* The Hebrew word means to tremble or quake with fear. It comes from Isaiah 66:5, which reads, “Hear the word of the Lord, you who quake at his word.” And yes, it’s the same verse that named the Society of Friends, the Quakers, who brought you Pennsylvania, abolitionism, and Quaker Oats.
† The Haskalah, as it is called in Hebrew, followed the broader Enlightenment, lasting a bit more than a century from its beginnings in the 1770s. Its proponents, many of them skeptical critics of religious traditionalism, combined dedication to reason and modernity with renewed interest in Hebrew language, Jewish history, and Jewish culture.
‡ Some sociological scholars of religion consider Haredim to be religious fundamentalists. The monumental Fundamentalism Project devoted five chapters of one of its major volumes to them. See The Fundamentalism Project, vol. 4: Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 173–357. Its editors defined fundamentalism as a modern strategy whereby “beleaguered believers attempt to preserve their distinctive identity … by selective retrieval of doctrines, beliefs, and practices from a sacred past.” The “fundamentals” so “retrieved and updated” are “accompanied … by unprecedented claims and doctrinal innovations” intended “to regain the same charismatic intensity today by which they forged communal identity … long ago.” Marty and Appleby, Accounting for Fundamentalisms, Introduction, 1.
§ Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye addresses God a bit more familiarly still. After formulaically thanking God for a year of flourishing crops, he tells his Maker as an afterthought: “As I think of it, what good will all that flourishing do for a shlimazel like me? Does my horse care whether oats are expensive or cheap?” “The Great Windfall,” in Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor’s Son, trans. Aliza Sevrin (New York: Penguin Books, 2009).
¶ For a subtle, important discussion, see Rabbi Irving Greenberg, “Voluntary Covenant,” Perspectives (National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, 1982). I will say more about this voluntarism in the next chapter. For now, note that the voluntary reading of the covenant isn’t merely a result of liberal ideals. Those liberal ideals themselves were influenced originally by a (Protestant) voluntary reading of the very same biblical covenant that was itself influenced by some rabbinic readings of the same story.
** Abie’s Irish Rose (Broadway 1922, film 1928) was contemporary with The Dybbuk (stage 1920, film 1937) and The Jazz Singer (1927).
†† Another form of meta-halakhah is philosophical rationalism, which seeks the reasons for the law in eternal philosophical truths. Other meta-halakhic approaches include ethical pietism, a focus on the cultivation of individual character; and biblicism, a turn to the narratives and poetry of the Bible to uncover the deeper values of the faith. In II:3 I shall argue that Religious Zionism is the newest and fastest-growing meta-halakhah of the modern era.
‡‡ The language is unique, too: a combination of the vernacular (English or Israeli Hebrew); Yiddish; Talmudic Aramaic; and rabbinic Hebrew. What emerges is a sociolect (a dialect associated with a particular subgroup) known as “Yeshivish,” also called Yeshiva English, Yeshivishe reid, or Yeshivishe shprakh. See the classic book by Chaim M. Weiser, Frumspeak: The First Dictionary of Yeshivish (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995). The final line of the translation of the Gettysburg Address into Yeshivish is worth the price of the book.
§§ By way of contrast, the motto of Yeshiva University, the flagship Modern Orthodox (not Traditionalist) institution of higher learning, is Torah u-Mada, “Torah and science,” a phrase that implies both tension and the possibility of resolving that tension. The very name Yeshiva University embodies the same tension: which is it, a yeshiva or a university? The unofficial motto of Lakewood is “Torah, Torah, Torah”: no tension, no contradiction, and, when you come right down to it, no official motto. That’s because a yeshiva doesn’t have a motto, a university does. And Lakewood is not a university, even if it now confers a degree called a Bachelor of Talmudic Laws to enable its students to attend graduate school.
* When I told this story to Julia Allison, she said without missing a beat, “Anyone interested in learning a whole religion on one foot should look into Buddhism.”
† I am saving the greatest current challenge to Progressive Jews, that of Israel and Zionism, for part II.
‡ Reform Judaism does draw a communal line. Most Reform temples will not allow a person who has not been born a Jew nor become a Jew to serve as an official of the congregation, to lead services, or to be called alone to the Torah. The justification, to the extent there is one, is that liturgical worship is a communal practice of those who have entered the covenant and that the communal institution of conversion is an outward sign of that commitment. I will discuss these issues of communal belonging in part III.
§ Nonbinary terminology is emerging. B-mitzvah seems to be the current leader along with b’nai mitzvah, a plural form paralleling they/theirs. See https://www.keshetonline.org/resources/a-guide-for-the-gender-neutral-b-mitzvah/; Alyson Kruger, “Bar or Bat Mitzvah? Hey, What About a Both Mitzvah?” New York Times, March 27, 2019.
* A different, growing part of the Modern Orthodox community is not committed to Evolutionism but accepts Traditionalism as a matter of theory while belonging to communities that are in practice less insular or restrictive.
* Spinoza, condemned by many as a heretic, is a complicated and complicating case. He did not precisely deny God, whom he considered immanent in nature. He may indeed have been “God intoxicated,” as the poet-philosopher Novalis put it, or a pantheist, or something else. See Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
† The Talmud explains the name as follows: Elisha, in a spiritual crisis after his mystical experience, “went and found a harlot” and proposed sex with her. Recognizing him, and knowing him as a prominent rabbi, she exclaimed, whether in reproach or astonishment or both, “Are you not Elisha ben Abuyah?” In response, Elisha uprooted a radish from a nearby patch and gave it to her. This was a radical act for a rabbi because it was the Sabbath, when the act of uprooting violated the biblical injunction to do no work. The woman concluded, “He is another” (BT Hagigah 15a). Often Aher is translated as “Other” or “the Other.” But in ordinary English, the singular form of “other” is “another.” That is both what the woman said of Elisha and also the natural translation of the word Aher when it is used to name him.
‡ The most horrifying answer was, of course, the Nazis’: the murder of the Jews as the “final solution to the Jewish question,” die Endlösung der Judenfrage.
§ Consider this passage, in which the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi imagines saying to Freud, “I think you believed that just as you are a godless Jew, psychoanalysis is a godless Judaism. But I don’t think you intended us to know this.” Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 99. Cf. Gila Ashtor, Exigent Psychoanalysis: The Interventions of Jean Laplanche (New York: Routledge, 2022), 23–29. Special thanks to Farrah Khaleghi Aizenman for sending me Ashtor’s book.
¶ Their names—Hank Greenberg, Sandy Koufax, Sid Luckman, Dolph Schayes, even Daniel Mendoza—flood me with nostalgia for a youth spent playing ball and reading books. The collections can tell us much about American Jewish cultural identity and attempts to construct masculinity within it, but next to nothing about meaningful Jewishness or, for that matter, sports.
** There is a large scholarly literature about how Jews think about history, much of it in conversation with the scholar Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s important book Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), which argued for an ahistorical or even antihistorical consciousness in traditional Jewish writing and thought. I am not, in this book, directly addressing this important topic, except to note that I am trying to provide historical context and trace possible future historical directions in order to illuminate the possible paths available to Jews today.
†† Maybe, on a Marxian analysis, it was precisely Marx’s Jewish origins as a product of the bourgeois, money-obsessed class that enabled him to discover the theory of history that identified the material as the true motivating force of history.
‡‡ Felix Adler (1851–1933), the founder of the Ethical Culture movement, was the son of the German-trained rabbi of the flagship New York Reform Jewish congregation, Temple Emanu-El of Fifth Avenue. His clear objective was to (further) universalize and transcend Reform Judaism. The Ethical Culture Fieldston School still bears the name of the movement and there still exists a New York Society for Ethical Culture.
* I am acutely aware here of the influence of my close and deeply missed friend Shahab Ahmed (1966–2015). His masterwork, What Is Islam: The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), is a 609-page exploration of what makes Islam Islam. Ultimately, Shahab answered his grand question with a capacious hermeneutical engagement around what he called the Pre-Text, Text, and Con-Text of the Qur’an (301–404). To Shahab, this engagement made Islam unique and distinctive, much more than just a religion or a culture or a civilization or even a discursive tradition. My (much shorter) attempt to make sense of Jewishness does not make the same claim to uniqueness. It does borrow in some ways from Shahab’s idea of hermeneutic engagement, but it is more an account of experience than of interpretation.
† Elohim has other biblical meanings too. Sometimes it means “human judges.”
* I have in mind the example of Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), which influenced me heavily when it came out and in the years since, not Ilan Pappé, The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge (New York: Verso, 2014), which I read only in researching this book.
† Throughout the book, I use the term “classical Zionism” in a broad way, to refer to a line of strongly secularist, nationalist Zionist thought that can be traced back through Theodor Herzl to figures like Moses Hess, Leo Pinsker, Moshe Lilienblum, and Peretz Smolenskin, and forward at least through David Ben-Gurion. I am aware of and appreciate the sophisticated historiography of Zionism that points out nuance, variety, tension, and contradiction within the category “Zionism.” For every generalization I make about classical Zionism, it would be possible to show exceptions. Nevertheless, some generalization is necessary in a work like this that is directed to the general reader, not only to specialists.
‡ In some ways, it was not. For example, the Jews of Judea in the Hellenistic period spoke Greek and Aramaic, not Hebrew, which seems already to have been reserved primarily for scholarly and liturgical use. As a matter of historical reality, some people who identified as Israelites or Judaeans—and later as Jews—lived outside the historic land of Israel from early in recorded history. The Jewish community in Egypt had a temple of its own (mentioned in the Talmud) and a population of tens of thousands even while the Second Temple in Jerusalem was standing. In nationalist thinking, however, the idea of the Diaspora came to be associated specifically with the loss of Jewish sovereignty after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 CE.
§ Compare Jefferson’s “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” in the first sentence of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
¶ The Israel question—what to believe about Israel and how to act in relation to Israel—is intimately intertwined with the Israel-Palestine question, which includes also the question of how Israelis and Palestinians can live alongside each other, if that is indeed possible. They overlap but are not identical. In this book, I do not purport to answer or even properly address the Israel-Palestine question. It is pressing and crucial nevertheless, and its gravitational pull can be felt.
** This phenomenon feels especially common among successful, intelligent, older Jewish men; but maybe that is just the group that is most comfortable and effective being highly vocal about it.
†† Christian Restorationism was the precursor to Christian Zionism, an important phenomenon in its own right. Briefly, Christian Restorationists believed and believe that Jews must resettle the ancient land of Israel as part of the divine plan that will lead to the Second Coming.
* This social justice formulation could be interpreted as imposing a special duty on Jews to prevent genocide worldwide. What remains ambiguous—and therefore contested to this day—is whether Jews must do so by bearing witness to the Holocaust, by drawing attention to other genocides when they are happening or about to happen, or by favoring military intervention to prevent or end genocide.
† Interestingly, what must be the most widely read book of Progressive Jewish theology— a New York Times bestseller read by Jews and non-Jews alike—did obliquely address this question. Rabbi Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People (New York: Schocken Books, 1981) argued that God was not all-powerful, and himself suffered in the suffering of the just. Although the book was framed as a response to individual human suffering, in particular the death of Kushner’s son at the age of fourteen from a degenerative disease, it also deserves to be read as an important work of post-Holocaust theology.
‡ Not by coincidence, at this time a coalition of Israelis and American Jewish Zionists began a historic process of outreach to American Christian evangelicals, who would eventually come to be important supporters of Israel on the U.S. political scene. Zionism had a long history of support from British Christian evangelicals. But those mainly liberal nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British evangelical Christian Restorationists and proto-Zionists had a very different cast from the politically conservative American evangelicals whom Zionism successfully recruited between 1980 and the present.
§ This has been changing, as I will shortly explain, although the Hamas-Israel war may curtail the change.
¶ The situation of the 1.6 million Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel is more complicated. They have civil and political rights but also face systematic discrimination not entirely dissimilar to the systemic racism that faces African Americans. Their status is increasingly an important concern for critics inside and outside Israel. And since the 1990s, some of their politicians have, as non-Jewish citizens of Israel, challenged the Jewish character of Israel, pointing out the difficulty of Israel being a democracy if it self-defines as Jewish in a way that necessarily excludes Palestinian citizens.
** Not all are kids. Consider Judith Butler (b. 1956), who in 2012 published Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). In the book, Butler draws on “certain religious concepts” of Jewishness to mount a critique of Zionism and a defense of Diasporism. The chapter titled “Is Judaism Zionism?” is particularly suggestive.
†† The Millennials, between Gen X and Gen Z, are a more complicated matter. Their conflict is often internal. Consider the magazine Jewish Currents, originally a communist-affiliated publication founded in 1946. It was refounded in 2018 by a self-described “team of millennials” and is now “committed to the rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture of the Jewish left, and the left more broadly.” The magazine publishes fascinating articles like one on the crisis of the organization IfNotNow, founded by millennials in 2014, a crisis driven, the article proposes, by the organization’s attempt to be a big tent to include liberal Zionists and anti-Zionists. (The article also notes that “many IfNotNow founders were heavily involved in Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist Jewish organizations.”) See Aaron Freedman, “What Happened to IfNotNow?: The Close of the Trump Era Finds the Millennial Anti-Occupation Group at a Crossroads,” Jewish Currents, April 26, 2021, https://jewishcurrents.org/what-happened-to-ifnotnow.
* The election also represented the rise to political power of Mizrahi Israeli Jews: roughly, Jews from majority Muslim countries, most of whom had come to Israel in 1948–1949 after the establishment of the state. Mizrahi Jews have long faced discrimination and cultural and economic marginalization in Israel despite their large numbers. (The word Mizrahi in this context is the Hebrew translation of the word “Oriental,” meaning from the countries of the Near and Middle East.)
† One could, in principle, be a religiously committed Evolutionist or Traditionalist Jew and also, separately, a secular Zionist who understands the settlement of Israel and the creation of the state in wholly mechanistic-secular terms, not in spiritual terms. This was, roughly, the view of the complex thinker Yeshayahu Leibowitz, reflected in English translation in Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, ed. Eliezer Goldman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). I know (and revere) a few Jewish intellectuals who, I believe, still hold something like this view, and they will recognize themselves in these words. But this view, possible in theory, is vanishingly rare in real-life practice. And those who hold it are not practitioners of Religious Zionism. They are religious Jews who are also Zionists.
‡ The great Sephardi chief rabbi Ovadiah Yosef (1920–2013), the spiritual leader of the Shas Party, took the view that while God had given the land of Israel to the Jewish people, God also authorized the people’s leaders to engage in pragmatic determinations of what would keep Jews alive, including the pragmatic determination of exchanging land for peace. The view is certainly logically coherent and finds support in Jewish sources. It has not, however, garnered substantial public support, notwithstanding its association with the revered figure of the rabbi known to this day as Maran (Our Master).
§ The city is now in Belarus. It was at various times part of Russia, Poland, and the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Jews from Brisk defined themselves as “Litvak” or “Litvish,” meaning Jewish-Lithuanian. Much of my own family comes from not far away.
¶ From the website of the school I attended:
Maimonides School’s mission is to produce religiously observant, educated Jews who will remain faithful to religious beliefs, values, and practices as they take their place as contributing members of general society. Maimonides provides students with both an outstanding religious education and an excellent college preparatory general education in an atmosphere that reinforces their commitment to the values of Torah and to the observance of mitzvot, and that fosters a strong sense of identification with Medinat Yisrael [the State of Israel; note Hebrew transliteration without English translation, itself a Zionist assertion].
** Goren composed the prayer using a liturgical formula that would naturally place it in the context of the Torah-reading service on Sabbath mornings. In Israel, it was used in that way among Religious Zionists from the time of its drafting. In the United States, however, the adoption of the prayer was slower and more sporadic. Most American Modern Orthodox synagogues already recited a separate prayer for the state of Israel at a different point in the Sabbath morning liturgy, adjoining the prayer for the government of the United States, which was itself the lineal descendant of prayers for the monarchies of the states in which Jews lived that can be traced back to the early modern period. The prayer for the state of Israel included a specific prayer for the “defenders” of the land of Israel, rendering the extra prayer for the IDF arguably unnecessary.
* Although Traditionalists don’t serve in the IDF, neither do Palestinian Arabs, with a few exceptions. A number of Bedouin who hold Israeli citizenship serve voluntarily in special units of the Israeli military. They are ethnic Arabs, speak Arabic, and have every right to be called Palestinian if they wish. Men of the Israeli Druze community, an Arabic-speaking religious minority, also serve in the IDF and are subject to conscription, as are members of the tiny Circassian community in Israel.
† The institutional prestige of Brisk is captured in this humorous, American-inflected anecdote from an English-language Israeli newspaper: “On Mea She’arim Street in Jerusalem you can buy a baseball cap with an inscription that is meant as a subversive comment on the current yeshiva reality. ‘I got accepted to Brisk’ the cap announces, ‘but I learn in the Mir.’” See Micha Odenheimer, “‘Harvard’ of the Haredim,” Haaretz, January 28, 2005, https://www.haaretz.com/1.4716757.
‡ These existed, although to avoid confusion I have not discussed them. Some of them founded the Mizrachi movement in Vilna in 1902. They could be characterized as early Religious Zionists.
§ Actually, there are at last count three different Chabad Houses in Shanghai alone: Chabad of Pudong, the Shanghai Jewish Center, and the Intown Jewish Center. When I last prayed in the synagogues of two of them, brought by host-extraordinaire David Orenstein, they were flourishing.
¶ This is a secondary use of the term “post-Zionism,” which primarily stands for the liberal, secularist view that Zionist ideology exhausted its usefulness after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and need not be perpetuated.
* See Esther 9:9. The book of Esther famously says that King Ahasuerus ruled 127 provinces. Commands of the king go out “to every province in its writing and to every people in its language.” The Jews are never said to have their own province, but they are said to have their own writing and language.
† This is a product both of semiconscious Jewish efforts in the United States to be understood as part of the white race and also of the worry that defining Jews as a race would lead to their being considered an inferior one.
‡ Take the Jewish mother. (No, take her, please.) The negative midcentury stereotype of the Jewish mother seems to be fading, along with the specific cultural circumstances that produced it. It’s worth noting that in Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the figure of the yiddishe mama was typically depicted as loving, caring, and compassionate, not as overbearing or anxious or demanding or smothering. Even Freud had nothing bad to say about Jewish mothers in particular. The point is that the midcentury Jewish mother stereotype had specifically midcentury Jewish cultural characteristics, but those have changed over time, and their perception has changed too.
§ To clarify a bit: Israel’s Chief Rabbinate is Orthodox. It uses Orthodox standards of halakhah for defining who is a Jew for those purposes. But the Law of Return as written doesn’t give the Chief Rabbinate control over who counts as a Jew for purposes of becoming a citizen under the Law of Return. If this is confusing, it’s because the legal reality is highly confusing and confused in a state where religion, nationality, ethnicity, and citizenship all overlap and there is conflict over all of them.
¶ Thus, for example, nonreligious Jews are sometimes treated by Traditionalist halakhah as though they were in the category of children who were kidnapped by non-Jews and did not have access to Jewish identity, knowledge, or education until adulthood. This is supposed to excuse them from being culpable for many of their sins.
* The One Westers made news a few years ago when they indirectly provoked a bizarre encounter at the Lincoln Memorial in which white teenagers wearing MAGA hats confronted a Native American beating a drum. Their views are adjacent to some of those advanced in the film Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America! (2018), which got public attention in 2022 when it was recommended on Twitter by the basketball player Kyrie Irving in a post that led to his suspension. They aren’t the same group as the better-known African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, who began in Chicago in the 1960s and are now centered in Dimona, Israel. That utterly fascinating group, some of whose members now serve in the IDF and thus profess loyalty to the state of Israel, is the subject of a brilliant book by the scholar John L. Jackson, who has also written deeply about other Black Hebrews. See John L. Jackson Jr., Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); and John L. Jackson Jr., Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
† Even the survival of the Jews, which is sometimes depicted as though it were a kind of evidence of chosenness, is not particularly unusual. Ancient Confucian beliefs thrive today, twenty-five hundred years after Confucius’s birth. The Buddha was a rough contemporary of Confucius. Hindu religion is older still. The Han Chinese are alive and well in their hundreds of millions today, over two thousand years after their ascribed birth as a distinct group. The term “Brahmin” was in use three thousand years ago to identify a caste within Hinduism. Christianity is now some two thousand years old. Many ancient peoples have indeed been lost to history. But quite a few have persisted, many of them in vastly greater numbers than the Jews, and not all attached to a single homeland. The idea that Jewish persistence is unique has more to do with theology than with actual history.
‡ In technical terminology, this is the transition from polytheism (worship of many gods) to henotheism (the worship of one particular god associated with a tribe or group without denying the reality of other gods) to monotheism (the denial that other gods exist at all apart from the one true God).
§ In Luke, the “light unto the nations” trope from Isaiah is paraphrased as an address to the infant Christ: “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.” Luke 2:29–32. This is also the text of the Nunc Dimittis.
¶ Maimonides does not mention the custom of the rabbinic court formally refusing applicants three times before accepting them. The practice is not legally mandatory under the halakhah and indeed arguably contradicts Maimonides’s specific dictum that the court should not delay the process but should act “immediately.”
** Abu al-Walid ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd, known in Latin as Averroes, was born in Cordoba, like Maimonides, just a few years earlier. Like Maimonides, Ibn Rushd came from a family of jurists and community leaders. He was deeply versed in his own religious legal tradition, about which he wrote books. Like Maimonides, he was a profound philosophical thinker. Like Maimonides, he was a rationalist who allegorized Scripture to bring its meaning into comprehensible relation to Aristotelian philosophical truths. Unlike Maimonides, Ibn Rushd shaped the reception of Greek philosophy in Europe through his writings, particularly his commentaries on all of Aristotle’s works that were available to him in Arabic. And although Maimonides was more influential in his lifetime and beyond among the world’s Jews than Ibn Rushd was among the world’s Muslims, Ibn Rushd shaped medieval Christian philosophy via Thomas Aquinas. Maimonides for the most part directly influenced only Jews.
†† College admissions, for its part, has a range of complex sociopolitical dimensions, with advantages given to legacies, athletes, and (until 2023 at least) students who represent diverse constituencies, so this measure is by no means definitive. Nevertheless it is a striking reality that the number of Asian American students admitted to top U.S. universities has risen enormously over the past twenty-five years, while the number of Jewish students admitted seems to have declined.
‡‡ The Nobel Peace Prize is a horse of a different color. And Israel’s 1966 Nobel laureate in literature, S. Y. Agnon, was born in Poland (in a town that is now in Ukraine) in 1888 and was in that sense a direct product of eastern Europe.
§§ Admiral Hyman Rickover (1900–1986), credited with creating the U.S. nuclear submarine fleet.
¶¶ I have not even mentioned the uncomfortable fact that Jews whose ethnic origins lie in the countries of the Middle East have, for the most part, not achieved the same kinds of success on the same scale as the descendants of eastern European Jews. Their cultural experiences were radically different in their countries of ethnic origin. And the great majority of them either emigrated or were forced to emigrate to Israel around the time of the establishment of the state, where they encountered discrimination from European-origin Ashkenazi Jews.
* I know whereof I speak. Much of this chapter is based on my own experience, as well as the experiences of hundreds of people who have shared their stories with me over several decades during which I became a go-to Jew to discuss the issue as a result of an essay I wrote, “Orthodox Paradox,” New York Times Magazine, July 22, 2007. I meant the essay as a love letter, albeit an honest one, to the Modern Orthodox community that raised and educated me. That is not how the essay was (mostly) read. Perhaps this time I will do better.
† Already there are powerful constitutional arguments in favor of a right to marry multiple partners. What has held back any movement from actively pursuing the cause is that both political progressives and political conservatives have deep skepticism about polyamory, progressives out of feminist concerns and conservatives out of traditionalist ones. For the history of arguments on the other side, see John Witte Jr., The Western Case for Monogamy over Polygamy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
‡ Compare Rabbi Emil Fackenheim’s 614th commandment, discussed in part I.
§ In fact, the degree of connection may be compared to that between ancient Israel and Jewish nationalists of the nineteenth century.
¶ The ancient Near Eastern cylinder seal is surely relevant here. The infant’s penis, like the similarly sized and shaped cylinder, is inscribed with a distinctive pattern that becomes the visible sign of the agreement/covenant, in the way that an inscribed seal would be used to mark an agreement.
** Notice that there is a close parallel between how we today think about love and faith. As liberals, we believe in the right to choose one’s faith. Yet at the same time, we understand that faith often feels involuntary, like you cannot will yourself into belief. These ideas are in tension with each other. Welcome to liberalism.
†† See William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis (1848–1850): “Remember, it is as easy to marry a rich woman as a poor woman.” And Thackeray was not the first to say it either. See The Yale Book of Quotations, ed. Fred R. Shapiro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 754.