In 1984, editing the late eminent philosopher of science Adolf Grünbaum, whose The Foundations of Psychoanalysis we were publishing at the University of California Press, I was taken aback one day at the vehemence of Adolf's defense of Philip Roth against the charge that he was a “self-hating Jew.” Grünbaum—born in Germany in 1923, emigrating with his family to the United States in 1938—had vivid and contemptuous recollections of how the Nazis had used the charge of “self-hating German” against any German who dared to challenge them. An uncompromising rationalist and universalist, Adolf would not stoop to changing his first name (“Why should I?”) simply because a vile dictator happened to bear it as well. In the same vein, he happily retained the umlaut in his last name. While not yet twenty years of age, he became one of the “Ritchie Boys,” German-speaking Americans, many of them Jews, who served the American military during World War II. After the war (and how I wish I could have witnessed this scene), he took part in the interrogation of Nazis being tried at Nuremberg as war criminals. Adolf comes to mind as I begin this double review because the allegation of “self-hatred” is one that either of the two authors may well face.In Reopening Muslim Minds, Mustafa Akyol, an émigré Turk unlikely to return to the land of his birth until the Recep Erdoğan dictatorship ends (as it will), writes with the verve of a journalist but the depth of a serious historian. The question he asks, in several different forms, is why and how, historically, Muslim minds were closed. Simply to understand that history is, for him, to begin the process of intellectual reopening and cultural reflourishing. The startling titles of chapters 4 through 7 make the stakes clear: “How We Lost Morality,” “How We Lost Universalism,” “How the Sharia Stagnated,” and “How We Lost the Sciences.” And yet—I cannot stress this sufficiently—Akyol writes as a committed Muslim raising his three sons to be Muslims like himself. He is the very antithesis of an Islamophobe, even though I can only too easily imagine the charge of “self-hating Muslim” being leveled against him, just as the analogous charge was leveled against Germans who wanted to defend the noble tradition of the German Aufklärung against the barbarism of the Nazis.As book review editor of the Los Angeles Times for seven years, I strictly followed the unwritten rule that no book should be reviewed by a known friend or colleague of its author. In this review, I confess, I am breaking that rule twice over. While the weightiest blurb on Reopening's back cover is from the Egyptian-born jurist Khaled Abou El Fadl, distinguished professor of American law at UCLA but equally distinguished as a scholar of Sharia, I myself appear on the cover writing, “Mustafa Akyol has written a page-turning intellectual adventure story that will rivet the attention of his fellow Muslims and raise the hopes of us non-Muslims all around the world.”I stand by that quotation. Muslim intellectuals working in the West will in the long run have a powerfully transformative effect on world Islam. Among them, Akyol is a standout for his skill in presenting crucial intellectual arguments in compelling narrative form. His The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims (2018) begins with the anomaly that while Jewish influence on formative Islam is undeniable, Islam nonetheless honors Jesus as the Messiah. With that puzzle before his readers’ eyes, Akyol proceeds artfully to a defense of the hypothesis that the Jews whom Muhammad knew in the Hijaz were those anomalously Christian Jews—well enough known to history—who accepted Jesus as the Messiah but rejected the claim that he was the divine son of God. These Jews, rejected by both rabbinic Judaism and Orthodox Christianity, conventionally “disappeared from history” after fleeing the first Roman sack of Jerusalem. But might the survivors not have ended up in Arabia? Akyol ends each of the chapters in his book-length exploration of this possibility with an intriguing question that will be answered only in the next chapter. The story he tells in Reopening is far more complicated, more multifaceted, than the one told in The Islamic Jesus, but he enlivens this work, too, with a remarkable degree of suspense.Omri Boehm is a Jewish Israeli, a veteran of the Israel Defense Force as well as of Shin Bet and a philosopher now on the faculty of the New School in New York. His book Haifa Republic was published first in Germany, where it was acclaimed in Die Zeit as the “most important book on the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict . . . that has appeared in recent years.” Boehm, fluent in German as the son of a German-Jewish immigrant to Israel, teaches often in Berlin and appears as often in the German press. It was op-eds of his on Israel/Palestine that led to his being invited by a German publisher to write a short book on that subject. The middle two chapters of his four-chapter book—“Forgetting and Remembering: The Holocaust” and “Remembering and Forgetting: The Nakba”—are the two that might lead some to label him an anti-Zionist if not a self-hating Jew, but the first chapter in the book names its true ambition, “The Liberal Zionism of the Future,” and its epigraph is Theodor Herzl's most famous line “If you will, it is no dream.” Boehm is as authentic a Zionist as Akyol is an authentic Muslim.Boehm's dream of a liberal Zionism begins with a critique of what has for too long passed as liberal Zionism—namely, advocacy of the “two-state solution.” The two-state solution is dead, he cogently argues, its demise by now admitted alike by Jewish Israelis and by Arab Palestinians. What lies ahead can only be the shaping of the de facto one-state outcome, accommodating two populations that are now essentially equal in numbers. As an American Christian student at the Hebrew University in 1966–67, I was stopped cold one day when an Israeli said to me, “We will give haaretz back to the Arabs when you give the USA back to the Indians.” In terms of abstract morality, he was right: America was as guilty of a massive nakba as Israel, or more so. But concretely, in 1967, the 300 million descendants of the invaders who had poured from Europe into North America were not facing 300 million Navajos, Comanche, and other Indigenous nations unreconciled to their subjugation. Such was the quantitative difference between the two morally equivalent situations. Israel's two equal populations, willy-nilly, are going to be living together forever. How, consistent with the founding ideals of Zionism, can Jewish Israel manage this future?Boehm's book, like Akyol's, is full of eye-opening and highly specific moments. Among these, let me single out just one. Arabs cannot possibly coexist with Jews as equals in Israel, Boehm argues, if the Jewish Israeli society defines itself in a way that excludes Arabs a priori as not part of the nation that rose miraculously from the ashes of the Holocaust. In “Forgetting and Remembering: The Holocaust,” he writes ofBoehm and I have been friends since he wrote me about a book-in-progress that he had interrupted his doctoral work at Yale to write. This book became The Binding of Isaac: A Religious Model of Disobedience (2007). In Genesis 22, Abraham never sacrifices Isaac and never says that he will. It is for his disobedience, in effect, that God praises and exalts him, having backed down from his original, evil command. Abraham—a model for Muslims as well as for Jews—is thus the archetypal loyal dissident, never more devoted to the Lord than when he challenges him. The two authors whom I bring together in this review have never met. I celebrate them for how each has found a way to be loyal to the universal while never deserting the particulars of the traditions that have shaped him—traditions to whose future shape he now brilliantly contributes.