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2. This aggressive secularism has resulted in a demographic catastrophe. The substitute religions, liberalism and the rest, were intended to secure the future of American Jews in safety and liberty. Whether they helped at all can be debated, but one thing is clear: they have proved increasingly powerless to attract the commitment of young American Jews. Presented with the argument that they should identify themselves with their people because Israel needs financial support (increasingly it doesn't), or to fight anti-Semitism (barely in evidence in America), or to deny Hitler a posthumous victory (what he failed to do with his ovens may be accomplished by assimilation and intermarriage), young Jews shrug. In the appalling stories told by "survivors," a word typically used without a modifier as if to say survivors of calamities other than the Holocaust aren't worth mentioning, they see no reason to alter their plans to marry whomever they fall in love with, Jewish or not.
No one should have been surprised by the 1990 statistic that more than half of Jews who get married now marry non-Jews. Nor by the fact, also cited by Abrams, that "20 per cent of the 'core' Jewish population has left the Jewish religion." Their parents never convinced them—probably never even hinted—that in the question of Jewish identity there is anything particularly urgent at stake. Abrams is the first writer to put this statistical and sociological argument on record at book length, and he has done so with great clarity and force. No wonder Jews are talking about his work, and not only talking. They are agreeing, which Jews rarely do about anything. Whether they will act on the remedy he offers is another matter.
3. To revive the prospects of American Jews, writes Abrams, the community must give up its false gods and return to—Judaism:
For what is required in American Jewry now is a change in the publicly acknowledged goals and standards of the community. It would be a far cry from the present attitude of disdain, or at best indifference, that is so often directed at those Jews who reject the community's assimilationist norms. It would make the financing of religious education a central community activity, so that no Jewish family that seeks a religious education for its children is prevented by the issue of costs. It would mean making the link to Israel far less a matter of financial support, and far more one of personal contact and commitment. It would mean bridging the gap between the lay organizations—above all, the Federations—and the community's religious institutions—its day schools and its synagogues. …
But far more important than the necessary changes in budget and programs is the change in understanding. The new understanding would not be that Orthodoxy is better than the Conservative or Reform movements, but rather that the fundamental proposition on which the Orthodox operate is in fact correct: Judaism, not Jewishness, must be the heart of a Jew's life and of the community's life.
Abrams is calling for a religious revival of far greater scope than the one that has been going on for several decades now, namely, the return of tens of thousands of secular Jews to the faith in Torah that their great-grandparents rejected. Tens of thousands aren't enough. Abrams rightly argues that without a much broader return to traditional Judaism, American Jewry will continue to shrink, leaving only an Orthodox remnant, passionate but small.
It's in the nature of his book, however, that it can only point the way to such a revival. It will not incite one.
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