Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment

Doomsday predictions that American Jews are on the verge of disappearing via assimilation are fallacious, declares Goldberg, in part because a large minority of Jews are becoming more observant, in part because even weakly affiliated Jews nevertheless still identify with a common cultural heritage and shared destiny. In a trenchant, provocative probe of American Jewish power politics, Goldberg, New York-based contributing editor for the Israeli news magazine Jerusalem Report, challenges conventional wisdom on many fronts. Refuting critiques by Noam Chomsky, Paul Findley, George Ball and others who contend that the clout of the American Jewish lobby created the U.S.-Israel alliance, he argues instead that the forging of this alliance under Nixon--a Republican president elected with almost no Jewish backing--thrust American Jewry's political establishment onto the international stage, linking liberal Jews in an uneasy alliance with mostly gentile Cold Warriors. Rejecting claims of a Jewish shift to the right, Goldberg marshals statistics to demonstrate that American Jews remain overwhelmingly Democratic and liberal, even though neoconservative, Zionist and Orthodox ""New Jews"" who gained prominence after the 1967 Six-Day War have come to be identified in the popular mind as the leadership of the American Jewish community. Whether he is discussing FDR's response to the fate of European Jewry or contemporary Jews' self-image of vulnerability, Goldberg forces one to rethink individual positions. (Nov.)