. . . Mr. Itzkoff places most of the blame for America's alleged intellectual decline on what he sees as an economically and intellectually elite cast of misguided liberals. They have isolated themselves from American society, he says, by their paternalistic treatment of the underclass, by discounting the importance of traditional family values and by failing to raise enough bright children to sustain national competence. The New York Times Book Review Few doubt that the United States has slipped from its longstanding eminence as the world's wealthiest and most productive nation. The problem for the past 30 years has been the diagnosis of both the decline and then the cure. Literally trillions of dollars have been expended in futile programs to stanch the hemorrhaging of our economic wealth, jobs, educational achievement, and cultural elan. Itzkoff argues that we will never stop the fall until we understand our real national dilemma. This is the decline in our national intelligence profile: fewer citizens of high intelligence, educational potential, and economic productivity. These ideas are taboo. Itzkoff, however, insists that these are the facts, and they must be examined. In this book, he lays out the available evidence for our social disintegration and suggests a rational program of policy initiatives that would begin to restore us to what we were as recently as 1955--the great hope of the world.

"The theme of this book involves the Holocaust [...]. Itzkoff's main concern is to understand and explain this event in the context of Jewish history and the unfolding meaning of Western civilizational experience"--Front flap.

Due to the unanticipated arrival of peak energy production, retrenchment and scarcity will be the themes of international discourse. This work probes the philosophical assumptions behind the world's planning lapse and how the sudden confrontation will affect our political and economic institutions.

Humans are biological creatures first. Culture is an expression of our brain and neurological function. Intelligence is the key to the flourishing of the human super-species. Humanity has reached the point where two sub-species are now competing within the earthly ecology. These are not defined by any of the existing racial categories, rather, intellectual and cultural behavior. They can be symbolized as Homo sapiens and Homo sapiens sapiens. In evolutionary history, no two sub-species have ever been able to cohabit a limited ecology. The outcome of this inherent selective conflict is written in the history of the human genus Homo, that is, the successive increases in brain size and intelligence and the disappearance of earlier, less corticalized forms of Homo. Civilization will eventually be shaped by the domination of Homo sapiens sapiens.

Judaism's Promise, Meeting The Challenge Of Modernity follows Seymour W. Itzkoff's well-received three-book series, Who Are the Jews? Judaism's Promise , confronts the many revolutions that have reshaped Judaism over the centuries allowing it and its people a path of leadership into the modern world. It takes the writings of the Torah, Holy Scriptures, and Talmud seriously as exemplars of the human search for civilizational and moral intellectuality. The book's basic concern is with the withering of Judaism as a force in contemporary Western civilization. Sadly millions of Jews have left the faith. Others venture forth only hesitantly into a synagogue, now a bastion of fossilized ritual and conspicuous consumption. These millions needed more from the orthodoxy, and this book attempts to show them the way back by giving renewed life to the heritages of Judaism, and, consequently, to its meaning for the modern world. Judaism's Promise argues for a return to the synagogue's originating Hellenistic commitment «to come together» in intellectual and moral study. As Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan argued, Judaism must once more become in the 20-21st century the civilization that it once represented to the wider world, and not a fossilized ceremonialism.

Book by Itzkoff, Seymour W.