The ill-conceived discharge was lobbed in an audaciously titled essay, "How to Save American Jews," by three professors from three different academic institutions. Jack Wertheimer, the lead author, is a historian at the Jewish Theological Seminary; Charles Liebman is from Bar Ilan University; Steven M. Cohen is from the Hebrew University. The last two are Americans who have made aliyah.

The title of their essay implies that America's Jews--living at the pinnacle of Jewish well-being, social acceptance, and power--are somehow in danger and need saving. That implication is an insult to both the achievements of America's Jews and to America. The title also implies that the authors possess a strategy for saving those most at risk. In fact, the authors are bent on doing the opposite. Rather than developing a strategy for saving anyone or anything, they devote the bulk of their essay to damning the organized American Jewish community's effort to reach the unaffiliated and the intermarried amongst our people.

JOI's 1993 survey of Jewish leadership, which included a representative sample of every branch of American Jewry, found that efforts to reach out to the intermarried in particular enjoyed the highest degree of consensus among all segments.

Yet, in complete disregard for what is of real concern to the great majority of committed American Jews, the authors contend that reaching out to "peripheral or fringe Jews" (they clearly do not mean Jews with tzitziyot fringes) and interfaith couples tends to "denude Jewishness of its particularity." Outreach, they say, caters "to the lowest common denominator...Trying to make potential converts feel comfortable...drastically subverts the tribal nature of the Jewish identity...Programs targeted at the uncommitted are virtually designed to undercut the Jewish values of the committed."

Having replaced serious analysis with epithets, the authors reach a predictable conclusion. They claim that "to ensure Jewish continuity for the next generation...the place to begin is in those sectors of the community that are already engaged to a greater or lesser extent, enhancing the level of their commitment." The fact is that the authors mean to begin with the most committed, and they also mean to stop with the most committed. The others simply do not matter to the three would-be-saviors of America's Jews.

"After all," they argue, "the two most engaged categories (see note) constitute together 44 percent of American Jews, and this percentage has not been declining by age. These are the core of the future community; surely they should be nurtured accordingly." Who should nurture them? The uncommitted? And, if that is not a realistic prospect, then what exactly is the appeal of the essay? Is it simply a plea that the committed nurture themselves alone?

Amazingly, the authors fail to see the absurdity of their argument . If this core group has held as steady as they proclaim, then why does it need "saving" now? What do they need to be "saved" from? And, how are those in this precious core better off by dismissing the other 56 percent of America's Jews?

If the "core" group doesn't need saving, and "peripheral" or "fringe" Jews are not, in the authors' judgement, worth or worthy of saving, then what exactly is being proposed under the guise of this essay?

Ultimately the Commentary essay is not about "how to save American Jews." Rather, it is about how to negate the worth of the majority of America's Jews in favor of the minority. This view is associated historically with the discredited position of classical Zionism on the future of Diaspora Jewry in general.

Sh'liat ha'Golah (negation of the Diaspora) is one of the key elements of Zionist philosophy. Whether as a result of anti-Semitism or assimilation, classical Zionists were convinced that Diaspora Jewry was doomed to extinction. At least for that reason, Zionists were convinced through the darker years of the Holocaust, for example, that there was little worth doing for European Jewry. And they did little.

What little was done, they reasoned, should be one for the ideologically convinced, and those who could be depended upon to build the State of Israel. Although modern Israeli realpolitik has abandoned or muted Zionism's traditional disdain for the Diaspora, the retrograde sentiment is apparently alive and well in the minds of American olim and fellow travellers, who seem to need to deny the reality of creative energies in American Jewry to justify their own existential choices.

In their book, Two Worlds of Judaism, (Yale University Press, 1990) Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen argue that Israeli and American Judaism are growing radically apart--and it is the former that tends to be more authentic, more particular, and more likely to survive in the future. The book suggests that American Judaism is doomed to extinction as a result of its growing universalism and accommodation to a pluralist-syncretist culture. The Commentary essay merely echoes more loudly than the earlier book the "doom of the Diaspora" theme of classical Zionist thought.

Surprisingly, at least one of the essay's authors, Steven M. Cohen, is also author of a major study of outreach programs for the Nathan Cummings Foundation (August 1992)--a fact conveniently left unmentioned in the Commentary piece. In that study he urged support for "alternative Judaic movements." Moreover he wrote, "It is easy to understand how spiritually oriented Jews, feminists, and environmental activists may find most conventional Jewish communities unappealing. For this reason (if not for the intrinsic values of those activities) such programs are worthy of continued support."

Elsewhere in the same report Cohen reviewed a host of outreach programs in synagogues, JCCs, and other communal institutions. He wrote: "such programs may be important as pilot projects to demonstrate the value of new approaches to the mixed married and under-involved...Outreach practice contains within it a valuable critique of conventional Jewish institutions...Perhaps most critically, outreach practice offers some hope to a Jewish communal world and depressed by what it views as alarming rates of intermarriage and disaffiliation."

Ignoring his own earlier work, Cohen and the other two would-be "saviors" of American Jewry asks to place our historical bet on those who they regard as the current equivalent of the "saving remnant"--the religiously committed. Instead of consigning all of Diaspora Jewry to extinction, as classical Zionism has done, Wertheimer, Liebman and Cohen are willing to allow for the viability of the 44 percent "core" group" That they are willing to write off the other 56 percent of America's Jews is none-the-less appalling.

Whether those committed to the Zionist future could have done more fifty years ago to save the European Jews from the ravages of the Holocaust is for historians to ponder. But, for those committed to the creative and evolving Jewish civilization in America, the apocalyptic perspective on our future can only serve as an irritating distraction.

That Zionism's failed analysis of Jewish history should serve as an intellectual force in the thinking of two Jewish professors (Liebman and Cohen) who chose to make aliyah and an historian of German Jewry (Wertheimer) is neither surprising nor objectionable. What is deeply disturbing is that such philosophical convictions might be transmuted into a program for American Jewry that could well become a nihilistic self-fulfilling prophecy.