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From the experience of a summons to a call that surprises us and prompts the query "Who, me?" Derrida explores the movement between growing up Jewish, "becoming Jewish," and "Jewish being" or existence. In his essay "The Other Abraham," which appears here in English for the first time, he imagines other Abrahams in light of the proclaimed universalism of philosophy and its recent fragmentation into "philosophemes." Thus we no longer confront "Judaism" but "Judeity," multiple Judaisms and Jewish existences, manifold ways of being and writing as a Jew--in Derrida's case, as a French-speaking Algerian deprived of, then restored to French nationality in the 1940s. What is it to be a Jew and a philosopher? How has the notion of "Jewish identity" been written into and across Jewish literature, Jewish thought, and Jewish languages? The volume addresses these questions, contrasting Derrida's thought with philosophical predecessors such as Rosenzweig, Levinas, Celan, and Scholem, and tracing confluences between deconstruction and Kabbalah. Derrida's relationship to the universalist aspirations in contemporary theology is also discussed, and an evaluation is offered of his late autobiographical writings.

The aim of this multifaceted volume is to open the question of Jewishness; above all to hold it open as a question, though not one of practical or theoretical identity. As much a contestation of identity as a profound reflection on what it means today to seek, elude, and finally to wrestle with the significance of "being-jew,"Judeities invites us to revisit the human condition in the twenty-first century.