The End of Jewish Modernity

Jewish modernity flourished between the age of Enlightenment and the Second World War, and its intellectual, literary, scientific and artistic legacy continues to dazzle us. In this provocative new book, however, Enzo Traverso argues powerfully that Jewish modernity has exhausted itself. Previously a beacon for critical thinking in the Western world, the mainstream of Jewish thought has, since the end of the war, undergone a conservative turn. With great sensitivity and nuance, Traverso traces this development to the virtual destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis, and the establishment of the United States and Israel as the new poles of Jewish communal life. This compelling narrative hinges upon a highly original discussion of Hannah Arendt‘s writings on Jewishness and politics. With provocative chapters on the relationship between antisemitism and Islamophobia, the ascendance of Zionism, and the new ‘civil religion of the Holocaust‘, The End of Jewish Modernity is both an elegy to a lost tradition and an intellectual history of the present.