Beyond Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought in America (review)

Jewish thought has been in a state of crisis ever since the night of the Holocaust descended upon the world. Sorting through the crisis is a daunting task, but it is one that Michael L. Morgan has admirably pursued in his book Beyond Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought in America. In this book Morgan does an excellent job of summarizing and, to some extent, critiquing the thought of five key post-Holocaust Jewish thinkers: Richard Rubenstein, Eliezer Berkovits, Irving Greenberg, Arthur Cohen, and Emil Fackenheim.

Morgan’s interest in these Jewish thinkers revolves around three challenges: (1) to respond to the murder camp seriously and honestly, (2) to oppose the evil of the event, and (3) to continue to live as a Jew. Morgan does not make it clear, however, as to what makes Jewish thinking about these matters Jewish. At times, it appears that it is enough for a person to be Jewish by birth and simply to think in order to be designated a Jewish thinker, as if the word Jewish pertained only to an accident of nature. If that is the case, however, then continuing to live as a Jew loses its meaning. And that is precisely what must be worked out: what does it mean to live as a Jew and to think as a Jew after the attempt to destroy every trace of the Jew? While he does not have an answer—indeed, seeking an answer is a task for any future Jewish thought—Morgan articulates the question with a great deal of insight.

The first three chapters of Morgan’s book explain the contexts for the crisis of Jewish thought and the issues confronting the intellectuals in the early years after Auschwitz. His analysis of Hannah Arendt’s thinking on radical evil and the banality of evil, for example, is penetrating and to the point. With Morgan’s help, one sees that Arendt’s influences were Aristotle and Kant (Morgan says nothing of the Nazi Martin Heidegger in his examination of Arendt), not Moses or Akiva, so that her view of Jewish history is not based on anything Jewish. In Chapters Four and Five Morgan shows how the 1960s affected Jewish thinking; especially significant to any thought of a Jewish future was the Six-Day War of 1967. In many ways, Morgan makes it clear, Jewish thinkers did not begin to grasp the implications of the near extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust until the Jews of Israel were nearly exterminated.

And yet, especially among the new theologians, the primary influences on Jewish thinking about Jewish history came either from non-Jews or from Jews who had abandoned Judaism. Chief among Richard Rubenstein’s influences, for example, were Freud, Tillich, Sartre, and Arendt. Morgan takes up his examination of “Richard Rubenstein and the New Paganism,” then, in his sixth chapter. Exposing “Rubenstein’s naturalism and his Nietzscheanism” (p. 101), Morgan demonstrates how Rubenstein exchanges what is holy for what is useful in his journey of “self-discovery” (p. 100), and not in a quest for anything entailing a higher relation. Indeed, for Rubenstein, there is no “higher” relation—there is simply the self stranded in the midst of what is. The difficulty that Morgan does not address in his assessment of Rubenstein is this: In what meaningful sense does a thinker remain Jewish when he renounces Torah and affirms paganism?

In his next two chapters Morgan goes from Rubenstein’s pragmatic paganism to “Eliezer Berkovits and the Tenacity of Faith” and “Irving Greenberg and the Post- Holocaust Voluntary Covenant.” Morgan is very good at elucidating Berkovits’s assess ment of the post-Holocaust era from an Orthodox standpoint and the demands of a “questioning belief” that it places upon “Job’s brother” (p. 112). Equally penetrating is his exposition of Berkovits’s suspicion not only of Western modernity but especially of a Christian tradition that all along has seen the elimination of Judaism as...