What is a Jewish Question? Jewish questions have been at the heart of Jewish intellectual inquiry from the beginning. Good questions have been at the heart of Jewish wrestling with God, with tradition, with obligations to ourselves and our fellow humans, and more. Am I my brother's keeper? If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when? Why is this night different from all other nights? Is it good for the Jews?
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Beginning in the late-eighteenth century and the advent of the modern period, political thinkers began to discuss a different type of "Jewish Question." Could Jews maintain a distinctive identity while integrating into other emerging nations? Were Jews able to become British, French, American for all civic and political purposes, retaining their Jewishness only as a private expression of their religion? These questions were both about the nature of Jews and the nature of modern life. And they often overlapped with questions about other groups: women, enslaved people, colonial subjects, and so on. According to some historians, liberal citizenship answered the Jewish question; it proved that Jews as individuals could seamlessly fit into national political systems. Theodor Herzl, on the other hand, proposed a "modern solution to the Jewish question:" Zionism.

And the Nazis produced a horrific Final Solution to their own interpretation of the Jewish question: complete and total annihilation. Nearly 80 years after World War II and the creation of the  state of Israel, and almost 250 years after the American Revolution, it would seem we are no closer to answering the Jewish Question than we were at the beginning of the modern period. Despite attempts to answer it, the Jewish Question may persist in ongoing preoccupations about the nature of Jewish difference and the prospect of freedom and equality for Jews and other people.