Who Is the American Jew?

Surveying the state of 21st-century American Judaism, Joshua Leifer finds a similar, sad pile of cultural detritus. “What is left of American Jewish culture has lost its distinctiveness and its bite, devolved into mere kitsch and cliché: no more Saul Bellow novels, only Seth Rogen movies.” His “Tablets Shattered” argues that American Jewry is, if not quite extinct, on its way out. He quotes the novelist Herman Wouk: “There will be no death camps in the United States. The threat of Jewish oblivion is different. It is the threat of pleasantly vanishing down a broad highway at the wheel of a high-powered station wagon, with the golf clubs in the back.”