RW: What you were saying before brings us to a sore point and that is the question of conversion. I'm writing a book about Jewish humour and most of that humour emerges at the end of the 19th century and then in the 20th century. In the European context a lot of it had to do with conversion — the way in which Jews are tempted for a variety of reasons to stop being Jewish and to become something else. Within liberal democracy, as open and welcoming as America is, conversion is not necessary. You don't have to convert to Christianity. In fact, many people want to marry Jews and they remain whatever they are — sometimes they even convert to Judaism. 

But I think that the alternative religion is liberalism. Liberalism now functions as a de-Judaised universalism because Judaism allows you to be a Jew nationally, even if you're not religiously, or religiously if you're not nationally. In other words you can say I'm a Jew, I'm a perfectly wonderful Jew,  without really being either part of the Jewish people or without practising Judaism in any way — and particularly without living with the negative part of the Commandments. 

But for me, Judaism's strength is its saying no to idolatry. It realises that the containment of evil must occupy at least half of your efforts if you don't want to descend to an animalistic state. That part of Jewishness is anathema to many people — they would like to maximise the good, "repair the world" and all that. But dealing with evil is what they want to escape from. 

So, interestingly enough, I find increasingly that the enemies of Judaism to some extent do come very genuinely from within. People who have no Jewish education particularly and in many cases very tenuous Jewish ties, what they take away from it is this idea: let's universalise Judaism, let's do it through ecology or do it through neighbourliness, let's do it through helping in Rwanda or through Aids research, and genuinely translate their Jewishness into that much less painful form. That begins to erode — what always worries me the most — the moral confidence of a people. The erosion of moral confidence is even more worrisome than the erosion of Jewish institutions, though obviously the two are connected. 

JW: On not accepting no for an answer: a prominent American rabbi related to me that Jews he deals with have no concept of limits. When he says, "No, you can't do that; Jewish law or custom forbids it," his people are dumbfounded. They have been taught to believe that the purpose of religion is to be therapeutic and accepting: all options are on the table and the role of religion is to help people feel good about themselves. I believe religion does play such a role but Judaism does have "do's and don't's." This may seem alien to many Jews, but it is central to the Jewish religion. The moral relativism I am describing is also very much part of European societies, not unique to American society. The interesting question is where that relativism stops. Which issues are beyond the pale and which are deemed open to negotiation in Western cultures?

RW: This is why it can sometimes be very confusing. What is rather surprising is that if one started to list all the cultural manifestations of Judaism in America today, you would really be overwhelmed. For example, the presence of Jewish Studies at the various universities, and now websites: Jewish Ideas Daily, Tablet, the Jewish Lives book series and the Next book series, and magazines. It is tremendously rich. But if you look at some of these manifestations of culture — the books that the Jewish Book Council touts, for example — you cannot find the Jewish substance in much of it. The people who are running these cultural institutions have a tremendous investment in Judaism, not lite, but what's the opposite of lite Judaism?