God of Daniel S

"Alan Miller has done an extraordinary thing. Confronting head-on the bewildering and seemingly disparate fragments of Jewish life in America, he has illuminated a new kind of meaningful and personally satisfying life-style that will be of the utmost importance and value to every Jew in America today. He has done this first of all by portraying an entire spectrum of Jewish archetypes in anecdotal, novelistic terms: the mystical, zealot Chasid who would rather dance than walk and rather sing than speak; the Orthodox, with his strict obedience to Rabbinic law; the Conservative, devoted to the past but ambivalent about the present; the Reform, uncomfortable with religious separatism; the agnostic Zionist, with his cultural and nationalistic bonds to Israel; the atheistic Yiddishist whose language, literature, theater, and music come from the great legacy of Eastern Europe; the prodigal son, the hippy who careens through the civil-rights movement past pot to radical student politics; and young Daniel S., whose parents 'made it' but rejected their Jewish background, and who now hungers for meanings, for membership in some community, for identity for himself, his wife, and their small children. What does it mean for Daniel S. to be a Jew in this free society? How does an American Jew live? Who is his God? The author answers these questions by presenting a view of Judaism as more than merely religion--rather, as the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people: an epic story of a people surviving four thousand years of political and spiritual assault by frequently altering, from necessity and pragmatic reaction, the nature of their tribal religious community, but ultimately preserving those traditions and symbols which comprise their very psychic essence."--Jacket.