The Vanishing Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century.

• Author: Polner, Murray

There is a specter hovering over mainstream American Jewish groups. It's called "Jewish continuity," an overheated reaction referring to the dread that the number of American Jews may sharply decline in the next century. Yet if true, and only if true, it is a predicament born of living in an open society which fosters freedom of choice. Public anti-Semitism is by and large a thing of the past. Indeed, never before have so many Jews been so secure, accepted, and successful. The United States -- and certainly not Israel -- has become our goldene medina, our golden, promised land.

Then why so much anxiety about whether Jewish women and men can be moved enough to remain Jewish, and agree to marry other Jews, and pass on the faith to their children and they to theirs? Is it possible that Israel and the collective memorialization of the Holocaust can no longer hold us together? That more positive, more Judaic values are required?

These two contentious and tendentious books by writers not known to be diffident about speaking their minds might never have appeared had not the National Jewish Population Study announced in 1990 that between 1985-1990, 52 percent of Jews were intermarried (though the actual figure may be six to 12 percentage points less). This "more than half" figure was a bombshell, especially since as late as the mid-'60s the rate was less than 10 percent. If so many Jews were marrying out, and their children only half-Jews, the reasoning went, might not the bulk of non-Orthodox Jews gradually fade away and "assimilate," abandoning a priceless 5,000-year-old heritage to a provincial and sectarian Orthodox remnant? Was a "demographic disaster" (as Elliot Abrams puts it) really awaiting us? Are we (as Dershowitz's title says) "vanishing"?

Still, skeptics abound. American Jews have neither converted in any significant number nor assimilated. Historian Gerald Sorin, in his new book Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America, makes an excellent case that we have instead acculturated. Assimilation, Sorin reminds us, means essentially the extinction of ethnic or religious singularity, whereas the bulk of American Jews have and may continue to undergo acculturation: "accommodation to the larger society without total loss of traditional cultural traits." Here in the U.S. they built "a religiously authenticated Jewish American ethnic identity around philanthropy, Israelism, political liberalism and the search for social justice as...