r e v i e w s | 219 avoid the theological thicket of the Church’s attitude towards Judaism as much as possible. Readers of this work will be pressed to conclude that the success of the interreligious moment in the present is largely based on a strategic evasion of certain questions and problematic texts, some goodwill, and plenty of political acumen. This conclusion seems to be correct if the prime focus is on the Israeli scene, not the American interreligious scene in general, and Jewish Orthodoxy in particular. What is clear, however, is that this book is an indispensable contribution to the study of Jewish– Catholic relations and hopefully its publication in English next year with Harvard University Press will generate the attention it no doubt deserves. daniel M. hersKowitz university of oxford, uK Daniel M. Herskowitz, Heidegger and His Jewish Reception. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2021. 356 pp. £75.00. i s b n 978 1 10884 046 0. Interest in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy among scholars of Jewish thought and philosophy has experienced a kind of renaissance. This is somewhat ironic because since the 1980s, and especially after the recent publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks in 2017, there has been a marked attempt to tie Heidegger’s philosophy inextricably to his alliance with Nazism and, in doing so, to invalidate his intellectual project entirely. Daniel Herskowitz’s Heidegger and His Jewish Reception is the latest attempt to argue that, at least looking at things from the perspective of intellectual history, it is simply impossible to ignore Heidegger’s influence on Jewish thinkers in the twentieth century. The underlying claim in Herskowitz’s book is stronger than simply one of influence; it is, rather, that Jewish thought in the twentieth century cannot be properly evaluated without a serious engagement with Heidegger’s intervention into the Western philosophical tradition as Jews read him. To erase or eradicate Heidegger would be essentially to tear out an essential organ of twentiethcentury Jewish thought. This is not because the figures treated in this book agree with Heidegger, although many agreed with basic premisses of his thought, but because they all think with Heidegger and never fully free themselves from his influence. As Levinas put it quite honestly, ‘[I] went through Heidegger, beyond Heidegger, by means of Heidegger … always with pain and suffering. But I cannot deny it, Mont Blanc is Mont Blanc.’ In his conclusion, Herskowitz frames it succinctly: ‘There is a sense in which Jewish reception of Heidegger can be recited as a story of reactions to two major crises of the twentieth century: the breakdown of faith in progress and reason around the First World War, and the catastrophe of the Second World War and the Holocaust’ (p. 291). The ‘breakdown of faith journal of jewish studies | vol. lxxiii no. 1 | spring 2022 | pp. 219–23 | issn 0022-2097 | https://doi.org/10.18647/3538/jjs-2022 | https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8125-6240 | copyright © Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, 2022. 220 | jou r na l of j ew ish stu dies and progress’ catapults the career of Heidegger with the publication of Being and Time, which places a dagger in the heart of both Christian faith (faith more generally) and the Enlightenment. And the consequences of Nazism, not only politically but philosophically, place a dagger in Heidegger’s critique of the progress of Western metaphysics. But not quite. Herskowitz argues that Jewish thinkers continued to engage with Heidegger, even after the 1960s when he refused to fully recant his membership of the Nazi party. The reason they did not fully reject him is that they couldn’t, because Heidegger’s intervention changed the contours of what it meant to think philosophically in ways one might think Mozart or John Coltrane changed the way we hear a scale, melody or harmony, or the way Picasso changed the way we see the world. One can reject a mode of such creative innovation; but one cannot reject its importance and act as if it didn’t happen. Reading Herskowitz’s book reminded me of a story. In the 1970s and 1980s there was an eccentric ultraOrthodox Jew named Leibel Weisfish, who was a member of the anti-Zionist group Neturei Karta. Weisfish was a great admirer of Nietzsche and travelled around Israel lecturing on Nietzsche’s genius and his importance to the Jews. I once heard Weisfish speak about Nietzsche and the Exodus from Egypt on the intermediate days of Passover at the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. He began his talk, in Hebrew, by saying about Nietzsche ‘I simply cannot exist without this goy’ (einenni yakhol bli ha-goy ha-zeh). The figures discussed in this book might have said the same about Heidegger, even as they disagreed with him. Heidegger was the goy these Jewish thinkers simply could not think without. Herskowitz’s book can be divided into two parts. In the first part he addresses Heidegger’s major critiques of Western metaphysics and Christianity and then works through early Jewish responses to Being and Time in figures such as Ernst Cassirer (in the famous Cassirer–Heidegger debates in 1929 at Davos), Hans Jonas, Franz Rosenzweig, Ignaz Maybaum, Hans Joachim Shoeps, Hugo Shmuel Bergman and, perhaps most interestingly, Alexander Altmann. Surprising for me were two essays on Heidegger written by the celebrated Israeli poet Leah Goldberg. Her 1943 essay makes a sharp distinction between Heidegger’s Germanism and ‘the Semitic way of thinking’. But in a 1935 essay she offers a stark warning to her fellow Zionists, writing that nationalism is a double-edged sword and that even education and culture do not guarantee morality and humanism. The fact that Goldberg saw fit to weigh in on Heidegger, while living in Palestine, shows the breadth of his impact on European thinking more broadly. It should be noted that many of these Jewish thinkers in the 1920s and 1930s were struggling mightily with Karl Barth’s theology, and Heidegger gave many an alternative vision, what Altmann claimed was a ‘theologically neutral vision’ that could better affirm the viability of Judaism. In some ways it was Heidegger’s alleged a-theism as r e v i e w s | 2 21 a critique of Christianity that enabled his work to become applied to Judaism more generally. Herskowitz writes, ‘Altmann holds that Heidegger’s ontology allows a translation or application of its existential conditions to the vocabulary of faith… [Altmann applies] Heidegger’s ontological preconditions to the ontic case of Jewish particularity… Ironically, it is Heidegger who is culled to substantiate Altmann’s proposed national and religious Jewish revival in the wake of Hitler’ (pp. 117, 118, 120). And the Jewish Volk, Altmann’s foundation for his Zionism, seems to grow from the volkish terminology in Being and Time. Altmann is but one lesser-known example where Herskowitz argues that Heidegger is absorbed in constructive Jewish thought even as its authors were aware of its dangers because, in part, the rationalist Kantian worldview espoused by Hermann Cohen, who died in 1918 (whose impact on Jewish thinking was profound), could not easily survive the devastation and fracture of the Jewish-German symbiosis after World War I. The second part of this deeply learned and insightful book looks at a few seminal Jewish thinkers – Martin Buber, Leo Strauss, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Emmanuel Levinas – and analyses their use and critique of Heidegger. I found the Buber and Strauss chapters the strongest, both of which dig deep into their thinking to uncover sustained engagements with Heidegger, even after the war. The Levinas chapter is solid as well, although there has been considerable work done on Levinas and Heidegger. The Heschel chapter is the weakest in my view, for two reasons. First, Heschel only writes about Heidegger in a series of lectures he gave late in life at Stanford, published as Who is Man? His seminal works, God in Search of Man and Man is Not Alone, are virtually void of overt Heideggerian influence. More substantively, I don’t think Heschel needed Heidegger, although he certainly read him closely. Like Levinas, Heschel believed that the trouble with modernity was its secular paganism and he offered ‘prophetic consciousness’ as an alternative, which returned us to a biblical world-view that Heidegger rejected. With Levinas, who also viewed Judaism’s main adversary as paganism, it is more complicated, as Herskowitz notes, in part because Heidegger’s ostensible separation of ethics from ontology and his advocacy of totality served as a foundation of Levinas’s critique. Here Herskowitz writes, ‘Levinas’s overriding aim is not simply to reject the concept of totality, but to object to its presumptuous claim for exclusivity and hence to reconceive it in light of, or relation to, otherness’ (p. 257). Yet Levinas must presuppose the ontology of totality, as described above all by Heidegger, for it to be fissured by alterity. Thus, even though Levinas rejects Heidegger’s presuppositions, his entire project is built and remains dependent on them. Heschel’s ethics does not need the alterity of infinity but is based rather on pathos, which is the awareness of God’s need and the human response to that need. Heidegger’s metaphysics thus plays no significant role, although, as others 222 | jou r na l of j ew ish stu di es have noted, Husserl’s phenomenology certainly does. Husserl also had a strong impact on Heidegger, who later rejected him. But it seems Heidegger and Heschel took different roads away from Husserl, and thus Heschel may be the exception to the rule of Herskowitz’s thesis on the necessity of Heidegger to twentiethcentury Jewish thought. Perhaps Herskowitz could have spent more time analysing Husserlian influence on both Heidegger and Heschel to find commonalities and contrast. The chapter on Leo Strauss is fascinating and insightful for a variety of reasons. Herskowitz makes a strong case that Strauss needed Heidegger in part to make his case against modernity, to wit: that modernity is the summation of Christianity without God that leads to historicism and nihilism ‘and Heidegger – even more than Nietzsche – represents the pinnacle of this dire state of affairs’ (p. 189). As opposed to Altmann, who used Heidegger’s ‘theological neutrality’ to construct a new Jewish theology, Strauss used Heidegger’s ‘atheism’ or ‘ontotheology’ to call his readers back to medieval philosophy, particularly Maimonides. ‘Heidegger’s mark on Strauss here is clear: He adopts the framing of the modern predicament as an original forgetting of a specific question, to which the suitable response is “Destruktion” and retrieval’ (p. 197). In some way for Strauss, Heidegger is the conclusion of what Spinoza began, and thus the only way out is backward. And yet it is precisely the danger of Heidegger’s thought that is its ‘saving power’ because according to Strauss we need Heidegger to finally overcome the Enlightenment, whereby we can rehabilitate the medieval project in a new register. Revelation remains, for Strauss, the only viable alternative to philosophy, and without Heidegger’s undoing the modern metaphysical tradition there is no way back. Herskowitz is at his most insightful in his reading of Strauss and particularly Buber. I am persuaded by Herskowitz’s claim that Buber’s entire philosophical project is a response to, and engagement with, Heidegger, far beyond the few essays he dedicates to his thought. And it seems Heidegger thought so too. From Buber’s ‘prophetic dwelling’ as a response to Heidegger’s ‘poetic dwelling’ to Buber’s discussion of the Gnostic, the atheistic, and Jungean psychology, Buber never leaves the Heideggerian critique behind, always trying to find ways around it but always going through it. In some way, of all the thinkers treated in this book, Buber’s critique of Heidegger is the most thorough and incisive, and yet, as Werner Kraft said of Buber, ‘[he] cannot free himself from Heidegger’ (p. 160). The question is, why not? Herskowitz suggests it is because Buber knew, even though he thought Heidegger was wrong, that there was no one who put his finger on the crisis of modern thought, the undoing of reason’s dominance that helped produce the Great War, then Heidegger. Anything that would emerge would arise by clearing away Heidegger’s solutions to reveal the depth and truth of his critique. The continued interest in Buber’s r e v i e w s | 2 23 thought today speaks to the continued realization that Heidegger, like it or not, remains a part of the Jewish philosophical project. Herskowitz has made a convincing case in that regard. What has Heidegger and His Jewish Reception given us? First, it has, in my view, put to rest the regnant view that Heidegger can be erased, more generally, but certainly in understanding twentieth-century Jewish thought. Second, it deftly distinguishes between Heidegger’s critique and his solutions, revealing that the former needn’t be inextricably tied to the latter. In fact, some of Herskowitz’s subjects vehemently rejected the latter (e.g. Strauss and Buber) yet could not free themselves of the former. Third, it shows that the very dangers of Heidegger’s solutions, particularly in the realm of the political, remain applicable to any theo-political project, and thus viewing Heidegger too tightly bound to his historical context is mistaken and dangerous. Finally, Herskowitz has offered us a new iteration of – a new way to envision – twentieth-century Jewish thought – unafraid to face the stark and ironic reality that one of the darkest philosophical minds of our era is also one of the most brilliant. To make sense of that is nothing less than to answer the perennial question of theodicy. shaul Magid dartMouth college, hanover, usa