the End of the Jewish People?

NOTE: DUST JACKET TORN A leading French sociologist and a Jew who visited Israel in 1963 and 1964 to teach at the University of Jerusalem posits and probes the title question in a book "riddled with anxiety" over the future of the Jewish people. He assays the place of the kibbutz in Israel today (a relative decline in population), the prominence of the Histradut and the emergence of an industrial, welfare state whose affluence threatens the concept of a people just as assimilation among the Jews of the Diaspora does elsewhere, as anti-Semitism recedes. Is anti-Semitism, acting as a negative catalyst, with its attendant anxiety on the part of the Jew, essential to his existence? Mr. Friedmann raises but does not silence this contention, nor does he pause over his conviction that a materially prosperous state inevitably means a secular nation. Nevertheless, a deeply concerned, stimulating (and somewhat difficult) study of the problem essential to Jewish survival.