The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century [Paperback]

Alan M. Dershowitz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 8, 1998

Dershowitz "writes with characteristic optimism and audacity" ("The New York Times Book Review"), in this provocative book about the contradictions and quandaries of American-Jewish assimilation.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Most recently in the spotlight as one of the many defense lawyers attending O. J. Simpson in his first criminal trial, attorney Alan M. Dershowitz is also a powerful advocate for the liberal Jewish tradition in this country. In an earlier book, Chutzpah, Dershowitz celebrated an end to Jewish isolation and institutional anti-Semitism in America; in his latest book, The Vanishing American Jew, he decries the perhaps inevitable result of this desegregation: assimilation.

Dershowitz writes powerfully about his fear that, with nothing to struggle against and no powerful motivation to maintain traditions, American secular Jews will, within a few generations, lose their Jewishness. The author writes from a privileged position: raised an Orthodox Jew, he embraced secular Judaism in his young adulthood and thus comes equipped with an intimate understanding of what he has chosen to reject and accept. Though Dershowitz has no definitive answers for the problem of The Vanishing American Jew, the questions he raises may be the first step in discovering a solution. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Famed lawyer Dershowitz argues that through intermarriage and assimilation, the American Jewish community is in danger of fading away.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Touchstone; Touchstone ed edition (September 8, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684848988
• ISBN-13: 978-0684848983
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,341,293 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ is a Brooklyn native who has been called 'the nation's most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer' and one of its 'most distinguished defenders of individual rights,' 'the best-known criminal lawyer in the world,' 'the top lawyer of last resort,' and 'America's most public Jewish defender.' He is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Dershowitz, a graduate of Brooklyn College and Yale Law School, joined the Harvard Law School faculty at age 25 after clerking for Judge David Bazelon and Justice Arthur Goldberg. While he is known for defending clients such as Anatoly Sharansky, Claus von B'low, O.J. Simpson, Michael Milken and Mike Tyson, he continues to represent numerous indigent defendants and takes half of his cases pro bono. Dershowitz is the author of 20 works of fiction and non-fiction, including 6 bestsellers. His writing has been praised by Truman Capote, Saul Bellow, David Mamet, William Styron, Aharon Appelfeld, A.B. Yehoshua and Elie Wiesel. More than a million of his books have been sold worldwide, in numerous languages, and more than a million people have heard him lecture around the world. His most recent nonfiction titles are The Case For Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can be Resolved (August 2005, Wiley); Rights From Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights (November 2004, Basic Books), The Case for Israel (September 2003, Wiley), America Declares Independence, Why Terrorism Works, Shouting Fire, Letters to a Young Lawyer, Supreme Injustice, and The Genesis of Justice. His novels include The Advocate's Devil and Just Revenge. Dershowitz is also the author of The Vanishing American Jew, The Abuse Excuse, Reasonable Doubts, Chutzpah (a #1 bestseller), Reversal of Fortune (which was made into an Academy Award-winning film), Sexual McCarthyism and The Best Defense.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Redundant, pointless, old news, May 27, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century (Hardcover)

Nineteen-ninety-one was an unusually bad year for American Jewry. It began with Saddam Hussein's bombing of Tel Aviv, aggravated by the occasional "No Blood for Israel" banner at antiwar rallies; in August, Crown Heights erupted in black-Jewish violence; a couple of weeks later, George Bush pleaded that he was just "one lonely little guy" fighting lobbyists for Israeli loan guarantees; in November, David Duke nearly won a Louisiana election. Alan Dershowitz's "Chutzpah" was just what Jews needed. It was an unapologetic call to arms, urging American Jews to be proud and assertive, to strike out firmly against anti-Semites and anti-Zionists. A few months after the book's summer 1991 publication, I spoke with Dershowitz. "I'm delighted," he said, "to be known more for my Jewish activism than for my defense of Claus von Bülow."

But for the last seven years, we've seen Dershowitz in a different context than Defender of the Jews. As a hired-gun appelate lawyer, he's moved on to clients every bit as upstanding as von Bülow: Mike Tyson, Leona Helmsley, O.J. Simpson. So the context for his new book, "The Vanishing American Jew," is quite different: Things aren't so bleak for American Jews in 1998, and Dershowitz is hardly Mr. Credibility. But frankly, if this volume were found chiseled into stone tablets on Mount Sinai, it would resonate little more. It's bloated, wildly unfocused and digressive, a repetitious jumble of ramblings that only infrequently tie into Dershowitz's thesis. The thesis itself-that, for Jewishness to survive without institutional enemies, the next generation needs a *positive* reason to stay Jewish-is hardly earthshaking, having been developed thoroughly in recent years by authors ranging from Los Angeles rabbi Michael Goldberg ("Why Should Jews Survive?") to the redoubtable Michael Lerner ("Jewish Renewal").

Like others, Dershowitz warns of "assimilation, intermarriage, and low birthrates" and locates a bright Jewish future in "the considerable, but largely untapped, strengths of ! our own heritage." But you'd be hard-pressed to locate that simple central point in much of "The Vanishing American Jew"-it's often buried under paragraphs and pages that will frustrate any reader picking up the book based on a misguided trust of the author. Since Dershowitz's editors clearly went too easy on his book, it falls to us to trim it from 370-plus pages to a more appropriate length.

First, some stylistic problems. To begin with, a good 35 pages are wasted on jokes cribbed from a variety of sources. You never have to wait many paragraphs before encountering, "It is also illustrated by the old joke that asks... I was recently told the following story about... I am reminded of the joke about... I end this chapter with a vignette that illustrates..." The jokes themselves (augmented by historical anecdotes and apocryphal stories) aren't bad, just trite, and nearly always irrelevant. Perhaps 10 pages are given over to self-aggrandizing "I was having lunch with" anecdotes about encounters and debates with U.S. and Israeli leaders. Those can go too. Self-evident, pointless rhetorical filler takes up 15 or so pages. "I am not prepared...to concede the end of the non-Orthodox American Jewish community, though I recognize the uphill battle we face," he writes.

Worse than pure filler are the empirically absurd overstatements that will make any reader stop dead in midpage: "Assimilation these days is so cost-free and easy that any Jew who does not want to belong to the Jewish people can resign with less hassle than it takes to get out of the Book-of-the-Month Club." And how about this: "[N]o group in America is less knowledgeable about its traditions, less literate in its language, less familiar with its own library than the Jews." Call it 10 pages. Out come all the egregious slaps at "foolish fundamentalists who find the answers to all of today's problems in the literal words of yesterday's texts." Figuring they won't be reading this book, Dershowitz goes so far as to call ultra-religious Jews "un-Jewish." At lea! st 10 pages. Taking out all the contradictory statements will knock out 15 pages or so. "While insisting that "We are supposed to be a light unto the world," 100 pages later-in an effort to not offend hard-hearted neoconservatives-he charges that Jews who claim that *tikkun olam* (to repair the world) is "the essence of Judaism" are "as wrong as those who claim that the essence of Judaism can be found in Newt Gingrich's Contract with America."

Now here's where we can really cut things down: Maybe 110 pages cover material that simply has nothing whatsoever to do with Dershowitz's thesis. Though, early on, he repeatedly hammers home that anti-Semitism no longer poses a serious threat, he stuffs the book's middle with dozens of impassioned pages on Holocaust denial, black anti-Semitism, Islamic fundamentalism and the Christian right. Not only has this all been covered thoroughly elsewhere, but Dershowitz doesn't even try to connect most of it to his goal of rescuing the Jewish people. And the detours don't end with his discussions of anti-Semitism. There's a discussion of "Is Judaism Messianic?" and a paean to the subject of argument. Don't miss his head-scratching endnote (unconnected, in my copy of the book, to any in-text reference) on the topic of college-campus date rape.

We're down to about 135 pages, not counting the heavily annotated endnotes, and we are entirely justified cutting this remainder by two-thirds, since Dershowitz repeats each of his points several times. So the book ends up the length of a sizable article. But I'll save you the trouble of reading *any* of it. Nearly 300 pages in, Dershowitz hits us with his solution, the salvation of American Jewry. Are you sitting down? Here it is: better Jewish day schools. Though he follows this blockbuster pronouncement with pleas for Judaism to become more open, for acceptance of intermarried couples and "doubting Jews," and for Jewish educators to become leaders, that's basically it. Dershowitz also recommends that Jews read Joseph Telushkin's ! wonderful "Jewish Literacy." I second that suggestion-and add one of my own: Buy the Telushkin volume with the money you'll save by *not* buying "The Vanishing American Jew.

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A reasonable attempt, January 29, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century (Paperback)

This book is a reasonable and sincere attempt to deal with a difficult problem -- how to preserve Jewish culture in an era when the pace of Jews' assimilation into their home societies is accelerating.

Among its better points, it tries to grapple with defining the essence of what it is to be Jewish, especially if one is to be inclusive of secular and agnostic Jews such as Prof. Dershowitz himself. He shows that Judaism includes many principles and practices, but that many of these are either shared with other groups, or not practiced by some people who nonetheless consider themselves Jewish. So it's hard to say that the content of any of these principles or practices is the distinguishing content of Judaism. His discussion of this is very illuminating, I think.

Ultimately, he comes up with the distinction that the common essence of Judaism is procedural rather than substantive -- it is a *way* of dealing with changes and differing opinions, rather than a specific set of principles or doctrines (content). The distinction he attempts to draw is one familiar to lawyers, but perhaps less so to others, and might be a bit of a let-down to many.

Prof. Dershowitz also defends the principle that being Jewish should be a matter of self-identification. Along the way he points out the contradictions between, on the one hand, the ultra-Orthodox view that religious law has been fixed since the time of Moses, and, on the other, their position that a child's religion follows his or her mother's (opposite of what is set forth in the Old Testament). It isn't clear, however, whether his liberality would also apply to someone who neither had a Jewish parent nor went through a conversion procedure -- maybe someone should ask him.

It probably will be difficult for any reader, Jewish or not, to identify with all the issues he tries to deal with along the way to reaching this result. For example, I personally found his discussion of religious ceremonies for agnostics and atheists a bit mind-boggling. But while I don't fall into either of those categories, there are many people who do and who also consider themselves Jewish. For this reason, I understand why he'd discuss this and similar topics.

There are a couple of pertinent things he doesn't mention, especially when it comes to intermarriage. (I speak from the POV of a committed Jew married to a non-Jewish woman.) One is that many modern Jews are turned off by the exclusionary language that is found in many Jewish religious texts (written, for the most part, thousands of years ago or under circumstances of violent persecution by non-Jews). If you find it hard to believe that the Jewish G-d or supreme power is really different from that of a sincere Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, etc., it's harder to swallow the absolute necessity of marrying a Jewish person, especially when Jews make up less than 3% of the US population and less than 0.2% of the world's.

He also doesn't mention that it's possible to convert children to Judaism without necessitating the conversion of a non-Jewish parent. Sometimes the non-Jewish parent doesn't have the personal conviction to warrant a sincere conversion, but nonetheless strongly supports the idea that children should have an unequivocal identity as Jewish. (Maybe this is easier to do when that parent has a strong ethnic but weaker religious identity, as is common with many people from Japan, China and some other East Asian countries. Negotiating Jewish and Japanese identities within a family, for example, might be easier than negotiating simultaneous Jewish and Christian ones. Of course, there are some committed religionists in East Asia too.)

I've got to agree with the reviewers who mention Prof. Dershowitz's frequent self-aggrandizing comments as one of the truly irritating features of the book. From having heard him speak almost 30 years ago, I'd guess this is one of his more enduring traits (not that other trial lawyers are significantly more modest). His use of jokes bothered me less, though they mostly come from one source (Jewish Humor, by Joseph Telushkin, which relates many of them in an overly abbreviated, and therefore flat, manner). So if you know that book you'll have heard 'em all before.

But I disagree with reviewers who suggest that Prof. Dershowitz is racist or feels Jews are better than other people. I think that's a misinterpretation, though his self-aggrandizement doesn't help get his sincerity across. He's candid about his divided feelings about his son's intermarriage, but I think he recognizes that it's possible for a human being to have inconsistent or contradictory feelings inside themselves. I might not agree with him on every point, but think it's to his credit that he deals with the intermarriage issue from the standpoint of publicly examining his own personal ambivalence, rather than adopting some doctrinaire point of view (which he makes fun of later in the book).

For the most part, he's grappling with a very legitimate issue: As a tiny minority who find themselves in an open, hospitable home culture, there's a strong attraction for Jews to thoroughly assimilate into that home culture. Over the course of a few generations, such assimilation makes it easy to lose the distinctive culture from their past. Prof. Dershowitz feels that there's a lot of merit in the Jewish cultural heritage, at the same time that he's an enthusiastic supporter of the open society that creates this dilemma. My impression is that he'd like for Jews to participate fully in that society while also retaining something particularly Jewish.

I think that most ethnic groups in the US face similar issues about integration vs. identity, though there are some unique aspects that complicate Jews' attempts to accomplish this goal, just as other ethnicities have their own unique circumstances to deal with. In the case of Jews these issues include (i) blending of culture with a religious heritage that's different from US majority, and (ii) relative lack of distinguishing physical or linguistic characteristics. I think his book is a sincere attempt to help a Jewish audience deal with this difficult conundrum.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It recognizes the problem, June 21, 2005

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century (Paperback)

This book is to be commended for recognizing a real problem. The American - Jewish community is declining in numbers. It is an aging community, one with high- rates of intermarriage, and low rates of fertility. It is a community which is an increasingly small percentage of American society as a whole.
Why is this important?
I think that there are two answers, one for Jews and another for American non- Jews.
Jewish communities have thrived in various places in the world, and then disappeared. The American Jewry community is an especially important one for the Jewish people historically especially in its relation to Israel and the Jewish people as a whole.
As for the second reason, I would maintain that for general American society the survival and thriving of an American- Jewish community is important because this community has made great contributions to American life in many different areas, and as on the whole been a great creative factor in the shaping of American civilization.
In considering the situation of American Jews it is necessary to understand that the challenges and character of American life are different from those that the Jews have known elsewhere. Only in America have Jews been given a kind of access and acceptance which in our own time means that there is virtually no discrimination against them. It is because America accepts the Jews, and adopts so much of what is Jewish as part of itself that assimilation happens so readily in the United States.
Clearly to preserve its own tradition and way the Jews of America have to ( This is Dershowitz's major recommendation) greatly increase the quality and quantity of Jewish education. Sadly most American Jews are very ignorant about their own traditions. And one encouraging element in American - Jewish life is the intense return to Jewish learning by a certain minority of the population.
Clearly learning to understand what the Jewish community and its history is , is central to preserving Jewish identity.
Another point. Since the publication of Dershowitz's book there has been a dramatic increase in world-wide anti-Semitism. This often takes the form of Anti- Zionism and is directed primarily against Israel.
American Jews have in the past played an important role in helping support the survival of Israel. Though support for Israel among the broad American public is relatively stable over the past forty years, and though there is massive Christian Evangelical support for Israel there is also now in the US a strong anti- Semitic, anti- Israel movement which combines Islamic fundamentalists, Palestinian Arab nationalists, those of the extreme right, and perhaps even more alarmingly , extreme left, politically.
A strong American Jewish community is an important element in ensuring an Israel which can survive in the future.
In this regard one additional element in strengthening Jewish young people's identity as Jews is through their traveling to and knowing Israel. The special 'Birthright' programs have attempted to do some of this.
Dershowitz surveys the problem, and shows his heart is in the right place.
His book is in this sense highly recommended. It should be supplemented however by the works of Jack Wertheimer, Sylvia Barack- Fishman, and others who consider this problem.