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You could safely bet the price of this book—in fact, the price of several copies—that over the recent Jewish high holy days no cultural or political topic provided the hook for as many rabbinical sermons as Elliott Abrams's Faith and Fear. In the Jewish community, one hears references to it constantly. That is good news, because the book is not only important for what it says, but also for what it doesn't say.

The argument here can be condensed to three points:

1. The orientation of the official Jewish community—its most powerful leaders and the organizations they run—is driven fundamentally by a fear of and flight from Judaism. Abrams, who is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, would have done well to have provided a definition of what he believes authentic Judaism is. There are several contenders for the title, ranging from the Reform Movement—which rejects the main tenets of the Judaism that existed for three millennia before anyone heard of Reform—to Orthodox Judaism, which upholds those tenets (i.e., an eternally valid Torah, given to Moses at Sinai along with an oral tradition explaining it). Yet, despite this omission, it's clear he means that the official representatives of the community fear some version of the religion as defined by ancient tradition.

Otherwise, how to explain the two most striking features of contemporary Jewish leadership? The first is antireligious agitating, such as the persistent demands for legislative and judicial action to curb the influence of faith in American life and the general atmosphere of anti-Christian suspicion found in statements like the Anti-Defamation League's notorious attack on the Christian Right. Both are typically explained as a reaction to Christian anti-Semitism, present and potential. Yet Abrams painstakingly documents the evolution of Catholic, mainline Protestant, and evangelical thinking in the direction of acceptance verging on embrace of Jews and Judaism.

In fact, it isn't so much that Jewish leaders fear Christianity per se. Liberal Jewish groups insist equally on striking at Jewish religious excursions into the public square, including patently milquetoast ones like a Reform rabbi's attempt to read a prayer at a high-school commencement. (A secular Jewish girl in Rhode Island, for whom "it was too much to ask … [that she] stand quietly or sit silently when others prayed," brought that case, which ended up in the Supreme Court.)

Combine this with the other striking fact about American Jewish life—the obsessive search for substitute religions, whether Zionism, liberalism, ethnic Jewishness, Holocaust veneration, or the preoccupation with phantom anti-Semitism—and you begin to get the picture. Abrams calls it "the Jews' widespread anxiety about Judaism."

One might add that this anxiety was predictable. Judaism imposes prodigious demands on all aspects of the Jew's everyday life. It is a burden King David regarded as joyous (see Ps. 19:9); but many other Jews, from Saint Paul to Marx and Freud to the current leader of the Reform Movement, have felt otherwise. As long as there have been Jews, factions among our people have sought methods of escape. Pious Christians, who observe more of the strictures of Judaism than many Jews do, excite Jewish resentment because they remind us of the commitment to biblical faith that so many of us have given up. It's a common human response to dislike people who make you feel guilty.

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