Browse

This book offers a provocative new view of the relationship between human desire, the production of knowledge, and conceptions of power by developing a non-polemical account of divine law. Where recent trends in political theology have insisted upon the antagonistic nature of the law, this book presents the paradigm-altering power of a discourse in the nexus between law and freedom. It demonstrates how this nexus catapults religious thought into a free and powerful engagement with non-religious political, ethical, and social positions. The first part analyzes the logic of exceptionalism. In the second part, the book argues that one cannot invoke a doctrine of election without rigorous scrutiny of texts that portray an electing God and an elected people. Once we scrutinize these texts, the character of freedom and law within the divine–human relationship shows itself to be different from that found in exceptionalist logics. The third and final part examines the impact of the logic of the law on Jewish-Christian apologetics. Rather than require that one defend one's position to a nonbeliever, this logic situates all epistemological justification within the order or freedom of God. If the condition of the possibility of this book's claim is the reality of divine freedom, such freedom also justifies the possibility of another's claim.

Freud and Monotheism: Moses and the Violent Origins of Religion brings together fundamental new contributions to discourses on Freud and Moses, as well as new research on the intersections of theology, political theory, and history in Freud’s psychoanalytic work. Highlighting the broad impact of Moses and Monotheism across the humanities, the contributors hail from such diverse disciplines as philosophy, comparative literature, cultural studies, German literature, Jewish studies and psychoanalysis.

The book explores the codependency of monotheism and idolatry by examining the thought of several prominent twentieth-century Jewish philosophers—Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas. While all of these thinkers were keenly aware of the pitfalls of scriptural theism, in differing degrees, they each succumbed to the temptation to personify transcendence, even as they tried either to circumvent or to restrain it by apophatically purging kataphatic descriptions of the deity. Jacques Derrida and Edith Wyschogrod, by contrast, carried the project of denegation one step further, embarking on a path that culminated in the aporetic suspension of belief and the consequent removal of all images from God, a move that seriously compromises the viability of devotional piety. The inquiry into apophasis, transcendence, and immanence challenges recent attempts to harness the apophatic tradition to construct a viable postmodern negative theology. Not only are these philosophies of transcendence guilty of a turn to theology that defies the phenomenological presupposition of an immanent phenomenality, but they fall short on their own terms, inasmuch as they persist in employing metaphorical language that personalizes transcendence and thereby runs the risk of undermining the irreducible alterity and invisibility attributed to the transcendent other. Apophatic theologies, accordingly, must be supplanted by a more far-reaching apophasis, such that the much-celebrated metaphor of the gift would give way to the more neutral notion of an unconditional givenness that allows the apparent to appear as given without presuming a causal agency that would turn that given into a gift.

Born in Warsaw, Abraham Heschel earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Berlin, and taught in Berlin and Frankfurt. After being deported by the Nazis to Poland in 1938, he taught in Warsaw and London. In 1940 he came to the United States, invited by Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio. From 1945 until his death, he was professor of Jewish ethics and mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. Heschel's life and thought have been widely acclaimed. Thomas Merton, for example, described him as “the greatest religious writer in America”. New editions of his writings are constantly being published. His best-known works include The Earth Is the Lord's (1950), Man's Quest for God: Studies in Prayer and Symbolism (1954), God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (1956), and The Prophets (1962). This book gives a personal insight into his life and views into the Hasidic movement and the important concept of halakha.

This book tells the story of a Jewish Studies that hasn’t yet happened—at least not fully. At bottom, the modest version of a swerve it performs is to ask: what do we mean when we say, “Jewish Studies,” when we conjoin its component terms, when a field takes up its past and projects its future, when we imagine it not as mere amalgam but project? JS offers a unique lens through which to view the horizon of the academic humanities because, though it arrived belatedly, it has spanned a range of disciplinary locations and configurations, from an “origin story” in nineteenth-century historicism and philology to the emancipatory politics of the Enlightenment, to the ethnicity-driven pluralism of the postwar decades, to more recent configurations within an interdisciplinary cultural studies. The conflicted allegiances in respect to traditions, disciplines, divisions, stakes, and stakeholders represent the structural and historical situation of the field as it comes into contact with the humanities more broadly. JSAC reconceives Jewish Studies as an agent of that force Jacques Derrida calls “leverage” both in relation to the humanities and to its own multiple possibilities, its pluralities of position, practice, and method. As one of several images marshaled, the lever functions not just to theorize or conjure JS but to figure it, to recast the enterprise through a series of elastic and catalytic tropes. In that way, the book seeks to harness the dialogical possibilities offered by the evolving collection of forces by which JS is constituted and practiced in order to open, refashion, and exemplify possibilities for a humanities to come.

Theory has often been coded as “Jewish”—not merely because Jewish intellectuals have been central participants, but also, this book argues, because certain problematics of modern Jewishness enrich theoretical questions across the humanities. In the range of violence and agency that can attend the appellation “Jew,” Jewishness is revealed as a rhetorical and not just social fact, one tied to profound questions of power, subjectivity, identity, figuration, language, and relation that are also central to modern theory and modern politics. Understanding Jewishness in its fluidity, this book helps articulate theory's potential to mediate pessimistic and utopian impulses, experiences, and realities.

First published in 1957, this book is a rethinking of the German–Jewish experience. The book challenges the elegiac view of Gershom Scholem, showing us the German–Jewish legacy in literature, philosophy, and critical thought in a new light. Part One re-examines the breakthrough to modernity, tracing the moves of thinkers like Moses Mendelssohn, building on the legacies of religious figures like the Baal Shem Tov and radical philosophers such as Spinoza. This vision of modernity, the book shows, rested upon a belief that “remnants” of the radical past could provide ideas and energy for reconceiving the modern world. The book's philosophy of the remnant animates Part Two as well, where his account of the political history of the Jews in modernity and the riches of Jewish culture as recast in German–Jewish thought provide insights into Leo Baeck, Hermann Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig, among others. Part Three analyzes the post-Auschwitz complex, and uses the Book of Job to break through that trauma. Biblical in its perspective, the book describes the innovative ways that German–Jewish writers and thinkers anticipated what we now call multiculturalism and its concern with the Other. Rather than destined to destruction, the German–Jewish experience is reconceived here as a past whose unfulfilled project remains urgent and contemporary—a dream yet to be realized in practice, and hence a task that still awaits its completion.

From the mid-nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War, if not beyond, certain works of European modernist art, literature, and music that were neither by nor about Jews have nevertheless been interpreted as somehow Jewish, or, more precisely, Jewified. This book argues that these strange interpretations, although hostile toward and often deliberately incomprehending of their object, need to be treated as integral to the history of European modernism. To grasp why, it suggests we turn our attention away from the dominant scholarly preoccupation with abject Jewish bodies and toward the antisemitic fantasy of a mobile, dangerous, contagious Jewish spirit, a spirit identified both with modernity and regression to an ancient past. The book tracks how this fantasy unfolds in the antimodernist polemics of Richard Wagner, Max Nordau, Wyndham Lewis, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, reaching its apotheosis in the notorious 1937 Nazi exhibition of “Degenerate Art,” and then turns to James Joyce, Theodor Adorno, and Samuel Beckett, offering radical new interpretations of these modernist authors to show how each presents his own poetics as a self-conscious departure from the modern antisemitic imaginary.

The Stanton Street Shul is one of the last remaining Jewish congregations on New York's historic Lower East Side. This narrow building wedged into a lot designed for an old-law tenement is full of clamorous voices—the generations of the dead who somehow contrive to make their presence known, and the newer generation keeping the building and its memories alive and to make themselves as Jews in the process. The book follows this congregation of “year-round Jews” through the course of a summer when its future must once again be decided. The Lower East Side, famous as the jumping-off point for millions of Jewish and other immigrants to America, has recently become the hip playground of twenty-something “immigrants” to the city from elsewhere in America and from overseas. Few imagine that Jewish life there has stubbornly continued through this history of decline and regeneration. This book illustrates the changes to a historic neighborhood facing the challenges of gentrification. It offers a portrait that is at once intimate and intelligible. Most important perhaps, it shows the congregation's members to be anything but a monochromatic set of uniform “believers,” but rather a gathering of vibrant, imperfect, indisputably down-to-earth individuals coming together to make a community.

Orientalism and the Figure of the Jew proposes a new way of understanding modern Orientalism. Retracing the path of modern Orientalist thought in German across crucial writings from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, the book argues that Orientalism and anti-Judaism are inextricably entangled. The book suggests, further, that the violent colonialist assertion of Western “material” power in the East is predicated in the modern period upon a “spiritual” weakness of the West: its panic or anxiety about an absence of absolute foundations and values entailed by modernity itself. Secularization and the critique of arbitrary authority, that is, lead to a crisis of value in the West which Orientalism attempts to deny. In detailed readings of writers from the historicist and idealist period—Herder, F. Schlegel, Goethe, Hegel, and Schopenhauer—the book shows how the modern West posits, through disavowal, an Oriental origin as fetish to fill this absent place of lacking foundations. The book argues that this fetish is repeatedly appropriated as Western through a quasi-secularized application of Christian typology, or figural interpretation. In addition, the book reveals that this Western appropriation of the “good” Orient always leaves behind a remainder, the “bad,” inassimilable Orient. The Aryan-Semite opposition illustrates this with painful clarity. Finally, the book demonstrates how certain key modernists—such as Kafka, Mann, Freud, and to some extent Buber—place in question this historicist narrative of modern Orientalism. A number of methodological consequences emerge in the Conclusion, which also indicates how this problematic survives in contemporary German-language cultures.

This work rummages among the responses to the unresolved question of whether and how Judentum (Judaism, Jewry, Jewishness) could be integrated into Germanophone societies between the Enlightenment and the Shoah. It examines how these modernizing societies, undergoing processes of identity formation, were confronted by the increasing difficulty to distinguish “German” from “Jew” and the persistence of the supposedly superseded Judentum, which threatened their own claims to autonomy and universality. To counter these threats popular and scientific discourses rendered difference visible by means of fetishizing ethnicity-, race-, gender-, and sexuality-coded representations of “the Jew”'s body (e.g., nose, hair) and body techniques (e.g., circumcision). But those identified as Jewish and immersed everyday in derisory and dehumanizing ascriptions had their own question and other answers. Those denigrating identifications became for some Jewish-identified individuals building blocks for working through their situations and constructing their responses. This book maps the dissemination of and interrelationships among signifiers of Jewish corporeality in Jewish-identified authors, such as Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karl Marx, Max Nordau, and Walter Benjamin, as well as “Jew”-identifying writers, such as Ludwig Feuerbach, Daniel Paul Schreber, Arthur Dinter, and Adolf Hitler. It also traces the gendered trajectory of Spinoza reception, “Zopf-” (braid) as a nodal-point mediating German Gentile-Jewish relations, and the poisonous correlation of Jews with syphilis and diseased reproduction. The book portrays how Jewish-identified individuals moved beyond introjection and disavowal to appropriate and transform this epidemic of signification to make sense of their worlds and our modernity.

Since at least the seventeenth century, the traditional God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has been under pressure to conform to the scientific worldview. Across the monotheistic traditions there has emerged a “liberal” conception of God compatible with a thoroughgoing naturalism. For many, this liberal “new” God is the only credible God. But is it a useful God? Does belief in so malleable a deity come from, or lead to, different political, moral, psychological, or aesthetic phenomena from atheism? The book evaluates the new God by analyzing the theology of three recent Jewish thinkers—Mordechai Kaplan, Michael Lerner, and Arthur Green—and compares faith in the new God to disbelief in any gods. The book reveals what is at stake in the choice between naturalistic liberal theology and a nontheistic naturalism without gods. Silver poses the question: “If it is to be either the new God or no God, what does—what should—determine the choice”? Although Jewish thinkers are used as the primary exemplars of new God theology, the book explores developments in contemporary Christian thought, Eastern religious traditions, and “New Age” religion. The book constitutes a significant contribution to current discussions of the relationship between science and religion, as well as to discussions regarding the meaning of the idea of God itself in modern life.

To Make the Hands Impure explores the act of reading as an embodied practice where ethics becomes a matter of tact—in the doubled sense of touch and regard. With the image of a book lying in the hands of its readers as insistent refrain, Newton’s argument To Make the Hands Impure stages the encounter of literary experience and scriptural traditions—the difficult and the holy—by cutting a provocative cross-disciplinary swath through classical Jewish texts, modern Jewish philosophy, film and performance, literature, translation, and the material text. The book’s conception of impurity as the redemptive effect of the sacred offers a profound rethinking of the postmodern meanings of Jewish tradition.  Instead of continuing to engage theology, either Christian or Rabbinic, To Make the Hands Impure uses and reinterprets other resources of Rabbinic tradition in order to rethink reading a literary text, both holy and secular, as secular midrash. Its tapestry of comparative readings, through which authors and their works are made to shed light on each other, can also be described as a contrapuntal symphony. The range of works and authors includes the Talmud and midrash, Conrad’s Nostromo and Pascal’s Mémorial, Henry Darger and Martin Scorsese, the September 11th Memorial and a synagogue in Havana. Separate chapters conduct masterly treatments of Emmanuel Levinas, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Stanley Cavell by emphasizing their performances as readers—a trebled orientation to Talmud, Novel, and Theater/ Cinema.

True disagreements are hard to achieve, and even harder to maintain, for the ghost of final agreement constantly haunts them. The Babylonian Talmud, however, escapes from that ghost of agreement, and provokes unsettling questions: Are there any conditions under which disagreement might constitute a genuine relationship between minds? Are disagreements always only temporary steps toward final agreement? Must a community of disagreement always imply agreement, as in an agreement to disagree? This book rethinks the task of philological, literary, historical, and cultural analysis of the Talmud. It introduces an aspect of this task that has best been approximated by the philosophical, anthropological, and ontological interrogation of human beings in relationship to the Other—whether animal, divine, or human. In both engagement and disengagement with post-Heideggerian traditions of thought, the book complements philological-historical and cultural approaches to Talmud with an anthropological, ontological, and Talmudic inquiry. It redefines the place of the Talmud and its study, both traditional and academic, in the intellectual map of the West, arguing that the Talmud is a scholarly art of its own and represents a fundamental intellectual discipline, not a mere application of logical, grammatical, or even rhetorical arts for the purpose of textual hermeneutics. In Talmudic intellectual art, disagreement is a fundamental category. This book rediscovers disagreement as the ultimate condition of finite human existence or co-existence.