A similar resentment gnaws at Betty Trachtenberg, Yale’s dean of students and the named defendant in the lawsuit of the Yale Five. When the freshmen insist that the university’s residential policy is repugnant to the Jewish faith, what does that imply about her own Judaism?

“I don’t like to think of myself as an enemy,” she says. “Here I am, a person who identified as a Jew… I didn’t want anyone to call into question who I was. When they filed this suit, it wasn’t against ‘Betty Trachten­berg, granddaughter of Velvel and Sophie,’ but that’s part of who I am. I honor the memory of my grandparents, and I feel that my memory has been compromised.”

Freedman writes about Wachs­berger and Trachtenberg with compassion and respect. But they are swimming, he says, against a tide they will not be able to overcome.

For in the struggle to define Jewish identity, to determine what “authentic” Judaism means, the secularists have been unable to sustain themselves. American culture is too decent, too comfortable, too embracing to withstand without the protective barrier of Jewish law and ritual. Intermarriage and assimilation are, after all, the American way. Why should the descendants of Jewish immigrants prove any more immune to the homogenizing melting pot than the descendants of Italian, German, or Japanese im­migrants? Ethnic pride, it turns out, does not keep Jews Jewish. Yiddish and Rosh Hashana greeting cards do not keep Jews Jewish. Not even Zionism and Holocaust remembrance and philanthropy keep Jews Jewish. The key to Jewish survival is what it has always been: Jewish practice and Jewish learning.

“Jewishness as ethnicity, as folk culture, as something separate and divisible from religion, is ceasing to exist in any meaningful way,” Freedman concludes. Kinderwelt is dead; Kiryas Joel blooms with health. “In the struggle for the soul of American Jewry, the Orthodox model has triumphed… The portion of American Jewry that will flourish in the future…is the portion that has accepted the central premise of Orthodoxy, that religion defines Jewish identity.”

In other words, there is no Jewish survival without faith and observance. Or, as R. Saadia Gaon wrote more than ten centuries ago, “The Jewish people are a nation only by virtue of their Tora.”

 

The most significant division in American Jewish life is not Orthodox-Conservative-Reform. It is the division, in Freedman’s words, “between a core of American Jewry oriented around religion and a periphery clinging to the eroding remnants of ethnicity.” To hark back to that long-ago editorial in The American Hebrew, it is the division between Jews who attend synagogue on a regular basis and those who show up only for the High Holidays. As one segment of the American Jewish community fades away through assimilation, another segment is turning with increased fervor and seriousness to the religion of its fathers. Hence the boom in intermarriageׁand the simultaneous boom in religious day schools.

The deepening emphasis on Tora and religious observance can be seen in every Jewish denomination. Among Orthodox Jews, there is an almost palpable tug toward the haredi lifestyle, with its emphasis on very modest dress, covered hair for married women, and the primacy of Tora study. In many modern Orthodox day schools, the great majority of graduating seniors spend one or two years in advanced Jewish study, usually in an Israeli yeshiva, before going on to college.

Orthodox Judaism has always laid great weight on Jewish learning. But with the skyrocketing popularity of daf yomi—organized Talmud study at the rate of one page per day—the number of Orthodox American Jews engaged in daily learning has reached unprecedented levels. When the most recent daf yomi cycle was completed in September 1997, 26,000 Orthodox Jews came to Madison Square Garden to mark the occasion; another 44,000 participated by satellite hookup.

Conservative and Reform Juda­ism are also being transformed by a greater embrace of traditional practice. In 1996, a leadership conference organized by the American Jewish Committee and drawn from every segment of American Jewry drafted “A Statement on the Jewish Future.” Of its five “fundamental values” for Jewish continuity, Tora was listed first, while tikun olam, the Jewish injunction to “repair the world” that has become a kind of mantra for liberal Jewish activism, was omitted.

In what Freedman calls “an obvious parallel” to daf yomi, the Conservative movement now urges its ad­herents to study a chapter of the Hebrew Bible every day. Conservative Judaism no longer permits intermarried Jews to teach in its Hebrew schools and will not enroll children who are not Jewish according to halacha—that is, who are born to non-Jewish mothers—in its Ramah summer camps.

Most remarkable of all, perhaps, is the swing toward Tora and traditional practice within Reform Judaism.

When the Reform rabbinate published its seminal Pittsburgh Platform in 1885, it went out of its way to underscore its rejection of halacha. The documentׁwhich would serve as the definitive statement of Reform belief for more than fifty years—did not even mention the word “Tora.” The key to Jewish practice, it said, should be “the views and habits of modern civilization.” Specifically excluded were “all the Mosaic Rabbinical Laws on diet, priestly purity, and dress,” which it described as “altogether foreign to our mental and spiritual state.”

For many years, this disdain for the old forms of Jewish observance was rigorously cultivated. Many Reform congregations forbade the wearing of kipot and banned Hebrew prayer. Some even celebrated the Sabbath on Sunday, and served oysters and shrimp at their annual dinner.

But by the late twentieth century, traditional practice was returning even to the Reform. Readers of Reform Judaism magazine were jolted when Rabbi Richard Levy, the president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), the main body of Reform clergy, appeared on the cover of the Winter 1998 issue wearing a talit and tefilin. In an interview inside, he argued forcefully for “a disciplined commitment to lifelong Tora study” and for achieving “kedusha [holiness]… through mitzvoth”ranging from keeping kosher to affixing a mezuza to every door in the house.

To be sure, the same issue included a rebuttal by Rabbi Robert Seltzer, a professor of history at Hunter College, who insisted that “past Jewish beliefs and practices do not automatically warrant our allegiance.” But even he felt it necessary to acknowledge “a longing for a religious experience that the classical [Reform] style may no longer satisfy.” When the CCAR returned to Pittsburgh for its convention the following year, it adopted a “Statement of Principles” that, as Freedman says, “reversed the branch’s historical contempt for ritual and religious law.” And in June of 2001, the CCAR went further. It voted to encourage traditional rituals in the conversion process, such as immersion in a mikveh—thereby overturning an 1893 resolution that had described conversion rituals as “unnecessary and meaningless.”

 

The rabbis of Eastern Europe turned out to be both right and wrong. For most Jews who emigrated, America would prove to be the treif medineh; many—perhaps most—of their descendants would not even consider themselves Jewish. But for a thriving core of religion-oriented Jews, America would become one of the great goldeneh medines of history. Observant Jews feared, in Freedman’s formulation,“that the new land would undermine their faith. Instead, we see now, it undermined faithlessness.”

Six weeks before he died in 1994, Irving Howe, the literary critic and historian, conceded that the secular Judaism he had so prized was doomed.

Jew vs. Jew is timely and well-written, unfailingly interesting and often moving. It is not only the kind of work that fuels passionate conver­sation, it is one that fuels it among people who might otherwise think they have nothing to say to each other. Most noteworthy of all, perhaps, is its tone: Freedman treats every participant in the dramas he chronicles with courtesy and fairness. Would that all of us who write and talk about our fellow Jews did likewise.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.