The Best Books of 2020, Chosen by Mosaic Authors (Part II)

To mark the close of 2020, we asked several of our writers to name the best three books they’ve read this year, and briefly to explain their choices. We have encouraged them to pick two recent books, and one older one. The first five of their answers appeared yesterday; the next six appear below in alphabetical order. The rest will appear tomorrow. (Unless otherwise noted, all books were published in 2020. Classic books are listed by their original publication dates.)

Haviv Rettig Gur

In What Are Jews for? History, Peoplehood, and Purpose (Princeton, 376pp, $35), Adam Sutcliffe, a history professor at King’s College London, has penned a dense but enlightening history of the idea of Jewish purpose, from its primordial roots in the biblical idea of consecration to a protector God into part of the intellectual bedrock of Western civilization. It is nigh impossible for modern Westerners to grapple with notions of peoplehood, of the meaning of history, and of the tensions between particularist and universalist ethics without appealing, sometimes unknowingly, to the Jewish discourse around purpose and chosenness. There is much here that was new to this non-academic reader. The book sometimes tilts to the left, including in its final section, where it identifies certain narrow ideas about Jewish purpose with present-day Israelis and takes them to task for it. But these moments are never overly cartoonish or wanton. In the end, it is a defense of the Jewish idea of purpose as a deep and broad and complex notion, and as a key source that later European and modern cultures have drawn on to construct their own identities and sense of self.