A Futurist Looks at the Jewish Future

When Max Singer died of cancer in late January at the age of eighty-eight, the world of ideas lost a vanishingly rare human specimen: the rational optimist.

The author of such landmark books as Passage to a Human World (1989) and The History of the Future (2011), Singer trained as a lawyer and worked for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission before joining Herman Kahn in 1961 as a cofounder of the Hudson Institute. Over the decades, his essays on matters social, political, and geostrategic appeared in magazines ranging from Reader’s Digest to Commentary, the Public Interest, the New York Times Magazine, and the Atlantic Monthly.

Indivisible from Singer’s life as a policy intellectual was his life as a Jew. In Israel, where he and his family spent much time in the 1970s and would later move permanently, he became affiliated with the BESA Center for Strategic Studies and the Institute for Zionist Strategies.