Document Type
Review Essay
Abstract
[First paragraph]
A Portrait of the American Jewish Community seems at first a contemporary, informed attempt to answer the old-and, for Jews, imperative-question, "What is a Jew?" And in the leading chapter Norman Linzer does project the "changing nature of Jewish identity," with what he calls the postmodern "decline of dissonance," a euphemism for the experience of Jewish difference. The beginning is suggestive of the philosophical treatise on the collapse of modern Jewish identity formulated in such work as Rabbi Michael Goldberg's Why Should Jews Survive? (NY: Oxford, 1998). But the book's carefully detailed chapters on Jewish American federations, social service agencies, urban communities and outreach programs it is actually a resource for social scientists and others working in the areas of modern United States Jewry.
Repository Citation
Baum, Rob K.. "On Linzer, Schnall, and Chanes' A Portrait of the American Jewish Community." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 3, no. 4, 2003, pp. 1–5. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol3/iss4/9