 More than his writing, Susman suggests, Mendelssohn’s life exemplified the decision to embrace German culture and the project of Enlightenment in whose creation he played a crucial role. By embracing modernity while solidly grounded in the Jewish tradition (whose first modern representative he would become), he courageously set out to justify his commitment to both as a choice. Mendelssohn’s decision to live as a modern individual who celebrates Judaism by choice answered Lavater’s challenge to explain how he could remain Jewish and at the same time be a modern citizen of the world. Mendelssohn’s decision, however, put the burden on the individual to justify adherence to Judaism in terms of an individual choice rather than by belonging to the communal reality of a people. In the wake of the Shoah, Mendelssohn may thus only appear as a figure of a world that has come to its tragic end. However, Susman argues, Mendelssohn’s choice is a vision that points beyond what, in the middle of the twentieth century, could only be seen as a cataclysmic end. Challenging hindsight analyses that cast Mendelssohn’s trajectory as opportunistically reformist at best and a calamitous betrayal of Jewish tradition at worst, Susman instead highlights how Mendelssohn’s predicament ultimately represents and adumbrates the challenges each Jew continues to face today.