By Noah Feldman,
Noted Harvard Law professor (and Bloomberg opinion columnist) Noah Feldman’s most recent book is To Be a Jew Today, in which he focuses on the issues of his own faith, and expands from them to discuss Judaism, through the lenses of religious faith, Israel, and the Jewish people. As a reader, it felt like he was trying to come to terms with dealing with his love and the struggle of being a Jew. I certainly identify with this struggle. Professor Feldman is very introspective in his evaluation of his own faith and struggles to explain the major trends in the Jewish tradition. It is a book that was three years in the making, but since it has been released in the post-7 October 2023 world, some things about the last few months are obviously discussed as part of the themes of the book.
In the first part, On God, Professor Feldman introduces (in place of the traditional denominational breakdown of Judaism), three different Jewish ways of looking at the world. The first are the Traditionalists—equivalent to those who are Orthodox, for whom G-d is “all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-authoritative.” The second are what he terms the Progressives—which in most respects covers the whole of the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist movements, who are “actively reviewing and revisiting G-d’s laws and G-d’s words with an eye toward extracting a moral truth from them.” The last are Evolutionists, who “in principle accept G-d’s authority and joyfully embrace the contention of Talmudic reasoning,” yet simultaneously “seek to understand what morality requires, so as to evolve the law in that direction.” Professor Feldman expresses his hope that with these three categories, in lieu of the traditional denominations, “every reader could find themselves somewhere in the range of options that I’m offering, even if they’re somewhere at the boundaries.” Mr. Feldman also notes that he has held all of these views, and sometimes has held all of them at the same time (which, when reading it, reminded me of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s test of a first-rate intellect). In this part, he also discusses how liberal/Democratic politics came from the Progressive movement (which, when reading this section, reminded me of the old joke that Reform Judaism is the Democratic Party with holidays).
In the second (and longest) part, Of Israel, Professor Feldman notes, in light of the 2023 Israel-Hamas war that is still ongoing, that effectively nothing has garnered more global attention than Israel. For many Jews, both outside and inside Israel, the Gaza conflict feels pivotal. Since October 7th, Jews throughout the world, whether they are pro-Israel or anti-Israel or some combination of sympathetic and critical, have found they have no choice but to deal with Israel’s impact and significance on their lives and feelings, regardless of willingness to engage on the subject of Israel. This recent experience demands a new formulation of what Israel means for being a Jew today. In this section, Professor Feldman analyses the history behind the Zionist project, from its origins with Herzl and other secular Zionists, who dreamt of what a Jewish state should be, to the present day. Mr. Feldman notes that, to those original secular Zionists, the formation of a Jewish state was not supposed to be an event in Jewish history, but the final event of Jewish history, at least as it relates to the roughly two millennia of suffering of Jews in the Diaspora (comparable to the assertion by Francis Fukuyama that the fall of communist Europe and conclusion of the Cold War was “the end of history”). A secular Jewish state would make world Jewry into a normal, regular nation-state, like France or Sweden or Portugal, not a diffused people fated to live as a neurotic and oppressed minority wherever Jews might end up. Of course, it hasn’t worked out this way; Israel didn’t become a singular Jewish nation-state, but its own nation on a separate course of evolution than those Jews who still lived in the Diaspora. Professor Feldman also notes how, unlike the expected secularisation of all Jewish Israelis, that there has been a religious renaissance in Israel, up to and including the creation of the chimaera known as Religious Zionism, which is far from the justification that many of the Founding Parents of Israel, secular and socialist that so many of them were, had in mind. As a result of this divergent evolution between Israel and the Diaspora (primarily the United States), Professor Feldman discusses how there has come to be a generational conflict between those who are Gen X or older, that tend to be traditional Democrats of the centre to centre-left that tend to be pro-Israel, even with criticisms of Israeli politics and policy. He discusses how groups, formed by Gen X and Millennial political progressives, try to thread the needle between being liberal Zionists with their criticisms of the right-ward shift of Israeli politics that the older and more established Israel lobbying entities, especially AIPAC, seem to overlook in their eyes. He also notes that the trend of many younger Jews’ views on Israel are very different, and in many cases could be described as anti-Zionist. He notes that the inter-generational rift stem not from different conceptions of progressive Jewishness but from two different , and in fact mutually exclusive, visions of Israel, filtered through a shared commitment to social justice.
In the third (and final) part, Of The Jewish People, Mr. Feldman discusses many topics that have been covered in depth elsewhere, given the amount of controversy, including the question of “Who is a Jew?” As Professor Feldman notes when discussing the question of Jewish peoplehood, acknowledging up-front that “your answer to the question of what the Jewish people is will depend to a great degree on what you think the Jewish people should be, and for what purpose.” As Mr Feldman notes, his opinion is of Jews as a large, extended family, “the kind of family I have in mind is not fixed or defined by blood ties alone, or even necessarily at all…it is defined by a whole range of different human connections people recognise as creating family.” Professor Feldman also covers how the Shoah transmogrified the raison d’être for a Jewish state from the older Zionist argument (all nations deserve a state of their own) to one based on the aspect of Jews being a chosen people (in this case by the Nazis and their attempted total annihilation of European Jewry, so that selection in effect sanctified the creation of the modern state of Israel). As he discusses in this section, a major part of the reason that the State of Israel is viewed, as many Israelis complain, by the standards of a western European democratic society such as Sweden, given its location in the Levant and the fact that over half of Israel’s population descends from Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews whose origins span the Middle East and North Africa, is given the State of Israel’s founding as a consequence of the Shoah as a democratic nation for western European Jews, in contrast to the Arab and Muslim states which surround Israel, either due to a more defensible political relativism or due to implicit racism on the part of those western European societies, as Prof. Feldman notes. One of the last major questions Mr Feldman asks in the book is: “Is there a way to be Jewish today that brings together G-d, Israel, and Jewish peoplehood and that is available to Jews with very different conceptions of all three?”
It goes without saying that this book is undeniably a very personal work on the part of Mr Feldman, and answers from his perspective the question of “Why be Jewish in the modern world?” It covers almost as wide of a swathe as the Talmud, from his personal perspective as a Jew and as a professor of law. It is guaranteed to be thought-provoking and to raise a lot of questions in the mind of its readers (which it surely did in me). It should be read by all–both Jews who would like an example of how one Jew looks at life, the universe, and everything; as well as gentiles who are looking for a window into the thoughts and struggles of modern Jews in the world.
Originally published in the Tishrei 2024/5785 issue of The Jewish American Warrior.
