Michael E. Staub. Torn
at
the
Roots.
The
Crisis
of
Jewish
Liberalism
in
Postwar
America. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2002. 386 pp.
Eli Lederhendler a1
a1 The Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
Jerusalem, Israel
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This is a uniquely informed and informative work
on the vicissitudes of the radical Jewish left in America, post-1945,
and the losing battle it has waged against more conservative impulses
within American Jewry. It is also notably uninformative
about the liberalism of American Jews that ostensibly forms the focal
point of its discussion. It ably documents a variety of topics: the
persistent intra-Jewish strife over political dissent, the overfree
use by both sides of Holocaust rhetoric, the penchant for Jewish
political discourse to indulge in citing so-called
“prophetic” and “Talmudic” models to
legitimize or delegitimize controversial contemporary positions, and
the recent demise of an organized, active Jewish left wing. In
contrast, the author displays little interest, if any, in survey data
on Jewish opinion, and he is similarly unconcerned with comparing
Jews and other ethnic or religious groups or otherwise
contextualizing the phenomena he discusses in general American
political terms. The result is a book that possesses many merits save
one: it is not a well-rounded or convincing treatment of postwar
American Jewish liberalism.
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