Born-again atheists

There's an interesting post at UChicago blog Apt3W about born-again Chabad Jews. I don't know enough Hebrew to understand all of the post, but I think I get the gist of it, which is why do different Jews have different religious odysseys. This is something that, for all my reading on the Jewish response to the Dreyfus Affair, never really came up, and it's something I know very little about, and am trying to figure out why that is, so here's my best guess:

For whatever reason, Jews who rediscover their religion--unlike, say, Protestants or Muslims--tend not to do so religiously. In "Arguing the World" Joseph Dorman writes about how New York intellectuals Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, and Irving Howe all rediscovered their own Jewishness as a result of the Holocaust, which they experienced either indirectly as American Jews or through serving in WWII in Europe, noting that none of these men themselves became religious as part of their reawakening. Reading testimonials of Jews who returned to their roots following the Dreyfus Affair, one encounters the same story.  Nationalism, ethnic solidarity, a desire to help Jews in other countries, all of these sentiments surged in many, but God was never especially important. The pattern into which Theodor Herzl, Bernard Lazare, and Edmond Fleg (a Swiss-French Jew) fell was this: Assimilation, antisemitism (both from themselves and from the outside) followed by an acknowledgement that they're Jewish and there's nothing they can do about it, followed by a desire to make being Jewish a positive thing since, after all, they're stuck with it. But the inescapability of Judaism makes belief in God sort of secondary. To give my own story, such as it is, (and leaving out the large chunks of "my story" that involve going to Fox and Obel to buy cheese, thinking about nice dogs, or putting on glitter eyeliner), I've experienced something not unlike the post-Dreyfus contingent, which is perhaps why I find that whole crew so interesting. Various factors--moving away from NYC where being Jewish is something one never has to think about, September 11/neocons/war on terror, making a good friend who follows rules I'd previously only heard vague things about, reading books about Judaism written by people other than Philip Roth--made me more interested in, if not exactly my roots, then in Jewish history more generally. While things like living in Israel or going to grad school for many years to study European Jewish history seem perfectly reasonable, doing something as radical as going to services never crosses my mind. That's why the story of the newly-Chabad couple makes for an interesting change. I never think of someone Jewish having any sort of faith--pride, maybe--and certainly not as being born-again, although all this reveals, most likely, is my own ignorance, which cannot be overestimated. I think of Jews as returning to the fold as a response to issues larger than themselves--often but not always a discovery of just how much the world hates the Jewish people--and not as a response to personal crises or work-related disappointments, and as having revivals that are emotional or intellectual but not exactly spiritual.