A Certain People/Israel in America

...THERE is widespread agreement that the survival of the Jewish people over two millennia requires a bit of explanation Jews themselves are not so much impressed by survival in the past as they are worried whether they can continue pulling off this trick in the future It was one thing surviving in an environment generally not friendly to Jews But can this be repeated in an almost totally accepting Amenca where absorption into the mainstream culture is available to the Jew for the asking9 From the Israeli vantage point, indefinite survival of the diaspora under conditions of flourishing religious and cultural creativity would raise senous questions about some basic Zionist assumptions Isn't a full Jewish life possible only in Israel7 Battered by intermarriage and assimilation, isn't the diaspora doomed to extinction'' Both of the books under discussion answer this question, particularly with respect to the American Jewish community, with a resounding no Silberman's study is the result of years of research on a scale not familiar to the American Jewish community His earlier books, Crisis in the Classroom, Crisis in k CERTAIN PEOPLE AMERICAN JEWS AND THEIR LIVES TODAY Charles E. SUbernun Summit, $19.95,458 pp...

...Jacob Neasner Beacon, $14.95, 203 pp...

...Michael Wyschogrod Black and White, and Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice, dealt with major problems afflicting the American body politic In those books, Silberman surveyed the social science literature on the subject, added a good dose of investigative journalism, and came up with wellinformed discussions of the problems in question His success was a function of the mesh between his technique and the problems he tackled The social sciences and investigative journalism deal well with social problems But religion is only partly a social phenomenon Everywhere he looks, Silberman finds good news for Jews Anti-Semitism is no longer a significant factor in Amencan life Nevertheless, Silberman concedes Given the long history of antiSemitism, as well as Jews' continued expenence of it on the personal level, it would be feckless to argue that "it can't happen here " The relevant question, however, is not can it but will it happen here, and the answer to,that is a resounding no, bailing changes so massive that Amencan democracy itself is threatened This is almost tautologous Certainly, massive persecution of Jews cannot happen as long as American democracy is healthy But what danger is there that Amencan democracy can be threatened...

...ISRAEL III AMERICA A TOO-COMFORTABLE EXILE...

...Silberman reports that Jews have made it big in the universities, the professions, and even in the biggest corporations (a whole chapter is devoted to celebrating the elevation in 1973 of Irving S Shapiro to chairman and chief executive officer of E I du Pont de Nemours and Co , "that bluest of blue chip corporations") Predictions of a significant shnnkage of the Jewish population in the U S due to a 15 November 1985 649 markedly low birth rate are also wrong It seems unlikely that intermarriage will lead to more than a slight reduction in the number of Jews, and it could very well bring about an increase Is everything just fine, then9 "Except for those who live in [Brooklyn's] Boro Park and its counterparts elsewhere," writes Silberman, "relatively few American Jews still believe in a God who makes demands on them, even fewer regard those demands as binding '' A simple, believing Jew might consider such a state of affairs a catastrophe, however well Jews were doing in other respects But Silberman finds no cause for alarm "In the traditional view," he writes, contrasting it with the teaching of Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism Judaism is primary the Jewish people exists — indeed, was called into being — to serve its religion — to carry out God's will In what he called a "Copernican revolution in his understanding of Judaism ' Kaplan argued that, in reality, the relationship ran the other way To Kaplan, peoplehood was primary, since Judaism Was the creation — the religious civilization — of the Jewish people and not the Jewish people for the Jewish religion Though Silberman refers to this view as "Mordecai Kaplan's once controversial notion of the centrahty of Jewish peoplehood," it remains as controversial as ever Many Jews, and not only Orthodox Jews, continue to believe that a Judaism without "a God who makes demands on them" is playing Hamlet without the pnnce If it is the Jewish people who created God, then it is also the same Jewish people who created the golden calf Being created by the Jewish people is precisely the circumstance that made the golden calf not worthy of worship, whereas the God of Israel is worthy of worship precisely because he was not created by the Jewish people Silberman's book has ment as long as it stays on the descriptive, sociological level, though even here its unshakable optimism is not fully justified It is to be regretted that the mass of empirical material in it (including some very good Jewish jokes) is not accompanied by a sounder theology Neusner's book consists of essays the author published in various journals during the last fifteen years Like Silberman, Neusner insists that "a valid Jewish way of life, an authentic and enduring Judaic religious expression" can and does exist in the U S Nevertheless, he understands the religious centrahty of Israel as a people set apart "While Jews do not confuse the decisions of the Israeli parliament," he writes, "with the will of God, nearly all understand the state to be something like that 'diminished sanctity' of which Ezekiel spoke in the aftermath of the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B C None perceives the state as merely of this world, convenient for relocating the remnants of European Jewry and the Jewish refugees from Arab states " Neusner thus demonstrates that a vigorous defense of the religious viability of American Judaism can be combined with a deep appreciation of the religious role of the state of Israel Commonweal 650...