by Larry Kaufman

I was in college during the heyday of David Reisman, whose seminal The Lonely Crowd taught my generation to classify ourselves as other-directed or inner-directed. I can still hear my room-mates scolding me, "The trouble with you is you're not other-directed and you're not inner-directed - you're tradition-directed." 

One of the lasting values of a University of Chicago education is that you learn to speak authoritatively about books you haven't read, which properly describes my relationship with The Lonely Crowd. And thus empowered, I'll define other-directed as responsive to peer pressure, inner-directed as a higher form of life, with overtones of rebelliousness, and tradition-directed (so far as I know, my room-mates' coinage, not Reisman's) as self-explanatory. 

Sixty years later, I'm still taking my room-mates' slur as a compliment, and one tradition I admire is for the young to be rebellious, iconoclastic, and unwilling to accept on faith the teachings of The Man. That's why I resonated to 26-year-old Isaac Luria's article in The Forward, Luria chides the Old Guard for its reservations about the Obama approach to peace in the Middle East - and reminds us all that his generation is not looking for seats at the old table, but is creating its own tables outside the established institutions - indy minyans being a prominent example. 

Luria is on the staff of JStreet, which describes itself as the political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement, and which others have described as the un-AIPAC. (His boss, Jeremy Ben-Ami, was among the attendees along with Rabbi Eric Yoffie at the recent White House meeting with Jewish leaders.)  I think Luria would approve of Rabbi Yoffie's statement of support for the President's position, even as he puts the Union and its peers on notice that a new generation is on the march. 

I was a stander-by some fifty years ago when a group of young rebels mounted a very public rebellion against the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago - and I watched over the years as several of the rebels rose to the Federation presidency, and the leader of the rebellion, the late Robert M. Schrayer, became a pillar of the international Jewish Establishment.

As a tradition-directed A.K., someone who has seen it all, I predict, not that these anti-establishment rebels will "sell-out," but that they will take over.  Their flame of Yiddishkeit burns brightly, albeit in a different style of menorah, and we should welcome their new light. 

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