Abraham Maslow offers an alternative to Freudianism and Behaviorism.
This book examines Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and self-actualization. It presents a psychology of optimism that stresses the positive attributes of human beings.  In ascending order Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is: physiological, safety, belonging, self-esteem and self actualization. This helped me understand my sense of distance from Israeli society. Many western immigrants came to Israel searching for belonging, self-esteem and self actualization.  Israeli society in the 60’s and 70s was preoccupied with physiological and safety needs. The western preoccupation with self-actualization seemed a childish self-indulgence. Today, however, given the tremendous economic development of Israel, many young, university educated Israelis have also become pre-occupied with self-actualization.  This is why in The Optimistic Jew I claim there is little difference between young university trained Jews from Tel Aviv or New York, Paris and London.
Maslow’s approach to the human condition has greatly influenced my psychological and philosophical worldview and is a foundation stone for the book.

Frankl believed that man's deepest desire is to search for meaning and purpose – that neurosis is caused by “frustration in the will to meaning”. Frankl’s belief in meaning was formulated in the horror of a Nazi concentration camp. His essential optimism comes through in the following: “It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future…and this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task…the [Auschwitz] prisoner who had lost faith in…his future was doomed.  With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and become subject to mental and physical decay…he simply gave up…lying in his own excreta, and nothing bothered him any more”.
The Optimistic Jew is an attempt to encourage the collective mind of the Jewish people to once again believe in its own future lest we end up lying in historical excreta with nothing bothering us anymore.

C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) was one of the most influential Christian writers of his day. The Abolition of Man rejects moral relativism and affirms "the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kinds of things we are." This very tiny book makes cogent, witty and eloquent arguments against a nihilistic view of the world that has become the foundation of postmodernist deconstructionism.  To proponents of this intellectual pose he says: “…you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ forever…You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things forever…To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.” This book reinforced my basic instinct that the pessimistic nihilism of postmodernism and post-Zionism are wrong at some very fundamental level.

Ordained as a Conservative rabbi, his attempts to adapt Judaism to the modern world led to the establishment of a new movement, Reconstructionism. He saw Judaism as a constantly evolving civilization shaped by Jewish experience and Jewish ethics reacting to its changing environment.  In his words “…group religion cannot raise the ethical standard of men and nations unless it is rooted in the realities of physical and human nature…religious systems committed to unchanging traditions are doomed to irrelevance and Judaism exists today because it has built within its concept of one God the dynamic for change and development…the Jewish people must be reconstituted. A practicable program for its creative survival as a transnational people (italics mine) – with the Jewish community in the State of Israel as a catalytic agent for the rest of Jewry – must be implemented.” This quotation reflects one of the major themes of The Optimistic Jew.

A critical philosophical and historical overview of Jewish identity with clear and straightforward alternatives accessible to the modern Jew. Wine takes Kaplan’s views to what I believe are a logical conclusion – Judaism has no need of the God hypothesis. The Society for Humanistic Judaism, like Reconstructionism, is an authentic American creation.  Yet like Reconstructionism it has not become a mass movement of choice of American Jews.  But if they applied their energies to the “secular” Israeli they would have an opportunity to make their approach to Jewish identity a major social and cultural force in Israel.  This in turn would oblige a greater number of American and European Jews to reflect on their approach to Jewish identity. A must read for the concerned modern Jew. 

Fromm is a modernist, a humanist and an optimist and interprets Jewish tradition from this perspective.  He offers a radically humanist interpretation of the Old Testament: God evolving from a domineering, dictator to a constitutional monarch, and ultimately to a nameless God – bound by the same morals and principles that govern humankind. This view is optimistic because it emphasizes our capacity to develop intellectually and become fully independent and free because of our ability to comprehend reality.  This interpretation of Judaism could only have developed in the 20th century. It is an interpretation that has great attraction for me.