Preserving Jewish Identity

Igrew up in a thickly Jewish environment and always felt very much at home in it, but when I was a college freshman it seemed to me, briefly, that continuing to be Jewish was an option I might choose not to exercise. If one didn't believe in revelation—and I couldn't—and if ethnic solidarity was rooted in mere prejudice—as I was tempted to think—then what sense did it make to carry on as a Jew? No single piece of writing played a larger part in helping me to answer this question than a mimeographed copy that an older student gave me of a talk that the political theorist Leo Strauss had delivered a few years earlier entitled "Why We Remain Jews." "What shall those Jews do," Strauss asked, "who cannot believe as our ancestors believed?" They must be brought to see, he insisted, how disgraceful it is to deny their origins and heritage and to abandon their Jewish identity. And they must understand that even if Judaism is at bottom a delusion, "no nobler dream was ever dreamt." Strauss didn't answer all my questions or make me pious, but he kept me loyal.