March 30, 1997
By JONATHAN ROSEN
The Vanishing American Jew In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century.By Alan M. Dershowitz. 395 pp. Boston: Little, Brown & Company. $24.95. |
ven before the recent disclosures that Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright was born Jewish, there were growing signs of what might be called American Marrano culture. Of course the Jews of Spain hid their faith out of fear of the Inquisition, while in America it is the children of a tolerant society who are threatening to transform Judaism into a religion of half-remembered rituals, forgotten ancestors and buried beliefs. Still, American Marranos, like the Spanish Jews before them, are changing the culture around them, because when Judaism goes underground, strange new things come into flower.This is the world that Alan M. Dershowitz enters in ''The Vanishing American Jew.'' Mr. Dershowitz, the outspoken Harvard law professor famous for taking on cases that buck the odds, would like to reverse the tide of assimilation, but he would like to do it without violating his own liberal beliefs in tolerance, inclusiveness and reason. Given the fact that tolerance, inclusiveness and reason are not the things that typically keep religion alive, he is facing his toughest case yet. Mr. Dershowitz, who has traveled the country and spoken to thousands of Jewish audiences since the publication of his 1991 book, ''Chutzpah,'' has a strong fix on a central crisis that he believes is facing American Jews today. Noting the statistic that since 1988 the intermarriage rate has been over 50 percent, and adding to that figure the low birth rates of non-Orthodox Jews, Mr. Dershowitz observes that ''if trends continue apace, American Jewry -- indeed, Diaspora Jewry -- may virtually vanish by the third quarter of the 21st century.''
Intermarriage is not a mere abstract statistical matter for Mr. Dershowitz. The wound at the heart of the book is the marriage of his son Jamin to Barbara, a Roman Catholic. Mr. Dershowitz is at his best when he describes his own complex reaction to the news: ''I was genuinely happy at Jamin's obvious joy and excitement over his forthcoming marriage, but happiness was not my only emotion.'' Though he quickly assures his son -- and the reader -- of his full acceptance of Jamin's decision, Mr. Dershowitz makes it clear that on an emotional level he is profoundly troubled by the realization that his grandchildren ''would not be Jews, at least not under the Orthodox and Conservative religious definition of who is a Jew.'' Mr. Dershowitz's mother -- who continues to practice the Orthodoxy Mr. Dershowitz gradually abandoned after his move to Cambridge -- is blunter in her response. ''What did I do wrong?'' she wants to know. Mr. Dershowitz's book is, in some sense, his attempt to persuade her -- and himself -- that no one did anything wrong. It can even be seen as an attempt to explain that his son's two children, despite the view of Jewish law, are in fact Jewish.
One of things that makes Mr. Dershowitz's book a slippery one is that the bad news continually turns into good news, and the good news into bad. For example, the reasons that the future of Judaism is in danger all point, ironically, to the very success Mr. Dershowitz touted in ''Chutzpah,'' his paean to Jewish assertiveness. No longer barred from neighborhoods, country clubs or colleges, as they were only two generations ago, American Jews have been catapulted into the open arms of mainstream America. The problem is that most American Jews, lacking positive reasons to remain Jewish, are ill equipped to deal with the virtual disappearance of institutional anti-Semitism.
For Mr. Dershowitz this is not, primarily, a religious matter. He believes that American Jews need to develop a durable secular culture able to give a permanent home to Jews outside the orbit of traditional observance. An over-reliance on the Orthodox definition of Judaism has left the drifting sons and daughters of assimilated parents with no place to go but out. The chutzpah he once argued Jews need in the face of Christian America he now feels secular Jews need in the face of traditional Jewish culture. He seems to associate Rabbinic Judaism with the anti-Semitism that surrounded it for hundreds of years. For a free American society, something freer is needed, a Judaism bound not to revelation at Sinai or Jewish law but to -- something else. Just what that something else is he struggles to define for most of his book. It lives more in the realm of rhetoric than practice: ''We more-secular Jews must create a new Jewish state of mind -- and way of life -- that directly reflects the Jewish values we care about.'' Though far from antireligious, Mr. Dershowitz has a rather chauvinistic view of secular Judaism. ''The great paradox of Jewish life,'' he writes, ''is that virtually all of the positive values we identify with Jews -- compassion, creativity, contributions to the world at large, charity, a quest for education -- seem more characteristic of Jews who are closer to the secular end of the Jewish continuum than to the ultra-Orthodox end.'' These are bold words coming from a man who grew up in Borough Park, Brooklyn, and went to yeshiva for years.
Mr. Dershowitz is proud of his Orthodox upbringing but he is prouder of the way he is now. He does not see why the pendulum should swing from religious devotion to disaffection and back again in an endless cycle of rejection and return. Can't it just stay in one place -- the place Mr. Dershowitz has himself arrived at? It is almost as if Mr. Dershowitz would like to re-create and mass produce the essence of his own experience: an Orthodox childhood anchoring a secular adulthood; memories of anti-Semitic America neutralized by a sense of obstacles overcome; a passion for Israel born during the state's earliest and most innocent days; a dark awareness of the Holocaust tempered by boundless optimism about the future.
The difficulty of passing on a religion parsed into ethical or historical pieces is clear from the author's encounter with his son. Mr. Dershowitz admits that for all his closeness to Jamin, he has failed to communicate to him the mysterious bond he himself feels to his people. That is hardly surprising, given his wish to view Judaism as a civilization like ''the American, Greek or Roman civilizations.'' Mr. Dershowitz is not the first person to attempt such a project. He frequently alludes to Mordechai Kaplan, the great American rabbi who decades ago coined the phrase ''Judaism as a civilization.'' But the Reconstructionist movement Rabbi Kaplan created never abandoned ritual observance and, in recent years, has made room for the transcendence it once defined itself against.
Like most people tackling questions of Jewish continuity, Mr. Dershowitz is much better at identifying problems than solving them. He is certainly right in observing that divisions between the increasingly militant Orthodox and the drifting secular are becoming untenable. He correctly deplores the abysmal state of most Jewish education. And he is right that new Jewish leadership is desperately needed to suit the needs of the next century. Mr. Dershowitz would like to be part of such a leadership. He would like to make sure, for one thing, that people like his grandchildren remain Jews. But he makes it clear from the outset that in his mind they already are. The book is dedicated to them, and to their parents, Jamin and Barbara. ''New links in an old chain,'' Mr. Dershowitz writes with characteristic optimism and audacity. Only time will tell whether he is indeed leading them back to Judaism or merely following them into the wilderness.
Jonathan Rosen is the cultural editor of The Forward. His novel, ''Eve's Apple,'' will be published next month.
More on Jews in AmericaFrom the Archives of The New York Times
Thanks to Jonathan Rosen and to Egon Mayer, Director of The Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, for the above suggestions.
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