About this item
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.
About the Author
Noah Feldman is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University as well as a Senior Fellow of the Society of Fellows and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a contributing writer for Bloomberg View. Feldman credit Nina Subin small version.jpgBefore joining the Harvard faculty, Feldman was Cecelia Goetz Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. He was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2005. In 2004 he was a visiting professor at Yale Law School and a fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center. In 2003 he served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law or interim constitution. He served as a law clerk to Justice David H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court (1998 - 1999) . Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, he earned a D. Phil. in Islamic Thought from Oxford University and a J.D. from Yale Law School, serving as Book Reviews Editor of the Yale Law Journal. He received his A.B. summa cum laude in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 1992, finishing first in his class.His new book, "The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President" will be available on October 31, 2017 (Random House) and is available for pre-order here. He is the author of six other books including: Cool War: The Future of Global Competition (Random House, May 21, 2013) , the award winning and acclaimed Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Justices(Twelve, 2010) , The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton University Press, 2008) ; Divided By God: America's Church-State Problem and What We Should Do About It (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2005) ; What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building (Princeton University Press 2004) ; and After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2003) . He also co-authored two textbooks with Kathleen Sullivan, titled, "Constitutional Law", 19th Edition (Foundation Press, 2016) and "First Amendment Law", 6th Edition (Foundation Press, 2016) . He has worked as a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine.
