The VANISHING AMERICAN JEW : IN SEARCH OF JEWISH IDENTITY FOR THE NEXT CENTURY

Rating:
Summary: Well written, enjoyable and on the mark
Review: A well-written easy-to-read book that right on the mark as it tackles one of the most difficult problems in contemporary judaism. As with all of Dershowitz' books, this one is filled with humor, meticulously researched and contains compelling arguments in support of his view that organized judaism is failing to provide the proper educational foundation to ensure the continuation of reform and conservative judaism in the USA.

Even if you, like me, do not share Mr. Dershowitz' orthodox background or left-wing politics, don't let that deter you from reading this excellent book.

Rating:
Summary: Dershowitz sounds like the flip side of David Duke sometimes
Review: Aren't we all just a little sick and tired of listening to so-called leaders of various segments of society demanding that everyone remain identity-conscious and refrain from being plain old individuals? Dershowitz is promoting collectivism in a nation founded upon rugged individualism.

Besides, if hallmarks of Jewishness ought to be retained (valuing education and success), then why not promote these values as things all Americans should strive for?

There is nothing unique about being a Jew that others cannot emulate. Nothing. Just cultural values, and those are accessible to all.

Good news, Alan! Lots of non-Jews in America care about education and treating minorities with respect. America is going totally Jewish anyways! You're not vanishing. You are watching your best values become mainstream, and that is why so many Jews feel no need to feel uniquely Jewish in a nation where some very cool Jewish "memes" (to borrow from Dawkins) are propagating themselves in the minds of the mainstream.

Now everyone wants their kid to go to Harvard.

Have a bagel and relax, Alan.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting
Review: Dershowitz conveys a genuine worry that Jewish people will lose their identity in the years to come. He is concerned about Jewishness getting lost in the struggle and furiousness of America. He says time and again in the book that the Jewish people need something to fight against to be great. He did not totally convince me of this. I think there are great Jewish doctors, professors, businessmen and women. Intellectual and business prowess. Isn't that something to be proud of?

I also wish that Dershowitz would have included more examples, perhaps little vignettes of various Jewish people and how they struggle in the world, or perhaps how they try to retain their identity in a fast-paced, sometimes fickle world. This would have been a good direction to take.

On the whole a very interesting topic for a book. Thank you for writing the book Dr. Dershowitz.

Rating:
Summary: Dershowitz sounds like the flip side of David Duke sometimes
Review: Dershowitz's work is vital and important for all American Jews. In my own lifetime, I have witnessed the development of a demographic crisis within our community. Indeed, the situation is no better than when Prof. Dershowitz published these prophetic words.

At the present time, it is possible to appreciate the factors which have contributed to the vanishing of American Jews. Dershowitz fails to emphasize the role of the single-minded pursuit of laurels and professional advancement in creating our current situation. So much has been sacrificed to achieving the goals of wealth, fame, and influence. Within my own family I have observed how the avid use of birth control as a means to enabling professional success has diminished our numbers. Moreover, Judaism is not a proselytizing religion. Our traditions are perpetuated only to the extent that we are able to reproduce. The widely-held perception (not unjustifiably) of the Jews as being greedy, dishonest, and obnoxious has not helped to recruit converts to our numbers. It is no small irony that Prof. Dershowitz writes these words from his perch at Harvard University, whose Jewish population better exemplifies these stereotypes than any I have encountered, particularly with their espousal of liberal causes and their competitive zeal.

We do well, then, to question what the long-term outlook is for secular Jews in America. My own sense is that the height of our influence over American culture is at its apex. The inexorable decline that will follow in the coming decades will be welcomed by many, particularly those who rightly perceive the Jews as the prime motivators of the legal and cultural assault on traditional Christian values (of which there is no better example than Prof. Dershowitz himself). The essay by E. Michael Jones on "The Apology in Context" is a superb explication of this view.

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!