Confessions of a Secular Jew: A Memoir - Softcover

"For Eugene Goodheart, one of our leading literary thinkers, the truth revealed by his life and career is less in the details... than in the sharp points he makes and the nuanced distinctions he draws in making them. His Confessions overturn seemingly familiar ground, making it fresh and fertile and significant again." -For Eugene Goodheart, one of our leading literary thinkers, the truth revealed by his life and career is less in the detailsAthan in the sharp points he makes and the nuanced distinctions he draws in making them. His Confessions overturn seemingly familiar ground, making it fresh and fertile and significant again.- --Ted Solotaroff, critic, editor, memoirist and author of First Loves: A Memoir "For Eugene Goodheart, one of our leading literary thinkers, the truth revealed by his life and career is less in the detailsAthan in the sharp points he makes and the nuanced distinctions he draws in making them. His Confessions overturn seemingly familiar ground, making it fresh and fertile and significant again." --Ted Solotaroff, critic, editor, memoirist and author of First Loves: A Memoir "For Eugene Goodheart, one of our leading literary thinkers, the truth revealed by his life and career is less in the detailsAthan in the sharp points he makes and the nuanced distinctions he draws in making them. His "Confessions" overturn seemingly familiar ground, making it fresh and fertile and significant again." --Ted Solotaroff, critic, editor, memoirist and author of "First Loves: A Memoir"

What it means to be a Jew lies at the very heart of Confessions of a Secular Jew, a provocative memoir and a thoughtful speculation on the nature of Jewish identity and experience in an increasingly secular world. The legacy bequeathed to Eugene Goodheart was a "progressive" secular Yiddish education which identifi ed Jewish struggles against oppression with working class struggles against exploitation. In the vanguard was the Soviet Union. Goodheart's heroes were Moses, Bar Kochbah, Judah Maccabee, Karl Marx and that strange honorary Jew, Joseph Stalin, whose anti-Semitism would later become known to the world. Confessions of a Secular Jew is the story of Goodheart's disillusionment with the naive, even false, progressivism of that education. At the same time, it is an attempt to rescue and come to grips with the positive remains of that education and heritage.