We Jews is an excellent read . Rabbi S. has distilled Jewish thought and life both religious and secular.

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz is one of the great Jewish scholars and teachers of our generation. His monumental translation of the Gemara into Hebrew and then English and French has been a fundamental tool in spreading the learning of Torah. His teaching of Torah, and outreach work have made a major contribution to the Jewish world of learning in our time.
In this book Rabbi Steinsaltz makes the admirable effort of attempting to assay the Jewish situation and reality. He tries to define who the Jewish people are through essays in collective psychology and sociology. He writes about specific characteristics of the Jews , about the ability to assimilate, about the infighting which has prevented Jewish unity, about the notorious difficulty of defining a group which is neither a nation or a religion or a an ethnic group solely. He also writes about stereotypical views of the Jews in regard to Money, about the Jewish Messianic complex, about Jews being excessively Warm or Cold emotionally, about the tendency of the Jews to Idolatry, about our role in the world, about the idea of unification and how it has effected great Jewish thinkers, and finally ` about what will become of the Jewish people'.
The work also contains questions at the end of each chapter asked by Steinsaltz's faithful student and long- time editor Arthur Kurzweil. These questions aim to refine and sharpen some of the major points made in the text.
With all my great respect for Rabbi Steinsaltz, and with all my understanding that his aim is only to help the Jewish people better serve God, I found myself deeply disappointed with this work. For one thing Rabbi Steinsaltz writes of the Jewish condition almost as if the State of Israel had not existed for the past fifty- seven years, and is not a growing and central part of Jewish history and the Jewish people. Secondly, I was dismayed at the lack of factual matter involving the actual transformations in the Jewish situation which have taken place in the past twenty or thirty years. For example Rabbi Steinsaltz writes at great length about the importance of understanding the Jewish people as a family. There are great insights in his writing on this subject. However the Jewish family today in America is often a family with non- Jewish members inside it. It is not the traditional, historical Jewish family. The degree of intermarriage and assimilation occurring among the Jewish people are a central element in any assessment of our situation now. I would have expected Rabbi Steinsaltz to address this, and provide suggested ways for the Jewish people to act now. After all, the book says it is going to address the Jewish situation and tell us what we are to do.
I was deeply dismayed that the worldwide Anti- Semitic attack on the state of Israel is not considered in the book. The survival of Israel is , in my judgment anyway, the most important item on the Jewish agenda. To write so much about Jewish history and character without writing even one word about the longing for Zion, the longing for Redemption, the miraculous ingathering of Exiles is to deprive Jewish history of its heart. It is all well and good to talk about Jewish Messianism way up in the air but for the people of Israel the Messiah has always been connected with the return to Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel. How could Rabbi Steinsaltz not consider this, not take into account in doing so , the thought of Rabbi Abraham Yitzhak Ha- Kohen Kook Z"ts"l. Rabbi Kook's idea of return to the land as connecting with worldwide redemption is a central strand of Jewish thinking and action today in Israel.
It seems to me that anyone who wishes to write a true and realistic work about the situation of the Jews today has to confront the very difficult realities the Jewish people are facing. These are in one sense demographic realities, relating to an aging, assimilating Diaspora. They are existensial problems relating to the efforts to destroy the Jewish character of the state of Israel. Rabbi Steinsaltz in this work does not even mention the divisions within Israeli political life, the fact that so many Jews have in some way turned against their own people. In this regard I would think that any `psycho-social analysis' of Jewish collective character would certainly make much more of the theme of ` betrayal' than Rabbi Steinsaltz has done.
Nonetheless for me the greatest omissions come from the other side. Nothing is said about those Jews who miraculously came and transformed a land of desert into a modern society. Nothing is said about the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language. Nothing is said about the heroic struggles of generations of Jewish soldiers who fought and fight to ensure Jewish survival in a very hostile environment. Rabbi Steinsaltz's total ignoring of these kinds of Jews makes his overall assessment of the Jewish people and their character seriously flawed.
We need today a Jewish thinker or thinkers who can really look at our situation, and strive to understand the directions we must take both for survival and for increased sanctity in serving God.
We need to face the hard realities of our situation so that we can hopefully struggle for a better Jewish future.
We need more books on this theme, and more relevant ones.