  In the year after the war ended, as Rosenzweig prepared both the Star and his Hegel and the State for publication, he turned his attention back to some of those issues in Jewish education that had occupied him during his exchanges with Hermann Cohen. Encouraged by a group of Jewish intellectuals in Frankfurt to join their efforts to establish a new institute for Jewish adult education, Rosenzweig began to formulate a program for Jewish education for his assimilated Jewish contemporaries, Jews who were educated and successful in a variety of fields but who were, for the most part, “amharatzim”—ignoramuses—when it came to the Jewish sources. Rosenzweig traced the challenges facing Jewish life in his time back to the emancipation, which had brought unimaginable freedoms and opportunities to the Jews of Europe, but which had, at the same time, severed the organic connection between Jewish life, on the one hand, and Jewish study and practice, on the other, that had been the signature of traditional Judaism. Those who fought against the assimilationist tide of the 19th Century and continued to devote themselves to Jewish law, in Rosenzweig’s eyes, transformed the living Torah into a rigid set of laws and practices requiring zealous obedience. In his own time, Rosenzweig thus claimed, neither the orthodox nor the liberal forms of Judaism set out a path of Jewish study and practice that was livable. Rosenzweig’s educational program made the re-discovery of one’s own personal Jewish life, or the renewed commitment to one’s own Jewishness the starting point of the path of Jewish learning, and thereby sought to ensure that whatever was learned, whatever practices were taken on, would become part of a living Judaism.