Jews and the New American Scene - Hardcover

Lipset, Seymour Martin; Raab, Earl

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674424433 ISBN 13: 9780674424432

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1995

Synopsis

Will American Jews survive their success? Or will the United States' uniquely hospitable environment lead inexorably to their assimilation and loss of cultural identity? This is the conundrum that Seymour Lipset and Earl Raab explore in their wise and learned book about the American Jewish experience.

Jews, perhaps more than any ethnic or religious minority that has immigrated to these shores, have benefited from the country's openness, egalitarianism, and social heterogeneity. This unusually good fit, the authors argue, has as much to do with the exceptionalism of the Jewish people as with that of America. But acceptance for all ancestral groups has its downside: integration into the mainstream erodes their defining features, diluting the loyalties that sustain their members.

The authors vividly illustrate this paradox as it is experienced by American Jews today--in their high rates of intermarriage, their waning observance of religious rites, their extraordinary academic and professional success, their commitment to liberalism in domestic politics, and their steadfast defense of Israel. Yet Jews view these trends with a sense of foreboding: "We feel very comfortable in America--but anti-Semitism is a serious problem"; "We would be desolate if Israel were lost--but we don't feel as close to that country as we used to"; "More of our youth are seeking some serious form of Jewish affirmation and involvement--but more of them are slipping away from Jewish life." These are the contradictions tormenting American Jews as they struggle anew with the never-dying problem of Jewish continuity.

A graceful and immensely readable work, " Jews and the New American Scene" provides a remarkable range of scholarship, anecdote, and statistical research--the clearest, most up-to-date account available of the dilemma facing American Jews in their third century of citizenship.

About this title

About the Author:

Seymour Martin Lipset is Virginia E. Hazel and John T. Hazel, Jr., Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University, a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, and a Senior Scholar of the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Research.

From Publishers Weekly:

The authors of this often provocative study maintain that American Jews' "tribal cohesion"?their term for ethnic and religious solidarity?is being markedly eroded by assimilation and intermarriage. Within just two generations, they predict, the American Jewish community could lose half its present population, even as a significant minority of Jews intensifies its religious affiliation. Lipset, professor of public policy at George Mason University, and Raab, director of Brandeis's Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy, link American Jews' "tribal cohesion" to a "strong sense of communal foreboding" based on fears of resurgent anti-Semitism, and they argue that Israel's vulnerability to attack reminds American Jews of their own vestigial insecurity, thereby reinforcing group solidarity. American Jews' predominant support for political liberalism, in the authors' analysis, is explained by Jews' recognition that the chief ideology of American society?individualism, populism, egalitarianism, anti-statism, civic equality?has helped to protect Jews from persecution while opening opportunities for economic advancement to them.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0674424433
• ISBN 13: 9780674424432
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 247