The rise of Jewish secularism1 was largely a story of the early twentieth century. That secular “moment” had its precursors, as has been shown in this book, and it is far from fully complete. But in every Jewish community where secular political, cultural, and philosophical movements flourished, the great ideological battles of a century ago have been transformed and have, in many cases, been won. Their legacy, in the sense of a cultural memory, remains alive — and not only as something belonging to the past. The concept of heritage suggests, on the contrary, a memory that still haunts its heirs and shapes their beliefs and their actions, both consciously and unconsciously2. One proof of its persistence is the fact that Jews the world over are infinitely more secular than their non-Jewish neighbors. We have sought to explore its various modes.
It would, however, be a mistake to draw a direct line between the secularism of the late nineteenth century and its more recent versions. It has often been argued that we live in a “post-secular” age — meaning that religion and its negation are no longer opposite poles3. Religion is part of the secular world in all its forms. It is steeped in the secular, and the secular is steeped in religion. Nationalist movements display religious features, while religious revivals often express themselves through political practice. The Enlightenment’s claim to have killed off the gods looks increasingly empty.
In the Jewish world too, the old dichotomies prove no longer to be set in stone. Consider the two largest Jewish communities, the State of Israel and North America, and see how the themes proposed by the thinkers we have discussed in this book resonate, and how they may evolve in the future.
The founders of secular Hebrew culture would certainly have been very surprised to discover that religion flourishes in the State created by the Zionist movement. For the first Zionists, political sovereignty was inseparable from a secular alternative to the Jewish religion. Sustained by the phenomenal success of modern Hebrew, this alternative still has deep roots in the State of Israel. Yet even if the foundational Zionist thinkers — Herzl, Nordau, Ahad Ha’am, Berdichevsky, and Brenner — envisioned a Jewish State largely without religion, the very ambiguity of the concept of a Jewish State has in fact made a divorce between the two difficult, not only in practice but ideologically as well. So, paradoxically, the State founded by the most radical of secularists turned out to inscribe religion into its laws of marriage, divorce, and inheritance, and into its official holidays. The definition of who is a Jew, which determines who may be a citizen, also refers back to religious categories.
Thus the secular revolution prophesied by modern Hebrew culture has not fully reached its promised land. In the 1950s the ultra-Orthodox rabbi Abraham Karelitz, also known as the Hazon Ish, met with David Ben-Gurion and pointed out to him that only the religious tradition could be considered a “full wagon.” This expression refers to a passage in the Talmud which holds that, when an empty wagon meets a full wagon on a narrow bridge, the full wagon must have the right of way. Convinced at the time that history was on his side, Ben-Gurion made certain concessions to the Orthodox, regarding them as fossils on the verge of disappearing. Yet in the years following the Six-Day War, two powerful religious movements challenged the hegemony of secular Hebrew culture: the anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox and the messianic religious Zionists. The former, who enjoyed a high birth rate and recruited from among Mizrahi Jews, and the latter, who rode the wave of religious fervor born in the wake of the conquest of biblical Judea and Samaria, asserted that the roles had been reversed, and that secular Jews were now the provisional aberration, a single century’s deviation from the longue durée4 of Jewish history.
These religious movements are not mere reversions to a pre-modern past; both are creations of, and responses to, modernity. If secularism was originally a reaction against religion, Orthodox Zionism, non-Zionism, and anti-Zionism are, as their names suggest, reactions to the dominant Israeli culture.
The Zionist movement, which sought to replace the religious cultures of the Diaspora with a new unified Hebrew culture, has instead produced an unexpected pluralism and diversity, expressed not only in ethnic but also in religious terms.
Because of the persistence of Orthodoxy and its political power, the otherwise dominant secular culture has an oppositional character: at least part of its meaning flows from its rejection of theocratic politics. From this point of view one can trace a line running from the East European Haskalah and the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalist writers to their spiritual heirs at the start of the twenty-first century. The first were certainly a minority, whereas the latter are themselves part of the establishment. Yet one can still recognize many of the themes and modes of thought of the founders of modern Hebrew culture in today’s Israel.
Take the response to this situation by a few contemporary Israeli writers who have, in one way or another, inherited the legacy of secular Zionism. Amos Oz, for example, picked up the torch of the secular tradition.
In his book of interviews conducted in post-1967 Israel, Oz devotes a chapter to the ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists who live in the Jerusalem neighborhood where he grew up: “in this neighborhood where I was born and raised the outcome of the struggle has already been decided, Zionism has been pushed back as if it had never existed.”5 This is the world that Brenner, Berdichevsky, and Bialik tried to banish forever: “Driven by revolt and disgust, they portrayed the reality around them as a putrid swamp, a heap of extinguished souls and dead words.
But at the same time as they denounced it, they immortalized it.” Yet in this corner of Jerusalem at least, and elsewhere in Israel, the secular revolution has failed, in part because “we [that is, contemporary secular Jews] would not dare, today, to renounce a world which has since been annihilated by Hitler.”6 The Shoah forbids the kind of sweeping attack undertaken by the founding fathers of modern Hebrew culture, even as this resurgent Orthodoxy represents a mortal threat to that culture. Oz cannot help slipping into a language that recalls Brenner’s — a language dangerously close to antisemitism: “Hitler and the Messiah, like two pillars of fire, dominate their daily lives, made up of pragmatism, of subtle and meticulous calculations preceding their every step, of a hundred disputes with themselves and with those around them.”7
Oz sets out to build a new argument to justify secular Zionist culture, confronting head-on the idea that secularism is an empty wagon8. He says that Israeli culture has a kind of anarchist core: “we don’t want discipline.” Such resistance to authority, together with the desire for a democratic pluralism, are not strictly contemporary; they stem from historical Judaism: “Democracy and tolerance are merely the expression of something deeper: humanism, whose essence is that the human individual is always an end and never a means. This ideal is no foreign body and no import: it flows from the very heart of Jewish civilization.” If humanism and democracy are inherent in Judaism, then their close cousin, secularism, must also have roots in Jewish civilization.
Oz’s project is to wrest Judaism — the riches of the historical Jewish tradition — from the hands of the rabbis and of religion. […] Perhaps the strongest evidence of the secular revolution in Hebrew literature that Brenner had predicted is the fact that a major work of the younger generation of Israeli writers is by a Palestinian-Israeli writer, Anton Shammas. Shammas chose to write Arabesques, an important novel that deals with the Palestinian experience, in Hebrew. Granted, Brenner’s own attitude toward the Arabs of the land was ambivalent, and he was eventually killed by one of them. But one wonders whether, three quarters of a century later, he might not have welcomed the fact that a non-Jew could write a compelling novel in a “Jewish” language as a sign that secular Hebrew culture had at last shed the parochialism of religious tradition.
Shammas’s intervention in what had appeared to be an intra-Jewish dialogue heralded a new movement, loosely called “post-Zionism,” which seeks to shift Israel from the status of a Jewish State to that of a State of all its citizens. The post-Zionists argue (without all subscribing to a single ideology) that the secularism inherent in the original Zionist movement will only be realized once Israel sheds its last vestige of religious identity and adopts a neutral category of citizenship. The post-Zionists also call into question the homogeneity of the category “Jew.” If the contemporary Jewish State must reckon with a significant minority of non-Jews — Palestinians, Arabs, Russians, and foreign workers — it must also confront the extraordinary diversity of its Jewish population. Israel may be a Jewish State by some formal criteria, secular or religious, but it is plainly not the unitary ethnic State envisioned by the founders of Zionism.
The most provocative theorist of post-Zionism in terms of the battle against religious tradition is the philosopher Adi Ophir. Ophir conducts a thorough critique of theological texts and shows how this religious discourse continues to spread through secular Israeli culture. He implicitly argues that the religion-secularism dichotomy, which nearly everyone assumes to be a fundamental division dating back to the origins of Zionism, is an illusion. Even in its most liberal versions, Zionism unconsciously took over basic categories of Judaism and dressed them in secular, nationalist garb. One could say that the critique here recalls Berdichevsky’s attack on Ahad Ha’am a century earlier.
For Ophir, the most central categories are those of the Jew and the Goy9. Or rather, the two categories are one, since the Jew defines himself against the Goy, who in turn has no independent existence outside this dyad. This fundamental distinction goes back to the very beginning of the Jewish religion, and although it has taken different forms throughout Jewish history, it has remained essentially the same. The Zionists secularized and nationalized this duality, which led them to found a State based on exclusion. Recall that Spinoza too had argued that the Jews had maintained themselves by self-segregation after losing their State, which in turn provoked the hatred of non-Jews; and because the Jews had maintained themselves in this way, they might one day regain political sovereignty. But Spinoza had no more sympathy than Ophir for Jewish self-segregation. Ophir’s project can thus be seen as an elaborate version of the argument Spinoza was developing three hundred years ago.
The powerful example Ophir gives for this thesis is that of the Passover Haggadah10. He shows that the Haggadah is the one text uniting the religious and the secular in modern Israel, since an overwhelming majority of Israelis take part in a Passover seder and read the text. He argues that the fundamental message of the Haggadah is one of segregation:
God “passes over”11 the houses of the Israelites to strike only the houses of the Egyptians. Freed from oppression, the Jews are free to reverse the equation of power and to oppress others. For millennia this was a fantasy of revenge; in the State of Israel it has become reality: Israelis no longer read the Haggadah as the oppressed but as the oppressors — of the Palestinians of the territories occupied in 1967 and of those who are formally Israeli citizens.
Ophir takes a step beyond the theology of the Haggadah.
If, he argues, in the religious tradition it was God whose mighty arm intervened to save His people, then in an age of secular nationalism that role is played by the Israeli army — the mundane equivalent of divine wrath. Faith in arms now replaces faith in God, but the function of the one is the same as the function of the other: to ensure that God’s people will be protected from the ever-present threat of the Goy.
Ophir’s post-Zionism may be seen as an effort to fulfill the foundational Zionist promise of “normalizing” relations between Jews and non-Jews. Herzl’s utopian novel Altneuland promised exactly such a normalization: in the Jewish State, the Arab is a fully fledged citizen who praises the Zionists in perfect German, albeit with a Berlin accent. The Zionists, Ophir suggests, did not realize that revolutionary promise — which, in his view, requires not only the secularization of religious categories but their deconstruction from within. Ophir’s secularism is thus not the same as Herzl’s, whose ignorance of Jewish tradition was matched only by his unwitting appropriation of its categories. Ophir, by contrast, builds his position out of a critique of the tradition itself. One could then say that, just as the Jew requires the existence of the Goy, Ophir’s secularism requires the existence of Judaism, whether in its religious or its Zionist form. It is not entirely clear, however, what its own positive content really consists of.
Ophir’s declared secular struggle with religious tradition shows that the specter of that tradition continues to haunt those who contest its fundamental truths. Like Ophir, young secular Israelis are turning in growing numbers to the study of traditional texts.
Secular batei midrash (houses of study) — Elul and Alma, to name only two — have sprung up since the 1990s. Likewise, the Orthodox practice of studying through the night on the holiday of Shavuot (Hebrew tikkun layl Shavuot) has also become a popular custom among certain non-religious Israelis. These non-academic institutions, which roughly coincide with the emergence of post-Zionism, reflect a desire to wrest the tradition away from the Orthodox and to make it the heritage of all Jews. If the secular/religious divide was the product of Zionism and all its precursors, these new non-religious students of the rabbis contest the divide itself. This relatively small phenomenon may not constitute a truly significant movement, yet it shows that secularism in Israel is not always driven by a Brenner-like rejection of everything religious tradition stands for. It is rather the indirect legacy of Ahad Ha’am, who likewise wanted to wrest the tradition from the rabbis.
If we now turn to the American Jewish community, we encounter another history of secularism since the early twentieth century. Whereas the dialectic of secularism and religion in Israel has been driven mainly by the persistence of rabbinic authority, the absence of rabbinic power in America has given rise to a different dynamic. Since Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the observation that the separation of Church and State in America has produced the most religious society of any modern country has become a commonplace.
Civil society teems with religious diversity, including newly created religions. American Jews have benefited greatly from this particular form of secularism. With the State guaranteeing religious freedom and tolerance, Jews have innovated and adapted their religion to the New World12. Unlike its East European and Israeli versions, Orthodoxy here must compete with a whole marketplace of religious — and not merely secular — options.
The majority of American Jews descend from the great immigration of 1881–1924. Chronologically this corresponds to the generations that founded the State of Israel after fleeing Europe in the same period. The immigrant generation (or generations) often abandoned religion and embraced progressive politics and a secular Jewish culture.
Having moved from the cities to the suburbs, the next generation often returned to religion, finding its Jewish identity in the synagogue. So it was that in 1955 Will Herberg could describe the Jews as the third leg of the American religious tripod: Protestant, Catholic, Jew13. A full embrace of America initially seemed to require the transformation of Judaism into a religion above all.
Yet just as religion was never absent from the first generation, neither was secular culture absent from the second. The political and cultural heritage of the immigrants endured, even if it had been translated from Yiddish into English. A wonderful passage in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America captures the sense in which the American-born generations came to affiliate with an ethnically inflected secular English: “Their Jewishness didn’t come to them from the rabbinate, from the synagogue, or from their few formal religious practices […]. Their Jewishness didn’t come from above […]. These Jews didn’t need any grand frames of reference, profession of faith, or doctrinal creed to know they were Jews; and they certainly didn’t need a separate language — they already had one, their native vernacular, which they wielded effortlessly, at a card table or in pitching some sales transaction, with all the ease of the indigenous population […]. Their Jewishness was woven into their fiber, like their Americanness.”14
For these Jews, whose Jewish identity carried an entirely secular meaning, American English had become a Jewish language through and through, in the sense that this was how they expressed who they were: Jews.
What is more, the postwar appropriation of religion was not only religious. Tradition was also drawn on as a source for secular expressions. Thus, as Hana Wirth-Nesher has noted, the Kaddish, the traditional prayer for the dead, often appears in the secular culture created by American Jews15. The most famous appropriation is probably Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Kaddish” (1960), the work of the beat generation poet, written three years after his mother’s death. Ginsberg was famously a Buddhist, and one has the sense that he places the “Hebrew Anthem” and the “Buddhist Book of Answers” on the same plane. But it is to the Kaddish that he turns when the thought of death visits him — his mother’s, his own, the planet’s. Ginsberg evokes his mother’s experience as an immigrant, and the poem becomes a eulogy to the movement that, in American Jewish history, transformed immigrant culture into a national culture.
Other works invoke the Kaddish differently. Written in 1942, Charles Reznikoff’s poem of the same name is a call for social justice and identification with the weak, while Leonard Bernstein dedicated his Kaddish Symphony to the memory of the recently assassinated John F. Kennedy. Only Leon Wieseltier’s Kaddish truly appropriates the historical and textual resonances of the prayer16. Written on the occasion of the death of Wieseltier’s father, a Shoah survivor, the book is both a work of historical scholarship and a personal spiritual meditation. One could say it thereby crosses the line separating religion from secularism — a line that has often blurred in the recent history of American Jewish culture.
Why is the Kaddish so often invoked in the works of American Jewish artists and writers? Has the long shadow of the Shoah become a kind of secular religion for American Jews? But aside from Wieseltier’s book, the few works just cited — and there are others, such as Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America — do not explicitly evoke the Shoah. Is it not rather because a secular culture is incapable of providing the tools to confront death — that of individuals and that of a European culture — that the most secular Jews turn to this characteristic expression of religious tradition in order to extract its historical associations for non-religious ends?
With the emergence of ethnicity and multiculturalism in the late 1960s, the third generation of Jews returned, often nostalgically, to an older self-definition in terms of peoplehood.
This shift was also influenced by an identification with Israel after 1967, which led many to see themselves as part of a nation rather than only of a religion. One might recognize here a remnant of Ahad Ha’am’s cherished idea of Zion as a cultural center radiating its light over the diaspora — though it was Israel as a State, rather than Hebrew culture, that resonated most strongly with American Jews.
None of the theorists of secular Zionism really anticipated such an effect of the Jewish State: neither Herzl, who wrongly thought it would put an end to antisemitism, nor Ben-Gurion, who wrongly believed it would bring about the ingathering of all the exiles.
As the cultural critic Andrea Most suggests, this third generation can be called “modern,” because “it believes that a once-existing wholeness has been shattered […] and [it persists] in the faith in the possibility of repairing the fragmentation of modernity.”17 This will to recover a lost culture can take religious forms, like Jewish Renewal, but also secular ones, through fiction, theater, or cinema. In the San Francisco Bay Area, for instance, a community of largely unaffiliated Jews attends a film festival every year whose numbers far exceed the total audience of weekly synagogue services. Of course the festival audience overlaps to some extent with synagogue-goers, but that is just the point: one can no longer so easily separate the secular and religious expressions of Jewish culture.
The surge of interest in Jewish Studies — almost every American university has at least one professor specializing in the field — is another instance of overlap between the religious and the secular. As an academic discipline, Jewish Studies, heir to the historical research pioneered by Spinoza, employs only secular methods, even when dealing with religious texts or taught by an observant professor. A secular approach to such texts can sometimes lead to conclusions radically incompatible with those of the dominant religious tradition. In research on the Talmud, for example, the religious text par excellence, some find a source for something as anti-traditional as gay rights. As with secular Hebrew culture in Israel, where academic Jewish Studies has a less massive impact, the field provides a way of taking part in Jewish culture without necessarily subscribing to the religion of Judaism.
Academic and lay interest in Spinoza is itself an expression of Jewish Studies. In her well-known book on Spinoza, Rebecca Goldstein, who pursued university studies in philosophy after being raised in an Orthodox milieu, describes the way her Orthodox teacher warned the students against the dangers of reading this seventeenth-century heretic18. So Spinoza remains as fascinating and absolutely as menacing to religion as were Solomon Maimon in the eighteenth century and Leo Strauss in the 1920s. Goldstein’s own path to philosophy likewise began with that threat of heresy. As one who teaches Spinoza regularly, I can confirm her account: he holds an exceptional fascination for undergraduates regardless of their background. Spinoza’s pull comes from the fact that the battle between religion and secularism is still very much alive.
Today’s generation, roughly the fourth in American Jewish history, has entered a process of redefining this battle. No longer feeling the anxiety their parents felt about antisemitism and assimilation, these Jews are often barely concerned with the emphasis on intermarriage, continuity, and synagogue membership, or with the trials facing the State of Israel. This generation, which has been called “post-modern,” often regards identity as constructed and changeable: there is no “essential” Jewishness — racial, religious, political, ethical, or anything else. Everyone, not only converts, is a “Jew by choice,” and the meaning of “Jew” is fluid and often situational. The old categories of “religious” and “secular” are no longer fixed. One might try out a religious ritual one day and throw oneself into social activism the next.
It is significant that some of this generation’s best-selling authors, such as Shalom Auslander and Nathan Englander, are Jews who grew up Orthodox but who now write about that world from the outside19.
Their ironic, sometimes funny distance from religion recalls a bit the Haskalah and the early-nineteenth-century Hebrew and Yiddish literatures, which often used satire to pillory the world of the rabbis. Auslander in particular is at war with the God of his fathers.
But whereas the nineteenth-century writers had nowhere to flee to — which is why they were searching for utopian addresses in Zion or elsewhere — today’s lapsed Orthodox Jews have a whole secular world at their disposal. Late twentieth-century American secularism has its own challenges, but they are fundamentally different from those of the previous century. By writing about religion from a position that is both inside and outside, these writers only further complicate the boundary between inside and outside.
Finally, for contemporary American Jews, Jewish identity is merely one identity among others. The post-modern turn of contemporary Jewish culture is fundamentally “anti-essentialist” and is, in that respect, open to a plurality of new possibilities. Fluidity is itself a sign of secularism, since its opposite — religion — demands binary divisions: us against them, with no gray zone between. Intermarriage is the most visible sign of this fluidity, but it is a fluidity that challenges religion on many fronts, including Orthodoxy.
In this challenge, we recognize the very questions raised a century ago by those, like Zhitlowsky and Brenner, who defended the idea of a secular Jewish culture. Zhitlowsky’s “great Sukkah” could welcome believers and heretics alike, and Brenner’s vision of a new Jewish culture was open to all who wished to join it.
Both of them, however, came out of a culture in which the great majority of Jews knew instinctively what it meant to be Jewish. Their revolutionary alternative presupposed a stable identity against which they revolted.
A century later, that stability is no longer to be assumed, especially in a society like America where self-fashioning and self-invention are essential hallmarks of the culture. Neither religious nor secular in the senses in which those terms were once used, American Jewish culture is in the process of redefining them. The only certain thing one can say about the future of these categories is that they will not in the least resemble what they were a century ago, when ideological secularism became a mass movement. The secularism of American Jews today is not ideological in that sense, and that is perhaps why it is novelists and memoirists, rather than ideologues, who give it expression.
In a certain sense, the majority of Jews around the world today are secular. They doubt the existence of God or regard the question as moot. They believe in the separation of Church and State. Even Orthodox Jews outside Israel would probably agree with Moses Mendelssohn that Church and State must be separate. And most Jews now define their identity in historical or cultural terms. But in a non-ideological age, “secular” has largely ceased to be a fighting word, and for that reason it is perhaps not the first word most Jews choose to identify with. In one sense, this means that the ideologues of Jewish secularism have won the battle; in another, they have not, in so far as the secular culture they had in mind was an intentionally chosen one.
If the hallmarks of secularism are the absence of dogma and resistance to uniformity, as Amos Oz maintains, then the whole of Jewish culture in Israel and North America, including its Orthodox elements, is deeply secular. No hegemonic authority, religious or nationalist, can impose its program. No road into the future can be charted with confidence. Secularism makes no promise of continuity or survival, but it does guarantee the freedom to experiment, without which neither continuity nor survival is possible.
I began this book20 with a personal story, and I would like to end it the same way. In the preface, I told the story of my father’s antinomian Yom Kippur. The socialist and Zionist ideologies my father had absorbed in the youth movement Hashomer Hatzair fueled a secular revolt against the religion of his parents.
It is this secularism, bound up with deep Jewish commitments, that he passed on to me and that drove the exploration of the ideas I have discussed in this book. But over the course of the twentieth century his secularism lost its ideological edge and ended up becoming something different — for him, and, in another way, for me his son. Toward the end of his life he returned to the synagogue, though only a few times a year. Coming home from Kol Nidre on the evening of Yom Kippur, something of the revolt of his youth would stir again: with a small mischievous look, he would ask for tea and cakes, as if to say that no form of religious devotion could erase a whole life of skepticism.
For my own part, it is a different way of celebrating the holiest day of the Jewish year that signals my own “post-secularism.” With a minyan (the quorum required for prayer) of friends, my family and I head out to Muir Woods21, where I like to think that the Almighty himself (if He exists) must surely pray amid the ancient giant sequoias. Is this ritual religious or secular? Neither and both at once — this paradoxical hybrid has only been possible after a century and more of the tradition of secular Jewish thought that has been the subject of this book.
(translated from English by Martine Leibovici)
I translate secularism, secular, as sécularisme, séculier and not as laïque, which is too steeped in French culture.↩︎
For this concept of memory, see Hermann Kevin Goldschmitt, The Legacy of German Jewry, New York, 2007, pp. 236-244.↩︎
See for example Peter Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World. Resurgent Religion and World Politics, New York, 1999.↩︎
In French in the text.↩︎
Amos Oz, Les voix d’Israël (The Voices of Israel), trans. G. Seniak, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1983, p. 15.↩︎
Ibid., p. 12.↩︎
Ibid., p. 21.↩︎
See Amos Oz, “Full wagon, empty wagon?”, in Contemplate. The Journal of Cultural Jewish Thought 3 (2005–6), pp. 60–72.↩︎
See Adi Ophir, “Jew-Goy” (in Hebrew), in Avodat ha-Hoveh. Masot al Tarbut Ysraelit ba’Zeman ha-Zeh (n.p., 2001), pp. 52–84.↩︎
Adi Ophir, “The Passover Haggadah. A deconstructed reading” (in Hebrew), in ibid., pp. 85–116.↩︎
In English: “passes over,” while Passover translates as Pâques.↩︎
See Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism. A History, New Haven, CT, 2004.↩︎
Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew. An Essay in American Religious Sociology, Garden City, NY, 1955.↩︎
Philip Roth, Le complot contre l’Amérique (The Plot Against America), trans. J. Kamoun, Paris, Gallimard, 2006, pp. 264–265.↩︎
Hana Wirth-Nesher, “Jewish culture USA” (in Hebrew), in Yirmiyahu Yovel, David Shaham and Yair Tzaban, eds., Zeman Yehudi Hadash. Tarbut Yehudit be-Edan Hiloni; Jerusalem, 2007.↩︎
Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish, New York, 1999.↩︎
Andrea Most, “Postmodernism and Jewish identity” (in Hebrew), in Zeman Yehudi Hadash, 4, pp. 126–29.↩︎
See Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza, New York, 2006.↩︎
See Shalom Auslander, Foreskin’s Lament. A Memoir, New York, 2007, and Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, New York, 1999.↩︎
The book of which this chapter is the last.↩︎
A national park in California protecting an old-growth forest of giant sequoias (Translator’s note).↩︎