As antisemitism surges worldwide, Rabbi Mark Wildes said the Jewish response must begin not with public relations but with education.
His new book, The Jewish Experience: Discovering the Soul of Jewish Thought and Practice, published in 2025 by Maggid Books, an imprint of Koren Publishers, is his effort to provide Jews of all backgrounds with what he believes is missing: a clear understanding of what Judaism actually teaches and why it’s worth defending.
“I started writing this before Oct. 7, but when Oct. 7 hit, I was like, I got to finish this thing,” Wildes told JNS.
Wildes, founder of the Manhattan Jewish Experience, has spent 27 years teaching young Jewish professionals in New York City. His new volume distills his long-running “Basic Judaism” course into a structured, accessible text covering belief in God, Torah, Shabbat, prayer and kindness.
In the book’s introduction, Wildes asked, “How many of us know the whys behind Judaism?”
“You learn a lot of the whats of Judaism, but not really the whys,” Wildes told JNS. “And this is really a deep dive.”
The book’s release has coincided with heightened Jewish anxiety on college campuses and in major cities in the United States and around the world. Wildes said that after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, he began seeing “Oct. 8 kind of Jews” walking into MJE programs—young adults shaken by anti-Israel protests and rising hostility but lacking a strong grounding in Jewish learning.
“Something happened,” he pointed out, “and people want to do something with it.”
He added that “what we need to do is just become prouder and lean further into who we are,” he said.
“We’re never really going to defeat antisemitism in my opinion,” Wildes said. “We don’t have the numbers to combat the social-media war.”
Instead, he sees Jewish engagement as the most effective response. “This is an opportunity to inspire people as to what it is about Judaism that’s actually worth defending,” he said. “People are left with that question: ‘OK, I’m being attacked, what am I defending?’”
‘Wisdom to live their lives by’
In one chapter, Wildes presents what he calls the “Arguments From Jewish History,” pointing to the survival of the Jewish people against successive empires. In another, he outlines the “Argument From Intelligent Design.”
He also addresses Torah min haShamayim, the development of the Oral Law and the philosophical logic behind Shabbat observance.
“There isn’t one word there that’s taken for granted,” Wildes told JNS. “That’s the way I teach.”
He highlighted that his book contains a chapter dedicated to tikkun olam, a Hebrew phrase for the “repair of the world,” which Wildes says is “a fundamental part of Torah,” noting that it has been politically co-opted into a general version of social justice.
“I think it’s really important not to lose fundamental parts of Torah, but to make sure it’s not being used against us, too,” he said.
Wildes’s book tour has included synagogues, Jewish high schools and college campuses, including at New York University. While the work has a decidedly Orthodox audience, he told JNS that he “wouldn’t mind getting a little more in front of Conservative and Reform audiences,” noting that many of his students come from such backgrounds.
He believes that Jewish young adults searching for meaning are increasingly turning to politics and social movements for community and identity. “There’s such a search out there right now,” he said. “People are willing to go everywhere and anywhere to find wisdom to live their lives by.”
His message, he said, is that Judaism already offers a path, if Jews are willing to learn it. “Judaism has a track record of inspiring and elevating the conversation and the substance of our lives by giving us a real something to sink our teeth into,” he said. “That has eternal values and that can be passed on.”
