In this revealing book, David Patterson explores Fackenheim’s rigorous pursuit of a philosophical response to the tragedy of the Holocaust. Fackenheim’s writing sheds light on the tensions between Jewish thinking and German philosophy, illustrating how elements of the latter were used by the Nazis to justify Jewish annihilation.

"Emil L. Fackenheim: Philosopher, Theologian, Jew" is a scholarly tribute to Fackenheim's memory. Fackenheim's combination of erudition and generosity served to inspire a lifetime of philosophical inquiry, and a number of his students are represented in this volume. The volume, in order to provide a forum through which to introduce his thought to a broader audience, covers a wide spectrum of Fackenheim's work including biographical, philosophical, and theological aspects of his thought that have not been addressed adequately in the past. Elie Wiesel, a close personal friend to Fackenheim for over 30 years, has provided the Foreword for the volume.

Gerald K. Stone has collected books about Canadian Jewry since the early 1980s. This volume is a descriptive catalog of his Judaica collection, comprising nearly 6,000 paper or electronic documentary resources in English, French, Yiddish, and Hebrew. Logically organized, indexed, and selectively annotated, the catalog is broad in scope, covering Jewish Canadian history, biography, religion, literature, the Holocaust, antisemitism, Israel and the Middle East, and more. An introduction by Richard Menkis discusses the significance of the Catalog and collecting for the study of the Jewish experience in Canada. An informative bibliographical resource, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Canadian and North American Jewish studies.

Can contemporary religion, and particularly Judaism, exist without being informed by history? This question was debated in 1940s New York by two German refugees who later rose to prominence — Leo Strauss, one of the twentieth century's most significant political philosophers, and Emil L. Fackenheim, an important post-Holocaust Jewish theologian. There has been little consensus, however, on the definitive meaning of their work. Reason and Revelation before Historicism, the first full-length comparison of Strauss and Fackenheim,places the informal teacher and student in conversation alongside sections of their analyses of notable thinkers. Sharon Portnoff suggests that both saw historicism as the nexus of the intersection and tension between philosophy and religion and raised the possibility of the persistence of the permanent in the modern world. Portnoff illuminates our understanding of Strauss's relationship with Judaism, Fackenheim's oft-overshadowed great philosophical depth, and the function and character of Jewish thought in a secular, post-Holocaust world.

Explores the religious experience of Judaism through the perceptions and teachings of ordinary Jews and the creative elite.

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.

Commentaries on his intricate works by twelve former colleagues and students explore various aspects of Doull's history and place it within the context of contemporary scholarship, allowing the reader to judge the depth and rigour of Doull's writing.

In this book, David Patterson sets out to describe why Jews must live -- but especially think -- in a way that is distinctly Jewish. For Patterson, the primary responsibility of post-Holocaust Jewish thought is to avoid thinking in the same categories that led to the attempted extermination of the Jewish people. The Nazis, he says, were not anti- Semitic because they were racists; they were racists because they were anti-Semitic, and their anti-Semitism was furthered by a Western ontological tradition that made God irrelevant by placing the thinking ego at the center of being. If the Jewish people, in their particularity, are "chosen" to attest to the universal "chosenness" of every human being, then each human being is singled out to assume an absolute responsibility to and for all human beings. And that, Patterson says, is why the anti-Semite hates the Jew: because the very presence of the Jew robs him of his ego and serves as a constant reminder that we are all forever in debt, and that redemption is always yet to be. Thus the Nazis, before they killed Jewish bodies, were compelled to murder Jewish souls through the degradations of the Shoah. But why is the need for a revitalized Jewish thought so urgent today? It is not only because modern Jewish thought, hoping to accommodate itself to rational idealism, is thereby obliged to put itself in league with postmodernists who "preach tolerance for everything except biblically based religion, beginning with Judaism," and who effectively call on Jews, as fellow "citizens of the global village," to disappear. It is also because without the Jewish reality of Jerusalem, there is only the Jewish abstraction of Auschwitz, for in Auschwitz the Jews were murdered not as husbands and wives, parents and children, but as efficiently numbered units. If the Jews, Patterson claims, are not a people set apart by "a Voice that is other than human," then the Holocaust can never be understood as evil rather than simply immoral. With Open Wounds, Patterson aims to make possible a religious response to the Holocaust. Post-Holocaust Jewish thinking, confronting the work of healing the world -- of tikkun haolam -- must recover not just Jewish tradition but also the category of the holy in human beings' thinking about humanity.

Intro -- Contents -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- I. God -- 1. Mordecai M. Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew -- 2. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone -- 3. Hans Jonas, "The Concept of God After Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice" -- 4. Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz -- 5. Eliezer Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust -- 6. Erich Fromm, You Shall Be as Gods -- 7. Marcia Falk, "Notes on Composing New Blessings: Toward a Feminist-Jewish Reconstruction of Prayer" -- 8. Edward L. Greenstein, "'To You Do I Call': A Critique of Impersonal Prayer" -- 9. Sandra B. Lubarsky, "Reconstructing Divine Power" -- 10. Rebecca Alpert, "Location, Location, Location: Toward a Theology of Prepositions" -- II. Revelation and Commandment -- 11. Marvin Fox, The Condition of Jewish Belief -- 12. Aharon Lichtenstein, The Condition of Jewish Belief -- 13. Will Herberg, Judaism and Modern Man -- 14. Jakob J. Petuchowski, "Revelation and the Modern Jew" -- 15. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man -- 16. Benjamin H. Sommer, Revelation and Authority -- 17. Tamar Ross, Expanding the Palace of Torah -- 18. Eugene B. Borowitz, Renewing the Covenant -- 19. Susan Handelman, "'Crossing and Recrossing the Void'" -- 20. David Novak, "Is the Covenant a Bilateral Relationship?" -- 21. Rachel Adler, Engendering Judaism -- 22. Mara H. Benjamin, The Obligated Self -- III. Spirituality -- 23. Arnold Jacob Wolf, "Against Spirituality" -- 24. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man -- 25. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath -- 26. Arthur Green, Jewish Spirituality/Seek My Face, Speak My Name -- 27. Daniel C. Matt, God and the Big Bang -- 28. Zalman Schachter- Shalomi, Paradigm Shift -- 29. Marcia Prager, The Path of Blessing -- 30. Nancy Flam, "Healing the Spirit" -- 31. Arthur Waskow, Down- to-Earth Judaism -- 32. Sheila Weinberg, "Images of God: Closeness and Power".

Sixty years after it ended, the Holocaust continues to leave survivors and their descendants, as well as historians, philosophers, and theologians, pondering the enormity of that event. This book explores how inquiry about the Holocaust challenges understanding, especially its religious and ethical dimensions. Debates about God's relationship to evil are ancient, but the Holocaust complicated them in ways never before imagined. Its massive destruction left Jews and Christians searching among the ashes to determine what, if anything, could repair the damage done to tradition and to theology. Since the end of the Holocaust, Jews and Christians have increasingly sought to know how or even whether theological analysis and reflection can aid in comprehending its aftermath. Specifically, Jews and Christians, individually and collectively, find themselves more and more in the position of needing either to rethink theodicy -- typically understood as the vindication of divine justice in the face of evil -- or to abolish the concept altogether. Writing in a format that creates the feel of dialogue, the contributors to Fire in the Ashes confront these and other difficult questions about God and evil after the Holocaust. This book -- created out of shared concerns and a desire to investigate differences and disagreements between religious traditions and philosophical perspectives -- represents an effort to advance meaningful conversation between Jews and Christians and to encourage others to participate in similar inter- and intrafaith inquiries. The contributors to Fire in the Ashes are members of the Pastora Goldner Holocaust Symposium. Led since its founding in 1996 by Leonard Grob and Henry F. Knight, the symposium's Holocaust and genocide scholars -- a group that is interfaith, international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational -- meet biennially in Oxfordshire, England.