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Two outstanding scholars with well-established and extensively demonstrated expertise on the American Jewish community present this important study of the baby boomers who constitute a majority of contemporary American Jewry. Eisen (a religion professor at Stanford) and Cohen (a sociology professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem) conducted 60 in-depth interviews and 1,005 mail surveys with individual American Jews, producing a picture of the "moderate affiliated Jews who make up the bulk of American Jewry." Their findings have significant implications for the future: the Jews they studied have turned inward, demonstrating decreasing attachment to Israel and minimal participation in the extensive panoply of Jewish organizations. This preoccupation with self and family has made observance of the Jewish holidays the primary expression of Jewish identification, with synagogue affiliation a rather distant second. The authors express apprehension about the future of the American Jewish community, placing the burden for its survival on the capacity of communal functionaries to be adroitly sensitive to the community's changing needs and concerns. Cohen and Eisen's work offers valuable confirmation that the trend toward religious individualism, as observed by Robert Bellah in Habits of the Heart and Wade Clark Roof in A Generation of Seekers, has also taken root in the Jewish community. Unfortunately, this study's excessive academic jargon will prevent it from gaining the wide general readership of Bellah or Roof. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Book Description
"Cohen and Eisen have written that rare work, a book that really matters! . . . The Jew Within tells the story of how American Jews live and understand their Judaism over the span of their lives, in their families, and among their friends." --Riv-Ellen Prell
Rocked by reports of soaring intermarriage rates, rampant assimilation, and diminishing population, the American Jewish community has been concerned with issues of Jewish identification and continuity. What matters most to American Jews and why? To answer this and other critical questions, Arnold Eisen and Steven Cohen, two fo the keenest observers and analysts of American Jewish life, probe beneath the surface to explore the foundations of belief and behavior among moderately affiliated American Jews. Among their thought-provoking conclusions are that the construction of Jewish meaning in America is personal and private and that communal loyaties and norms no longer shape Jewish identity as they did several decades ago.
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