5: Text excerpt from Elliott Abram’s "Faith or Fear" and audio excerpt from Cynthia Ozick’s “The Artist as Dreamer.”

5: Text excerpt from Elliott Abram’s "Faith or Fear" and audio excerpt from Cynthia Ozick’s “The Artist as Dreamer.”

These two sources both see Gordon as having made a profound mistake. Elliott Abrams is a prominent American neoconservative who served in foreign policy positions in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations. In an excerpt from his 1999 book Faith or Fear, he claims that Gordon was wrong to think it was possible to separate private religious practice from public identity. Cynthia Ozick is one of the most celebrated American Jewish authors of fiction and criticism, and this excerpt comes from the question and answer period of a lecture she gave at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal on November 8, 1980. She, too, sees Gordon’s line (which she misattributes, as has commonly been done, to the Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn) as representing “great Jewish cowardice.”

Suggested Activity: Have students read Abrams’s excerpt aloud without telling them who wrote it. Ask them what they can infer about the author’s politics or ideas on the basis of how he interprets Gordon’s line. Ask students whether they agree with Abrams that “an end to rituals” inevitably “undercut[s] faith as well,” and ask them to draw on their own experiences to argue for or against this idea. Next, play the except from Ozick’s lecture and ask students to paraphrase what Ozick means when she says Gordon’s idea can be thought of as responsible for creating a “segment of German-Jewry which so annihilated its idiosyncratic Jewish culture that it led itself to a point of vast self-despising.” Does she see the risk of following Gordon’s advice as larger or smaller than Abrams does?

Sources: Elliot Abrams, Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in Christian America (New York: Touchstone, 1999), 21.

Cynthia Ozick, “The Artist as Dreamer” (November 8, 1980), The Frances Brandt Online Yiddish Audio Library.