In the provocative The Future of the Jewish People in Five Photographs, Peter Temes uses a set of images, both iconic and obscure, as touchstones to explore a Jewish future that contains "possibilities hopeful and inspiring but also challenging and troubling."
Temes wonders whether Jews, who today account for only .2% of the world's population, will eventually lose their distinct identity. The first two photographs spotlight the Zoroastrians, whose population, once as high as three million, has shrunk to 200,000, and the Jews of Kaifeng, China, who gradually assimilated into the surrounding population. In the process, Temes notes, these peoples did not become extinct, but instead merely made a "change from one set of ideas to another."
His third photograph, of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, highlights the tension between Jewish tradition's demand to embrace the cause of social justice and the imperative of self-preservation. A photograph of Adolph Eichmann, on trial for war crimes in Jerusalem in 1961, anchors reflections on the role of Israel in defining the future of the Jewish people.
The final photograph depicts a female rabbi performing the exacting task of repairing a Torah scroll, spurring Temes to consider the importance of traditional Jewish texts and the ongoing conversation in which Jews engage those texts.
In this concise, passionately argued book, Temes provides valuable fodder for many searching conversations about what it will take to carry the Jewish saga into the new millennium. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer