In the introduction to "Nothing Sacred: The Truth about Judaism," author Doug Rushkoff explains when the early '90s Internet revolution turned into the greed-driven, dot-com rush of the late '90s, he found himself in an intellectual bind. "How could I still promote the empowering side of interactive media without pumping up a Ponzi scheme that was destined for casualties?" he writes. His answer was to turn to Judaism, not only his cultural and spiritual roots, but also what he describes as the original religion of media literacy.

Rushkoff, a self-described lapsed Jew, spent two years getting literate in Judaism by traveling around the country attending synagogues, reading the Torah and talking with Jews across the cultural and political spectrum. The result is a book in which he places Judaism within a modern context for his generation. He also argues that the religion is on the brink of becoming irrelevant because its most core value of open-ended inquiry has been obscured by an obsession with self-preservation and idolatry.

Last week, the United Jewish Appeal center in New York pulled an interview with Rushkoff off the organization's Web site, arguing that his questions about Israel were too controversial. Recently, I sat down with Rushkoff in the East Village of Manhattan to discuss how the incident has proved his point about the religion's mainstream, the marketing of so-called "Jewish chic" to 20- and 30-somethings, and what Judaism at its core means to him today.

RLH: What did you question about Israel that upset the UJA?

I'm very gentle. I preface any discussion about Israel by saying that I don't want anyone to think that I don't think Israel should be there. I do believe that Israel should there and I love Israel, but now I want to talk about whether or not we can even talk about Israel. I'm not saying we shouldn't support Israel using Torah, but what does it do to our relationship with Torah? What does it do to our relationship to God when we say God invented the Nation State? Should we use the story of Exodus to support our claim to this Nation State or does it hurt our relationship to the story of Exodus if we're using Torah to prove that we own a piece of land? Did God come up with the Nation State or was it the Treaty of Versailles?

This experience with the UJA ties into your whole criticism about mainstream Judaism.

Judaism as I see it is the invention of conversation and a way of conversing about typical things. What are we here for? How do we deal with one another? I think it's become too concretized. I think Jews have idols now and I think Israel has become an idol. That's a problem for Judaism and it's a problem for Israel. If we want a living nation, we have to find ways to support and nourish the living nation. The worst thing for the preservation of the religion and the preservation of that nation is this idolatrous relationship to Torah and to Israel.

What's your Jewish background?

I grew up in Queens, Larchmont and Scarsdale. My family was classical Reform. I'm circumcised. I got Bar Mitvahed. We did Passover. We did Hanukkah. Unfortunately, the way Reform Judaism works is that you're done with Jewish education after your Bar Mitzvah, and then you don't really come back to it until you're married and have a kid. Because I'm a thinker and writer, I've thought about spirituality and religion throughout and my work has been informed by a true Jewish outlook which is iconoclastic, towards literacy and intellectual inquiry.

Why do you think that a lot of lapsed Jews have turned away from Judaism?

It's become very closed off, racist and ethnocentric. Fundamentalists are now running this religion. Most people like me haven't tried to do anything officially Jewish because we've thrown out the baby with the bathwater. We say the fundamentalists are in charge. The last place you're going to have an intelligent conversation about God or religion or Torah or Israel is in a Jewish organization because they're too afraid to talk about it.

So then what is Judaism to you now?

Iconoclasm, monotheism and social justice. It's the same thing it was. The only difference between before I wrote the book and now, is that I think of synagogue as more of an impediment to the practice of Judaism.

Judaism was not meant to be a religion. It was meant to be an ongoing process by which we wean ourselves from religion. Judaism is a way of getting God out of the way so that we take care of each other. Judaism is of the contention that human beings can be adults. That we don't have to be children in front of our God, but that we can be responsible. The reason that Judaism was so radical and illegal in the beginning was because the notion that human beings make a difference was against their religion. Gods were responsible for everything. You had to worship your God and then you got rain or you got sun or you got crops. The Israelites said if there is God then Gods are important but human beings are actually part of the equation. That's not what Judaism is about right now.

What is practicing Judaism, if you're not going to temple?

Last night I sat with 20 Jews around a table and we argued the weekly Parsha, the section of Torah that came up that week. We sat in the ground floor of the New York University Center for Jewish Life. Judaism is happening at this table as we argue about it. I think it has to happen in homes. Real Judaism will be an underground phenomenon because Jewish institutions have more to fear from Judaism now then they have to gain, which is sad.

You also argue that mainstream Jewish organization's rejection of interfaith marriage is a bad thing for Judaism.

The fact that fighting assimilation and fighting intermarriage is at the top of the agenda of the money givers of the institution of Judaism is a problem. I believe that intermarriage should be looked at more intelligently. Judaism is not a race. Judaism is a people who subscribe to an idea. When people talk about losing the purity of the Jewish gene, it's Hitler talk. The inquisitioners are the ones who talked about a Jewish race. Instead of warning people in various forms of media that non-Jews are dirty and won't raise your children right and you shouldn't go on dates with them, we should look instead at how we could be more influential in getting intermarried couples to incorporate Judaism into their lives.

When we are an unwelcoming, ethnocentric, closed-minded place, why would any intermarried couple want to be a part of it? I'm begging to be a part of it. I'm begging to set a place at the table for those of us who want have a conversation about whether God is a creature that gave us Israel as a piece of land or whether there are better ways to support our connection to Israel. That's not even up for discussion.

What do you think of something like Heeb magazine, which is trying to revive Judaism for young people?

I've got problems with that mode of Jewish self-expression. It's funded and appreciated by the same people who are censoring me. It's seen as the last-ditch attempt to bring in 20-somethings by any means necessary. It's not creating conversations. It's making Judaism cool and hip like MTV, but it's like Al Jolson in blackface. We're appropriating hip hop culture -- the matzah on the turntable -- in order to look cool. By trying to make Judaism look hip and trendy is communicating that we don't believe that Judaism is intrinsically cool.

Which is where the idea of what you're calling "Open Source Judaism" comes from, right?

Anyone who wants to do Judaism should have access to Judaism. Judaism is not just something that you do, it's something you enact. You've got to learn the code in order to alter it. The angry Orthodox reviewers have this picture of me as Jack Horner in a corner with a Matzah ball on my spoon. This book calls for an amount of learning that most Jews wouldn't want to do. They think that is uneducated because I can do yoga and call it Judaism.

Speaking of that, why do you think so many so-called lapsed Jews turn to Buddhism and other spiritualities, like yoga?

Most young intelligent Jews are turning to Buddhism and Hinduism because Judaism is no longer offering them a path of inquiry. Judaism is now offering idols. The idol of temple. The idol of Israel. I'm not saying Israel should be destroyed. I'm not saying that Jews should be killed. What I'm saying is that Jews are turning away from Judaism because in the expression of centralized Judaism all they see is Zionism and temple. They want a spiritual path which involves the engagement of the intelligent individual.

Explain your transition from looking at media culture to Judaism.

Judaism is a religion about media literacy. The way you get in is that you have a Bar Mitzvah, which is a demonstration that you can read and think intelligently about it. Judaism has been dedicated to transparency, which is another big issue in the media space. It has to be as easy to express yourself as it is to receive the expressions of someone else. I got interested in media because of interactivity. The 20-year hegemony of a top-down media is now being over turned and it's now becoming a conversation space where we are smashing our sacred cows and people are becoming intelligent and literate.

That is the same thing that happened in the Exodus story, where a hand-me-down pre-existing religion is transformed into Judaism, where we all argue around a table about what God is and what we are going to believe? The transition from television to Usenet is the transition from the idolatrous religions to rabbinic arguing Judaism. I felt like what I had been doing in media, the Internet and children's education, is applying Judaism. Then I looked back at Judaism and thought Judaism needs it more than any of these fields.

So what has this book taught you about your Jewish path?

I am going to abandon organized Judaism in America because I'm finding it much more likely to meet people to engage with about Judaism away from that. I'm probably going to move toward the Interfaith movement in my own spiritual life. The only difference between me when I wrote the book and me now is I no longer believe that the safeguards built into Judaism to prevent idol worship and ethnocentrism are powerful enough to prevent it. I see Judaism driving itself off a cliff.

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt is a writer in Manhattan. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Observer and numerous other publications.

When I lived in Northern California for six years, I was never happy unless I had a plane ticket back to New York. Now that I've moved back home to Manhattan, the opposite is true. As a chronic bicoastalite, each coast has always proved the perfect antidote to the other. In conversations comparing the cultures of each coast, it's always becomes a geographical cat fight that no one ever wins because both sides always end up with an advantage. New York is less comfortable, but its intellectual tradition is deeper and its pizza crust is thinner. Northern California is more flexible and innovative, but its pizza crust is doughy and dense. Whether discussing social milieus or business styles, the conversation continues in an endless loop.Now with E-mail, the web and social and inter-office mailings lists, bicoastalites have more immediate links to each culture. For me and many others in the Net industry, technology creates an information age mental condition that prevents you from ever really having to commit to one place. Todd Lappin, a writer for Wired magazine, likes to call the condition "Bicoastal Disorder." "The mental condition only sets in after one has lived on each coast long enough to appreciate and internalize their respective virtues, and it's most noticeable symptom is the chronic longing for something unique that is 2,500 miles away," he recently wrote in an E-mail.For example, six years of West coast snow boarding has made me turn up my nose to the piddly slush covered hills of the East. I'll sheepishly admit that there are mornings when my longing for Sierra sun and powder is so strong that I'll check the snow conditions on the Lake Tahoe Weather Cam on the Web before I've really registered the condition of the sky over the Hudson River just outside my window. I know a New Yorker in San Francisco who after her morning coffee ritualistically logs on to The New York Post online in order to get that gritty in-your-face tabloid fix that only a New York paper can offer.We are not alone. A few years ago, Nina Katchadourian, a Brooklyn based artist, who grew up in Palo Alto, created a clever solution to her chronic bicoastal disorder. With a glue stick and an exacto knife, Katchadourian took a standard Triple A map of the United States, cut out the entire center of the country, and meticulously reconnected each highway so that the East and West coasts merged into a new drum stick shaped continent. In Katchadourian's cartographic fantasy, you could literally drive over the George Washington Bridge and arrive in California in approximately four hours."I was nostalgic for the West coast so I decided to rearrange the communication system to have it serve my needs," she says. Or to put it in the dizzying techobabble of a tech industry press release: Katchadourian's map provided a total coast to coast merger solution for bicoastal navigation. "It's the exacto knife program," she jokes. Her connected roads stand as a low-tech metaphor for the increasing high-tech connections that the web and E-mail provides for virtual relations between friends and businesses that on the one hand makes Bicoastal Disorder more manageable, and other the hand much more severe. While she now owns a brownstone in Brooklyn, she says still can't totally commit to either coast. "New York drives me crazy unless I know that I'm going to visit California at some point in the future."Last year, No End, the San Francisco-based mailing list for the Web community began a satellite list for New York transplants and bicoastal commuters. Steven Warren, a programmer and the list's New York host, recently moved home to New York after living in San Francisco for ten years. He says that the constant electronic connection to San Francisco makes it much easier to go back and forth. "I can pick up freelance work or make plans to stay with old friends so I can easily support my West coast habit."Other bicoastalites take it even further. Sitting in a San Francisco apartment, Steve Silberman, a senior correspondent for Wired News, who is from New York and based in San Francisco, says that four years ago it was clear to him that the leading edge of Internet culture was in the West, and therefore he was happy to be living in San Francisco. "But as the American Internet becomes more about media and professional writing and less about technology and social experiment, its center of intellectual gravity is tumbling towards New York City," he says. So for him, it is becoming increasingly difficult to decide between either place. "The thing that has made it possible to live in both places is to live in a third place all the time; online," he says. "My home town isn't New York, or San Francisco. It's The Well. That's where most of my friends, neighbors and colleagues are; the people involved in the ongoing narrative of my life."While technology offers an electronic lithium for Bicoastal Disorder by bringing the coasts closer together, it also makes bicoastal culture clashes more immediate and pronounced. While Tom Keinan, the twenty-eight year old Director of Business Development for Organic Online worked in New York, he found that he would have to change the tone of his emails when he was writing to the San Francisco co-workers. When he transferred to the San Francisco office, the first few weeks were pretty rocky. "At first, my New York hard-edged, blunt, and demanding manner sent teammates crying to the bathroom because I hurt their feelings," he says. "I had to soften my approach to adapt to the different expectations of what is acceptable behavior in San Francisco."Robert Hoffer, CEO of Query Labs, an online directory service that has offices in Silicon Valley and New Jersey, says that he flies to Silicon Valley at least once a week. "The plane is like the bus," he says. "You're constantly having to switch between a more casual and a more hard-nosed manner of business." As the East coast becomes increasingly dependant on the technical innovation of Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley becomes increasingly dependent on Wall Street financiers, advertisers, and big media conglomerates, maybe having a little of each culture in your head and being able to surf between styles is actually good for business. Maybe Bicoastal Disorder is healthy."I can't wait until they invent the Star Trek matter transporter," says Wired's Silberman. "so I can have smoked sturgeon at Balducci's in the morning and then beam back to San Francisco for a quiet dinner without the sound of horns blaring in my ear." Until that day, maybe the best antidote to Bicoastal Disorder is the wisdom that spread around the Internet under the false identity of a Kurt Vonnegut commencement speech. "Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you too hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you too soft." In between, stay in the right direction and envision new maps.