Hello, I Must Be Going

James Loeffler’s essay, “The Death of Jewish Culture,” is a compelling tour de force, which is to say that it says something important and says it with style but also that, in the swoop and slash of its argument, it leaves out a fair amount.

The occasion for Loeffler’s reflections is the demise over the last few years of several high-profile projects aimed at promoting Jewish culture to young (or at least youngish) artsy American Jewish hipsters. However, as Loeffler’s choice of presiding spirits— he quotes Ahad Ha’am, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, and S. An-sky—shows, the Jewish culture he is really eulogizing is not only high and secular but distinctly Eastern European—and it has been gone for three-quarters of a century. The kind of secular culture he is interested in, he says, is

a self-consciously modern, public culture, rooted in the unique civilization that gave it birth and formed its voice, and expressive of a thick, expansive, holistic identity.