The challenge to Jews in America has always involved living in a culture in which anti-Semitism (certainly by European standards) has been muted. So what happens when individuals find themselves confronted without that decidedly negative force that helped maintain clear community boundaries and practices elsewhere?

Well, the result has been a flowering of ideas about how an ancient identity should relate to and live within a democratic culture that itself lacks much sense of history or social permanence. To put it simply, Judaism in the United States has been inventive and adaptive--including as it has such energetic and creative intellects as Isaac Mayer Wise, a key founder of Reform Judaism; Solomon Schechter, the great leader of a traditionalist response in Conservative Judaism; and the vastly imaginative Mordecai Kaplan, from whose ideas arose Jewish Reconstructionism.

None of this is to slight the Orthodox, who have played a highly important and (within themselves) varied role in the continuing question of how to respond to the broad religious and economic currents that flow within American culture.

With such a creative spirit, with such determination to conceive of ways that tradition ought to engage culture, it's very difficult to envision American Judaism as being anything other than vital and enduring. After all, 350-plus years in this country is a pretty good run. Here's a great future.