Where Are We?:

...It is easier not to have to wrestle with the dilemmas outlined in this book by attaching one's deepest loyalty to the whole human family rather than the family of Abraham...

...The key to the problem is Fein's determination to remain an active Jew...

...The problem is that fewer and fewer Leonard Feins are being produced by the American Jewish community...

...On the face of it, this should not be so...

...Since Jews started from a far more liberal base line, they are still more liberal than the population as a whole, though, in absolute terms, there has been some shift to the right...

...It is worth noting that Fein does not opt for the secular Jewishness to which many Israeli Jews are attracted...

...Fein does not really tell us why he insists on remaining a committed Jew but he tells us how he does it...

...The final rift this book explores is that between the well-established liberalism of American Jews and the perception that it is a liberalism on the wane...

...This is probably even more applicable in the case of a Jew as committed to the survival of the Jewish people as is Fein...

...Again and again, Jews have learned that they cannot assimilate, that they remain assimilated Jews, or agnostic Jews, or non-identified Jews, but Jews nevertheless...

...As everyone knows, the American Jewish story is one of the great American success stories, economically, socially, and politically...

...Fein points out "that Jews consistently and persistently misapprehend the perceptions and overstate the bigotry of others...

...After the Holocaust, it is difficult to be realistic about how Jews are perceived...

...But I do not think this is Fein's agenda...

...How and why does a nonbeliev-ing Jew remain a Jew and as deeply committed to the survival of the Jewish people and-in a sense-of Judaism as his believing brethren...

...One comes away with the impression that the unbelief resides at a relatively superficial level of the personality while the "as-if" Judaism goes very deep...

...In fact, only 20 percent did...

...But there is a deeper rift than this...

...So he struggles with these unpalatable legacies of the Jewish past, swallowing them in part, reinterpreting the rest and, in the process, being left less than totally happy...

...Fein is a liberal American agnostic who is determined to remain a Jew...

...Those who wish to retain their Jewish identity must therefore formulate a largely religious self-definition, even if the religious language used masks an essentially secular orientation...

...He is beset by a number of inner rifts which make it difficult to enjoy fully the blessings of the Golden Land...

...His life would be easier without these burdens but he knows that were he to shed them he would be reading himself out of Jewish destiny...

...In America it is possible to assimilate or, even without full-scale assimilation, to have so little interest in Jews and Judaism that full-scale assimilation cannot be far behind...

...It can be denied, of course, that it is a choice...

...Everything else follows from this basic choice and one wonders why he makes it...

...And in America it is really possible to exchange the smaller family for the larger one.ily for the larger one...

...This is probably even more applicable to "as-if" Judaism...

...It is our collective secret, of which we never speak nor even whisper-perhaps not even to survey researchers...

...Karl Barth used to argue that unbelief should never be taken at face value...

...But Fein's interest in things Jewish is unlimited and that is something of a mystery...

...We believe," writes Fein, "that God is central to Judaism, and we call ourselves Jews, but we are without God...

...He is aware of the "as-ifness" of his choice, but he is not impeded by this awareness...

...It is as if we have decided that some secrets are too disturbing to utter, as if we have agreed to live our lives as Jews in the presence of a cosmic wink...

...Fein does not argue that this "as-if' Judaism is superior to the traditional brand...

...He does it by freely choosing-to associate himself with the myth of revelation at Sinai...

...The rabbis of the Talmud taught that the commandments ought to be fulfilled without any ulterior motives, but it is better to fulfill them out of ulterior motives than not to fulfill them at all, because if a person starts by obeying the commandments out of ulterior motives, in time he will come to obey them without any ulterior motives...

...If one pretends long enough, the pretense might become a reality...

...Faith, as he understands it, "is belief in the actuality, the factness of a thing or event...

...As Milton Himmelfarb has pointed out, Jews still earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans...

...Faithfulness, on the other hand, "is concerned not with the thing's actuality, but with my actualization of it...

...Fein's book probes those rifts...

...And yet, the American Jew who emerges from the pages of Leonard Fein's study is not at ease...

...Above all, serious anti-Semitism in this country has been on the decline for decades now, though it is by no means non-existent...

...Were he formulating the Jew-ishness of a small minority of alienated Jewish intellectuals, one could argue with him on various levels...

...He argues that it is so pervasive that it must be taken seriously...

...The better things are for American Jews, the more painful the question: Why did the Jews of Europe deserve to be eliminated while we thrive...

...American Jews live in an environment in which being Jewish is understood primarily in religious terms...

...Fein's deepest struggle is with this dilemma...

...Michael Wysehogrod The old Yiddish saying, "It is difficult to be a Jew," has rarely been false and, curiously enough, it is not even false when applied to the current condition of American Jewry...

...Psychologically, this can be answered by maintaining that things are not as good here as they seem...

...This startling disjunction is a fracture of compound consequence, one that we seek to ignore but that necessarily haunts us...

...An example: Fifty-three percent of the Jews questioned in a 1982 Daniel Yankelovitch poll thought that a majority of non-Jews agreed with the statement "Jews have too much power in the United States...

...First, there is the Holocaust...

...If this is the way it is, if there is no escape anyway, one might as well make a virtue of necessity and choose to remain a Jew...

...The strength of Fein's position is its popularity...

...To do so, he must come to terms with two realities with which he is not particularly comfortable: God and some degree of Zionist nationalism...

...Fein does not have faith, but he chooses to engage in faithfulness...

...Fein argues that American Jews are, proportionately, as liberal as they have ever been and the shift away from liberalism is not greater than the general shift in the population...

...ButFein has tapped into a kind of mainstream American Judaism or Jewishness...