Intermarriage and the Philosophy of Jewish Identity after Heidegger

The question of intermarriage and Jewish identity in Jewish education is one that is generally dealt with from a predominantly sociological perspective. What is often overlooked is what the philosophical meaning of identity is.

In this paper, I shall ask whether or not post-Enlightenment liberal societies conceptualize the meaning of identity in ways that are compatible with classical Jewish understandings. By means of this analysis I hope to offer some insight into the definitive question of whether or not identity education that thinks within the Western philosophical tradition can be conducive to the cultivation of Jewish identity. In my analysis, I will focus on the critique of Western philosophy’s epistemological understanding of identity presented by Heidegger in Being and Time contrasting his notion of the inevitable inauthenticity of the They-self with the role of the individual in the collective of Am Yisrael found of the writings of Jewish thinkers such as Buber, Rav Kook and Rav Chaim of Volozohin. I shall focus on the ontological contrast between Heidegger’s authentic Dasein and a notion of identity that specifically seeks to cultivate the ontological ‘They-self’ seeing the individual as a partial expression of an authentic collective and not the other way around. This position not only contradicts Heidegger but undermines the post-war liberal emphasis on the primacy of the individual. It is this ethos that Jews have adapted to and which I will argue is responsible for the dramatic erosion of the robustness of Jewish collective identity throughout the modern liberal world.