There’s an old Jewish saying, at once self-disparaging and yet slightly smug: “Ten Jews, 50 opinions.” Jews are obstreperous and argumentative, it seems to imply, but also individualistic and highly independent. While Jewish communities often try to present the appearance of a unified front to the outside world, in reality Jews have never marched in ideological lockstep and never will. How could they, a people trained from birth to ask questions and demand answers even from God?

However you analyze it, no one who has ever looked at the depth and breadth of Jewish publishing could ever doubt this basic proposition. Jewish writing ranges from the aggressively secular to the militantly Orthodox, from New Age spiritualism to hard-nosed political analysis, from books in English to books in Hebrew, Yiddish, French, Spanish, Russian, and God-only-knows how many other languages.

As a culture, Judaism considers learning and study a holy task, and the five books of Moses are a cornerstone of Jewish nationhood. Literacy is virtually a religious obligation, and even in the Middle Ages most Jews (or Jewish men, at least) could read and write. In modern times, these attitudes easily transformed themselves into a broader cultural respect for learning and books of all types – even among secular or alienated Jews who didn’t identify with the broader Jewish community.

Lisa Schiffman, author of Generation J, may have once included herself in this latter category. Raised as an atheist in small-town America, and alienated from Jewish culture by distance and not-so-benign family neglect, Schiffman has written an account of her search for a Jewish identity and her attempts to reconcile it with her own life. The cover illustration provides a neat metaphor for the process: a stark black and white photo of the author’s naked back reveals a beautiful tattoo of a Star of David entwined with a vine. It’s a jarring image. For traditional Jews, decorative tattooing falls into the same category as eating pork: it is treff, or ritually unclean. In older times, people with tattoos could not even be buried in Jewish cemeteries.

Like the photo, the book surprises. At first, Schiffman writes uncertainly; her prose is disjointed, and her tone alternates between that of a trained anthropologist and a funky Internet writer. She turns up her nose at traditional Judaism, but is not being as deliberately provocative as she first seems. She reveals only much later that the tattoo is a henna body-painting – temporary decoration for a friend’s wedding. Taken in context, Schiffman’s decision to be “tattooed” with a Star of David is in fact a bold statement of Jewish belonging.

For most Jewish-Canadians, Schiffman’s picture of Jewish-American upbringing will be surprisingly alien. She describes a childhood almost vacuumed clean of Jewish identity by second-generation parents bent on escaping into the American melting pot. In a telling anecdote, the author relates how she and her parents shocked the owner of a kosher deli by demanding to know if the sausages on his menu contained pork. (By contrast, the vast majority of Jews in Montreal and Toronto and Winnipeg may not always eat kosher, but at least they know when they are breaking the rules.)

Generation J is simultaneously chatty and deeply significant, painfully personal and introspective – and yet still universal. It rings bells for any Jew born in the post-Holocaust era, for almost anyone trying to negotiate the treacherous waters of identity, spirituality, and belonging. It’s long on spiritual desire, short on anthropological rigour and inconsistent in style, but ultimately successful.

In Why Should Jews Survive? author Michael Goldberg asks many of the same questions and looks at the same social phenomena as Schiffman, but his is a much less personal journey. As a rabbi and a theologian he’s more concerned with the repair of a North American Jewish body politic that he believes to be broken.

Goldberg’s is an angry book. In a clear, intellectual but decidedly non-academic style, the author confronts two of North American Jewry’s most sacred cows and leads them straight to the abattoir. He states that The Holocaust and the State of Israel have dominated the discourse in Jewish life – particularly in North America – since the end of the Second World War to the point that they have become harmful obsessions. “The real threat posed to Jews by the Holocaust did not die with Hitler in a Berlin bunker,” he writes. “Instead, it still imperils the Jewish people today in the form of a story that mutilates Jewish self-understanding.”

He rails against how the Nazis succeeded in changing the “master story” that dominated Jewish self-awareness for centuries. The uplifting narrative of the Exodus – of moving from slavery to freedom – has been replaced in the Jewish psyche by the unalloyed catastrophe of the Holocaust. This, says Goldberg, has given rise to an obsession with survival rather than the Jewish people’s traditional injunction to “mend and change the world.”

Why Should Jews Survive? is both a liberating and infuriating book. Goldberg identifies many relevant issues and problems in American Jewish life. His mastery of Biblical scholarship is undeniable, and his assessment of what is wrong with Jewish civil discourse in the late 20th century strikes several chords. However, his prescription is problematic. He calls for a return to an open, uplifting, non-consumerist spirituality – to a form of practising Judaism he calls “Covenentalism.” It’s an attractive picture, but here the drumbeats begin to get a little too loud, his criticisms of Judaism’s other branches too shrill. Lisa Schiffman sought out her Jewish identity, working through and moving past the Holocaust in her own way. Goldberg would want her to do this his way.

From Your Father’s House: Reflections for Modern Jewish Men, by Rabbi Kerry M. Olitzky, is a specifically Jewish response to the men’s movement in the United States. The Reform, Reconstructionist, Revival, and even Conservative movements have abolished most of Judaism’s traditional gender barriers. As women fill rabbinical pulpits to become cantors, synagogue presidents, and directors of major Jewish organizations, men are finding it necessary to redefine their spiritual, personal, and familial roles.

In structure, the book deliberately echoes the Biblical psalms: it comprises a series of brief essays on aspects of life and manhood, broken into thematic chapters like Petition, Joy, Thanksgiving, Encounter, and Struggle and Survival. Though Olitzky treads the fine line between serious self-help guide and spiritual goofiness, he never crosses it. Olitzky’s tone is touchy-feely, and the book is an easy read, though not a simplistic one; it speaks to men’s strengths as well as their weaknesses. A discussion of the Jewish mourner’s prayer, or Kaddish, which one repeats for a year after the death of a parent, really hits home. “Judaism doesn’t accept the notion that armed combat transforms a boy into a man,” says Olitzky. “Rather it teaches that it is the Kaddish that matures a boy.”