The Non-Jewish Jew

In these essays Deutscher speaks of the emotional heritage of the European Jew with calmness and clear-sightedness; as a historian he writes without anger but with compassion; as a non-Jewish Jew he writes without religious belief, but with a generous breadth of understanding. As a philosopher he writes first of some of the great Jews of Europe: Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Freud. He explores the Jewish imagination through the painter Chagall. He writes of the Jews under Stalin and of the 'remnants of a race' after Hitler; of the Zionist ideal, of the establishment of the state of Israel, of the war of June 1967, and of the perils ahead.