Forward.com

The title of the book says it all: “The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century”. WHICH CENTURY? The American Jewish community has severe problems today. In the period from 1970 to 2000, the number of people who identify as Jews in America decreased by something like a third, the same percentage of decrease in the number of Jews as Hitler achieved in worldwide Jewry in the Holocaust. Tell me, why should we pay ANY attention to the turn of the last century? We better start focusing on an honest appraisal of our situation today and what we need to do about it: Birthright America, scholarly forays into our romanticized past, breast beating over our suffering in the Holocaust and in modern day Israel, parochial pride in the fiction of the coming Orthodx hegemony, etc., etc. are obviously not working. I know it's comforting to take these sentimental looks, but in the end it's counterproductive. Start focusing on what it would take for our grandchildren to really believe that Judaism has some value for them, rather than for us. Without that honesty, we will shrink and shrink in numbers. Maybe some people will be ok with the shrinking as long as they can kvetch about the past. I think the future is much more important.

Mr Mollen - Actually, this sentimental viewing into a romanticized Jewish past might hold the clue as to what kind of Jewish future is now needed in America. These books about Yiddish, for example, present a Jewish world that was clearly distinctive, absolutely different than the cultural reality of others. If American Jews enjoy reading about such times, perhaps distinctiveness is that which is lacking in their lives. The desire to be the same as others is what typified the Jewish experience in America. The abandonment of our own language was essentially an ideology. Most changed their distinctively Jewish names (every Moishe because a Maurice or a Max; every Chayim became a Harry). Most importantly, their core education was totally non-Jewish, and until this very day most American Jews receive very little formal and professional Jewish instruction. The result is that the difference between a Jew and another American is quite blurry, but the difference between an American Jew and another Jew in the world is more than obvious. There has to be a willingness to return to a distinctively different identity; there has to be a willingness to adopt a cultural expressiveness that is not merely another shade of the American experience. A return to Jewish language literacy as a tool for creating a distinctively Jewish culture in the future is more than urgent. Unfortunately, no one is listening. It's much easier to send children on ten day trips to Israel than it is to provide quality education that will enable graduates to open up a Hebrew book or to create their own original Jewish poetry.