The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community in America

Two outstanding scholars with well-established and extensively demonstrated expertise on the American Jewish community present this important study of the baby boomers who constitute a majority of contemporary American Jewry. Eisen (a religion professor at Stanford) and Cohen (a sociology professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem) conducted 60 in-depth interviews and 1,005 mail surveys with individual American Jews, producing a picture of the ""moderate affiliated Jews who make up the bulk of American Jewry."" Their findings have significant implications for the future: the Jews they studied have turned inward, demonstrating decreasing attachment to Israel and minimal participation in the extensive panoply of Jewish organizations. This preoccupation with self and family has made observance of the Jewish holidays the primary expression of Jewish identification, with synagogue affiliation a rather distant second. The authors express apprehension about the future of the American Jewish community, placing the burden for its survival on the capacity of communal functionaries to be adroitly sensitive to the community's changing needs and concerns. Cohen and Eisen's work offers valuable confirmation that the trend toward religious individualism, as observed by Robert Bellah in Habits of the Heart and Wade Clark Roof in A Generation of Seekers, has also taken root in the Jewish community. Unfortunately, this study's excessive academic jargon will prevent it from gaining the wide general readership of Bellah or Roof. (Nov.)