An innocent question from Robert Mnookin’s daughter—“When are we going to become Jewish?”—prompted the Harvard law professor and Kansas City native to take stock of the situation of American Jews today. While they’ve now achieved unprecedented integration, esteem, and influence, he concluded, they also face a number of critical challenges: rampant intermarriage, weak religious observance, a waning sense of community (owing to a diminished threat of persecution), and deeply conflicting views about Israel.

Mnookin, an assimilated American Jew, lays out his findings and analysis in a discussion of his new book The Jewish American Paradox. He radically proposes what he calls a new “big-tent” approach to determining who is Jewish, not restricting it to ancestry or formal conversion but accepting all who choose to identify.

Mnookin is the Samuel Williston Professor of Law at Harvard and a leading scholar in the field of conflict resolution.