‘We are now seen as insiders, not as outsiders,’ Silberman told the temple audience.

Charles E. Silberman, a well-known commentator on problems in American culture from race relations to crime, was more than fashionably late last week for an engagement at the Stephen S. Wise Temple.

Silberman was invited to the synagogue Wednesday evening to speak on anti-Semitism and Jewish intermarriage, two central topics in his latest book, “A Certain People: Jews and Their Lives Today.”

The book has stirred criticism in the Jewish community, particularly from Orthodox and Conservative Jews. The disagreement is over Silberman’s optimistic view that anti-Semitism is no longer a significant problem for Jews in America and that, despite increasing intermarriage and assimilation, Jewish tradition is stronger than ever.

At Stephen S. Wise, a prosperous and growing Reform synagogue grandly situated above the San Fernando Valley atop Sepulveda Pass, Silberman drew a predictably appreciative audience.

Their sympathy frayed noticeably, however, when the appointed hour of his talk came and went and Silberman did not show up at the Plotkin Chapel, where about 70 people waited.

Conversation began. Some young couples grew animated and began to exchange signs of affection, even a kiss or two. People began to look over their shoulders at the door.

After half an hour, an assistant rabbi announced that Silberman was “on his way” and would arrive soon.

About 8:15, 45 minutes late, Rabbi Isaiah Zeldin marched in, leading a solemn-faced Silberman and two Jewish leaders from the Valley who were to join the author on a panel.

Silberman maintained his solemn stance for several more minutes while two temple officials made solicitations for the Jewish Federation Council campaign.

One of them used the technique of alarm.

“Fifty-eight percent of the Jewish children have no Jewish education,” Mel Gagerman said shrilly. “Thirty percent of Jewish families live below the poverty line.”

When his turn came, Silberman first told a story about a Jewish orator of ancient times. On his 70th birthday, he said, the orator told his followers that “he had spent his entire life trying to come late to a Jewish meeting without ever succeeding.”

The self-deprecation worked so well that he threw in a Woody Allen joke about “a civilization more advanced than ours.” This civilization was exactly 15 minutes more advanced, he said. “They start all their meetings on time.”

Reviewers have detected an unexpectedly personal tone in “A Certain People.” Silberman’s earlier works all plowed through expanses of scholarly research with the disinterested cutting edge of the journalistic voice.

But, live before a friendly audience, the 61-year-old author made no attempt to summon the obligatory statistical proof for his sanguine ideas on the state of Judaism.

Instead, he reached into personal experience.

In 1942, he said, Fortune magazine asked, “Can the eternal stranger be absorbed in the country that has absorbed everyone else?”

By 1953, when he joined Fortune’s staff as an editor, its executive editor and several members of its editorial board were Jewish, Silberman said.

“We are now seen as insiders, not as outsiders,” he said.

In his childhood, Silberman said, the central image of Jewishness could be “summed up in one Yiddish word-- shah --be quiet, don’t draw attention to yourself. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t do anything to be noticeable.”

That was because his parents’ generation feared being identified as Jewish, he said.

Silberman said he learned how much the world had changed on the day he took his son to meet Vice President Hubert Humphrey at the White House.

“Hey, dad. Come and look at this Torah,” he said his son called out, having strayed to a corner of the room.

“I knew with an absolute total certainty that, if I had been in an analogous situation I could not have called out to my father in that way if my life depended on it,” he said.

Now Jews wonder whether their culture will be lost through assimilation, Silberman said, as if “there is not enough anti-Semitism left to keep Jews Jewish.”

Silberman thinks the problem is mostly in the perception. He cited a description of the quintessential Jewish telegram by the late Israeli statesman Abba Eban: “Start worrying,” the telegram would say. “Reasons will follow.”

Later, two of the three panelists objected, though mildly, to Silberman’s contention that Jews are worrying too much.

One suggested that he may have have drifted too far from “the trenches” where Jewish caseworkers see the decimation caused by intermarriage, the loss of Jewish values and the attraction of the young to cults.

Silberman replied with a story, this one about a friend and fellow scholar who married a Protestant woman. Ten years later, he said, she adopted the practices of a Jew. And, four years after that, she converted.

“None of us has any answer,” he said. “All we can say is that something new is going on. We can enrich and enlarge the Jewish community as well as weaken and diminish it. The results are not preordained.”

Silberman’s prediction is clear enough: Stop worrying. Reasons will follow.