Crisis and Covenant: Jewish Thought After the Holocaust

Where was God during the Holocaust? Was the creation of the modern state of Israel the beginning of Jews' postwar redemption, or a fateful diversion from it? Are American Jews assimilating to the point of extinction, or merely evolving? These are some of the issues with which Sacks grapples in this searching examination of contemporary Jewish thought. Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Sacks maintains that the Jews, after facing systematic extinction by the Nazis, have reaffirmed their covenant with history and achieved a heightened sense of peoplehood since WW II. He traces the modern Jewish crisis of identity to the collision between the Jews' sense of their concrete particularism as a chosen people and the secular universalisms of the Enlightenment. Offering no easy answers, he discusses the ideas of George Steiner, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, Gershom Scholem and other thinkers, setting each issue or dilemma against the sociological realities of contemporary Jewry. (Aug.)