To Be a Jew Today

A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People

By: Noah Feldman

Narrated by: Noah Feldman

A leading public intellectual’s timely reckoning with how Jews can and should make sense of their tradition and each other.

What does it mean to be a Jew? At a time of worldwide crisis, venerable answers to this question have become unsettled. In To Be a Jew Today, the legal scholar and columnist Noah Feldman draws on a lifelong engagement with his religion to offer a wide-ranging interpretation of Judaism in its current varieties. How do Jews today understand their relationship to God, to Israel, and to each other—and live their lives accordingly?

Writing sympathetically but incisively about diverse outlooks, Feldman clarifies what’s at stake in the choice of how to be a Jew, and discusses the shared “theology of struggle” that Jews engage in as they wrestle with who God is, what God wants, or whether God exists. He shows how the founding of Israel has transformed Judaism itself over the last century—and explores the ongoing consequences of that transformation for all Jews, who find the meaning of their Jewishness and their views about Israel intertwined, no matter what those views are. And he examines the analogies between being Jewish and belonging to a large, messy family—a family that often makes its members crazy, but a family all the same. Written with learning, empathy and clarity, To Be a Jew Today is a critical resource for listeners of all faiths.

©2024 Noah Feldman (P)2024 Recorded Books

The authors, warm and passionate reading of his book kept me going through a lot of very dense material. He is fantastic.

This book is encyclopedic, overwhelming in many ways, and most profoundly enriching as a human being, and as a Jew. It’s kindness and embrace of every single type of Jew, it’s notion that to be Jewish is to be all of the above, is a profound and heartening take away. The combination of one of the finest minds in the world with what is clearly one of the finest hearts in the world is very powerful

Really thought-provoking

My mind is reeling from all the ideas presented here. I want to read it all over again!

learning the many faces of being a jew

> l liked the authors approach, learned a great deal. found who I am as a non-traditional Jew. what it means to struggle.

An interesting manifesto

This is an interesting manifesto for how to be a Jew in the Modern World. Going over God, Israel, and Family, he establishes a unique way of looking at these three areas of the Jewish People that both separate and divide us.

Struggling with Judaism

Noah Feldman has written a book that captures and confronts most of the issues that face contemporary Jews. Clearly a lot of the struggles are his own and I’m sure that he will continue to struggle with them for years to come. I wish him success
For the rest of us (Jews and others) reading this book will give you perspective and much to think about