The indispensable online magazine of Jewish life and thought, Mosaic, is featuring a spectacular contribution by our friend, the French journalist and president of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, Michel Gurfinkiel. Gurfinkiel offers a sweeping, compelling, and, yes, depressing assessment of the present condition and future prospects of European Jewry. It’s an essay that deals eloquently and comprehensively with that topic–but also one that sheds light on the broadest and deepest challenges facing Western civilization.

Here’s Gurfinkiel’s conclusion: