An uncertain people

...tion, gay rights, environmentalism, At one time—when Christianity was opposition to capital punishment— used to incite the murder of Jews— they perceive any attack on that the suspicion of Christian belief political agenda to be an attack on the Jewish people itself...

...From these circumstances came the impulse toward "safety through secularism," as Abrams puts it...

...He demonstrates that the Jewish community is withering precisely because the majority of American Jews has chosen not to make such a commitment...

...Furthermore, as Abrams points out, the apodictic Judaism of the time was focused more on ritual than doctrine, so it had developed no vocabulary with which to convey the importance of continued religious practice...

...Where the religion of the immigrants was unable to answer the challenges of modernity, the Orthodox Judaism of today in part welcomes the reciprocal influence...

...But Abrams makes clear that those days are long gone...

...The strategy has been to raise the wall separating church and state and to bring down the wall separating Jews from Christian America...

...Jewish survival no longer means protecting individual Jews from acts of anti-Semitism...

...For him, religion entails personal obligation...

...Reversing such decline will require new thinking...

...In the end, Abrams's argument comes down to a rather simple question: If "the central issue" is "continuity," then shouldn't we look to the one element of the Jewish community that has been most successful at it...

...He records the efforts made in the Roman Catholic Church to reverse anti-Semitism and end active proselytization of the Jews...

...Judaism is indeed "a terribly demanding faith," as Abrams says, might have been justified...

...it means saving the entire Jewish people from self-wrought extinction...

...June 23, 1997 The Weekly Standard / 37...

...Of course, his argument is premised on the idea that the Jewish people is something worth preserving...

...ican Jewish Congress, Jews here are past zero population growth...

...In his new book Faith or Fear, Elliott Abrams points out the astonishing fact that "12 percent of Americans of Jewish heritage are now Christians" and that one-third of Americans of Jewish ethnic origin say that Judaism is not their religion...

...Turning to the Jewish fear of evangelical Christianity, he argues that and Jews will take any opportunity to find equally fulfilling but undemanding substitutes—such as Zionism, politics, even the Holocaust...

...Once they arrived in America, however, it was easy for many of them— especially the younger ones—to imagine that Judaism no longer applied...

...For Abrams, the best new idea is also the oldest: He argues powerfully in favor of Judaism over "Jewishness" as the answer to the problem of Jewish continuity...

...With philanthropic, rather than religious, leaders guiding the community, American Jewry became committed to "life under the new sacred Law of the Constitution rather than the old Law of the Torah...

...If the majority of American Jews do not think that preserving the Jewish people is worth a personal commitment, then we need only wait another generation or so for the problem to go away...

...According to a study by the AmerMark Miller is a writer living in Washington, D.C...

...Indeed, as Abrams argues, this "flight from Judaism"—accompanied by a massive effort to redefine what it means to be Jew-ish—is much more dangerous and troubling than Christian proselytization...

...Intellectual" is no longer antithetical to "Jewish...

...Where there had once been social pressure to conform to community practice, now there was pressure to abandon that practice and assimilate into the dominant culture...

...In their mostly segregated and self-governing communities, Jews lived according to the dictates of religious authority, which set the boundaries of acceptable behavior and imposed the rhythms of the day, the week, the year...

...He recognizes that alternative forms of Jewish expression have not only failed, but have brought the American Jewish community to the brink of disaster...

...He also believes that the survival of Jews requires a religious commitment on the part of every individual Jew and on the part of the Jewish establishment...

...Abrams is careful to draw a line between Christian belief and targeted prosely-tization, a legitimate reason for Jews to be suspicious of evangelicals...

...The Jews are partly to blame for any rift, though, because of their prejudice against believing Christians, which Abrams finds insulting and counterproductive...

...Abrams considers these substitute sources of Jewish identity and finds them all unable to sustain any kind of Jewish commitment for more than a generation or two...

...They had little choice but to stay in their own communities and conform...

...But while pursuing these goals single-mindedly, the establishment has remained blind to the fact that the unwavering secularism of its means stands opposed to the single most distinguishing feature of the Jewish people: the Jewish religion...

...But part of it can be explained by the fact that the religion is meeting the intellectuals halfway...

...Where they once lived together in close-knit communities, they are now dispersed throughout the country...

...The new threat comes from within the Jewish people—declining birthrates, declining religious affiliation, declining Jewish identification, and increasing assimilation...

...He also cites parallel efforts within Protestant mainline churches...

...The answer to the question "Why obey Jewish law...

...Do not the Orthodox and other traditionally observant Jews have the right to claim success—and to insist that their approach must be right...

...The trouble began with the large immigration of Eastern European Jews between 1880 and World War I. In the old country, Judaism had defined the life of virtually every Jew...

...He also points out that, even in the face of proselytization, "the vast majority of Americans of Jewish heritage who are now Christian crossed that line not at the urging of a group like Jews for Jesus but because one generation drifted away from Judaism, and, with intermarriage, the next left it behind entirely...

...Now that secularism has become entrenched in American Judaism, it has brought with it a new crisis of Jewish survival for which the Jewish establishment has been caught wholly unprepared...

...An Uncertain People Elliott Abrams on the Dwindling American Jews By Mark Miller In the eyes of the American Jewish establishment, Jewish survival has always meant one thing: defending against anti-Semitism and the policies that foster it...

...To illustrate the phenomenon, Abrams surveys Supreme Court religion jurisprudence and the unwavering support that Jews have provided the secularist one of its most powerful sources is side...

...Although his position is quintes-sentially a small-c conservative one, Abrams does not advocate the instrumental view of religion common among political conservatives—that religion is good for the masses solely because it makes them law-abiding and virtuous...

...between Jews and Christians, it has Because Jews have identified so not done so where the Christians strongly with liberal politics—abor-have been believers, as Abrams notes...

...It is quite a step for a Jewish intellectual to arrive at such a position, i.e., that "Jewish" isn't antithetical to "intellectual...

...is now infinitely more sophisticated than, "Don't ask such questions...

...Liberal Jewish leaders and those advocating "alternative forms of group cohesion" have "changed the borders of the Jewish community so that they suddenly include people and practices not formerly considered Jewish...

...In most Christian denominations," he concludes, "a two-thousand-year-old war against Judaism is being called off and its direct connection to anti-Semitic violence admitted...

...not the hostility of the Christians but While the Jewish establishment the political attitudes—and, implicit-has endeavored to break down walls ly, the class attitudes—of the Jews...

...Elliott Abrams is a severe, insightful critic of the assumptions that have brought the American Jewish community to its current predicament...

...Instead of bringing more outsiders into true Judaism, such efforts have merely weakened the borders enough so that Jewish people may feel perfectly comfortable crossing them on their way out...