More Than Numbers

Jewish Week, The, November, 2002

The Jewish Week 11-29-2002 An op-ed in The New York Times last week, asserting that the health of Judaism should be judged by its ideas rather than its numbers, sounds noble, on first blush. Douglas Rushkoff, a professor of communications at New York University, writes: "The Jewish people are not a race, to be preserved.

Judaism is a set of ideas to be shared." But taking Rushkoff's thesis to its logical conclusion, which he does indirectly, in elegant prose, is to suggest that it is more important to have Judaism's "universal tenets" of social justice and values than to have Jews themselves. To assert, as the professor does, that Jewish institutions are "more dedicated to safeguarding the Jewish race than to teaching Judaism," leading to "a Jewish culture...

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