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This is the first installment in a five-part series.
Next, part 2 [January/February 2001], "God of Abraham—and Saint Paul," will focus on the pathbreaking "Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity" published last fall in the New York Times and the book of essays it occasioned, Christianity in Jewish Terms, edited by Tikva Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter Ochs, David Fox Sandmel, and Michael A. Signer.
Part 3 will consider medieval anti-Semitism and the Eucharist (via Miri Rubin's Gentile Tales).
Part 4 will discuss German Jews, Edith Stein in particular.
Part 5 will conclude the series with Messianic Judiaism.
Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry, by Samuel G. Freedman, Simon & Schuster, 397 pp.; $26
American Jews appear to have it pretty good. An observant Jew nominated for vice-president! But according to Samuel Freedman in his new book Jew vs. Jew, with the persecution Jews suffered in the past—the anti-Semitic slurs, the pogroms, the exclusion—came a sort of unity. Jews stuck together because they had to. Nowadays, they don't have to—and dissension is threatening the newly factious and fissiparous Jews at every turn. They are divided over Israel, over pluralism, over conversion. The Orthodox sneer at the Reform, and the Reform sneer back. Conservative congregations crack apart over what to call God: He or She. Parents are affronted when their rabbi won't perform their son's wedding because he's marrying someone whose mother isn't Jewish. It's a bad time for American Jewry.
Freedman's thickly researched, elegantly written book surveys these fissures among American Jews. The book is bracketed by two especially dramatic episodes. It opens with a snapshot of Janet and David Marcus, who recently moved from their long-time home in Great Neck, Long Island, "largely to escape their neighbors." The Marcuses belonged to a Reform temple, their sons celebrated their bar mitzvahs, and they were friendly with their neighbors, the Guilors. Until, that is, the Guilors became baalei teshuva—literally, masters of the return, non-observant Jews who become Orthodox. The Guilors put up a sukkah (hut) in their yard to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles, they invited other families over for Shabbat lunch, they proudly walked to shul (synagogue) on the Sabbath. The Marcuses were mystified, and repulsed. They moved—to escape.
Jew vs. Jew closes with a different group of Jews fighting about the ethos of their neighborhood. Beachwood, Ohio, had been largely Jewish since the 1960s, populated by bake-sale-baking, city-council-serving, PTA-fund-raising Reform and Conservative Jews. In the 1980s, more and more Orthodox Jews moved in, and, in 1997, the Orthodox petitioned the Beachwood Planning and Zoning Commission to alter some zoning rules so that they could build an Orthodox synagogue and day-school. Beachwood's non-Orthodox Jews fought them at every step, scared that they were losing control of their community, that the Beachwood they had built was being transformed into an unrecognizable ghetto where they would be made to feel guilty for eating at McDonald's and driving on Shabbat.
These struggles over the shape of a community serve as bookends to Jew vs. Jew, but do not, Freedman says, represent the only issues antagonizing American Jews. Jews are fiercely divided on the question of Israel. In a chapter set in Jacksonville, Florida, Freedman tells the horrifying story of Harry Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew who, in 1997, placed a bomb in a local Conservative synagogue because Shimon Perez, whose views on the peace process Shapiro found repugnant, came to speak. This, for Freedman, captures the whole problem. Klal Yisrael—the community of Israel—is no longer a value in a community where Jews can bomb one another's houses of worship over land and politics.
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