As Jewish intellectuals grappled with modernity in the late 1950s, a profound identity crisis emerged in both English and American Jewish communities. Through analysis of periodical literature from 1958-1959, including the London Jewish Chronicle, Reconstructionist, and Partisan Review, a pattern of spiritual questioning and institutional critique comes into sharp focus. Leading English Jewish voices like Peter Shaffer, Dannie Abse, and Alexander Baron diagnosed their community's descent into mere cultural nostalgia, while American Jewish thinkers confronted the exodus of intellectuals from religious institutions. The analysis draws on interviews, articles, and essays to trace how figures like Harry Gresh documented synagogues' failure to engage educated Jews, while Richard Rubinstein sought to bridge existentialism with Reconstructionist thought. Walter Kaufmann's selective preservation of Jewish ethics without theology, and Isaac Deutscher's vision of "non-Jewish Jews" as universal emancipators, further exemplify the period's theological tensions. These sources reveal a widespread crisis in Western Jewish communal identity, marked by an increasingly unbridgeable gap between religious tradition and secular intellectual life. While some proposed separating Jewish ethical teachings from their theological roots, this review suggests that only renewed theological engagement could address the spiritual malaise affecting Jewish institutional life.