Bernard Avishai | The Nation

The official Jewish leadership has shown itself rather more forgiving in the recent past. When the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared in 1974 that Jews owned the banks, the press and everything else, most Jewish leaders were at pains to smooth things over. In 1986, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was waited upon by a Jewish delegation, which thanked him fulsomely for something he did not and cannot give effective support in Moscow for human rights for Soviet Jewry, the gesture was dismissed as symbolic at best, cynical at worst.

The article focuses on the book "Exodus and Revolution," by Michael Walzer. The book is most welcome precisely because the question of what makes for American Jewish interests cannot be settled with elbows alone. The secular Yiddish world of Jewish immigrants is gone, and the notion that it can be replaced by vicarious Zionism is going fast. American Jews who persist in the spirit of Eastern European Orthodoxy face no serious crisis, but the rest, indeed the majority, have no clear sense of Judaism's future. Walzer insists that his book is not intended as instruction for any particular religious group in America.