Book Review : A State of the Union Report for U.S. Jewish Communities

Where Are We? The Inner Life of American Jews by Leonard Fein (Harper & Row: $19.95, 352 pages)

When my family and friends gather to celebrate Passover, we listen to Jenny and Sarah, the youngest children at the seder table, recite the Four Questions. In a sense, Judaism is a faith based on questions--the questions that God asks of us, the ones we ask of God. And so it’s perfectly appropriate that Leonard Fein rattles off some four dozen questions, mostly rhetorical, in the first chapter of “Where Are We?,” his earnest (and intentionally provocative) attempt to explain the Jews of America to themselves and to the rest of the world.

“What is it about the Jews, about Judaism?” ponders Fein, a scholar, a journalist, and one of those rare contemporary intellectuals who has made his name and fortune on the basis of his intellect. The Jews in America enjoy the greatest degree of liberty, security and prosperity in the history of the Diaspora, and yet the ease of life in America has also eroded precisely those values that have allowed the Jews to survive. As a result, Judaism in America is in danger of losing what Fein regards as its essential and authentic Jewishness, or of wholly disappearing through assimilation.

With Courage, Candor

Fein writes with real courage and candor about the ironic role of the Holocaust and the state of Israel in shaping Jewish identity in America--we are remote in time from the unspeakable horror of Auschwitz, we are remote in distance from the Israel’s struggle for survival, and yet many American Jews define their Jewishness solely in terms of the memory of the Holocaust and the mythic elements of the Jewish state.

“Shared concerns are among the things that connect people,” Fein points out, “and surely both the Holocaust and the saga of Israel provide America’s Jews just such grounds for connection. But . . . they have become substitutes for the shared meanings that once defined and informed the Jewish connection.”

Indeed, his chapters on the Holocaust and Israel are by far the most compelling, the most deeply felt, and most articulate portions of a book that suffers from rather too much rhetorical throat-clearing and what the author himself calls “backings and forthings.” Fein declares himself to be “concerned with the trivialization of the Holocaust, disturbed by the degree to which the memory of it crowds out other memories, displaces reasons, depresses hope.” Auschwitz, he suggests, “is not the most important or even the most interesting thing that ever happened to us.”

‘First a Faith’

Israel, Fein writes, “is for us first a faith, and only then a place.” Although “Where Are We?” was written before the recent turmoil in Gaza and the West Bank, Fein anticipates the troubled response of American Jews to the political, diplomatic and military travails of Israel: “Only now,” Fein explains, “are American Jews beginning to understand that Israel exists in the real world. For many for us, the advent of that understanding is accompanied by stress, by frustration, by disappointment, sometimes even by resentment.”

The challenge of Judaism in America, according to Fein, is found in the very freedom that we enjoy: “Freedom’s promise includes the freedom to stop being Jewish,” he points out. “Today, we use the term ‘Jew by choice’ to describe converts to Judaism. In another generation, or two, or five, all of us will have become Jews by choice, or ceased to be Jews at all.”

But Fein sees no point in concern over survival of the Jewish community without an equal concern for the survival of Jewish values: “Survival for its own sake is not merely redundant, but self-defeating . . . . We cannot expect an identity that is not nourished by distinctive ideological and cultural commitment to be passed on from generation to generation.”

Repair of the World

Fein’s notion of these enduring Jewish values focuses on the concept of tikkun olam (“the repair of the world”), God’s mandate to humankind to participate in the perfection of the world that He created and bestowed upon us. Tikkun olam has recently emerged as the dominant theme in many Jewish circles, both secular and observant, and Fein argues for raising tikkun olam to the stature of a religious credo in the American Jewish community. What’s more, he presents tikkun olam specifically and explicitly as a call to progressive politics and social action: “While there are many ways to help mend the world, it is through public policy that we define what we mean by freedom and by justice,” Fein writes. “Ours is a communal commitment, and I know of no serious argument that permits an apolitical Judaism.”

Fein’s book, although flawed by a certain ambivalence and its own weighty marshaling of arguments and evidence, is a challenging and thorough discussion of virtually every question that now troubles self-identified and concerned Jews in the Diaspora--indeed, “Where Are We?” is literally a State of the Union message for the American Jewish community. And, in the end, it more of a work of hope than hopelessness, a manifesto rather than a jeremiad: “I do not accept that we are stuck with a joyless Judaism that comes as a reminder our own inadequacy, that we are condemned to Jewishness as only a circumstance, an accident, a condition,” Fein concludes. “I believe instead that we can find a path to Judaic achievement and success, that we can impose intention upon our condition, and find thereby sustaining--and redemptive--meaning.”