THERE'S NOTHING like contemporary Jewish affairs to stir things up, as the spirited and thoughtful, if occasionally overwrought, responses to my description of American Jewry circa 2009 make vibrantly clear. Although my intention was to take the measure of Jewish life, not to judge it, two of my interlocutors— Professors David Kraemer of the Jewish Theological Seminary and Michael P. Kramer of Bar-Ilan University, respectively—have placed me in the dock, not only reading into my prose but, worse still, charging me with a bad case of historical amnesia, sneering, exasperation, alarm, and, of all things, a furrowed brow. Confusing a rhetorical gambit—‘Go figure!’—with a moral position, they suggest that had I only reckoned more forthrightly with the historical process, with the longue durée, perhaps my brow would unfurrow and I would come to see that today's orange or vacuum cleaner is yesterday's seder plate or ḥanukiyah.

I do not doubt for a second that the history of Judaism or, for that matter, that of Yiddishkeit more generally, is one of constant change. All the same, is it not fair game to entertain the wee possibility that some changes represent a difference of degree while others represent a difference of kind? To wonder if, perhaps, just perhaps, there is something afoot in contemporary American Jewish life— the impact of the internet, say, or the stunningly large pool of the religiously unaffiliated and culturally uninterested, or the striking number of Jews who, for the very first time in Jewish history, as Leon Wieseltier has pointed out time and again, know no Jewish language, let alone feel a sense of connection to Israel, and have no qualms on that score (see Greenberg and Fingerhut 2007; Rifkin 2006; Wieseltier 2002). Is there not something here that might possibly represent a bona fide watershed moment? It seems to me that this is a question well worth asking, even if it runs the risk of irritating one's colleagues.

Oh, and this: the gentleman from Bar-Ilan seems to have gotten his Zionist knickers in a twist because I wrote that Israel lends itself more easily to description than the United States. It does. I am not, heaven for fend, suggesting that the Holy Land is not a complex place, or that the sight of babes in Gottex bikinis alongside hasidim with peyot is not literally eye-opening.