Over the last 30 years, books for young Jews have dropped religious and national identity and become obsessed with the Holocaust. Can they be put on a better track?

Houdini’s was the prototypically self-made American tale. But even while turning himself into the world’s greatest breaker of constraints, he remained a proudly identified Jew.

Lauded in Israel but unknown outside, Zelda’s poetry provides an alternative to the desacralized cosmos in which most of us live.