Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century encourages contemporary Jewish thinkers to reflect on the meaning of Judaism in the modern world by connecting these reflections to their own personal biographies. In so doing, it reveals the complexity of Jewish thought in the present moment. The contributors reflect on a range of political, social, ethical, and educational challenges that face Jews and Judaism today and chart a path for the future. The results showcase how Jewish philosophy encompasses the methodologies and concerns of other fields such as political theory, intellectual...

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...

In this tribute to Steven T. Katz on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Michael Zank and Ingrid Anderson present sixteen original essays written by senior and junior scholars in comparative religion, philosophy of religion, modern Judaism, and theology after the Holocaust, fields of inquiry where Steven Katz made major contributions over the course of his distinguished scholarly career. The authors of this volume, specialists in Jewish history, especially the modern experience, and Jewish thought from the Bible to Buber, offer theoretical and practical observations on the value of the...

In The Beginning of the World in Renaissance Jewish Thought, Brian Ogren offers a deep analysis of late fifteenth century Italian Jewish thought concerning the creation of the world and the beginning of time. Ogren's book is the very first to seriously juxtapose the thought of the great Jewish thinker Yohanan Alemanno, Alemanno's famed Christian interlocutor, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the important Iberian exegete active in Italy, Isaac Abravanel, and Abravanel's renowned philosopher son Judah, known as Leone Ebreo. By bringing these thinkers together, this book presents a new...

In "And They Shall Be One Flesh" On the Language of Mystical Union in Judaism, Adam Afterman offers an extensive study of mystical union and embodiment in Judaism. Afterman argues that Philo was the first to articulate the notion of unio mystica in Judaism and is the source of the henōsis mysticism in the later Neoplatonic tradition. The study provides a detailed analysis of the Jewish medieval trends that developed different forms of mystical union and mystical embodiment through the divine name and spirit. The book argues that the development of unitive mysticism in Judaism is...

The Ethics and Religious Philosophy of Etty Hillesum contains the proceedings of the second international Etty Hillesum Congress at Ghent University in January 2014 and is a joint effort by fifteen Hillesum experts to shed new light on the life, works and vision of the Dutch Jewish writer Etty Hillesum (1914-1943), one of the victims of the Nazi-regime. Hillesum s diaries and letters illustrate her heroic struggle to come to terms with her personal life in the context of the Holocaust. This volume revives Hillesum research with a comprehensive rereading of her texts. With the current...