In this book, David Patterson sets out to describe why Jews must live -- but especially think -- in a way that is distinctly Jewish.

For Patterson, the primary responsibility of post-Holocaust Jewish thought is to avoid thinking in the same categories that led to the attempted extermination of the Jewish people. The Nazis, he says, were not anti- Semitic because they were racists; they were racists because they were anti-Semitic, and their anti-Semitism was furthered by a Western ontological tradition that made God irrelevant by placing the thinking ego at the center of...