‘To Be A Jew Today’ examines modern, multifaceted faith and struggle

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• Amna Nawaz:

  From drafting Iraq's Constitution, to testifying in the 2019 impeachment inquiry into former President Donald Trump, Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman has dived deep into the intersection of power and ethics.

  In his latest work, Feldman turns that focus on his own Jewish faith to understand identity, politics and culture, even in the midst of Israel's war in Gaza.

  I recently spoke with Feldman about his new book, "To Be a Jew Today."

  Noah Feldman, welcome back to the "NewsHour." Thank you so much for joining us.

  Noah Feldman, Author, "To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People": Thank you for having me.

• Amna Nawaz:

  So, when asking the central question of your book, what it means to be a Jew today, you ask if there's one unifying Jewish theological world view.

  And you write this — quote — "I want to suggest it's possible to characterize Jewishness in the way the Bible explains the meaning of the name Israel, to strive, struggle and contend with God."

  Tell us more about what that struggle means.

• Noah Feldman:

  You know, that passage comes from the moment when the character Jacob wrestles all night with a figure who is very shadowy — it might be an angel, it might be God himself — and somehow survives it, and he gets rewarded by being given the name Israel.

  But that name is not an unmitigated blessing. It suggests not that everything is going to be great all the time, but that he's capable of struggling with the hardest things. And I think that's really characteristic of what it is to be Jewish.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Much of your book is in search of these unifying views, the things that tie Jews together. But, at the same time as we speak here, we are seeing real division among American Jews in particular over Israel's war in Gaza in response to the Hamas October 7 attacks.

  What does that division say to you about Jewish identity, or identities, more accurately, today?

• Noah Feldman:

  I think it says two things.

  The first is that, over the last 30 or 40 years, Israel has become really central to the identity and thought world of almost all American Jews, even for Jews who are very critical of Israel, and even in some cases to the point of rejecting Israel altogether. They still have to define — they find that they have to define in some relationship to Israel.

  And that wasn't always the case. The other thing, though, is that there is something that unifies different Jews who have different perspectives on Israel. And that is that a lot of Jews in the United States today, especially Jews who identify as progressive in their politics and in their Jewishness, really believe deep in their hearts that to be Jewish is to embrace the ideal of social justice, to embrace the prophetic ideal of pursuing the right and the good.

  And in some cases, they might even think that the whole idea of Israel is incompatible with social justice and equality for Palestinians.

  And so their unifying religious belief in God as a God of social justice or in a spirit of social justice leads those different Jews to different conclusions about Israel.

• Amna Nawaz:

  You know, at the same time, even before October 7, we were seeing rising antisemitism globally. In a recent piece for "TIME," you examined what you call really the persistence of antisemitism, a more complicated, subtle form, as you describe it today.

• You write:

  "Antisemitism's capacity to keep its familiar character, while also channeling new fears, is what confers its stunning capacity to reinvent itself."

  What does that mean? What form does antisemitism take today?

• Noah Feldman:

  What I mean is that antisemitism has always grown out of a given society's preoccupations, fears and concerns at a given moment.

  So, if you were living in the 1800s and the big struggle was the struggle between capitalism and communism, and everyone was very worried about that, antisemites either depicted Judaism as the most capitalist or the most communist, depending on which one they didn't like.

  And they were projecting their concerns and fears on to Jews, and in an antisemitic way. Today, a lot of our preoccupations, especially among people to the left — and there are important things to care a lot about — are about oppression, systemic racism, imperialism, colonialism. These are very important issues that deserve serious scrutiny.

  But, sometimes, unconsciously, we might find ourselves projecting those worries onto Jews generally, and then depicting Jews in general as oppressors, or as white supremacists, or as settler colonialists.

  And although there are forms of those kinds of arguments that could be made without any conscious antisemitism, I was trying to argue in that piece that, sometimes, those unconscious traditions of projecting the worst thing you can think of onto the Jews can inflect and shape our thinking.

  And they make us forget that Jews today are just 75 years, a little bit more than that, past the Holocaust, in which Jews were murdered and oppressed, and that, before that, Jews were themselves subject to systemic oppression for centuries, for millennia, really.

  And so, although that doesn't make it impossible to criticize Jews or to criticize Israel without being antisemitic, you should be able to do that, at the same time, it's worth taking a deep breath and introspecting and asking yourself, are my criticisms fully free of those older kinds of prejudices?

• Amna Nawaz:

  There are moments in the book when you speak very plainly and very directly to your readers. There's one element that resonated with me, in particular, when you talk about the idea of being a — quote, unquote — "bad Jew."

  And you wrote — quote — "It makes me sad when, often, in a rueful, gentle, self-mockery, Jewish friends of mine say to themselves, 'I'm a bad Jew.' They aren't. You aren't. There are so many ways to be Jewish," you write.

  Why was that important for you to stress?

• Noah Feldman:

  You know, it was so important to me, Amna, to make the point that there is no such thing as a bad Jew.

  I think the reason is that, in the whole great tradition of Jewish thought, you can sin and you can do something that's wrong and you can be punished for it or called to account for it, but you're never treated as though you're not a Jew anymore or as though you have crossed the line into being a bad Jew.

  You could be a bad person for doing bad things, but you can't really be a bad Jew, per se.

  And so when people say — and they're usually kind of joking around — oh, I'm such a bad Jew because I didn't do this or I didn't do that, I want to say to them, as long as you're striving, as long as you're trying to figure out what makes you a Jew, as long as you have love for other Jews, love for the spiritual and the divine, even if you don't believe in it, then you're being a good Jew. You're doing just fine. And you're just exercising some irony and some self-recognition.

  And, in that sense, you're being as Jewish as you could possibly be, because you're — you're just casting a skeptical eye on yourself and being a little bit funny about it.

• Amna Nawaz:

  The author is Noah Feldman. The book is called "To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

  Thank you so much for joining us. Really such a pleasure to speak with you.

• Noah Feldman:

  Thank you for having me, Amna. I really appreciate your questions.