To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People

A leading public intellectual's timely reckoning with how Jews can and should make sense of their tradition and each other.

What does it mean to be a Jew? At a time of worldwide crisis, venerable answers to this question have become unsettled. In To Be a Jew Today, the legal scholar and columnist Noah Feldman draws on a lifelong engagement with his religion to offer a wide-ranging interpretation of Judaism in its current varieties. How do Jews today understand their relationship to God, to Israel, and to each other--and live their lives accordingly?

Writing sympathetically but incisively about diverse outlooks, Feldman clarifies what's at stake in the choice of how to be a Jew, and discusses the shared "theology of struggle" that Jews engage in as they wrestle with who God is, what God wants, or whether God exists. He shows how the founding of Israel has transformed Judaism itself over the last century--and explores the ongoing consequences of that transformation for all Jews, who find the meaning of their Jewishness and their views about Israel intertwined, no matter what those views are. And he examines the analogies between being Jewish and belonging to a large, messy family--a family that often makes its members crazy, but a family all the same. Written with learning, empathy and clarity, To Be a Jew Today is a critical resource for readers of all faiths.

Author: Noah Feldman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 03/05/2024
Pages: 416
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.35lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.00w x 1.70d
ISBN: 9780374298340


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 10/01/2023 pg. 19
Kirkus Reviews 02/01/2024
Shelf Awareness 03/08/2024

About the Author
Noah Feldman is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University, where he is also founding director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law. A leading public intellectual, he is a contributing writer for Bloomberg View and the author of numerous books, including The Broken Constitution, Divided by God, and The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State.