JEW VS. JEW: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry.

• Author: Hammer, Joshua
• Position: Review

JEW VS. JEW: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry

By Samuel G. Freedman Simon & Schuster, $26.00

SAMUEL FREEDMAN BEGINS HIS new book with an ambitious thesis: a civil war has broken out among America's Jews. It's a struggle, says the former New York Times reporter and author of three previous books, that threatens to tear the religion apart. It's a battle to define the `true Jew'--one that pits secularists against fundamentalists, hawks against doves, Torah purists against Torah relativists. And it's only going to get worse.

Freedman spent three years traveling across the country reporting on the struggle from the front lines. At a half-dozen stops along the American trail, he finds conflicts where emotions run deep and neighbors turn against neighbors with astonishing vitriol. The result of his research, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of America, Jewry, is a fascinating study of a family splitting at the seams. It also leaves one wondering whether the author is presenting the Jewish landscape as it really exists.

As Freedman sees it, American Jewry's halcyon days came in the period around World War II, when the community was bound together by Yiddishkeit, a common identity rooted in language, culture, and ethnicity. The ultimate symbols of that period were the Jewish summer camps in the Catskill mountains where campers celebrated socialist values and sturdy Zionist pioneers. But in the post-war era, that consensus fell apart. Declining religious observance and intermarriage left the majority of Jews with only a few vestiges of their Jewish identity--what Freedman calls "Seinfeld and a schmear." At the same time, a resurgent Orthodox movement was drawing strength and becoming increasingly strident about what makes a true Jew. Meanwhile, Israeli politics were turning violent, culminating with the Rabin assassination in 1995. As a result, a growing number of fissures are cracking apart the Jewish landscape.

Freedman is a masterful reporter and storyteller, and he wrings drama out of a mosaic of disputes across America. He relates the saga of a decade-long attempt to build a massive synagogue and yeshiva complex...