Allen Ginsberg’s Judaism is a fraught subject. Although he was brought up in a family that felt itself unquestionably Jewish, his parents did not practice Judaism as a religion. The family felt keenly the brunt of antisemitism and were deeply traumatized by the Holocaust. Both “Howl” and “Kaddish” bear its unmistakable impact. Unlike his father and many others he knew, Ginsberg did not, though, become a booster for the state of Israel. In fact, he came to revile the concepts of nationhood and religious exclusivity, opting instead for an ethos of compassion and fellow feeling. His universalism linked him with secular Jewish pioneers such as Baruch Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Sigmund Freud, and Leon Trotsky, all of whom have been characterized as “non-Jewish Jews.” Ultimately, his Jewishness appears most strongly in his practice of “lovingkindness” and in his role as prophet against capitalist greed and militaristic warmongering, which allies him with the prophets of the Hebrew Bible.