The Non-Jewish Jew and other Essays

Essays on judaism in the modern world, from philosophy and history to art and politics

In these essays Deutscher speaks of the emotional heritage of the European Jew with calmness and clear-sightedness; as a historian he writes without anger but with compassion; as a non-Jewish Jew he writes without religious belief, but with a generous breadth of understanding. As a philosopher he writes first of some of the great Jews of Europe: Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Freud. He explores the Jewish imagination through the painter Chagall. He writes of the Jews under Stalin and of the remnants of a race' after Hitler; of the Zionist ideal, of the establishment of the state of Israel, of the war of June 1967, and of the perils ahead.