Jewish Identity in Crisis

Two books that take ona sense of growing division and uncertainty among American Jews.

THERE IS NO shortage of prophets among American Jews, and lately they declare the end of a golden age. Elliott Abrams agrees. In "If You Will It," he presents a plan to rebuild the American Jewish community because today he finds it in ruins.

Mr. Abrams is a Republican foreign policy expert and chairman of the Tikvah Fund, a Jewish foundation. He leads with the facts, which are sobering. A 2020 Pew Research study finds that a third of Americans raised Jewish, or raised by a Jewish parent, are not Jewish today. Pew calls this subset, composed of 2.8 million adults, Americans "of Jewish background." Most call themselves Christian. Only half of the 2.4 million U.S. children living with a Jewish parent are raised exclusively in the Jewish religion.

"These numbers tell a tale of loss, not of vitality," Mr. Abrams writes.

Maybe it's the triumph of the melting pot, but we shouldn't be surprised when such Jews report diminishing Jewish practice, belonging and care for Israel.

"A sense of peoplehood," he concludes, "isn't a genetic inheritance and can beis being-sloughed off by hundreds of thousands of American Jews." Israel is rarely thrust aside on its own. "That state is the center of world Jewish life," Mr. Abrams writes, "and those who try to distance themselves from it and from a sense of Jewish peoplehood, are unlikely to remain Jews for many generations."

Weakening Jewish support for Israel is a symptom: "The underlying problem is that a striking proportion of American Jews have very weak feelings about being part of the Jewish people in any way at all." Refreshingly, Mr. Abrams is undaunted.

"We know what works," he ventures: Jewish education, summer camps and time in Israel. The key is immersion-allowing a child "to live as a Jew among Jews" in the way past generations did. Peoplehood, the book's key word, can't be built on the quick or the cheap. Mr. Abrams focuses on pragmatic ways to cultivate it.