Jewish Centers and Peripheries: Europe Between America and Israel Fifty Years After World War ?, edited by S. Ilan Troen. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999. 438 pp. $44.95. In the wake of the tragic destruction of European Jewry during the Holocaust, the center of gravity of Jewish life shifted to the gradually ascendant American Jewish community and the newly created State of Israel. Once the fundamental reservoir of the Jewish people - 83 percent of world Jewry lived in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century - and the principal incubator of vibrant Jewish culture, Europe and its discrete Jewish nationalities were supplanted in numbers, cultural resources, socioeconomic power, and political authority by the two newer Jewish centers. Indeed, during this past half-century the Jewish world and anything deemed significant in it has come to be viewed through a bipolar lens focused on America and Israel. This book implicitly - and the editor explicitly - argues for an amended perspective. Troen, in fact, suggests that today, when assessing vital Jewish communities, we need to broaden our line of sight and take into account European Jews as well. Although containing only 17 percent of world Jewry - one million in the West, two million in the East - the continent has witnessed a reconstruction of Jewish communal life (to be sure, stronger in some places than in others), but one grounded more in secular/ethnic values of democracy, pluralism, and multiculturalism than in religious ideals. This rebirth and the specific nature of this rebirth, which Troen welcomes, merits study and reflection. Hence this book, which offers a potpourri of essays describing the Jewish character, institutional structure, idiosyncratic history, style of leadership, and future potential of select European Jewish communities, and how they interface with America and Israel. Written by a disparate collection of scholars, lay leaders, community professionals, and a diplomat, the essays vary greatly in quality, intellectual agenda, methodological rigor, and analytic power. While some of the individual contributions are informative, judicious, and enjoyable, the volume as a whole suffers from a lack of organizational coherence and conceptual clarity, and provides no compelling or overarching synthesis. Following an introduction by the editor, the book is divided into five parts. The first features two theoretical essays on the condition and prospects of diaspora Jewries by Israeli scholars Yosef Gorny and Gabriel Sheffer. The first piece, reflective of standard secular Zionist Utopian and historiographie visions mat place Israel at the center of world Jewish life, postulates the possible recreation of European Jewry on the basis of secular pluralism. It, however, reads like a cross between wishful thinking and pious prognostication. Sheffer's contribution is the more interesting but his argument more flawed. Based on the reality of etiino-national persistence of other diaspora groups Chinese, Armenians, Greeks, Japanese, for example - he avers unequivocally that diaspora Jews need have no fear about survival. Not only does the essay therefore imply that the Jewish diaspora is simply analogous to that of other groups - it is not; contemporary Israelis and their second generation descendants living in die diaspora may be compared conceptually in his model, not Jews who have had no concrete personal contact with Israel - but its comparative methodology is applied to an absurd degree. …