People and Polity is Daniel J. Elazar's systematic and comprehensive study of Jewish community organization. Elazar explores how the Jewish community, as a polity, transcends geographic boundaries in the same way that the Jews, as a people, have transcended time. Establishing a conceptual framework drawn from the historical context of Jewish community organization and from the Jewish political tradition, Elazar outlines the forces shaping the contemporary Jewish community. At the same time, he looks at the way in which the Jewish community, although consisting of a politically sovereign state and a voluntary diaspora, can be viewed as a polity under contemporary conditions and considers what elements constitute that polity.

In Part I, Elazar presents a synthetic and analytic overview of the organizational dynamics of postmodern Jewry. He identifies certain basic elements of political organization that recur in virtually every Jewish community and polity and demonstrated how the structure of Jewish community organization has been adapted to the postmodern epoch. Elazar surveys the reconstitution of countrywide communities and examines the spheres of activities through which the Jewish polity carries out its functions. Part I concludes with a look at the new Jewish public that has emerged in the postmodern epoch.

Part II focuses on the individual countrywide communities which constitute the Jewish polity. Elazar begins with Israel and then examines the Jewish communities of Europe, the Western hemisphere, the British Commonwealth, the Muslim World, and the far-flung diasporas of Africa and Asia. He looks at the institutions of each Jewish community and their organizational dynamics in the context of the overall Jewish condition. Elazar concludes with a discussion of the problem of building citizenship in the Jewish polity now that it has been renewed under postmodern conditions.