Jewish Centers and Peripheries: Europe Between America and Israel Fifty Years After World War II (review)

Book Reviews 161 within the book-her personal struggles and intellectual journey-is part of what anchors her ability to disturb to her equally important gift to provide hope for transformation. Riv-Ellen Prell American Studies University of Minnesota Jewish Centers and Peripheries: Europe Between America and Israel Fifty Years After World War II, edited by S. Han Troen. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999. 438 pp. $44.95. In the wake ofthe tragic destruction ofEuropean Jewry during the Holocaust, the center ofgravity ofJewish life shifted to the gradually ascendant American Jewish community and the newly created State of Israel. Once the fundamental reservoir of the Jewish people-83 percent ofworld Jewry lived in Europe at the tum ofthe twentieth century -and the principal incubator ofvibrant Jewish culture, Europe and its discrete Jewish nationalities were supplantedin numbers, cultural resources, socioeconomic power, and political authority by the two newer Jewish centers. Indeed, during this pasthalf-century the Jewish world and anything deemed significant in it has come to be viewed through a bipolar lens focused on America and Israel. This book implicitly-and the editor explicitly-argues for an amended perspective. Troen, in fact, suggests that today, when assessing vital Jewish communities , we need to broaden our line ofsight and take into account European Jews as well. Although containing only 17 percent of world Jewry-one million in the West, two million in the East-the continent has witnessed a reconstruction ofJewish communal life (to be sure, stronger in some places than in others), but one grounded more in secular/ethnic values of democracy, pluralism, and multiculturalism than in religious ideals. This rebirth and the specific nature ofthis rebirth, which Troen welcomes, merits study and reflection. Hence this book, which offers apotpourri ofessays describing the Jewish character, institutional structure, idiosyncratic history, style ofleadership, and future potential of select European Jewish communities, and how they interface with America and Israel. Written by a disparate collection ofscholars, lay leaders, community professionals, and a diplomat, the essays vary greatly in quality, intellectual agenda, methodological rigor, and analytic power. While some of the individual contributions are informative, judicious, and enjoyable, the volume as a whole suffers from a lack of organizational coherence and conceptual clarity, andprovides no compelling or overarching synthesis. Following an introduction by the editor, the book is divided into five parts. The first features two theoretical essays on the condition and prospects of diaspora Jewries by Israeli scholars YosefGorny and Gabriel Sheffer. The first piece, reflective ofstandard 162 SHOFAR Fa112000 Vol. 19, No.1 secular Zionist utopian and historiographic visions that place Israel at the center of world Jewish life, postulates the possible recreation ofEuropean Jewry on the basis of secular pluralism. It, however, reads like a cross between wishful thinking and pious prognostication. Sheffer's contribution is the more interesting but his argument more flawed. Based on the reality of ethno-national persistence of other diaspora groupsChinese , Aimenians, Greeks, Japanese, for example-he avers unequivocally that diaspora Jews need have no fear about survival. Not only does the essay therefore imply that the Jewish diaspora is simply analogous to that of other groups-it is not; contemporary Israelis and their second generation descendants living in the diaspora may be compared conceptually in his model, not Jews who have had no concrete personal contact with Israel-but its comparative methodology is applied to an absurd degree. One could rightfully infer from reading this essay that gathering data on diaspora Jews is pointless: all we need to do when discussing the question of Jewish continuity and survival is to study the Chinese or the Greeks; since they haven't disappeared, neither will Jews! The book's second section, with a somewhat contrived and arbitrary title, "Historical Documentation"-many articles in this volume after all have a historical orientation-features a very sketchy essay by Ralph Goldman on the activities of the Jewish JointDistributionCommittee in Europe between 1945 and 1995. It also includes a thoughtful analysis by Leon Volovici on the communal role and leadership style of former Romanian Chief Rabbi Moshe Rosen, who skillfully navigated between acquiescence to the Communist dictator Ceau~escu and promotion of Jewish group needs. Parts three and four...