Noah Feldman, meet Albert Shanker. Albert Shanker, for those who don't remember, was the longtime and famously volatile head of the American Federation of Teachers. In Woody Allen's 1973 movie Sleeper, Allen's character wakes in the year 2173 and is asked how civilization was destroyed. "A man named Al Shanker got the bomb," he replies.

Noah Feldman isn't throwing bombs, but he certainly lit a fuse. The Harvard law professor's New York Times Magazine article about his ostracism from his Modern Orthodox yeshiva continues to be Topic A wherever observant Jews gather to pray, eat, or blog.

A few camps have emerged. One camp says Feldman got what he deserved for marrying a non-Jewish woman and that his day school could not be expected to recognize the achievements of a graduate who ran so afoul of community norms. Another feels the school acted badly — or at least rudely — by keeping Feldman out of its alumni magazine. A third camp says he had no right to embarrass his former school, even as members of this camp support the positions that might be seen by others as an embarrassment.

The debate even morphed into one about journalistic ethics, after the New York Jewish Week reported that, contrary to the article's key motif, Feldman and his editors knew before publication that he and his then girlfiend may not have been intentionally cropped out of a photograph of his class reunion. The Orthodox Union even called for Feldman's ouster as a contributing editor to the magazine, in a press release almost giddy with its sense of "gotcha."

I offered my take on the brouhaha last week, focusing not on the debate within Modern Orthodoxy or the much wider debate in the Jewish community over intermarriage. Instead, I wrote that Feldman's essay suggested a coming schism within the Jewish community between those who view Judaism as a way of life whose survival demands a commitment to a series of behaviors, and those who see it as a "conceptual program" that deemphasizes a sense of peoplehood.

I'm a "surivalist," I suppose, and found myself agreeing with Jack Wertheimer of the Jewish Theological Seminary, who wrote, "Only in its particularism can [Judaism's] values truly be fulfilled, and only as a counterculture can Judaism survive."

But there's a certain smugness in this attitude — first, in my confidence that my choices will ensure the survival of anything; second, in the way it devalues the abundant contributions of Jews who have drawn on the "conceptual program" to, well, transform the world; and third, in the failure of Jewish institutions to make this "particularism" relevant.

Another way to describe the "survivalist" mode is the "Orthodox model," as Samuel Freedman called it in his Jew vs. Jew. Freedman called the embrace of "traditionalism" by the Reform and Conservative movements affirmation "that Jewish knowledge and identity can be instilled only through the sectarianism of a day school, through a selective disengagement from the American mainstream."

Freedman went on to describe a core of religiously observant Jews who survive and replicate themselves, and a more assimilated periphery of secular "just Jews" who reach, in Irving Howe's famous judgment, a "dead end."

The problem with this analysis, as I wrote at the time, is that it presents the current Jewish era as the inevitable consequence of the history that preceded it as well as a predictor of the future that will follow it. To have performed the same exercise 100 years ago would have yielded the opposite conclusion: The Orthodox model would have been seen as the least successful model in Jewish history, in that 90 percent of its adherents abandoned its strictures for different lives in America and Palestine.

Jewish "particularism" would have been a social disaster even 50 years ago, when anti-Semitism was still a barrier in so many ways. No one can say which strategies will be demanded — and will make demands on us — 10, 20, or 30 years from now. Each generation calls forth its own corrective. If followers of the "Orthodox model" — and I include myself among them — think we've reached the end of Jewish history and that our children and grandchildren will come out as our clones in the Jewish choices they make, then we are very likely in for a shock.

Promoting the "Orthodox model" can also mean discounting the explosive creativity of the "just Jews" in the arts, sciences, pop culture, and academia. The 20th century became what some call the "Jewish century" because Jews were able to synthesize their Jewish identities with Western culture — and use the former to transform the latter. The Orthodox model might see this as a loss for Judaism, but I can't look at that long list of Jewish Nobel Prize winners and wish those men and women had spent more time in heder.

Wertheimer makes a strong case for peoplehood and particularism, but his Conservative movement has seen its own followers peel off both to the right and left over the last two decades. It's one thing for leaders to bemoan those who have given up on their "responsibilities." But it's a hollow complaint unless they can point to the ways in which their institutions and communities have creatively addressed the needs and aspirations of American Jews raised in a climate of complete freedom.

Feldman sits at the very crux of this debate. Raised Orthodox, married out, successful in ways that would make any Jewish mother kvell — he is either a Jewish success story or a failure, depending on your perspective. But that perspective should be tempered with humility.