Noah Feldman, To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People (2024)

I thought I knew the basics, or some of the basics, about the various Jewish denominations today. This deeply thoughtful, nuanced, and humane book taught me otherwise. Not only was I unaware of entire categories of contemporary Judaism (for example, I thought Hasidim were the entirety of ultra-orthodox Judaism [or Haredi], but there are also the Yeshivish, whom I had never heard of before; nor did I know about the Evolutionists or the....). Perhaps even more importantly, I hadn't known about the complex mutations of many of these denominations or of particular beliefs of theirs, especially about Zionism and, later, Israel. I hadn't really understood that the original secular Zionism had wanted a state for the Jews, not a Jewish state - what became Israel was to displace the Jewish religion and make Jews just another "normal" nation. I hadn't known that for Progressive Jews, at least until the last couple of decades, the Holocaust and Israel had been interpreted (un- or subconsciously) in almost christological terms: the Holocaust was the Passion of the Jews, Israel their Resurrection. I hadn't known that Religious Zionism has since the 1990s more or less displaced the original, secular one, even as Israel has become increasingly central to the identities of many Jews in the Diaspora. Or that Jabotinsky, Begin, and Netanyahu also wanted/want to occupy all of Biblical Israel, like the Religious Zionists do, but with a different justification. And I learned much else besides. Feldman expresses opinions about much of this, but he always does so after open-minded, nonjudgmental consideration of the paths different groups of Jews have taken. He unflinchingly addresses uncomfortable questions, like whether Judaism isn't a form of tribalism, or the reasons for Jews' spectacular successes in many fields in the last 150 years. He weaves in parts of his own story, revealing how various encounters shaped his beliefs and even shook them. By the end, I felt I hadn't only learned many particulars but had also gained a deep appreciation of Feldman's own, and more generally, the Jewish people's, "struggles with God together" (which is his concluding definition of what it is to be Jewish).