About this Book

Hailed by Publishers Weekly as "an insightful and provocative mix of analysis and history", this indispensable book by scholar and writer Barry Rubin, author of many works on the Middle East, seeks to solve the enduring riddle of Jewish assimilation, its temptations and traps. His book is a lively examination of the perennial anxiety of many Jews whose efforts to disappear into the majority culture while insisting on a unique identity could arguably be said to define what it is to be a Jew. The seductions of WASP culture, for example, and the longings among some Jews to embrace it form an enduringly painful and often funny theme in the books of such Jewish-American writers as Philip Roth and the films of such directors as Woody Allen. In his film Stardust Memories, Allen summed up the dilemma of assimilation in an unforgettable scene. Two trains stand on parallel tracks. The passengers on one are anguished, funny-looking, swarthy people - they include Allen himself. On the other train, happy, well-dressed, taller, light-haired people are partying. Tempted by a beautiful blonde (played by Sharon Stone in one of her first screen appearances), Allen desperately and unsuccessfully tries to jump onto the second train. Of course, Auschwitz casts its palpable shadow over the probable fate of those on the first train. The subject of the Jews is nearly inescapable, though much of it concerns those escaping being Jews. How could it be otherwise with a highly literate, obsessively self-reflective people whose social and intellectual role far exceeds its numbers, whose survival and persecution have been so dramatic, and whose members are so unique, but - paradoxically - somehow seem to embody thehuman condition. And the issue of assimilation is always present - implicitly or explicitly, as subject or basis - in an outpouring of books, films, music, and plays by and about Jews. And yet, curiously, there is no book remotely like Assimilation and Its Discontents, a work that traces the trajectory of modern Jewish assimilation from the Napoleonic reforms in the early nineteenth century - which, for the first time, permitted Jews to truly emerge from their European ghettos - to the angst so well portrayed in contemporary novels as well as displayed in the grim statistics of intermarriage (about 50 percent of all Jews marry non-Jews). This is a book about how Jews changed themselves in order to join - even to lead - modern society and how they altered the society they entered. America's cultural and intellectual life owe a very great deal to this agonizing transition. Barry Rubin thoughtfully recounts how the Jewish effort to break out of the ghetto unleashed three revolutions: first, a movement to redefine what it meant to be Jewish at all; second, the Jewish contribution to movements of social change; and third, the Jewish shaping of today's dominant liberal humanist culture.