A Jewish Tale of Love: On Defiance, Meaning, and the Fate of a People - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

A provocative reinterpretation of Jewish history that reveals how a fierce, unyielding love once sustained a people, and asks whether that love can be renewed amid profound crisis.

The great civilizations of the ancient world are gone. Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome—each filled the world with splendor, then faded to dust. The Jews, barely a rounding error in humanity, are still here. Why?

In A Jewish Tale of Love, Shivi Greenfield offers a bold answer: Jewish survival was never secured by power, territory, or belief alone, but by a fierce, demanding form of love—one that bound individual lives to a shared destiny. This love was not sentimental. It was defiant, disciplined, and often oppositional, binding identity to destiny and making Jewish life worth sustaining at any cost.

Yet today, at the very moment of its triumph, that love is burning down to embers, leaving one question impossible to escape: Can a people outlive the love that keeps it alive?

“My brilliant and wise colleague, Shivi Greenfield, has written an important and provocative new book which should ignite serious reflections on the seismic shifts taking place in contemporary Jewish life. While the Torah commands us to love, Shivi makes a convincing case that contemporary Judaism is less bound together by love. But love is core to creating a thick, deeply held Judaism. I so appreciate that rather than issue a verdict, his latest book is a call to greater imagination in shaping new paradigms of obligation and belonging.”
—Rabbi Rick Jacobs, President of the Union for Reform Judaism

“In this heartfelt, readable, and original book, Shivi Greenfield demonstrates why a dark moment in Jewish history should be an opportunity not for anger or defensiveness—but for a deep dive inward into the beating heart of our history and belief. It’s in the texts, prayers, and feelings of our ancestors, the author argues, and particularly in those that can seem most foreign to us, that we can find tools to help us grapple with the dilemmas of the present.”
—Matti Friedman, author of Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai

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