Two new books—HDS Visiting Professor of Modern Jewish Studies Shaul Magid’s The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance, completed just before October 7, and Noah Feldman’s To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People, written late enough to be updated—provide judicious, sober genealogies of the political and spiritual conflicts that have afflicted Jewish communities in light of their relationships to Israel. Taken together, they invite a more capacious understanding of Jewish lives and Jewish futures in the diaspora.