"A people still, whose common ties are gone; who,
mixed with every race, are lost in none."
—George Crabbe
That Americans of different ethnic or religious origins intermarry surprises no one—half of Japanese-Americans, more than half of all Catholics, nearly three-quarters of Italian-Americans, 84 percent of Polish-Americans, and so on. But where others declare a religious catastrophe, Jews call down heaven and earth in prognostications of gloom, counting the years to the last Jew in the United States, who supposedly will die in 2076. These two books, taking up the hyped demographic question, ask theology to address a problem of sociology. Because of their remarkable confusion of categories neither works terribly well, but while one is measured and well-crafted, the other spurts streams of words onto paper in an interminable flow of impressions and opinions. Elliott Abrams advocates a reversion to Judaism as the final solution to the American Jewish problem; Alan M. Dershowitz demands the rejection of Judaism as a religion to solve that same problem. Expert in what he knows from personal research and eschewing what he does not, Abrams has written a thoroughly professional study. Dershowitz, a hobbyist and parvenu, sets forth an intellectually vulgar and self-celebratory exercise in amateurism.
Abrams'...