel of Meir Cohen or Sam Levinson, we are presented with the neurotic, Yiddish-inflected tirades of Jackie Mason. But he sure sounds Jewish!

So much for “popular American Jewish secular culture.” What about our political discourse and social outlook? Secular Jewish political discourse is now trapped between the rock of Leftist, touchy-feely spiritualism and the hard place of Commentary’s Tough Jews with Tenure Who Know How to Handle Arabs and Other Congenital Antisemites. If you weary of canned politics, try following secular Jewish discourse in the Forward—the only popular Jewish publication with a firm faith that there is a distinctively Jewish productivity in the visual, performing, and literary arts. What greets your eye? Sure, there are the usually excellent reviews of Jewish fiction and academic works on historical Jewish culture. But they are produced and read by perhaps 3% of the American Jewish community. Others are busy making bestsellers out of such titles as Neurotica (If He has a Headache, Why Should YOU Suffer?)

Yes, we find ourselves in a protracted cultural pickle. Perhaps, it’s time to say a kaddish for Jewish secularism. But do we replace it with the products brought to you by the user-friendly makers of various diluted Jewish life-style options? Not so fast! But that’s a topic for another moment.