Jewish modernity flourished between the age of Enlightenment and
World War II--and in fact was a major driver of intellectual,
scientific, social, literary, and artistic progress in that period.
But the age of Jewish modernity is over.
That's the argument
that historian Enzo Traverso mounts in this provocative book. With
great sensitivity and nuance, he teases out the fundamentally
conservative turn that the mainstream of Jewish thought has taken in
the years since World War II, revealing its roots in the Holocaust
and the establishment of the United Nations and Israel as the new
poles of Jewish communal life. Building his argument on a highly
original reading of Hannah Arendt's writings on Jewishness and
politics, Traverso offers both an elegy to a lost tradition and a
damning intellectual history of the present.
