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In this chapter, and in Chs. 6–9, an analysis and examination is made of the writings of the major American Jewish thinkers/theologians. The thinker addressed in this chapter is Emil Fackenheim, a Jewish theologian and philosopher, who has radically changed his thinking since 1967. Citations of each thinker's work earlier in the book are capitalized on in order to explore the theme of history and identity as it occurs in their work, and it is shown that these figures struggled with very deep and pressing problems not only about God and the Jewish people, and about human nature and moral purpose but also about the very nature of Jewish belief and its understanding of the world, history, God, and much else. They realized the dangers that accompanied their sensitivity to the Holocaust and their unconditional commitment to an honest and probing encounter with the death camps, and at the same time, they refused to abandon Judaism. In some ways, they appear like other intellectuals of the current era, who realize that we cannot transcend history nor can we be overwhelmed by it, but in other ways, they appear unlike them, for their sense of value and purpose arises out of the horror of the death camps.

This chapter covers the writings and interchanges of various Jewish theologians who wrote in America in the late 1940s, the 1950s, and the 1960s, who included existentialists, and Reform Jewish theologians. These writers include Emil Fackenheim, Will Herberg, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Eugene Borowitz, Bernhard Heller, Jakob Petuchowski, Arthur Cohen, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Joseph Soloveitchik, Lou Silberman, Bernard Martin, Eliezer Berkovits, Richard Rubinstein, and many others. The chapter also covers the debates in various journals as well as ideas put forward in more substantial publications (essays, books, etc.).

This chapter examines the way in which post‐Holocaust Jewish thought began to emerge in the 1960s and its role within Jewish religious thought. These post‐Holocaust Jewish thinkers did not constitute a school, nor did they have common views, except in some fairly general ways, and in the fact that they all confronted the Holocaust. The five main thinkers in particular (Richard Rubinstein, Eliezer Berkovits, Irving Greenberg, Arthur Cohen, and Emil Fackenheim) did not believe that responsible and honest Jewish self‐understanding could proceed, and yet ignore, the horrors of the death camps. The thinkers whose work is discussed in this chapter are Richard Rubinstein (the earliest Jewish theologian to write about the importance of the death camps for the Jewish faith), Emil Fackenheim, Irving Greenberg, Moredecai Kaplan, and Steven Schwarzchild.

The Holocaust may represent absolute desecration: the end of all holiness. The urgent question of the post-Holocaust age is whether holiness may be reaffirmed, whether holiness is possible in history. Emil Fackenheim (1916–2003) argued that holiness is an active search for God’s presence. Such a search could repair history—but it is unclear whether such a search can even occur. Can Jews in good faith continue to believe in the saving presence of God in the midst of a desecrated history? This chapter examines the situation of modern thought that makes holiness, as the search for God, both precarious and necessary.

This chapter highlights the distinctive character of Strauss’s response—both political and philosophical—to his difficult position as a Jewish student of philosophy in Weimar Germany by contrasting it with the responses of two other similarly situated individuals—Hannah Arendt and Emil Fackenheim. All three were Jewish students of philosophy in Germany, Strauss and Arendt in the 1920’s and 1930’s until the National Socialists came to power; Fackenheim in the 1930’s. Because they were Jewish, they could not simply follow or adopt the exciting “new thinking” of the philosopher, Martin Heidegger–especially after he publically joined the Nazi party that called for the expulsion and, finally, the extermination of the Jews. Because they were students of philosophy, however, they could not simply dismiss Heidegger’s thought on account of its horrible political consequences.

This chapter examines the changes in the Jewish conception of sovereignty after the Holocaust. It analyzes the relevant works of Emil Fackenheim, George Steiner, and Irving Greenberg, Diaspora Jewish thinkers who have grappled with the meaning of Jewish loyalty and commitment after the Holocaust. It explains that Fackenheim considered survival as a religious duty, Steiner criticized Zionism in his negative view of nationalism, and Greenberg believed in the ethics of Jewish power. This chapter suggests that the message of the Holocaust for the Jews is the need to combine the particularistic commitment of an oppressed people and the universalistic commitment to solidarity with the oppressed of other nations.

This brief introduction discusses the importance of understanding what the American Jewish response – and more importantly, the American Jewish theologians’ response – to the Holocaust has been, and what it has taught Jews about their approach to the past and the future. The author has approached this by an examination of the writings of five thinkers (Richard Rubinstein, Eliezer Berkovits, Irving Greenberg, Arthur Cohen, and Emil Fackenheim), each of whom in the 1960s and 1970s began to treat the Holocaust as a central and determining feature in his Jewish thinking. Each conceived of his theological task as understanding Judaism in terms of an act of coming to grips with Auschwitz, yet each has been influential in different ways, and for different constituencies. A brief summary is given of the writings of each of the five, and of some of the thoughts and conclusions raised. The introduction ends with an outline of the book.

Reading Barth in conversation with three different post-Holocaust Jewish theologians on the question of God’s relationship to history, Boesel comes to a new appreciation for the diversity within the Jewish tradition itself. This leads him to pose the important question “If one is to rethink Christian faith and theology in response to engagement with the Jewish ‘other,’ which Jewish ‘other’?” He challenges all theologians engaged in comparative work to consider whether a predisposition to seek common ground restricts which “others” we engage. He goes on to reconsider his original critical reading of Barth, recognizing that Barth’s own theology “appears to move with an inter-religious freedom that can be appropriated as responsive to the diversity of intra-Jewish difference itself” because of its own emphasis on the radical judgment of God that stands over every human religious claim. Boesel ends by acknowledging the problem of supersessionism that continues to haunt Barth’s theology.

Religion was not a sufficient condition for the Holocaust, but it was a necessary one. What happened at Auschwitz is inconceivable without beliefs about God held first by Jews and then by Christians. No example of mass murder does more than the Holocaust to call into question God’s providential involvement in history. More than any other disaster in modern times, the Holocaust resonates and collides with biblical religion, the dominant religious tradition of Western civilization. The resonance and collision, particularly as they emerge in the thought of Richard Rubenstein, Emil Fackenheim, and Emmanuel Levinas, raise questions about God’s failures as part of the failures of ethics, including how best to respond to those shortcomings.

This chapter explores the possibility of a different route by which the collision between tradition and modernity might be negotiated, one that does not involve the fragmentation of Jewry into denominations. One possibility of what one might call a non-denominational non-Orthodoxy is suggested by the thought of one of the most profound twentieth-century Jewish thinkers, Franz Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig, as a characteristically modern thinker, places the self — not community or law — at the heart of his system. A very similar position, philosophically more explicit, was advanced by Emil Fackenheim in an essay written in 1938. The chapter then addresses the challenge of reinterpreting Jewish law in such a way as to make it viable as the code of a modern society. In the early decades of the twentieth century, this line of thought was explored by Rabbi Chaim Hirschensohn. But the most complex, haunting response to the crisis of halakhah and modernity was given by Rabbi Abraham Kook. The chapter also discusses the differences between Orthodoxy and Reform.