…So-called Reform Judaism is clearly disappearing. By their own demographer Stephen Cohen, they are intermarrying like the Ten Lost Tribes and disappearing, dissolving into the American melting pot, which, by the way, was an expression invented by an English Jew, Israel Zangwill, at the turn the 20th century observing the tsunami of Jews flooding into the United States. He saw in America a great melting pot, and so it has come to pass that the Jews are dissolving into it there very quickly. Not long along I saw some newspaper piece on Rabbi David Wolpe at famous Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, laudatory of course, though in the course of the article one fact reported was not pursued by the journalist: most of his congregants today are Iranian Jews.

Which tells us what? That the once great Los Angeles Jewish community, Reform and Conservative, whose grandparents spoke Yiddish like the Jews in Hollywood, is gone. The children and the grandchildren of those Jews who built this large Conservative shul in the early 20th century no longer gather there. The Iranians who escaped the Shah in 1979 have taken their place…