Survival Through Integration (Paperback): American Reform Jewish Universalism and the Holocaust

The book focuses on the most prominent exponents of the universalistic ideology of American Reform Judaism in the 1930s and 1940s. Those who attempted to maintain unquestioning fealty to the principles of universalistic Reform, even in view of the disheartening realities of the Holocaust, are the heroes of the plot that unfolds here. The way they struggled for their beliefs should be viewed as a point of departure for a more general discussion of the challenge posed by the Holocaust to the modern Jewish belief in the possibility and desirability of full cultural and social Jewish integration into non-Jewish society at large.

Ofer Shiff is the head of the Ben Gurion Research Institute in Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He has published extensively on issues related to the challenge posed by antisemitism and the Holocaust as seen by various Jewish group in Israel and the United States.