From the general media and Jewish weeklies published in most large American cities the reader will learn more than he cares to about the political and social doings of what Ze’ev Chafets calls “federated Judaism,” an interlocking directorate of the leadership of upscale synagogues, the fund-raising community federations, and the inevitable country clubs. These people are the often self-appointed elite of the Jewish community. It goes without saying that country club ‘membership is open only to the most financially well-off and socially “acceptable” members.

Likewise, the federations are controlled not only by the big givers, which is not unexpected, but by those subscribing to the conventional wisdom of the liberal ideological agenda to which established Jewry remains in thrall. Chafets tells of one prominent outfit called the New Israel Fund whose goal is not to make life easier for the Israeli populace, much less the leadership of either major party, but rather to transform Israel into the type of place “that would meet the approval of the ACLU, The Nation magazine, and the Sierra Club.” Apparently wanting to apply the same philosophy to the US, many national and local Jewish organizations joined the lynch mob against Robert Bork.

Securing membership in a synagogue is not very easy, either. Here, dues rather than overt ideological standards are the big hurdle. Most synagogues do not charge a fixed annual fee for all, but set obligations on the basis of perceived ability to pay. Although the motive may be admirable, the financial test exposes the prospective member to a humiliating inquisition into his assets and annual income by synagogue “finance committees” peopled by creatures who were evidently unsuccessful in their applications to become IRS auditors. Not only that, these synagogues then typically favor those paying the highest dues in dispensing honors and perquisites. After having to put up with these invidious distinctions, the congregants get a lot more newly-fashionable politics than old-fashioned religion.

Chafets, who grew up in Michigan but has lived in Israel for the past 20 years, tells of a first visit in two decades to his old temple in Pontiac, where it turned out that very little had changed. The thrust of the sermon was that the prophets had all been liberal Democrats who would have supported the ERA, gun control, school busing, and a cutoff of aid to the contras. “In my day, the prophets were Hubert Humphrey men; twenty years later, they were with Mario Cuomo and Michael Dukakis.”

The protagonists of Members of the Tribe are, thankfully, not the synagogue, country club, and fund-raising poobahs who have made organized American Jewish communal life so banally conformist. Rather, Chafets devotes his work to the rich diversity of Jewish America one would never dream existed from the pages of The New York Times. (The Times Book Review, incidentally, delivered itself of a huffing dismissal of Members of the Tribe for “bypassing” the Jewish establishment. It should be anticipated that the elite media would give such short shrift to this indispensable book on a previously neglected aspect of American Jewish life; one of Chafets’ earlier books, Double Vision, skewered America’s leading media organs for left-wing bias in reporting on the Middle East.)

Chafets does not rehash what can be found every month in Commentary; indeed, there is nary a mention of Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, or any other intellectual fountainhead of neoconservative thought. Instead, Chafets’ heroes are the Jews of Middle America, people who would never be allowed into the established country clubs or be encouraged for membership by many synagogues like, say. Temple Leo Baeck, Los Angeles’ most fashionable synagogue, which Chafets calls a size-three congregation because of its members’ predilection for frequenting equally toney health clubs.

One not at all chic group is policemen. Chafets informs us that Jewish policemen are not extinct, and that seven or eight walk the streets of Detroit alone. In fact, the most poignant portrait in the book is that of Detroit policeman Marty Goldfine, who for a time was assigned to guard the inner city Downtown Synagogue. Despite an excellent record, Goldfine had never been promoted beyond the rank of patrolman, frequently being passed over in favor of members of preferred races and gender. The theologians of affirmative action, of course, do not consider Jews a “minority” for their purposes, nor were Jews given, according to Goldfine, fair treatment by police officials or unions. It was a case of plain, old-fashioned discrimination. Yet, while otherwise active in antidiscrimination and “civil rights” causes currently in vogue, the organized Jewish community in Detroit refused to help Goldfine, since Jews were “not supposed to be cops.” It would have been astonishing if it had acted otherwise; to liberals, middle-class males like Goldfine, regardless of whether or not they are Jewish, are the cannon fodder dragooned into bearing the cost of affirmative action reverse discrimination. Goldfine, not surprisingly, rejected the idea of moving to the suburbs because he did not feel comfortable with “federated Jewry.” (Still, Goldfine was proud enough of his Jewish heritage to be “thrilled” to be featured in a Jewish book. Adding to the irony of all this was the fact that Goldfine changed his name back to the original family name from the Gaynor surname adopted by his father. In contrast, the former head of the B’nai B’rith, of all people, had his name altered from Abraharn Fastenberg to a thoroughly anglicized moniker.)

Chafets chronicles his travels with a representative of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) through Midwestern hamlets searching for vest-pocket Jewish communities to aid the cause. Strange as it may seem at first blush, AIPAC has discovered a greater commitment to the preservation of Israel’s security among these isolated Jews than in the enclaves of Manhattan, Cambridge, and Beverly Hills. In contrast to Brooklyn Heights and the Upper East Side, Yasser Arafat-chic evidently has not yet hit Rapid City, South Dakota.

The diversity of Jewish life mirrors that of the general society; along with Jewish policemen and mainstreet small-town merchants, Chafets unearthed Jewish cowboys, Jewish country-and-western singers, black Jews, and even Jewish inmates in a maximum security prison. Why does Marty Goldfine belong in the same book with the residents of Pennsylvania’s Gaterford penitentiary? And why them with the other varied characters? Their one common denominator is their status as “misfits”—not welcomed, and at best barely tolerated, by the institutions of established Jewry.

Most important for those who are concerned with preserving traditional cultural values, Members of the Tribe assures us that, far from being anachronistic, Middle-American Jewry is alive and well. May it continue to prosper.

[Members of the Tribe: On the Road in Jewish America, by Ze’ev Chafets (New York: Bantam Books) 259 pp., $18.95]