I didn’t need the experience of the last 36 years to be convinced that Hillel Halkin’s analysis in his 1977 book, Letters to an American Jewish Friend, was correct. I read the book almost immediately after it appeared and have been in substantial agreement with Halkin ever since, even though (for reasons he would apparently consider legitimate, if also lamentable), I didn’t follow him in emigrating from the United States to Israel. But that doesn’t prevent me from being a little irked when, prompted by his new essay in Mosaic, I turned back to re-read what he had to say then about the slowly vanishing Jewry of the Diaspora.