Noah Feldman: ‘Many Jewish Families Will Prefer Not to Talk About Israel This Passover’
Noah Feldman, an American who speaks eloquent accent-free Hebrew.Credit: Mark James Dunn
Tzach Yoked writes in Haaretz
In his nine books, Harvard law professor Noah Feldman has explored subjects from the U.S. Civil War and the battle against slavery to the rise and fall of ISIS. Twenty years ago, when he was 33, he also found the time to help write Iraq’s new constitution after Saddam Hussein fell.
This constitution failed to bring law and order to the fractured country, which may be one reason Feldman turned to other subjects. And after celebrating his 50th birthday, he shed his judge’s robe and tried to crack religious, national and Zionist issues that are the basis of modern Judaism.
Feldman’s new book, “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People,” was published at a particularly fraught moment in American Judaism (and not only there). It ponders deep questions of identity, antisemitism and the relationship with Israel.
“The main reason I wanted to write the book is that, three years ago, my children [a son 18 and a daughter 17] had reached the stage where they were thinking about university, and it was clear to me that their experience as Jewish students was going to be totally different from what I experienced as a student 30 years ago,” Feldman said in a telephone interview from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.