The Making of Modern Jewish Identity: Ideological Change and Religious Conversion by Motti Inbari (review)

Motti Inbari is a distinguished scholar whose previous books have explored the interplay of Jewish Orthodoxy, Zionism, and modernity. He is thus well positioned to explore the intricacies of modern Jewish identity, which he does in his latest book, The Making of Modern Jewish Identity: Ideological Change and Religious Conversion. In this book, Inbari has chosen to investigate the vagaries of Jewish identity in the past century through the presentation of the life stories of six Jews who underwent profound changes in their religious and ideological perspectives.

The first example Inbari presents is that of Arthur Koestler (1905–1983), whose embrace of, and break with, the Communist Party of Germany constituted significant markers on the twisted path of communist ideology in the twentieth century. Another significant issue in Koestler's ideological journey, as chronicled by Inbari, was the author and journalist's varying attitudes toward Zionism and Jewish peoplehood.

The author next chronicles the change of political orientation of Norman Podhoretz (b. 1930) between the left and neoconservatism, as well as the working out of his attitudes toward his Jewish identity and toward Israel. Inbari usefully compares his case with that of Koestler (63–64).

The chapter on Rabbi Yissachar Shlomo Teichtal (1885–1945) lets the author analyze a personality who made the transition from anti-Zionist Haredi Orthodoxy in pre-World War II Slovakia to religious Zionism, under the apocalyptic conditions of the Nazi Holocaust. Teichtal's book became highly influential within the radical religious Zionist circles that Inbari has investigated in previous books.

The next case study is that of Ruth Ben-David (1920–2000). She was born a French Catholic but, in an exceptionally complex spiritual and ideological transformation, she converted to Liberal Judaism in France. She subsequently turned to Haredi Judaism, ultimately marrying the radical anti-Zionist leader, Rabbi Amram Blau (1894–1974).

Haim Herman Cohn (1911–2002), who ended his eminent legal career as a justice of the Israel Supreme Court, began his spiritual journey within Orthodoxy. Inbari chronicles the stages of Cohn's "deconversion." He relates this to the jurist's disillusionment over the fact that religiously Orthodox personalities were capable of illegal and immoral behavior, along with Cohn's growing inability to believe in the God presented by Orthodox Judaism in the face of the destruction of millions of Jews in the Holocaust.

Inbari's final example is that of Avraham Burg (b. 1955), who grew up in a religious Zionist household. But Burg's political and ideological evolution led him to advocate radical denunciation of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and to oppose the very idea of Israel as a "Jewish state."

Clearly the six personalities chosen by Inbari bring the reader to a more nuanced understanding of the major religious and ideological issues facing Jews in the past century. His choice of juxtaposing examples of radical religious and ideological change gives the reader a comparative perspective that can be brought to bear on further instances of this phenomenon. His useful discussion of the scholarly literature on ideological and religious conversion gives students a helpful theoretical framework into which they can place the individual cases examined. This survey of the scholarly literature on conversion will be of particular interest to those interested in the study of new religions.

One theoretical consideration, however, seems to be mostly absent from this book. Given that most of the chapters (with the major exception of Teichtal) use autobiographical accounts of the subjects, it may be regretted that the author did not choose to discuss directly the growing theoretical literature on the literary genre of autobiography. Nevertheless, this book can be usefully employed as a textbook for undergraduate courses on modern Jewish identity.