Rating: 
Summary: Redundant, pointless, old news
Review: Nineteen-ninety-one was an unusually bad year for American Jewry. It began with Saddam Hussein's bombing of Tel Aviv, aggravated by the occasional "No Blood for Israel" banner at antiwar rallies; in August, Crown Heights erupted in black-Jewish violence; a couple of weeks later, George Bush pleaded that he was just "one lonely little guy" fighting lobbyists for Israeli loan guarantees; in November, David Duke nearly won a Louisiana election. Alan Dershowitz's "Chutzpah" was just what Jews needed. It was an unapologetic call to arms, urging American Jews to be proud and assertive, to strike out firmly against anti-Semites and anti-Zionists. A few months after the book's summer 1991 publication, I spoke with Dershowitz. "I'm delighted," he said, "to be known more for my Jewish activism than for my defense of Claus von Bülow."But for the last seven years, we've seen Dershowitz in a different context than Defender of the Jews. As a hired-gun appelate lawyer, he's moved on to clients every bit as upstanding as von Bülow: Mike Tyson, Leona Helmsley, O.J. Simpson. So the context for his new book, "The Vanishing American Jew," is quite different: Things aren't so bleak for American Jews in 1998, and Dershowitz is hardly Mr. Credibility. But frankly, if this volume were found chiseled into stone tablets on Mount Sinai, it would resonate little more. It's bloated, wildly unfocused and digressive, a repetitious jumble of ramblings that only infrequently tie into Dershowitz's thesis. The thesis itself-that, for Jewishness to survive without institutional enemies, the next generation needs a *positive* reason to stay Jewish-is hardly earthshaking, having been developed thoroughly in recent years by authors ranging from Los Angeles rabbi Michael Goldberg ("Why Should Jews Survive?") to the redoubtable Michael Lerner ("Jewish Renewal"). Like others, Dershowitz warns of "assimilation, intermarriage, and low birthrates" and locates a bright Jewish future in "the considerable, but largely untapped, strengths of ! our own heritage." But you'd be hard-pressed to locate that simple central point in much of "The Vanishing American Jew"-it's often buried under paragraphs and pages that will frustrate any reader picking up the book based on a misguided trust of the author. Since Dershowitz's editors clearly went too easy on his book, it falls to us to trim it from 370-plus pages to a more appropriate length. First, some stylistic problems. To begin with, a good 35 pages are wasted on jokes cribbed from a variety of sources. You never have to wait many paragraphs before encountering, "It is also illustrated by the old joke that asks... I was recently told the following story about... I am reminded of the joke about... I end this chapter with a vignette that illustrates..." The jokes themselves (augmented by historical anecdotes and apocryphal stories) aren't bad, just trite, and nearly always irrelevant. Perhaps 10 pages are given over to self-aggrandizing "I was having lunch with" anecdotes about encounters and debates with U.S. and Israeli leaders. Those can go too. Self-evident, pointless rhetorical filler takes up 15 or so pages. "I am not prepared...to concede the end of the non-Orthodox American Jewish community, though I recognize the uphill battle we face," he writes. Worse than pure filler are the empirically absurd overstatements that will make any reader stop dead in midpage: "Assimilation these days is so cost-free and easy that any Jew who does not want to belong to the Jewish people can resign with less hassle than it takes to get out of the Book-of-the-Month Club." And how about this: "[N]o group in America is less knowledgeable about its traditions, less literate in its language, less familiar with its own library than the Jews." Call it 10 pages. Out come all the egregious slaps at "foolish fundamentalists who find the answers to all of today's problems in the literal words of yesterday's texts." Figuring they won't be reading this book, Dershowitz goes so far as to call ultra-religious Jews "un-Jewish." At lea! st 10 pages. Taking out all the contradictory statements will knock out 15 pages or so. "While insisting that "We are supposed to be a light unto the world," 100 pages later-in an effort to not offend hard-hearted neoconservatives-he charges that Jews who claim that *tikkun olam* (to repair the world) is "the essence of Judaism" are "as wrong as those who claim that the essence of Judaism can be found in Newt Gingrich's Contract with America." Now here's where we can really cut things down: Maybe 110 pages cover material that simply has nothing whatsoever to do with Dershowitz's thesis. Though, early on, he repeatedly hammers home that anti-Semitism no longer poses a serious threat, he stuffs the book's middle with dozens of impassioned pages on Holocaust denial, black anti-Semitism, Islamic fundamentalism and the Christian right. Not only has this all been covered thoroughly elsewhere, but Dershowitz doesn't even try to connect most of it to his goal of rescuing the Jewish people. And the detours don't end with his discussions of anti-Semitism. There's a discussion of "Is Judaism Messianic?" and a paean to the subject of argument. Don't miss his head-scratching endnote (unconnected, in my copy of the book, to any in-text reference) on the topic of college-campus date rape. We're down to about 135 pages, not counting the heavily annotated endnotes, and we are entirely justified cutting this remainder by two-thirds, since Dershowitz repeats each of his points several times. So the book ends up the length of a sizable article. But I'll save you the trouble of reading *any* of it. Nearly 300 pages in, Dershowitz hits us with his solution, the salvation of American Jewry. Are you sitting down? Here it is: better Jewish day schools. Though he follows this blockbuster pronouncement with pleas for Judaism to become more open, for acceptance of intermarried couples and "doubting Jews," and for Jewish educators to become leaders, that's basically it. Dershowitz also recommends that Jews read Joseph Telushkin's ! wonderful "Jewish Literacy." I second that suggestion-and add one of my own: Buy the Telushkin volume with the money you'll save by *not* buying "The Vanishing American Jew.
Rating: 
Summary: asked the right questions, but has the wrong answers
Review: The author, accurate in his identification of the problems of Jewish assimilation, none the less cannot come to an answer that will in fact keep the Jews from vanishing. Secular Judaism, cultural Judaism, and any other form that does not require adherance to halacha and Torah values, cannot survive. The book sounded like a justification for the fact that Dershowitz, coming from an Orthodox background, had a son that married out of faith. I am sure that this fact alone, how it happened and how it could have been prevented, had a substantial influence on his writing. Though I share his pain and his concern for future generations, his solutions, other than Jewish education, are not sufficient. Education will hopefully attract the disenfranchised and other non Orthodox Jews to finding their roots and returning to basic Jewish law. That will keep the Jewish nation from vanishing.
Rating:
Summary: asked the right questions, but has the wrong answers
Review: The author, accurate in his identification of the problems of Jewish assimilation, none the less cannot come to an answer that will in fact keep the Jews from vanishing. Secular Judaism, cultural Judaism, and any other form that does not require adherance to halacha and Torah values, cannot survive. The book sounded like a justification for the fact that Dershowitz, coming from an Orthodox background, had a son that married out of faith. I am sure that this fact alone, how it happened and how it could have been prevented, had a substantial influence on his writing. Though I share his pain and his concern for future generations, his solutions, other than Jewish education, are not sufficient. Education will hopefully attract the disenfranchised and other non Orthodox Jews to finding their roots and returning to basic Jewish law. That will keep the Jewish nation from vanishing.
Rating: 
Summary: A reasonable attempt
Review: This book is a reasonable and sincere attempt to deal with a difficult problem -- how to preserve Jewish culture in an era when the pace of Jews' assimilation into their home societies is accelerating. Among its better points, it tries to grapple with defining the essence of what it is to be Jewish, especially if one is to be inclusive of secular and agnostic Jews such as Prof. Dershowitz himself. He shows that Judaism includes many principles and practices, but that many of these are either shared with other groups, or not practiced by some people who nonetheless consider themselves Jewish. So it's hard to say that the content of any of these principles or practices is the distinguishing content of Judaism. His discussion of this is very illuminating, I think. Ultimately, he comes up with the distinction that the common essence of Judaism is procedural rather than substantive -- it is a *way* of dealing with changes and differing opinions, rather than a specific set of principles or doctrines (content). The distinction he attempts to draw is one familiar to lawyers, but perhaps less so to others, and might be a bit of a let-down to many. Prof. Dershowitz also defends the principle that being Jewish should be a matter of self-identification. Along the way he points out the contradictions between, on the one hand, the ultra-Orthodox view that religious law has been fixed since the time of Moses, and, on the other, their position that a child's religion follows his or her mother's (opposite of what is set forth in the Old Testament). It isn't clear, however, whether his liberality would also apply to someone who neither had a Jewish parent nor went through a conversion procedure -- maybe someone should ask him. It probably will be difficult for any reader, Jewish or not, to identify with all the issues he tries to deal with along the way to reaching this result. For example, I personally found his discussion of religious ceremonies for agnostics and atheists a bit mind-boggling. But while I don't fall into either of those categories, there are many people who do and who also consider themselves Jewish. For this reason, I understand why he'd discuss this and similar topics. There are a couple of pertinent things he doesn't mention, especially when it comes to intermarriage. (I speak from the POV of a committed Jew married to a non-Jewish woman.) One is that many modern Jews are turned off by the exclusionary language that is found in many Jewish religious texts (written, for the most part, thousands of years ago or under circumstances of violent persecution by non-Jews). If you find it hard to believe that the Jewish G-d or supreme power is really different from that of a sincere Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, etc., it's harder to swallow the absolute necessity of marrying a Jewish person, especially when Jews make up less than 3% of the US population and less than 0.2% of the world's. He also doesn't mention that it's possible to convert children to Judaism without necessitating the conversion of a non-Jewish parent. Sometimes the non-Jewish parent doesn't have the personal conviction to warrant a sincere conversion, but nonetheless strongly supports the idea that children should have an unequivocal identity as Jewish. (Maybe this is easier to do when that parent has a strong ethnic but weaker religious identity, as is common with many people from Japan, China and some other East Asian countries. Negotiating Jewish and Japanese identities within a family, for example, might be easier than negotiating simultaneous Jewish and Christian ones. Of course, there are some committed religionists in East Asia too.) I've got to agree with the reviewers who mention Prof. Dershowitz's frequent self-aggrandizing comments as one of the truly irritating features of the book. From having heard him speak almost 30 years ago, I'd guess this is one of his more enduring traits (not that other trial lawyers are significantly more modest). His use of jokes bothered me less, though they mostly come from one source (Jewish Humor, by Joseph Telushkin, which relates many of them in an overly abbreviated, and therefore flat, manner). So if you know that book you'll have heard 'em all before. But I disagree with reviewers who suggest that Prof. Dershowitz is racist or feels Jews are better than other people. I think that's a misinterpretation, though his self-aggrandizement doesn't help get his sincerity across. He's candid about his divided feelings about his son's intermarriage, but I think he recognizes that it's possible for a human being to have inconsistent or contradictory feelings inside themselves. I might not agree with him on every point, but think it's to his credit that he deals with the intermarriage issue from the standpoint of publicly examining his own personal ambivalence, rather than adopting some doctrinaire point of view (which he makes fun of later in the book). For the most part, he's grappling with a very legitimate issue: As a tiny minority who find themselves in an open, hospitable home culture, there's a strong attraction for Jews to thoroughly assimilate into that home culture. Over the course of a few generations, such assimilation makes it easy to lose the distinctive culture from their past. Prof. Dershowitz feels that there's a lot of merit in the Jewish cultural heritage, at the same time that he's an enthusiastic supporter of the open society that creates this dilemma. My impression is that he'd like for Jews to participate fully in that society while also retaining something particularly Jewish. I think that most ethnic groups in the US face similar issues about integration vs. identity, though there are some unique aspects that complicate Jews' attempts to accomplish this goal, just as other ethnicities have their own unique circumstances to deal with. In the case of Jews these issues include (i) blending of culture with a religious heritage that's different from US majority, and (ii) relative lack of distinguishing physical or linguistic characteristics. I think his book is a sincere attempt to help a Jewish audience deal with this difficult conundrum.
Rating: 
Summary: Inspiring, goes to the heart of a crucial issue
Review: While I could write a great deal about this important, and (I hope) influential book, and I don't agree with all of Mr. Dershowitz's conclusions and proposed solutions, the most meaningful thing I can say about it is that it has energized ME, a 46-year old lifelong secular Jew, to try to fulfill my long-held dream to organize Fringe Jews (unaffiliated Jews, alienated Jews, fractional Jews, Gentiles related to Jews, etc.) so that we can all together find ways to feel connected, and to connect our children, to the Jewish world, without being made to feel bad about not being religious, and to have the Chutzpah (to borrow Dershowitz's theme from his earlier book) to assert our right to a place at the table of 21st Century Jewish culture and civilization, but also the sense of responsibility to get whatever version of Jewish literacy we believe we need, and to give it to our kids. Thank you, Mr. Dershowitz!
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