Explore what it means to be Jewish in contemporary America with a collection of columns by Professor Martin S. Jaffee, which first appeared in Seattle’s JTNews: The Voice of Jewish Washington.

From his early days as a boy in suburban Long Island, Jaffee’s Jewish radar has served him faithfully. He’s always been able to spot a fellow Jew from a mile away, and his faith has helped him through many tough times.

It’s time to laugh along with the professor as he makes humorous observations and also considers more serious issues such as faith, tradition and family. In this volume you’ll read essays about:

● Jewish radar in the post-ethnic Twilight Zone;
● Groucho’s paradox;
● Experiments in popular Jewish mythology;
● The hardest Jewish conversation;
● And much more!

Jaffee’s column “A View From the U,” is a fan favorite for Jews throughout the Pacific Northwest and was recognized in 2007 by the Jewish Press Association of America with the Simon Rockower Award for Excellence in Journalism. Now, everyone can experience his wit and insights in The End of Jewish Radar.

For some 50 years my Jewish Radar has served me faithfully. Ever since it was installed, around my eighth year, I’ve been able to spot another Jew a mile away. Lately, though, I’ve noticed failures. Some Jews—for example, a newly-minted Reform convert from Arkansas--did manage to fly under my radar. The extent of the problem, however, only recently became clear. I’ll describe this moment of truth at the close of this rumination. But first, let me describe my once-state-of-the-art Jew-spotting equipment. The software was developed gradually, in a series of up-grades, from the mid-1950s through the early-60s. The hardware was manufactured in Franklin Square, NY, one of a chain of “incorporated villages” entwining Long Island’s Southern State Parkway. These were the boom times for the generation that spawned the Boomers! Easy mortgages lured thousands of Jewish G.I.s and their families away from stuffy Brooklyn and Bronx apartments into suburban bungalows with lawns. Jews, of course, weren’t the only newly-white ethnics abandoning The City to the not-yet or never-to-be-whites transforming New York’s ethnic politics. The same flood brought thousands of Italian, Polish, Greek, and Slavic families, like us, only a generation or two removed from the immigration trauma. Wherever the tides dropped us, we took root, blossoming overnight into Suburbanites. In this laboratory of polyglot pluralism, Jewish Radar was developed as intelligence technology: to enable me and mine to distinguish “us” from “them.”

Martin S. Jaffee is the Samuel and Althea Stroum Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Washington. He has spent almost thirty years as a teacher and researcher, in the history of Jewish culture and its contemporary expressions. He lives with his wife, daughter, mother-in-law, and three cats in Seattle.