SPARSE AT SEDER?

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

As millions of Jewish families hold Passover Seders this week, in many households the ritual celebration of deliverance from Egypt will be followed by talk of a new predicament. Prompted partly by a debate between two pugnacious lawyer-authors--and partly by dire statistics, which, over years, have become as rote as the Passover Haggadah--a generation will look at its children and speculate whether its grandchildren will be Jews at all.

Alan Dershowitz's book, The Vanishing American Jew (Little, Brown; 395 pages; $24.95), has been out only a month, but its title describes a crisis long under way. For decades, while their opportunities and status soared, Jews uneasily watched the rate at which their children married outside the faith do likewise. Unease turned to alarm in 1990, when the National Jewish Population Survey announced that the intermarriage rate had reached 52%. A last forlorn fantasy--that all those Gentile spouses would eventually become Jews--was punctured by a meager 9% conversion rate. In fact, 54% of the children in all Jewish households are not being raised as Jews. The result, often feared but never quite in this context: "Saving an unforeseen reversal of current trends, it appears...that the history of the Jews as we have known it and them is probably approaching the end."

That citation, from historian Norman Cantor, appears in Dershowitz's book; but the contrarian defense lawyer takes issue with its grim tone. Intermarriage, he argues, is the inevitable consequence of long-sought success and social acceptance. Rather than trying to forbid it, American Jews must abandon an outmoded self-image as persecuted and mine their traditions for a powerful new identity that children and grandchildren will embrace. Somewhat eccentrically, he notes that the new identity need not include a religious aspect.

Dershowitz's conclusions were dubbed "lame" in a review by Elliott Abrams, a think-tank head and former Assistant Secretary of State whose own book on assimilation, Faith or Fear (Free Press; 256 pages; $25), is due in June. Abrams too detects a distortion in American Jewish self-image: he thinks the elite, eager to fit in, traded religious identity for the less off-putting "faith" of secular liberalism, and the price is outmarriage. "Jewishness without Judaism," he insists, "cannot be transmitted from generation to generation."

Abrams' conclusion that Jews should unite with Evangelical Christians to chip at the wall between church and state seems as contestable as Dershowitz's pro-secularism. But the issue of whether to respond to intermarriage by widening "outreach" to Gentiles or narrowing more closely on faith fuels a simmering debate within Judaism's major branches. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the pre-eminent voice of America's liberal Reform movement, detects "a degree of [religious] involvement that far transcends anything we've seen before." Yet it was Reform that in 1983 felt it necessary to assert that Jewish lineage, which traditionally passes through the mother, could be transmitted patrilineally as well--thereby admitting the children of Gentile mother-Jewish father intermarriages. And Reform has gone further: 88% of its temples allow non-Jews as members, and 27% even accept them as officers. For a correlative, imagine Presbyterians naming an unconverted Jew an elder.

Not everyone is pleased. Ismar Schorsch, a key leader of America's large Conservative movement, says he can accept some Jews "slipping out of the community and coming back when their existential needs require them." But he rejects patrilinearity, and Conservative thinkers have suggested a communal triage that would concentrate on a congregation's observant "core" rather than chasing those on the "periphery." Meanwhile, Rabbi David Hollander, a leader of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, a vocal minority group within the Orthodox movement (the smallest and most traditional American branch), fumes: "In a generation or two, we won't know who is and who is not a Jew. " The wrangle, never dormant, has been inflamed recently by Israeli religious politics and a statement by Hollander's rump group that "Reform and Conservative are not Judaism at all."

Such poisoned words obscure the fact that there is an underutilized option offensive to none of the parties: improved education. A group called the National Jewish Outreach Program has tutored more than 100,000 marginally Jewish adults. But the best hope may lie in serving youth. The Orthodox have always had an extensive system of Yeshiva day schools; Reform and Conservative are expanding their smaller networks. Sprinkled around the country are high schools sponsored by members of all three branches. It is intriguing to imagine what would happen if more sprang up: instead of saddening her parents by arriving at Seder with a nice Catholic boy (like her older sister's husband), a Reform Jewish girl could thrill them with the fine Conservative lad she met in, say, biology lab. Three guesses as to the faith of their kids.

--Reported by Richard N. Ostling/New York

With reporting by RICHARD N. OSTLING/NEW YORK