Deceptive Images: Towards a Redefinition of American Judaism

Deceptive Images is a profoundly thoughtful effort by a social scientist—who is a participant observer in American Jewish life—to come to terms with his concerns about how American Jews and Judaism have been studied, and his sensitivity to the policy implications of such studies. Liebman writes about what he cares deeply about; as a social scientist he is able to use concepts and theories in which he has been trained, although not without a sense of their limitations.

In the passionately arg...