The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century - Hardcover

Dershowitz, Alan M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316181331 ISBN 13: 9780316181334

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 1997

Synopsis

In this urgent book, Alan M. Dershowitz shows why American Jews are in danger of disappearing - and what must be done now to create a renewed sense of Jewish identity for the next century. In previous times, the threats to Jewish survival were external - the virulent consequences of anti-Semitism. Now, however, in late-twentieth-century America, the danger has shifted. Jews today are more secure, more accepted, more assimilated, and more successful than ever before. They've dived into the melting pot - and they've achieved the American Dream. And that, according to Dershowitz, is precisely the problem. More than 50 percent of Jews will marry non-Jews, and their children will most often be raised as non-Jews. Which means, in the view of Dershowitz, that American Jews will vanish as a distinct cultural group sometime in the next century - unless they act now. Speaking to concerned Jews everywhere, Dershowitz calls for a new Jewish identity that focuses on the positive - the 3,500-year-old legacy of Jewish culture, values, and traditions. Dershowitz shows how this new Jewish identity can compete in America's open environment of opportunity and choice - and offers concrete proposals on how to instill it in the younger generation.

About this title

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.

About the Author:

Alan M. Dershowitz is a professor at Harvard Law School.

About this edition

• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0316181331
• ISBN 13: 9780316181334
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 395