The Future Jew

The Future Jew argues a startling thesis: The Jewish people have not yet responded decisively to the Holocaust. They have failed to recognize the event as a radical turning point in their history. This book declares that the extermination of six million innocents could only have happened in a world devoid of divinity.


The Future Jew is no dry academic treatise. A passionate response to history's most heinous crime, it is a highly accessible, compulsively readable work. Building its case through documentary evidence, ingeniously employing the tools of literature, it graphically recalls the Holocaust—and prescribes a bold response.


Michael Carin demonstrates that events have imposed a new mission on the Jews. It is time for them to set aside their antique devotions, and reshape Judaism as ordained by intellectual honesty. In the past they gave the world monotheism. In the future they must lead in establishing global secularism—a world liberated from the irrational, chronic, bloody antagonisms born of religious superstition.


At center stage in this book is the powerful and poetic Holocaust Haggadah. As it tells the story of Nazi genocide, it infers that Judaism is not immune to evolution. The Holocaust Haggadah shows that new customs of secular observance can arise, and that theists do not have a monopoly on ritual.


Carin's potent call to abolish theistic faith, in the name of the six million, will touch a waiting nerve in the Jewish psyche. Indeed, the universality of The Future Jew's theme will excite debate across all denominational lines.

…………………….

Michael Carin’s response to the following statement and question: “Prior to the Holocaust, Jewish history is littered with attempts at eradication of Jews. Why do you emphasize the Holocaust specifically as a turning point?”:


"Because it was so profoundly conceived and gigantically executed. Because it was all-encompassing and potentially definitive in the sense of total extermination of the Jewish people. You can (if you’re a believer) ignore predations that happened in remote history. You can (if you’re a believer) discount massacres that did not wipe out whole communities. You can (if you’re a believer) close your eyes to centuries of scapegoating and persecution while holding on to your faith that it’s all a test, a gauntlet, a preparation for reward – all an intricate working out of God’s plan which we cannot possibly understand since he is VAST and we are less than mere puny dots. But I submit that you cannot, even if you’re a believer, continue to believe that an almighty protector exists after you have seen a modern state bring to bear all its power in order to murder, en masse, Jewish infants and grandmothers – and while aiming with concentrated will at nothing less than the eradication, everywhere in the world, of all Jewish infants and grandmothers. Accordingly, the Holocaust should act as a turning point for faithful Jews; the Holocaust demonstrates the futility and emptiness of their faith; in the name of six million innocents it demands, it ordains, that they renounce their faith."