WHO COUNTS? BY ROBERT BRYM THE PRESENT AND FUTURE OF JEWISH CANADA
ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARÍA HERGUETA
EPICURUS was a third century BCE Greek religious skeptic. He taught that the good life is characterized by happiness, tranquility, and freedom from suffering, most of which is caused by the irrational fear of divine retribution and punishment after death. Taking a dim view of the Hellenization of some of their coreligion- ists, devout Jews of the era developed an eponymous term to refer to any Jew who deviated from strict reli- gious observance: epikoros (Hebrew) or afker (Arama- ic), later rendered as apikoyres in Yiddish.
The persistence of this denigrating term testifies to the fact that, for millennia, some Jews have widely re- garded religious defection as a threat to Jewish continu- ity. That’s why a 1964 cover story in Look , a then-pop- ular weekly magazine, caused such a furor. It was ti- tled “The Vanishing American Jew.” Its author, Thom- as B. Morgan, claimed there would be hardly any Jews left in the US by the year 2000, due largely to inter- marriage. Look ceased publication in 1971. Morgan passed away in 2014. In contrast, American Jews now
SPRING 36 2025
Made with FlippingBook Digital Proposal Creator