But even with this lament, it’s not clear what he wants from Jews. He yearns for a response to bigotry “grounded in a principle, a belief, a morality,” but doesn’t get any more specific about what that would mean. He seems to call notional, cultural Jews back to the roots of Judaism, but dismisses ritual and tradition as nothing more than the “mechanics of religiosity.” He makes many generalizations about what American Jews are like—often in the same weird idiom anti-Semites use, like “the Jew thrived” or “the Jew flourishes”—but he doesn’t spend much time excavating the experiences and differences among real, living people.