There's a popular expression among Jews that sums up the diversity of Jewish belief and practice: "Two Jews, three opinions." Without doubt, Noah Feldman's well-informed To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People will elicit a variety of clashing responses as it surveys some of the most critical issues in the Jewish world, not least because it arrives at a time of crisis brought on by the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
Feldman, a law professor at Harvard and noted public intellectual, brings to the project a substantial grounding in Jewish sources and a life experience that began with 13 years at a Modern Orthodox parochial school in his hometown of Cambridge, Mass. In his book's three well-documented sections, Feldman addresses a trio of expansive and daunting topics: Jewish perspectives on God, Israel, and the notion of peoplehood. Rather than considering these contentious subjects from the perspective of the prevailing movements in organized Jewry--Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist--he prefers to recategorize Jews into broad segments he calls Traditionalists, Progressives, Evolutionists, and Godless Jews.
To Be a Jew Today is a deeply serious work that's aimed primarily at a knowledgeable, or at least curious, Jewish audience, but is one that's accessible for any reader who wants to know more about the challenges, contradictions, and richness of Jewish life. There's much here that's likely to please or unsettle anyone who engages seriously with what it means to be Jewish in the contemporary world. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer