Jewish philosophy responds to the challenges of today's world. By studying the ideas of great contemporary thinkers, readers will achieve a rich understanding of our contemporary spiritual needs.

"MIchael Morgan has served up an intellectual treat. These subtle and carefully reasoned essays explore the dilemmas of the post-modern Jew who would take history seriously without losing the commanding presence Israel heard at Sinai.... It is a pleasure to be nourished by a fresh mind exploring the tension between reason and revelation, history and faith."Â -- Rabbi Samuel Karff "This is without doubt one of the most significant works in modern Jewish thought and a must for a thoughtful student of contemporary Jewish philosophy." -- Rabbie Sheldon Zimmerman "This may well mark the next stage in the long history of Jewish self-understanding." -- Ethics "... rigorous history of modern Jewish thought... " -- Choice Is Judaism a timeless, universal set of beliefs or, rather, is it historical and contingent in its relation to different times and places? Morgan clarifies the tensions and dilemmas that characterize modern thinking about the nature of Judaism and clears the way for Jews to appreciate their historical situation, yet locate enduring values and principles in a post-Holocaust world.

Judaic cultures have a commitment to language that is exceptional. Language in many form – texts, books and scrolls; learning, interpretation, material practices that generate material practices – are central to Judaic conduct, experience, and spirituality. In this Judaic traditions differ from philosophical and theological ones that make language secondary. Traditional metaphysics has privileged the immaterial and unchanging, as unchanging truth that language can at best convey and at worst distort. Such traditional metaphysics has come under critique since Nietzsche in ways that the author explores. Shira Wolosky argues that Judaic traditions converge with contemporary metaphysical critique rather than being its target. Focusing on the work of Derrida, Levinas, Scholem and others, the author examines traditions of Judaic interpretation against backgrounds of biblical exegesis; sign-theory as it recasts language meaning in ways that concord with Judaic textuality; negative theology as it differs in Judaic tradition from those which negate language itself; and lastly outline a discourse ethics that draws on Judaic language theory. This study is directed to students and scholars of: Judaic thought, religious studies and theology; theory of interpretation; Levinas and other modern Jewish philosophical writers, placing them in broader contexts of philosophy, theology, and language theory. It is shown how Jewish discourses on language address urgent problems of value and norms in the contemporary world that has challenged traditional anchors of truth and meaning.

Explores central questions in the history and theory of Jewish ethics, namely, the relationship between ethics and law, the relationship between ethics and theology, and the problems and prospects for constructing a contemporary Jewish ethic.

How Jewish is modern Jewish philosophy? The question at first appears nonsensical, until we consider that the chief issues with which Jewish philosophers have engaged, from the Enlightenment through to the late 20th century, are the standard preoccupations of general philosophical inquiry. Questions about God, reality, language, and knowledge - metaphysics and epistemology - have been of as much concern to Jewish thinkers as they have been to others. Moses Mendelssohn, for example, was a friend of Kant. Hermann Cohen's philosophy is often described as 'neo-Kantian.' Franz Rosenzweig wrote his dissertation on Hegel. And the thought of Emmanuel Levinas is indebted to Husserl. In this much-needed textbook, which surveys the most prominent thinkers of the last three centuries, Claire Katz situates modern Jewish philosophy in the wider cultural and intellectual context of its day, indicating how broader currents of British, French and German thought influenced its practitioners. But she also addresses the unique ways in which being Jewish coloured their output, suggesting that a keen sense of particularity enabled the Jewish philosophers to help define the whole modern era. Intended to be used as a core undergraduate text, the book will also appeal to anyone with an interest how some of the greatest minds of the age grappled with some of its most urgent and fascinating philosophical problems.

Internationally recognized scholar David Ellenson shares twenty-three of his most representative essays, drawing on three decades of scholarship and demonstrating the consistency of the intellectual-religious interests that have animated him throughout his lifetime. These essays center on a description and examination of the complex push and pull between Jewish tradition and Western culture. Ellenson addresses gender equality, women’s rights, conversion, issues relating to who is a Jew, the future of the rabbinate, Jewish day schools, and other emerging trends in American Jewish life. As an outspoken advocate for a strong Israel that is faithful to the democratic and Jewish values that informed its founders, he also writes about religious tolerance and pluralism in the Jewish state. The former president of Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, the primary seminary of the Reform movement, Ellenson is widely respected for his vision of advancing Jewish unity and of preparing leadership for a contemporary Judaism that balances tradition with the demands of a changing world. Scholars and students of Jewish religious thought, ethics, and modern Jewish history will welcome this erudite collection by one of today’s great Jewish leaders.

What is the next chapter in Judaism’s story, the next step in its journey? The dramatic changes of recent decades invite us to explore what role Judaism is to play in this new era. As the digital future becomes the present, Danny Schiff makes the case that the period known as “modernity” has come to an end. Noting the declining strength of Conservative and Reform Judaism, the largest US Jewish movements of modernity, he argues for new iterations of Judaism to arise in response to the myriad of weighty questions that now confront us about what it means to be human. Here is an account of the digital age through a Jewish lens, in which Schiff examines Jewish teachings and traditions, exploring what moral insight they might have to offer in this period of great flux. He marshals the thought of well-known futurists such as Ray Kurzweil and Yuval Noah Harari to forecast the exponentially larger shifts in the human condition that lie ahead, and proposes that a countercultural Judaism could have renewed relevance in addressing some of the pressing issues that confront humanity in the twenty-first century.

The culmination of Eliezer Schweid’s life-work as a Jewish intellectual historian, this five-volume work provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary account of the major thinkers and movements in modern Jewish thought, in the context of general philosophy and Jewish social-political historical developments, with extensive primary source excerpts. Volume Two, "The Birth of the Jewish Historical Studies and the Modern Jewish Religious Movements," discusses the major Jewish thinkers of central and eastern Europe before 1881, in connection with the movements they fostered: German-Jewish Wissenschaft (Zunz), Reform (Formstecher, Samuel Hirsch, Geiger), Neo-Orthodoxy (S. D. Luzzatto, Steinheim, Samson Raphael Hirsch), Positive-Historical (Frankel, Graetz), and Neo-Haredi (Kalischer, Malbim, Hayyim Volozhiner, Salanter). In addition, extensive attention is given to the thinkers of the east-European Haskalah, both earlier (Levinsohn, Rubin, Schorr, Mieses, Abraham Krochmal) and later proto-Zionist thinkers (Zweifel, Smolenskin, Pines, Lilienblum).

Recent news of a California city to outlaw circumcision, and anti-Semitic and anti-Zionistic activities at many U.S. Universities has already caused many Jews to recoil in horror. Bothered by this, history teacher and author Michael Stein decides to write a compelling fiction, Decision 2030, about the Jews' decision to fight or leave. This book is a fictional account of a Jewish community, Grayvelt, that is suffering from physical and political attacks on a massive scale in the years prior to 2030. Because of the damage done to the Jewish quality of life, the community responds in two different directions. One choice is to remain in the U.S, and fight with the help of competent civilian soldiers; another choice is to move to the northern part of Israel into a new community. The three major emerging Jewish heroes are Earle Smith, Gloria Resnick, and Rabbi Moshe Weinhauser. The Jews are helped by four non-Jewish couples known as the Fearsome Foursome. The four couples show the Jews how to fight back. The growing admiration between the Jewish community and the fearsome Foursome results in the winning strategy to minimize the terrible effects of the anti-Semitic Edgar Brown Society. Decision 2030 contains the different points of view to remain or leave the U.S. for Israel. It has a great deal of adventure dealing with fire bombings, car and truck chases, midnight attacks, and military attacks. It also has nearly a dozen examples of alliteration which came forth in the natural flow of the author's pen. The novel also contains an original prayer and an alliterative poem.

This volume brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to explore the intersections between crisis, scholarship, and action. The aim of this book is to think about the “moment of crisis,” through the concepts, writings, and methodologies awarded to us by Jewish thinkers in modernity. This book offers a broad gallery of accounts on the notion of crisis in Jewish modernity while emphasizing three terms: interpretation, heresy, and messianism. The main thesis of the volume is that the diasporic and exilic experience of the Jewish people turned their philosophers and theologians into “experts in crisis management” who had to find resources within their own religion, culture and traditions in order to react, endure and overcome short- and long-term historical crises. The underlining assumption of this book is therefore that Jewish thought obtains resources for conceptualizing and reacting to the current forms of crisis in the global, European, and Israeli spheres. The volume addresses a large readership in humanities, social and political sciences and religious studies, taking as its assumption that scholars in modern Jewish thought have an extended responsibility to engage in contemporary debates.