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Will appeal to thoughtful readers who ponder the 'big question' of the meaning of life. It explores the question both in a philosophical way and through using classical and contemporary Jewish texts. Both philosophy and Judaism run into ineliminable doubt. This shared circumstance can promote honest dialogue.
What Jewish tradition can teach us about human dignity in a scientific age This book explores one of the great questions of our time: How can we preserve our sense of what it means to be a person while at the same time accepting what science tells us to be true—namely, that human nature is continuous with the rest of nature? What, in other words, does it mean to be a person in a world of things? Alan Mittleman shows how the Jewish tradition provides rich ways of understanding human nature and personhood that preserve human dignity and distinction in a world of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, biotechnology, and pervasive scientism. These ancient resources can speak to Jewish, non-Jewish, and secular readers alike. Science may tell us what we are, Mittleman says, but it cannot tell us who we are, how we should live, or why we matter. Traditional Jewish thought, in open-minded dialogue with contemporary scientific perspectives, can help us answer these questions. Mittleman shows how, using sources ranging across the Jewish tradition, from the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud to more than a millennium of Jewish philosophy. Among the many subjects the book addresses are sexuality, birth and death, violence and evil, moral agency, and politics and economics. Throughout, Mittleman demonstrates how Jewish tradition brings new perspectives to—and challenges many current assumptions about—these central aspects of human nature. A study of human nature in Jewish thought and an original contribution to Jewish philosophy, this is a book for anyone interested in what it means to be human in a scientific age.
Theory, as it’s happened across the humanities, has often been coded as “Jewish.” This collection of essays seeks to move past explanations for this understanding that rely on the self-evident (the historical centrality of Jews to the rise of Critical Theory with the Frankfurt School) or stereotypical (psychoanalysis as the “Jewish Science”) in order to show how certain problematics of modern Jewishness enrich theory. In the range of violence and agency that attend the appellation “Jew,” depending on how, where, and by whom it’s uttered, we can see that Jewishness is a rhetorical as much as a sociological fact, and that its rhetorical and sociological aspects, while linked, are not identical. Attention to this disjuncture helps to elucidate the questions of power, subjectivity, identity, figuration, language, and relation that modern theory has grappled with. These questions in turn implicate geopolitical issues such as the relation of a people to a state and the violence done in the name of simplistic identitarian ideologies. Clarifying a situation where “the Jew” is not readily or unproblematically legible, the editors propose what they call “spectral reading,” a way to understand Jewishness as a fluid and rhetorical presence. While not divorced from sociological facts, this spectral reading works in concert with contemporary theory to mediate pessimistic and utopian impulses, experiences, and realities. Contributors: Svetlana Boym, Andrew Bush, Sergey Dolgopolski, Jay Geller, Sarah Hammerschlag, Hannan Hever, Martin Land, Martin Jay, James I. Porter, Yehouda Shenhav, Elliot R. Wolfson
Sanctified Sex draws on two thousand years of rabbinic debates addressing competing aspirations for loving intimacy, passionate sexual union, and sanctity in marriage. What can Judaism contribute to our struggles to nurture love relationships? What halakhic precedents are relevant, and how are rulings changing? The rabbis, of course, seldom agree. Underlying their arguments are perennial debates: What kind of marital sex qualifies as ideal--sacred self-control of sexual desire or the holiness found in emotional and erotic intimacy? Is intercourse degrading in its physicality or the highest act of spiritual/mystical union? And should women or men (or both) wield ultimate say about what transpires in bed? Noam Sachs Zion guides us chronologically and steadily through fraught terrain: seminal biblical texts and their Talmudic interpretations; Talmud tales of three unusual rabbis and their marital bedrooms; medieval codifiers and mystical commentators; ultra-Orthodox rabbis clashing with one another over radically divergent ideals; and, finally, contemporary rabbis of varied denominations wrestling with modern transformations in erotic lifestyles and values. Invited into these sanctified and often sexually explicit discussions with our ancestors and contemporaries, we encounter innovative Jewish teachings on marital intimacy, ardent lovemaking techniques, and the art of couple communication vital for matrimonial success.
From the 1930s through the 1970s, the philosopher Martin Heidegger kept a running series of private writings, the so-called Black Notebooks. The recent publication of the Black Notebooks volumes from the war years have sparked international controversy. While Heidegger’s engagement with National Socialism was well known, the Black Notebooks showed for the first time that this anti-Semitism was not merely a personal resentment. They contain not just anti-Semitic remarks, they show Heidegger incorporating basic tropes of anti-Semitism into his philosophical thinking. In them, Heidegger tried to assign a philosophical significance to anti-Semitism, with “the Jew” or “world Judaism” cast as antagonist in his project. How, then, are we to engage with a philosophy that, no matter how significant, seems contaminated by anti-Semitism? This book brings together an international group of scholars from a variety of disciplines to discuss the ramifications of the Black Notebooks for philosophy and the humanities at large. Bettina Bergo, Robert Bernasconi, Martin Gessmann, Sander Gilman, Peter E. Gordon, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Michael Marder, Eduardo Mendieta, Richard Polt, Tom Rockmore, Peter Trawny, and Slavoj Žižek discuss issues including anti-Semitism in the Black Notebooks and Heidegger’s thought more broadly, such as German conceptions of Jews and Judaism, Heidegger’s notions of metaphysics, and anti-Semitism’s entanglement with Heidegger’s views on modernity and technology, grappling with material as provocative as it is deplorable. In contrast to both those who seek to exonerate Heidegger and those who simply condemn him, and rather than an all-or-nothing view of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, they urge careful reading and rereading of his work to turn Heideggerian thought against itself. These measured and thoughtful responses to one of the major scandals in the history of philosophy unflinchingly take up the tangled and contested legacy of Heideggerian thought.
Judaism is a religion and a way of life that combines beliefs as well as practical commandments and traditions, encompassing all spheres of life. Some of the numerous precepts emerge directly from the Torah (the Law of Moses). Others are commanded by Oral Law, rulings of illustrious Jewish legal scholars throughout the generations, and rabbinic responsa composed over hundreds of years and still being written today. Like other religions, Judaism has also developed unique symbols that have become virtually exclusive to it, such as the Star of David and the menorah. This book argues that Judaism impacts human geography in significant ways: it shapes the environment and space of its believers, thus creating a unique “Jewish geography.”
For many, the Holocaust made thinking about ethics in traditional ways impossible. It called into question the predominance of speculative ontology in Western thought, and left many arguing that Western political, cultural and philosophical inattention to universal ethics were both a cause and an effect of European civilization's collapse in the twentieth century. Emmanuel Levinas, Elie Wiesel and Richard Rubenstein respond to this problem by insisting that ethics must be Western thought's first concern. Unlike previous thinkers, they locate humanity's source of universal ethical obligation in the temporal world of experience, where human suffering, rather than metaphysics, provides the ground for ethical engagement. All three thinkers contend that Judaism’s key lesson is that our fellow human is our responsibility, and use Judaism to develop a contemporary ethics that could operate with or without God. Ethics and Suffering since the Holocaust explores selected works of Levinas, Wiesel, and Rubenstein for practical applications of their ethics, analyzing the role of suffering and examining the use each thinker makes of Jewish sources and the advantages and disadvantages of this use. Finally, it suggests how the work of Jewish thinkers living in the wake of the Holocaust can be of unique value to those interested in the problem of ethics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Presenting a thorough investigation of the work of Levinas, Wiesel and Rubinstein, this book is of key interest to students and scholars of Jewish studies, as well as Jewish ethics and philosophy.
Exile and Restoration in Jewish Thought presents the history of an idea originating at the intersection of Judaic piety and the social history of the Jews: faith in a protective sovereign deity amid contrary conditions. Exiled primordially (Eden), during the Patriarchal era, in the sixth century bce, and from the first century to the twentieth, the Jewish experience of alienation has been the historical backdrop against which affirmations of divine benevolence have been constructed. While histories of Jewish thought have tended to accentuate the speculative creativity of medieval and modern Jewish philosophers, the intellectual tradition can come into focus only with attention to these thinkers' understanding of diaspora and persecution. Ralph Keen describes the distinguishing feature of Jewish thought as a religious hermeneutic in which the primitive promise made to Abraham is preserved not just as a pious memory but as a certain hope for eventual restoration. Intended for readers with some familiarity with the history of philosophy, this book offers the historical context necessary for understanding the distinctively Judaic character of this tradition of thought, and elucidates the role of religious experience in the long process of negotiating between adversity and expectation.
"An introductory textbook that examines how Jews are a culture, ethnicity, nation, nationality, race, and religion. With each chapter revolving around a single theme--Narratives, Sinais, Zions, Messiahs, Laws, Mysticisms, Cultures, Movements, Genocides, Powers, Borders, and Futures--this introductory textbook interrogates readers' understanding of the Jewish community. Written for a new mode of teaching--one that recognizes the core role that identity formation plays in our lives--this book weaves together alternative, marginalized voices to illustrate how Jews have always been in the process of reshaping their customs, practices, and beliefs. Judaisms is the first book to assess and summarize Jewish history from the time of the Hebrew Bible through today using multiple perspectives"--Provided by publisher.
Explores the full diversity of Black Jews, including bi-racial Jews of both matrilineal and patrilineal descent; adoptees; black converts to Judaism; and Black Hebrews and Israelites, who trace their Jewish roots to Africa and challenge the dominant western paradigm of Jews as white and of European descent. The book showcases the lives of Black Jews, demonstrating that racial ascription has been shaping Jewish selfhood for centuries. It reassesses the boundaries between race and ethnicity, offering insight into how ethnicity can be understood only in relation to racialization and the one-drop rule. Within this context, Black Jewish individuals strive to assert their dual identities and find acceptance within their communities. Putting to rest the notion that Jews are white and the Black Jews are therefore a contradiction, the volume argues that we cannot pigeonhole Black Hebrews and Israelites as exotic, militant, and nationalistic sects outside the boundaries of mainstream Jewish thought and community life. it spurs us to consider the significance of the growing population of self-identified Black Jews and its implications for the future of American Jewry.