Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America: Abrams, Elliott: 9780684825113: Amazon.com: Books

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Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America Hardcover – June 4, 1997

by Elliott Abrams (Author)

3.9 9 ratings

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Argues that Jews should stop spending energy attacking Christian fundamentalists since Jewish interests are more consistent with those of other people of faith than with secular liberals who wish to drive religion out of public life

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Print length

256 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Free Press
Publication date

June 4, 1997
Dimensions

6.4 x 0.89 x 9.58 inches
ISBN-10

0684825112
ISBN-13

978-0684825113
See all details

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If You Will It: Rebuilding Jewish Peoplehood for the 21st Century
Elliott Abrams
Hardcover
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The Jewish population in the United States may shrink by two million people in the next half-century. This demographic likelihood--well known in Jewish circles and due almost entirely to intermarriage--creates a dilemma for group survival. A big part of the problem, writes Elliott Abrams, has been the secularization of Jewish life. Abrams uncovers data showing that Jews are among the least religious people in America. Many have made a tragic mistake in equating Jewish security with removing all forms of religious devotion from public life. And now, says Abrams, they must either rediscover the faith that can sustain them or risk vanishing into the great American melting pot. Provocative, but persuasive, this highly readable book deserves a wide audience.

From Library Journal

Neoconservative writer Abrams (Security and Sacrifice, Hudson Inst., 1995), who had a controversial career in politics as a former assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration, is now the director of a Washington, D.C., think tank. Like Alan Dershowitz in his The Vanishing American Jew (LJ 3/1/97), Abrams is concerned with the loss of Jewish identity in an attractive, amorphous American culture. While both seek a revitalization of the Jewish spirit, Dershowitz sees belief in a deity as just a part of Jewish cultural renewal; Abrams believes that the only way for Jews to survive is by renewed religious faith. Dershowitz scorns the Orthodox methods of separateness, while Abrams believes Jews should emulate some of them. Abrams also argues for the benefits of a school voucher plan and heeding the influence of evangelical Christian groups. Libraries that ordered the Dershowitz tome may want to buy this one for comparison and contrast. Recommended for libraries serving a Jewish clientele.?Paul M. Kaplan, Lake Villa Dist. Library, Ill.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Jews constitute only 2 percent of the U.S. population. One-third of all Americans of Jewish ancestry no longer claim Judaism as their religion. Of all Jews who have married since 1985, the majority have married non-Jews, and only 28 percent of the children of intermarried couples are raised as Jews. Demographers predict a decrease of from one million to more than two million in the American Jewish population in the next two generations. Even the tragedy of the Holocaust has failed to halt this trend, Abrams points out. He insists that American Jews can reverse these disastrous demographic patterns by believing that they are, above all else, members of a religious community and that American Jewry will survive as a religious community or not at all. Abrams is sending a clear and fervent warning: if this nation's Jews refuse to listen and change, 5,000 years of history will soon come to an end. George Cohen

Review

Abrams ... rehearses the Jewish decline with grim thoroughness. -- The New York Times Book Review, Richard A. Epstein

The grim data on Jewish assimilation and intermarriage that have called forth this book are by now well known. According to the National Jewish Population Study of 1990, most marriages involving an American Jew are exogamous. In short, the very survival of the American Jewish community is in doubt. To the growing chorus calling for strong action, Abrams adds his own distinctive voice.

Much of Elliott Abrams's book is devoted to an analysis less of the sociological facts than of the thinking that helped bring American Jewry to its present pass and even now occludes a clear vision of the way forward. Alongside their aggressively secular interpretation of the public order, American Jews have, in Abrams's words, "devised a variety of substitutes for Judaism" itself. But each of these substitutes, however praiseworthy on its merits or as a means of expressing a peculiarly Jewish ethos, fails from the point of view of ensuring Jewish survival.

With all the substitutes discredited, Jews, in Abrams's judgment, have but one recourse if they mean to survive: namely, to return to their religious faith. They must, in other words, practice Judaism, for "only Judaism can save the Jewish people, and ... only Judaism provides a justification for doing so."

There is a problem that runs throughout Abrams's engaging and generally clear-sighted book. At one point, he notes correctly that to be opposed to intermarriage is to stand in conflict with a traditional American ideal--namely, the ideal of "individual autonomy." He also mentions the French observer Michel Guillame Jean de Crèvecoeur, who as long ago as 1782 identified a "strange mixture of blood" as a characteristically American phenomenon. These facts being so, the challenge to Jewish survival may be much more deeply rooted in American culture and in the American past than the relatively recent developments that occupy Abrams's attention here--liberalism, separationism, and the various substitutes for religion in which American Jews have overinvested.

In this connection, it is strange that Abrams never draws a link, however partial, between the demographic disaster facing American Jews and the unintended cultural repercussions of the working of individual autonomy in the marketplace--to capitalism, in short, with its high estimation of personal choice, its distaste for collective identities and inherited status, and its belief that the customer is always right. All of these tenets are at odds with traditional Jewish law and theology. How Judaism's strikingly pre-modern concepts of the self and its obligations can be reconciled with the incomparable benefits of modern capitalism is a pressing question, and it is a pity that Abrams, an influential conservative activist, does not take it up. -- Commentary Magazine, Jon D. Levenson

About the Author

Elliott Abrams is President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Free Press; First Edition (June 4, 1997)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0684825112
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0684825113
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.4 x 0.89 x 9.58 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #330,929 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,983 in Judaism (Books)

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3.9 9 ratings

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Elliott Abrams

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Elliott Abrams is Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C. He served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor in the Administration of President George W. Bush, where he supervised U.S. policy in the Middle East for the White House.

Mr. Abrams was educated at Harvard College, the London School of Economics, and Harvard Law School. After serving on the staffs of Sen. Henry M. Jackson and Daniel P. Moynihan, he was an Assistant Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration and received the Secretary of State's Distinguished Service Award from Secretary George P. Shultz.

Mr. Abrams was president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., from 1996 until joining the White House staff. He was a member of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom from 1999 to 2001 and Chairman of the Commission in the latter year, and in 2012 was reappointed to membership for another term. Mr. Abrams is also a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, which directs the activities of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He teaches U.S. foreign policy at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.

Mr. Abrams joined the Bush Administration in June, 2001 as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director of the NSC for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Organizations. From December 2002 to February 2005, he served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director of the National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs. He served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy from February 2005 to January 2009, and in that capacity supervised both the Near East and North African Affairs, and the Democracy, Human Rights, and International Organizations directorates of the NSC.

He is the author of three books, Undue Process (1993), Security and Sacrifice (1995), and Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America (1997), and the editor of three more, Close Calls: Intervention, Terrorism, Missile Defense and "Just War" Today; Honor Among Nations: Intangible Interests and Foreign Policy; and The Influence of Faith: Religion and American Foreign Policy.

His new book, Tested by Zion: the Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, will be published by Cambridge University Press at the end of 2012.

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Dr. Sherman
Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on August 9, 2014
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An important book on understanding the nexus between Judaism and Christianity.

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A M
okok
Reviewed in the United States on December 15, 2012
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A little too dramatic in making an elefant from a fly but it still gives some insights into the matter of a minority among a different or even opposing majority

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Proud to be an American!
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Reviewed in the United States on April 23, 2016
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Recommended reading.

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K. Caldwell
"Non-parasites would 'Return. '" They can thrive and make ...
Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2016
"Non-parasites would 'Return.'"

They can thrive and make the rest of the world envious of them, but they must do it from there, not here.

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SS Ranto
Jewish Continuity
Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2013
In the June 21, 2013 J Magazine op/ed, local Conservative Rabbi Menachem Creditor bemoans the shutdown of the Conservative movement's college outreach program. He then explains why the American Conservative movement (USCJ) is declining, but declining it is. "Fewer and fewer synagogues are affiliated with USCJ..."

Elliott Abrams, in his book Faith or Fear, How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America, tackles the problem of Jewish continuity. Will Jews in America survive the ravages of assimilation and population decline?

"The results of the National Jewish Population Study of 1990, and several other major works of research, draw the portrait of a community in decline, facing a demographic disaster. The term "disaster" is no exaggeration: Jews, who once comprised 3.7 percent of the U.S. population, have fallen to about 2 percent....Demographers predict a drop of anywhere from one million to over two million in the American Jewish population in the next two generations" (pp.1-2).

At the same time, however, Orthodox Jews are increasing their numbers. Never has the Orthodox community been more vibrant, opening day schools and synagogues and demanding that marriage stay within the faith. Ironically, " the very Jewish groups who most loudly profess their anxiety about Christians are, with a frequency never before seen in all of Jewish history, marrying them" (P.99). Intermarriage is rampant because antisemitism among Christians has declined significantly over the last 80 years. At the same time much of the non-Orthodox Jewish community has abandoned Jewish ritual practice and injunctions against intermarriage. In its place the mainstream Jewish community has taken up the religion of secularism and liberalism--all religion is an anachronism and abhorrent. So the liberal Jew cares not about the Christian's faith (or his own) since it is simply a collection of old and ridiculous superstitions, and now, since she no longer demonizes his Jewish background, the two can and will marry.

Can the non-Orthodox denominations of American Jewry be saved from extinction? According to Abrams, it matters less if one is Orthodox as long as Jews use Orthodox tactics: high levels of admission to (private religious) day schools. Jewish communal groups need to lower tuition rates to make this happen. Secondly, mainstream American Judaism must increase ritual observance--more Torah study, keeping kosher, observing the Sabbath, etc. Abrams argues that one does not have to become fully Orthodox and completely observant--just ratchet up one's level of ritual commitment. If you do not believe, do it anyway for the generations that will come after you. Only then will American Jews continue to thrive.

Elliott Abrams is, of course, the neocon, responsible for much national policy in the years before the Obama administration. One should therefore not be surprised that his book is a conservative reaction to the problem of Jewish continuity. The other option, Alexander Schindler's idea to convert secular non-Jews and non Jewish spouses has not convinced the children of these unions to stay Jewish (P. 118). I recommend considering Abrams' opinions.

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Ron Coleman
Abrams was right
Reviewed in the United States on April 23, 2017
Abrams got it, though unfortunately it is clear that no one is listening.

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Scribe
Liberals ignore this book at their peril
Reviewed in the United States on April 3, 2001
Abrams' unflinching clarity, wisdom, brilliance, responsibility, and calm are equally evident in his writing and in his eyes (see book jacket). His book, rich with meticulously documented references and chapters organized with the grace of rivers flowing into the sea, held me in thrall; it was over too soon! (We love to read someone else's case for our existing opinions.)
After my own vain efforts to bridge the rift between Right and Left, observant and downright anti-religious, I had recently concluded that the anti-religious Left is a branch best left to die. Abrams addresses my conclusion. Liberals ignore this book at their peril. My burning questions: (1) From a theological perspective, wouldn't a non-anti-Jewish Christianity cease to be Christianity at all?, and (2) What is it -- a yeshiva education? -- that creates a person so clear-sighted, unrelentingly logical, and pleasantly articulate as the author?
pk

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Wayne G. Johnson
Can religious belief be justified?
Reviewed in the United States on July 27, 2013
Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America

Abrams' book is well worth the read for anyone with interest in the religious scene in the U.S. He clearly outlines the problem of the erosion of Jewish religious believers in the more or less tolerant society. His concern is that Jewish identity will gradually be lost through intermarriage and the eroding of Jewish religious training and practice. His remedy would be to bring the genuine religious dimension back into the life and practice of those who want to keep identity as Jews.

What is missing in his analysis is the problem of the rational justification of religious beliefs. Therein lies a problem he does not seem to recognize. But consider the following men of Jewish background who are either confirmed agnostics or outright atheists: Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, Steven Pinker, Isaac Asimov, Freud. The list could be extended. Einstein once observed that religions, including Judaism, are incarnations of the most primitive beliefs. These men, as many others, have a strong sense of their Jewish heritage, but they could hardly support Abrams' admonition to build formal religious belief and practice back into their lives.

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