THE VANISHING AMERICAN JEW.<i> By Alan M. Dershowitz</i> .<i> Little, Brown: 396 pp., $24.95</i>

Fresh from his courtroom victory as part of the defense team that won O.J. Simpson an acquittal on charges of having murdered two people, Alan Dershowitz, a distinguished Harvard Law School professor, now seeks to defend the Jews of America from the seductions of assimilation. He thinks he knows how to build Jewish identity in the 21st century.

In “The Vanishing American Jew,” Dershowitz well articulates the problem facing Jews in the most prosperous and tolerant nation history has yet seen. No longer faced with significant levels of anti-Semitism, Jews are free to prosper in American society; increasingly, they are choosing to do so by abandoning their Jewish identification, by intermarrying at an astonishing rate (one out of two marries out of the faith, according to the most reliable recent studies) and by thinking of themselves as people who happen to have a Jewish parent rather than having a deep connection to the history, religion and spiritual heritage of the Jewish people.

Dershowitz likes being Jewish and thinks other Jews ought to also. He argues against the notion that there is any particular idea or perspective that is “essential” to Judaism, whether a belief in God or a liberal cultural secularism. To be sure, he likes secularism but offers no suggestions about how secular Jews might develop a cultural apparatus that would enable them to pass on traditions from generation to generation. He insists that Judaism has no political inclinations and seems unaware of the long Jewish legal tradition that requires the community to take care of the poor (not leaving the impoverished among us to the tender mercies of the market) or the Jewish legal obligation to help others in need (a responsibility that is not merely a matter of individual choice, as he implies). Indeed, Dershowitz’s Judaism seems indistinguishable from good old-fashioned civil libertarianism.

Civil libertarianism may well be an important element in any society that we would wish to live in, but it doesn’t provide the sort of robust credo or value system people need to impart meaning and purpose to their lives. So, one must ask, what is supposed to motivate Jews to retain their Jewish identity? Dershowitz offers an answer steeped in a kind of inchoate and sentimental nationalism.

Loyalty to the Jewish people is, by this account, everything. But loyalty to whom? And to what? Loyalty to the notion of “the people” is, as history has repeatedly demonstrated, dangerous; it quickly leads to a weakening of the capacity to hear the pain of others. Most notoriously, when it comes to Israel, too often American Jews are instructed by much of their leadership to unite “in support of whichever government happens to be in power,” as Dershowitz bluntly observes. Endorsing this view, Dershowitz goes on to insist that “until we are prepared to put our bodies in harm’s way by making aliyah [immigrating to Israel], we should never try to dictate to a fellow democracy how it should balance the risks and benefits of different roads to peace and security.”

This is a criterion that is Stalinist in its implications, for it seeks to hold criticism hostage to a notion that would forever force honest and open discussion to take a backseat to narrow ideas of “national interest.” Such a constricted view of nationalism preempts rational debate. Dershowitz uses criteria he would never accept, say, with regard to criticizing the practices and policies of other countries where he is unwilling to put his body in harm’s way. Blind allegiance to one’s people is as deforming as the dogmatism of religious fundamentalism that Dershowitz elsewhere in his book rightly rejects.

What is missing from Dershowitz is any sense of God or spirituality at the center of any revivified Jewish life in America. To approach the world from the standpoint of the spiritual is to ask fundamental questions about how to respond to the world around us with awe and wonder and amazement. The failure to take such a project seriously is at the core of the problem. The desire (especially among young people) for transcendent meaning and purpose is a desire that Dershowitz fails to acknowledge. It is the central flaw of a book that often adequately describes the predicament of a people whose very success materially, has not been matched by an ability to help young Jews understand how the spiritual wisdom of Judaism could provide them with a framework of meaning to navigate through the sea of cynicism and selfishness that surrounds them.

Amid all Dershowitz’s moaning about the troubled Jewish future, he rarely bothers to ask why it is that so many young American Jews are not attracted to the Judaism of their parents. Had Dershowitz bothered to bestir himself from his Harvard study and journey across America and talk to younger Jews, he would probably have discovered that, in the community as a whole, spirituality is largely absent and a ubiquitous materialism and selfishness dominates much of Jewish life; official Jewish institutions are often controlled by the wealthy and professional fund-raisers, who value ordinary Jews only in so far as they can squeeze a kopeck out of them; an obsessive focus on past suffering banishes joy in today’s world; any dissent over Israeli state policies is greeted with charges of disloyalty and self-hatred; prejudice toward women and gays and African Americans is all too widespread; and prayer services and synagogues remain too often bound by cultural assumptions redolent of the 1950s (for example, that the basic unit of affiliation is being part of a traditional two-parent family or that the cost of membership should be based on the earning potential of only the upper strata of upper-middle-class incomes).

It would be anti-Semitic and mistaken to suggest that the Jewish world is more given to materialism and narcissism than is the rest of American society. It is not. It shares the same bottom-line mentality as the rest of the culture whose guiding creed is increasingly to look out for No. 1 and to maximize one’s own wealth and power, seemingly at the expense of everything else. What our children have been asking is a question that Dershowitz nowhere poses in his book: If the Jewish world has the same values and attitudes as the rest of American society, then why do we have to learn Hebrew and why do we have to marry only Jews? What’s so bad about assimilation if being Jewish is indistinguishable from the values and mores of the larger American society and culture?

The identity crisis in the Jewish American world mirrors the spiritual crisis in the larger American society. Just as many Americans moved to the right side of the political spectrum to find their spiritual and ethical needs addressed--and did so because too many liberals seemed oblivious to issues other than those of individual rights--so too are many Jews embracing forms of orthodoxy that provide an ethos of spirituality and community all too absent in Dershowitz’s secular and politically neutered Judaism.

The good news, apparently unknown to Dershowitz, is that one need no longer choose between a spiritually alive Judaism that is rooted in a repressive and sexist orthodoxy and a liberal Jewish identity that is secularist and without roots in the long history of Jewish spiritual life. A Jewish renewal movement, inspired in part by the work of Abraham Joshua Heschel and Zalman Schachter Shalomi, is spreading through all denominations of Judaism. It derives inspiration from aspects of Kabbalah, Hasidism, feminism, psychoanalysis, Eastern spiritual practices and even from segments of modern orthodoxy. It is providing a path for people who wish to be spiritually serious, committed to Jewish religious practices and still politically liberal and intellectually honest.

But spiritual experience isn’t Dershowitz’s concern. When he sits in synagogue on Yom Kippur after his heavy lifting during the Simpson trial, Dershowitz tells us in one of the more troubling passages in the book, he manages to come up with a reading of Jewish texts and traditions that justifies his role during the trial. One is forced to suspect that Dershowitz conveniently turns his religion into a comfort zone that all too easily sanctifies personal ambition and acts as a balm to pesky moral misgivings. It is, of course, this appropriation of Judaism to base careerism that disgusts so many younger Jews and makes problematic the future of an American Jewish world.

Dershowitz, alas, doesn’t have a clue about any of this. He simply recommends a form of Jewish secularism as a solution to the social tragedy of American Jewry. It isn’t good enough. His failure to understand the deeper roots of Jewish angst renders him unable to account for why his own son, Jamin, has entered what Dershowitz describes as an “interfaithless marriage.” Or why Jamin, who “understands a lot about me: what motivates me, what makes me happy and what makes me angry,” is nonetheless unable, Dershowitz reveals, to understand his own father’s sense of being Jewish. “My feelings toward my Jewishness have always been something of a mystery to my children, especially to Jamin,” he writes. Unfortunately, reading this disappointing book will bring his son no closer to such understanding.