In Quest of a New Sinai

...Fein's reflections on the twin pillars of contemporary Jewish awareness, the Holocaust and the State of Israel, are especially penetrating...

...I, for one, happen to share most, if not all, of the author's substantive political views...

...And the particularism inherent in Zionism creates special dilemmas for Jews living in a country that reinforces the universalistic tendency in their heritage...

...It represents family, victory, virtue...

...what he forgets is that—as we have been taught in our time by theologians like Abraham Isaac Kook and writers such as Athol Fugard and Milan Kundera—the deepest political truths are to be discovered not in political activitybutinthe hearts of men and women...

...He is right to emphasize the unique perspectives Judaism brings to politics and the centrality of social action in its understanding of human completeness...

...Fein presents his argument with considerable literary grace, but it is vitiated by political self-righteousness and the poverty of its religious vision...

...The ambiguity arising from this compromise is especially acute in the case of Judaism...

...Fein has, in effect, written two very different books and bound them together...

...It is in getting specific about the restorative task that Fein goes astray...

...What, then, is the self-understanding, what are the values, by which American Jewry may grow into the future...

...For us," Fein says, "Israelis first a faith and only then a place...

...I thought of John Donne's exclamation: "O my America, my new found land...

...Sinai, whether or not it happened, and whether or not we can cope with it, is the most important thing that ever happened to us...

...it ought to be required reading for every American Jew...

...By what right does he assume he has the inner logic of Jewish history on his side when he attacks neoconservatives and champions policies such as affirmative action...

...Auschwitz, he says, speaks to two basic elements of Judaism—a history of persecution and a profound sensitivity to human suffering...

...This is a much needed contribution to Jewish thought and letters...

...And my commitments as a Jew—moral, spiritual and otherwise— are quite germane to how I formulate those opinions...

...Leonard Fein confronts that silence...

...From Jewish history he deduces a calculus of worldly aims without a whiff of the eternal...

...Fein begins his answer with the observation that "as an empowered community" it has the opportunity "to define itself as a partnership in tikkun olam [a venerable liturgical phrase that roughly translates as "mending and restoring the world...

...Well-intentioned as that statement might be, it borders on the idolatrous...

...On the contrary, they cannot sustain an identity as hewers of wood and drawers of water for a far-away state, notwithstanding the depth of their sentimental attachment to it...

...If Auschwitz is the locus of Jewish vulnerability and hurt, Israel is the seat of confidence and imagination...

...Asaresult, although Jewish interests in this country are more secure than ever before (as Charles Silberman demonstrated with much fanfare a few years ago in A Certain People), the values that ought to be served by those interests have attracted little scrutiny...

...Indeed, as Fein perceptively notes, it was the crisis that faith underwent in the 1960s and early 1970s which spurred American Jews to reach for new sources of meaning...

...Reviewed by Yehudah Mirsky Writer, political consultant Several years ago I overheard a snatch of conversation on a picket line...

...So the existence of Israel hardly obviates the need for American Jews to arrive at values of their own rooted in a mature self-understanding...

...There has been an eerie silence at the heart of Jewish life...

...In the first, roughly comprising Part I, he frames the most urgent questions now facing American Jewry with the same lucidity, eloquence and passion he injected into the pages of Moment, the magazine of Jewish affairs he edited for over a decade...

...The second book, taking up most of Part II of Where Are We?, attempts to answer the questions previously posed...

...Politics," he says, "is our religion, liberalism is the preferred denomination...

...If Sinai is too remote or mysterious, look to Auschwitz," Fein writes...

...The Biblical prophets, it is true, took their politics very seriously...

...there is a quotation from the Hasidic Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav: "As your answers have become my questions, perhaps my questions may become your answers...

...We do not know what it means, nor do we truly need it to mean anything...

...Her companion replied: "Baptize her Methodist, baptize her Catholic, baptize her lots of things...

...Jewish ritual life and the great corpus of Jewish literary creations are absent from his vision of restoration...

...But I do not for a moment think that I have a monopoly on Jewish ethics, nor do I believe that politics alone is the key to Jewish survival —or to the restoration of the world, for that matter...

...In pushing the social and political dimension of Jewish experience to the foreground, he neglects—even violates— much of the fabric and spirit of Judaism as lived through the ages...

...It is one of the great ironies of American history that so many religions have flourished here precisely because they have dispensed with their thunderbolts and shed much of the numinous and categorical power with which they originally established themselves in the hearts of their adherents...

...Leonard Fein has pointedly asked the right questions, and for that we should all be grateful...

...At the beginning of Where Are We...

...Running through his entire discussion is the theme that if American Jews are to lead authentic lives, they must learn to take themselves seriously, both as Americans and as Jews...

...We Uve with a consciousness of time, with the awareness that we are neither the first nor the last,' he says...

...It is enough that it makes us feel...

...it puts us in touch with awe, with evil, with the absolute...

...Earlier in his book Fein himself argues movingly that there is no single definitive interpretation of Judaism...

...After the extraordinary promiseof Fein's questions, the answers are a genuine disappointment...

...It is, perhaps perversely, more accessible to a disenchanted modern consciousness than are other religious moments...

...In America, in our time, such a path can serve as our pre-eminent motive, the path through which our past is vindicated, our present warranted, our future affirmed...

...Orthodox Jews are something of an exception, yet they too live in response to modernity, albeit in a contrary fashion...

...In Where Are We...

...The private places, the intimate spaces where men and women, as individuals and as members of a community, wrestle with fate, with conscience and with God—these have no role in Fein's analysis...

...at the same time, they are far removed from the norms of belief and behavior that have traditionally structured Jewish life...

...Yet if Israel is made the sole repository of Jewish hope, he cautions (echoing Jacob Katz, Gershom Scholem and other students of Zionism), alienation is bound to set in when the reality falls short of the dream—be it the dream of the Left or the Right...

...But Auschwitz, in and of itself, cannot be the basis for a community: Concentration camps make victims, not values...

...Regrettably, it amounts to little more than a rehash of some of the stalest clichés about American Jewish life—in particular, the notion that Jewishness, properly understood, is nearly identical to a certain strain of political liberalism...

...But I want my daughter baptizedMethodist," a woman said...

...The difficulty with Fein's position runs deeper than mere partisanship...

...It remains to all those who care about the future of American Jewry to grapple with them, and to enter into a dialogue with his answers...

...we, however, are not vouchsafed the certainty of prophecy...

...As Americans, Jews have played a major role in the articulation of pluralism and in the pursuit of social and political ideals, but they have been animated by the mixture of myth, social structure and ideology that constitutes the American faith...

...The American Jewish experience is radically at odds with nearly all previous Jewish history in two major respects: Jews in the United States today enjoy a freedom of choice and degree of social acceptance heretofore unimaginable...

...How, then, can he contend that one political stance bears within it the seeds of the Jewish future, to the exclusion of all others...

...Furthermore, declares Fein, "Auschwitz is not the most important or even the most interesting thing that ever happened to us...

...In his view, its content is identical in nearly every respect to the program of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party...