What the authors are describing pejoratively, the way that a general Jewish liberalism can coexist with more conservative impulses and attitudes, has long been particularly obvious in debates about the state of Israel, where the most cosmopolitan of Jewish liberals can suddenly sound like strident nationalists. (Or as the writers of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” put it in their “rap battle” between two rivalrous female Jewish lawyers: “Cause we’re liberals/ duh, progressive as hell / though of course, I support Israel.”) But it extends to a general Jewish interest in, and sometimes alarmism about, issues like fertility rates and cultural preservation that in the world of Gentile politics are associated with the social and cultural right.

This combination has often frustrated more thoroughgoing conservatives — Jewish ones especially — who don’t understand why more American Jews don’t extend their conservative impulses beyond the tribe and vote Republican. But a “liberalism without/conservatism within” combination is common to minority populations, and it’s a particularly reasonable reaction to the experience of Jewish history: An oft-persecuted people’s flourishing can both depend on maintaining a certain conservatism about its own patterns of marrying and begetting and cultural transmission (and, in the case of Israel, the safety of its lonely nation-state), and on encouraging liberalism and cosmopolitanism in the wider, potentially-hostile order in which the diaspora subsists.

(And then, of course, this complicated combination also reflects the fear among many politically liberal Jews that if they don’t sustain a certain familial traditionalism, they’ll just cede the Jewish future to the ultra-fecund ultra-Orthodox.)

The interesting question is whether the combination can survive the pressures of our own era. One form of pressure comes from the left, which is increasingly intent on rooting out all residues of traditionalism within the liberal order — treating any form of nationalism as suspect, any policing of religious orthodoxy as dangerous, any approach to sex and family and childrearing that isn’t purely gender-egalitarian as a dangerous atavism.

That spirit, seeking ideological consistency and opposing (to quote Cohen’s critics) “patriarchal, misogynistic, and anachronist assumptions about what is good for the Jews,” may not be able to tolerate the mix of cosmopolitanism and tribalism, liberalism and traditionalism, that has defined American Judaism for years.