Jewish USA Heritage Month: Whadayaknow?

Since 2006, only one religious group in the U.S. has had a federally proclaimed month celebrating its history. That’s when President George W. Bush officially declared May as Jewish American Heritage Month (JAHM).

Yet JAHM has fallen under the radar.

“I’m very disappointed,” said Marcia Zerivitz, who was one of the driving forces behind lobbying Congress to establish the month.

JAHM’s current annual budget is about $10,000 and consists entirely of individual donations, according to Ivy Barsky, director of the National Museum of American Jewish History and a member of the JAHM advisory committee. Barsky hopes to change that. Her Philadelphia museum recently took over as JAHM’s public face and organizer.

“One of the original goals of Jewish American Heritage Month that we haven’t necessarily realized as well as we’d like is teaching the non-Jewish world in America about the contributions of American Jewry to this country,” Barsky said.

Educating the wider American public was the goal of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Sen. Arlen Specter, who in 2005 introduced legislation in Congress to establish the month.

“If you educated and raised awareness about contributions throughout American history all over the country, it would make people more familiar with the Jewish community and our people and hopefully impact a reduction of anti-Semitism and intolerance,” Wasserman Schultz told JTA.

 “It was exhilarating,” she said. “It was the first legislation that I passed as a member of Congress, and I’m the first Jewish woman to represent Florida in Congress, so it was very significant for me personally.”

At the time of the proclamation, “there was considerable excitement,” but JAHM has yet to live up to its potential, said Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. “So much money is spent on Jewish education in the United States that the fact that we have not been able to harness this golden opportunity given to us by the government, and really develop a month that would affect every American Jew, is a sign of the disorganization that we’ve seen — ultimately it’s a sign of a problem.”

In 2010, President Obama hosted the first Jewish American Heritage Month reception at the White House with such Jewish luminaries as Sandy Koufax and musician Regina Spektor, but the program was cut in 2013 due to the budget sequester. Also in 2010, Jewish-American astronaut Garret Reisman brought the original proclamation with him aboard the Atlantis space shuttle.

Jewish groups, however, have been hesitant to commit money to the commemoration.

“I would think that all these national [Jewish] organizations would get behind it, but everyone is struggling for funding,” said Zerivitz, who is on the JAHM board. “[The] Holocaust gets the emotions going in the American Jewish community, and Holocaust things are much easier to fund than American Jewish history things.”

Sarna is optimistic about JAHM’s future.

“This is a lot easier than making peace in the Middle East, believe me,” he said.