Volume 45, Number 13 · August 13, 1998
How Odd of God
By Garry Wills
Jews: The Essence and Character of a People
by Arthur Hertzberg, by Aron Hirt-Manheimer
HarperSanFrancisco, 294 pp., $25.00
Portrait of American Jews: The Last Half of the Twentieth Century
by Samuel C. Heilman
University of Washington Press, 190 pp., $17.95 (paper)
The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century Schuster.
by Alan M. Dershowitz
Little, Brown, to be published in paperback in August by Simon and, 395 pp., $24.95
In 1990, according to the National Jewish Population Survey, there were 4.2 million Jews in America (fewer than Hitler killed in Europe), and that number is shrinking. Even if one adds the 1.1 million people who have at least one Jewish parent but no longer identify themselves as part of any Jewish community, the number of Americans who are Jews is barely over 2 percent, down from 4 percent in 1937. Things are even worse in Europe, where there are under 2 million Jews (down from 10 million in 1939), and some of those are leaving.[2] Bernard Wasserstein, a Fellow of St. Cross College, Oxford, writes in Vanishing Diaspora:
Review, 3002 words
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