Expressions of theological identity, if they are to potentially change minds and influence actions, should never be reduced to abstractions, dogma or sound bites. If they are to challenge the listener or reader’s assumptions and prejudices or enable them to navigate existential storms, they must reflect intellectual and spiritual courage. To truly resonate, they must also be deeply personal in nature, spurring the listener or reader to turn inward as well. 

Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove’s brilliant new book, For Such a Time as This: On Being Jewish Today (Harvest, 2024) does all this and much, much more. 

In the interest of full disclosure, let me note at the outset that Rabbi Cosgrove is not only my rabbi but my friend. I was president of New York City’s Park Avenue Synagogue and a member of its search committee when he became our congregation’s senior rabbi, and we have consulted one another on a wide range of subjects ever since. Wise, kind and learned, he combines absolute integrity and deep compassion with courage and a refreshing sense of humor. 

Rabbi Cosgrove has inspired and guided our congregation with great distinction for the past 16 years. With For Such a Time as This, he answers questions and resolves — or, in some cases, reinforces — doubts, helping to chart a course for American Jews far beyond his Park Avenue Synagogue community. 

The book is a must-read because of the truths it contains and the uncomfortable issues it raises. In the shadow of the Oct. 7, 2023 pogrom perpetrated by Hamas terrorists, it may be even more important that non-Jews who interact with Jews, and especially with Jewish students in college and secular high schools, read For Such a Time as This from cover to cover.

The impact of Oct. 7 and its aftermath on Jewish identity is the theme that runs through the book and the prism through which Cosgrove views and analyses the present-day Jewish condition.

Contemporary Jewish history looms for most American Jews as well as Israelis as either pre-Oct. 7, an age of relative innocence and naïveté, or post-Oct. 7, when a host of long-standing assumptions and illusions were shattered. 

Cosgrove distinguishes between two basic types of Jewish identity: a “Genesis identity,” expressed through voluntary acts of positive Jewish identification”; and an “Exodus identity,” negative identity ascribed to Jews by others.

“Prior to Oct. 7,” he writes, “most American Jews understood themselves to be Genesis Jews. The degree to which we observed Jewish life, affiliated with community, gave philanthropically, identified with Israel — these were all voluntary choices we made as individuals, as families and as communities… For non-Orthodox Jews, being Jewish was a lifestyle choice, an identity we asserted — or didn’t. It was a product of living in a free society, in its blessings and challenges.”

On Oct. 7, however, these same American Jews found themselves abruptly, jarringly, forced to transition “from a life as Genesis Jews to Exodus Jews.” Hamas’ savagery and the disappointing failure on the part of far too many erstwhile friends and allies to recognize its full import, Cosgrove explains, “activated a world of ‘us versus them,’ triggering a long-dormant sense of global Jewish peoplehood.”

“The Jewish people circled their wagons and coalesced. Not joyfully; nor, for that matter, by our own volition. After Oct. 7, being a Jew became an identity defined by others, by those who ignore our pain, exclude us, hate us, threaten us, and in some cases kill us. An identity shaped by a fight on the battlefield in Israel and Gaza, against those who would deny our kin the sovereign right of self-defense and self-determination. An identity shaped by a fight on campuses, social media, and beyond… On Oct. 7, American Jews became Exodus Jews, our Jewish identity shaped by our instinct for self-defense, in response to events tragic, traumatic, not of our choosing, and beyond our control.”

Cosgrove highlights the multifaceted essence of American Jewish identity, what he calls living a hyphenated life. He describes the disparate paths being set by Israeli Jews and Diaspora Jews, paths that far too often show no sign of converging anytime soon. And he does so very deliberately in the context of Oct. 7, the elephant in the room — or on the world stage — that effectively sucks up the oxygen in any consideration of most topics of concern to Israelis and Diaspora Jewry.

What sets For Such a Time as This apart from other books, especially those with a tendency to preach to their readers, is its intergenerational character. To be sure, Cosgrove’s own perspective is that of a Conservative rabbi ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary who holds a PhD from the Chicago University School of Divinity. But he also sees the world through the eyes of his four children, all young adults, and their contemporaries, which makes his words eminently relatable to their generation.

Cosgrove is an unapologetic Zionist who understands that many non-Zionist, even anti-Zionist Jewish Gen Z-ers are not inherently antisemitic but are in fact “operating from a place of authenticity and sincere intellectual inquiry.” In one of the book’s most powerful chapters, he tells young Jews espousing such views:

“I hear you, your voice is important, and you are not alone. . . . Not only do you have a place in the Zionist conversation, but also that conversation depends on you. We might not always agree, but make no mistake, now more than ever we need you, the larger Jewish community needs you, and Israel needs you.”

He is similarly nuanced in acknowledging the legitimacy of those who advocate for a “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and those who reject it out of hand as unworkable. However, in the latter instance, he also differentiates between those whose concerns are security driven and others who are motivated by a zealotry bordering on fascism (my analogy, not his) in their rejection of Palestinian rights to any of the land that both they and Israeli Jews claim as their own. Indeed, Cosgrove points out that the expansion of the Greater Israel Jewish settler movement and the Israeli Peace Now movement are “two movements born of a single trauma,” namely the shock of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, “representing two diametrically opposed visions of Israel’s future — a division that continues to play out to this very day.” 

One of the book’s striking “aha moments” occurs when Cosgrove posits that the utterly inadequate reaction to Oct. 7 on the part of many secular educators was not evidence of antisemitism on their part but rather a product of their confusion at Jewish kids and parents who had never before made much of being Jewish suddenly insisting on having their pain, anger and loss be acknowledged and treated with at least the same prominence and respect as the impact of the Israel-Hamas war on Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

Cosgrove writes that the principals and heads of New York City private schools with whom he spoke “were flummoxed, trying to get their heads around a new phenomenon in their schools — Jewish families who were suddenly assertive in their identity, publicly affirming in their Zionist commitments, and now perceived themselves to be persecuted. These school administrators would never have described these same parents and students in this way prior to Oct. 7.”

All of which makes me think that the reach of For Such a Time as This goes beyond the American Jewish community. It is an essential resource for principals, heads of secular schools and educators in general, as well as university and college presidents, provosts and senior administrators who urgently need a crash course on what American Jews feel and think a year after Oct. 7. It should also be made widely available to Jewish university, college and high school students to give them an in-depth understanding of the diverse dimensions of what it means to be Jewish today.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School, lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School, and general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress. He is the author of the forthcoming book Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025).