More Derision than Revision

...All are handled in a pedestrian fashion, with few new insights to compensate for the failure to capture the drama of the various situations...

...Second, why the heat directed at the one group that would appear to come closest to meeting Hertzberg's criteria—the modern American Orthodox, who have created a network of schools and synagogues that do, in one way or another, provide an inner content to Jewish identity by stressing classical Jewish learning...

...This, Hertzberg bitingly remarks, explains why "Zionism without culture, a movement that had fundraising and the mounting of political pressure as its content, existed only in America...

...And Hertzberg wants to leave no doubt that these ancestors were, by and large, relatively ignorant of things Jewish...

...The poor and ignorant, with little to lose, hoped to strike it rich in the New World...

...His public condemnations of Israeli policies, while securing him a place in Leftwing intellectual circles, have relegated him to a marginal role in organized Jewish life...

...In the 1950s, we are told, "Jews built synagogues to swim together, to play mah-jongg, or to attend an almost endless variety of meetings...

...To deal with the second problem first, Hertzberg's strange hostility to Orthodoxy becomes understandable in the opening paragraphs of the book's acknowledgments page...

...The American Jewish community had decided...

...Jewish concern with anti-Semitism and participation in the larger struggle for social justice are similarly dismissed with a sneer: "American Jews were going to make their 'spiritual life' out of solving their problems or other people's problems...

...There he recalls that his father, "who was the leader of a Chasidic community in Baltimore," was the first to suggest to him that Jewish immigrants to America were the poorest element of European Jewry...

...He is also an accomplished academician...

...Not until the author reaches the late19th century does the personal polemic begin to show...

...The son's book, then, is an elaboration of the father's complaints about American Jews...

...The battle for strict separation of church and state, the insistence on public commemoration of the European Holocaust, the ongoing fight against an increasingly amorphous American anti-Semitism, do not seem potent enough to keep American Jewry going...

...On the other hand are those who perceive simply a changing, rather than an eroding, Jewish community...

...Arthur Hertzberg, taking a historical approach, is convinced the naysayers are right...

...The Jews in A merica was written by a very bitter man...

...A former president of the American Jewish Congress, he frequently does battle in the tangled thicket of American Jewish organizational leadership and has served on the boards of numerous Jewish policymaking bodies...

...Hertzberg dismisses all of the Orthodox by deriding the theological fundamentalism of the leader of a Chasidic sect, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who believes that the world was created less than 6,000 years ago...

...This is the time of the mass Jewish migration from Eastern Europe, the historical moment when the ancestors of the bulk of today's American Jews began to arrive on these shores...

...First, why the venom...

...He has, however, produced a mediocre book...

...After reviewing their often told story, it goes on to trace the attitudes of the Puritans towardtheJews...

...But having broken with his father's strict Orthodoxy, the son cannot take the argument to its logical conclusion—that, at the very minimum, survivalist Jews can learn a lot from the success of the American Orthodox...

...To cite only one example, Hertzberg has his alma mater, the Jewish Theological Seminary, moving to New York from Philadelphia in 1902, although it was actually located in New York from its inception in 1886...

...The overwhelming preoccupation in the New Land was to survive and to succeed, " he writes, "and Jewish learning was not a useful tool in these endeavors...

...Thus he cannot see the great outpouring of American Jewish support for Israel in 1967 for what it was: fear of yet another Holocaust...

...On the one hand are those who predict a steady erosion...

...Hertzberg has nothing but scorn for American Jewish identification with Israel, viewing it as another desperate strategy to find some content in the vague label of Je wishness...

...The book proceeds in this belittling vein, arguing that, in the absence of immersion in the Jewish scholarly tradition, the Jewishness of American Jews consisted mostly of ethnic memories of the intensive Old World Jewish life...

...that its inmost Jewish content was activism...

...He certainly has the credentials to write penetratingly about the Jews of the United States...

...Once Hertzberg gets into the postWorld War II period that coincides with the early stages of his own career in Jewish life, the cynical, sarcastic edge to his writing becomes still more pronounced...

...The suburban rabbi of the 1960s was expected to be neither a leader nor a scholar, but a mere "synagogue functionary...

...In addition, he has become widely known as a communal gadfly through outspoken Op Ed pieces on Israel and contemporary Jewish affairs in the New York Times and lengthier essays in the New York Review of Books...

...He must ridicule them instead, and the "fundamentalist" charge is a convenient way to do so...

...Two questions present themselves...

...The dust jacket of The Jews in America claims the author "has written a challenging revisionist history of the Jewish experience in America...

...Even American Zionism, which would seem to have marked a return to the wellsprings of Jewish culture in calling for a regenerated Jewish people in a national homeland, is not immune from Hertzberg's charge of insufficient authenticity, since Louis D. Brandeis, its leader, "felt no need to study Talmud or learn Hebrew as a prerequisite to Zionist leadership...

...The book starts at the beginning, with the arrival of the first boatload of Jews in New Amsterdam in 1654...

...while perhaps different from their forebears when measured by traditional standards, this argument runs, the "new Jews" have worked out new forms that are not necessarily less "Jewish" than the old...

...Hertzberg is one of the few American pulpit rabbis who has managed to escape confinement within the four walls of his synagogue...

...To Hertzberg, that crisis, culminating in the Six-Day War, "saved" American Jews "from having to think about issues of meaning and value" by supplying an outlet for their Jewish energies...

...For some among the intellectuals, Marxist socialism and/or Freudian psychoanalysis filled the vacuum created by the crumbling of Jewish spirituality...

...Following a long career on the faculty of Columbia University, he currently teaches at Dartmouth...

...The tone gradually shifts from that of the chronicler to that of the bitter critic, who ultimately declares in an angry prophecy that American Jews are doomed, unless—they find religion...

...Surveying the contemporary scene, Hertzberg warns that American Jews are running out of causes...

...The reader will then find treatments of familiar themes: Jews in Colonial America, Jews in the American Revolution, Jews and the new Republic, the immigration of large numbers of Jews from Central Europe and their economic success, the rise of Reform Judaism...

...Surely, scholars can—indeed, do—present a negative balance sheet for American Jewry in calm and measured words, something Hertzberg seems incapable of...

...Furthermore, Hertzberg notes that there was scant incentive for those who came to retain or reinforce whatever Jewish learning they did have...

...But the combination of scholarship and pulpit have not exhausted Hertzberg's energies...

...As for the anger toward American Jews that underlies much of the book, it appears to be due, at least in part, to the author's realization that the Jewish community does not view him as a leader...

...they point to high intermarriage rates, low birth rates and the relentless pressures of assimilation...

...What we in fact get, at least for the first 250pagesor so, is a lot of basic information that is not always accurate...

...Unless there is a spiritual revival—"men and women who hear voices"—Rabbi Hertzberg foresees the end of American Jewish history...

...Two of his previous books— one on the French Revolution and the Jews, the other an anthology on Zionist thought with a brilliant introductory essay by Hertzberg—are considered pathbreaking classics...

...The Jewish-educated elite in Europe, who tended to be among the more prosperous elements of the community, stayed put in the old homelands, where they had status and the comforts of closely knit traditional societies...

...Reviewed by Lawrence Grossman Director of Publications, American Jewish Committee A lively debate has been going on over the past few years about the quality of American Jewish life and the future of the American Jewish community...

...As the account gets closer to the present, a "revisionist" thesis of sorts does emerge: a denigration of American Jewish life...