Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America. - book reviews

Elliott Abrams, New York: The Free Press, 1997. 237pp. $25.00 (cloth).

Since the National Jewish Population Study of 1990 revealed high rates of intermarriage and assimilation, the issue of the survival of Jewry in the United States, has been, quite properly, one about which there has been intense reflection, discussion, and action within the American Jewish community. This serviceably written book by the president of the conservative think tank, The Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a worthwhile contribution to the debate. Abrams's thesis is that the only way for Jewry to survive in the U.S. is through a renewed emphasis on the Jewish religion. He further argues that the conscious strategy of American Jewish leadership, ever since the arrival of the German Jews in the nineteenth century, has been to work for the secularization of the greater society and the reformation, actually minimalization, of the more distinctive traits of Jewish religion. By following this two-pronged strategy, it was thought, Jews would only be minimally different from their fellow citizens and thus be more able to live and prosper in the U.S. with little fear of anti-semitism. Though Abrams does not hold this historical move in contempt and admits its success, he maintains that it is not only unnecessary now but threatens the existence of the U.S. Jewish community.

For one thing, anti-semitism has become a pretty marginal phenomenon and can be expected to further decline. Abrams cites surveys to show this and points to the very fact that many Christians are quite willing to marry Jews. It indeed seems beyond doubt that anti-semitism has been substantially reduced in the post-Second World War U.S. Although Abrams is aware that the secularization process has played a role in this- as the American Jewish leadership foresaw- he spends much time discussing changes in the official positions and educational materials of the various Christian denominations without acknowledging that these changes are, in all likelihood, in part due to the secularistic mindset that has affected even many religious people. Certainly, positive changes in the Christian world's view of the Jewish People and its religion should be noted and welcomed, but Abrams's emphasis on conscious decisions is a weakness that goes beyond the book's analysis of anti-semitism and extends to its consideration of secularization. While his discussion of the Jewish elite's decisions for secularization of U.S. society and reform of the Jewish religion is valuable, the West (including the Jews of the West) didn't become secular merely because of conscious choices. Choices are important but so are large scale historical processes which provide the contexts in which individual choices are made. Secularization, the child of Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, has been a sea change in human affairs.

Surely religion arises, in part, because of the desire of homo sapiens for supernatural assistance in matters beyond their control. The industrial and scientific revolutions, by increasing human power and control over nature, have helped to weaken the psychological hold of religion. If one is ill, one may still pray or wear an amulet, but one also often has good grounds to hope for successful scientific medical treatment. Furthermore, the titanic shift of the population from agriculture to industrial and postindustrial work in cities and suburbs means that people in the West generally do not rely directly on nature for their livelihood and well-being nearly as much as they once did and so are less obviously vulnerable to its vagaries. Of course, there are still many phenomena about which we can do little or nothing at all, such as natural disasters, unrequited love, and, above all, death. Thus the process of secularization, while weakening religion and making it less pervasive and central in the lives of Western societies and of most individuals in them, neither destroys it nor generates widespread hostility to it, per se. Thoroughgoing secularist ideology remains the position of a relative few.

Abrams examines and dismisses the nonhalachic substitutes of Jewish ethnicity, concentration on the Shoah, pursuit of social justice, and attachment to the State of Israel as unable to preserve the Jewish people in the U.S., though he sees each having its place within the Jewish religious context. The statistics prove his case: rates of intermarriage and disappearance through assimilation are significantly lower amongst those raised in religiously observant Jewish families. Yet, while non- or minimally religious ways of Jewish life in the U.S. have proved weakly resistant to assimilation, Orthodox Judaism is also a failed alternative in that it has shown itself thus far incapable of attracting the Jewish masses of the U.S. and winning them to a life lived according to halacha. The conundrum is that a "secular" Jewish way of life- one not necessarily antireligious or a-religious but in which religion plays no large role - appeals to the vast majority of American Jews but is increasingly unsuccessful at preventing intermarriage and assimilation, while orthodoxy, though relatively successful in preserving its members as part of the Jewish people, has little appeal to most of U.S. Jewry. Abrams realizes that most contemporary Western people cannot pretend that they are premodern and nonsecular, nor, probably, would they want to if they could; for despite his repeated calls for faith, at the end he calls, not for a return to orthodoxy but for Jews to increase their level of personal observance, more Jewish education (especially day schools), and more visits (especially by adolescents) to the Land of Israel. These are sensible suggestions but the question inevitably arises: at what level of religious observance, combined with such aspects of Jewish life as support for the State of Israel, will substantial reductions in intermarriage and assimilation occur, and how willing would American Jews be to increase their observance to that level in order to improve the chances of their children and grandchildren being loyal Jews?