cover image CONFESSIONS OF A SECULAR JEW: A Memoir

CONFESSIONS OF A SECULAR JEW: A Memoir

Eugene Goodheart, . . Overlook, $27.95 (262pp) ISBN 978-1-58567-146-5

"Being Jewish for me is at once a given and a question," declares Goodheart (Pieces of Resistance, The Reign of Ideology), a nonbeliever who was immersed in Yiddish culture as a child of East European immigrants in Brooklyn. His well-wrought memoir—more meditative than confessional—evokes generational touchstones: a boyhood in a Yiddish synagogue committed not to God but to communism; studies at Columbia University under the influence of outsider Jew Lionel Trilling; acquaintance with Saul Bellow and Hannah Arendt. As an academic, Goodheart, a self-described liberal who inherited his father's aversion to fanaticism, finds himself resisting 1960s radicalism as well as conservatives like Boston University president John Silber. He takes pride in being described as a "humanist"—finding the term "an intellectual vaccine against dogmatisms"—though he prefers the modifier "unfashionable" to the pejorative "old-fashioned." Some of these interconnected essays may seem slightly out of place—a chapter on his aged mother is more personal in tone than most of the book—yet they also echo the book's themes. Goodheart acknowledges his shame in not condemning casual anti-Semitism, observing that a questioning Jew like himself no longer exhibits instinctive responses. But just as Goodheart finds his place teaching humanities at Brandeis—the only secular Jewish university in the country—in this lively and accessible book he has admirably displayed the diaspora Jew's "anxious activity of... mind." (May)