Who Are the Jews—And Who Can We Become?

In this episode of the New Books Network, I speak with Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman about his book Who Are the Jews and Who Can We Become? (Jewish Publication Society, 2023), the 2023 National Jewish Book Award Finalist in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience. Hartman is president of the Shalom Hartman Institute and holds the Kaufman Family Chair in Jewish Philosophy. His work has consistently addressed what constitutes Jewish peoplehood across a landscape of internal difference.

Hartman's central argument distinguishes between the Genesis covenant and the Exodus covenant. The Genesis covenant is a covenant of belonging: membership in the Jewish people that obtains by birth or by formal entry into the community, independent of belief or practice. The Exodus covenant, by contrast, is a covenant of aspiration, calling the people toward holiness, ethical development, and spiritual growth. Where the first establishes identity, the second establishes obligation.

In our discussion, Hartman emphasized that the Genesis covenant requires each community, and each individual, to relinquish the presumption of controlling a singular, authoritative account of the Jewish story. Read together, the two covenants do not divide the Jewish people into separate camps so much as describe the full shape of Jewish belonging: one covenant that secures the people as a people, and a second that gives that peoplehood its ongoing direction and purpose. Jewishness, on this account, transcends denominational boundaries—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, secular, and otherwise—even as each tradition supplies its own particular mode of enacting the Exodus covenant's demand for growth.

Hartman situated this framework within a longer pattern in Jewish intellectual history: the recurring effort to locate an essential core beneath the full body of commandments, exemplified by Hillel's reduction of the Torah to a single ethical principle. This tendency toward distillation, he argued, helps explain how communities as historically and culturally distinct as Yemenite, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and secular Israeli Jews continue to recognize one another as belonging to a single people, notwithstanding significant divergence in practice. Shared calendar and shared collective memory, in his formulation, do more to sustain peoplehood than uniformity of observance.

The conversation turned to the relationship between Jewish identity and the State of Israel. Hartman located Zionism itself within the Genesis covenant: attachment to the Jewish people's return to and sovereignty in the land of Israel is, on his account, a constitutive part of Jewish family and belonging, not a separate or optional commitment layered on top of it.

Hartman further addressed the changing status of intermarriage, noting a shift from its historical treatment as a violation of the Genesis covenant toward broader acceptance, particularly in Diaspora communities. He observed that a substantial proportion of Jewish spouses in intermarriages maintain Jewish identity, practice, and communal affiliation, complicating any straightforward inference from rising intermarriage rates to communal decline. Jewish continuity, on this account, is proving more resilient, and more complex, than earlier demographic anxieties assumed.

The conversation closed on the question of how Exodus Judaism—a Judaism oriented toward aspiration, self-criticism, and moral striving—can be sustained in a period marked by contested facts and by the anti-Zionism as antisemitism seen around the world. Hartman offered no definitive resolution, but argued for the continued value of engaging the argument itself: treating the Genesis covenant as the foundation that preserves collective belonging, and the Exodus covenant as the ongoing rationale for what that belonging is for.

As we continue the discussion to find common ground and appreciation of the greater Jewish story, follow Jewish Tapestry for engaging talks on Jewish heritage communities.