No, this is not a manual for becoming less Jewish.

It is the opposite.

How to Stop Thinking Like a Jew is the self-help book the world has been trying to hand Jews for three thousand years.

Bow.

Be quiet.

Believe this.

Stop believing that.

Leave.

Convert.

Assimilate.

Behave.

For some reason, the instructions have not taken.

The book follows the argument from Egypt forward: the habit of looking at authority and asking says who, the refusal to put a man where God goes, the inability to leave a question alone, and the spectacular trouble that follows.

Sometimes that habit saves us.

Sometimes it gets us flattened.

Usually it produces another meeting.

The history is real.

The self-help is useless.

That's the point.

Sherman Sall grew up in New York in a strongly Jewish and Zionist household, later lived in Israel and Europe, and has spent a lifetime watching Jews argue: with authority, with history, with one another, and very often with the wording of the question.

How to Stop Thinking Like a Jew is not memoir. It is his comic history of a civilization that keeps getting told to stop, keeps getting flattened for refusing, and keeps coming back with a follow-up question.