Jewish Philosophy Research Articles

Rationalistic Messianism and the Vicissitudes of History: The Final Chapter of Joseph ibn Kaspi’s Tam ha-kesef

Born around 1280, the Provencal Jewish philosopher Joseph ibn Kaspi was a prolific writer whose works touched upon a wide range of subjects. I present here an English translation of the eighth chapter of his final work, The Silver is Spent (Tam ha-kesef). In this chapter, Ibn Kaspi discusses the coming of the Messiah and the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. Coloured by his Aristotelian philosophical outlook, the chapter has a number of interesting features, including its naturalistic approach to history, and the arguments presented for the rationality of belief in a future messianic era.

Becoming a Macho Mensch: Stanley Kubrick,Spartacusand 1950s Jewish Masculinity

This article seeks to uncover the underlying Jewish thematics of Stanley Kubrick�s Spartacus (1960). Explicit references to Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism were conspicuously absent from the film, but the Jewishness of Howard Fast�s 1951 novel, combined with screenwriter Dalton Trumbo�s various drafts, as well as the interventions of prime motivating force and star Kirk Douglas and Kubrick, still penetrated through to the final screen version, It focuses on three interrelated, yet wholly and previously unexplored, elements of the male Jewish self-image: the character of David the Jew, the Jewishness of the character Antoninus, and the Jewish philosophy of �manliness� known as �menschlikayt�, which privileged a Jewish posture of timidity, and denigrated as �goyish� or �un/non-Jewish/Gentile�, conventional masculinity. These I will deal with in turn, after having considered the role Kubrick actually played in making the film and what drew him to the material in the first place, before concluding with the importance of the Jewishness of Spartacus for understanding both Kubrick and his career as a whole. In so doing, it makes extensive use of archival materials in exploring the adaptation process.

Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism by Aaron W. Hughes (review)

Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism by Aaron W. Hughes (review)

Never Forget: March of the Living and Place-Based Holocaust Storytelling

As twenty-first-century Jewish educators, we have repeatedly seen Jewish teens look upon the systematic murder of six million of their people by Nazi Germany-a historical event that occurred more than seventy years ago-almost as they would another one of those ancient stories that they commemorate during the holidays of Passover, Chanukah, Purim, or Tisha B'Av. The narrative around these holidays is often described as Once upon a time [...]. They tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat (e.g., see Abramson).And yet the story of the Holocaust, or Shoah, never seems to end, and neither do its political implications. This is due in large part to the fact that in a post-Holocaust world, Jewish educators have endeavored to provide teens with an experience that will imbed the conceptual framework of the Holocaust-and Jewish identity-into their very beings, turning an intellectual study of history into an emotional, memorable, and meaningful experience that will positively influence their moral, spiritual, and political lives. They have done this most effectively, we believe, through place-based storytelling.This essay provides a brief background of early Holocaust education, along with a description and analysis of one response to concerns about those educational experiences, March of the Living (MOL). It endeavors to answer the questions: (a) What are some difficulties associated with efforts to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust? (b) What are the political agendas of those wishing to keep that memory alive? and (c) How is March of the Living's place-based storytelling approach more effective than were previous attempts to further those political agendas?BackgroundIn the years following the Second World War, Holocaust education relied on black-and-white, graphic documentary films such as Night and Fog (Resnais) to express the full horror of the events that befell European Jews during World War II. Because these highly disturbing films were subsequently deemed inappropriate for children (e.g., see Futterman), educators then resorted to inviting survivors who were ready to share their accounts of their experiences. This second approach proved to be more stimulating and uplifting than were the films, and the teens were able to connect with the survivors, ask questions, and write gracious and meaningful thank-you letters. Unfortunately, what we found as educators in subsequent conversations with students was that, just a few days later, the impact often seemed to fade.In 1988, a new modality for teaching the Holocaust was developed. Rather than relying on films or survivors who were, with the passing years, beginning to lose their ability to tell their stories, this program took teens to the sites of the Holocaust in Poland. The experience became known as the March of the Living. Youngsters would travel to Poland and visit the sites of Jewish incarceration, torture, and extermination over the course of a week and then fly to Israel and spend a second week celebrating Israel's Memorial Day and Independence Day. In most communities, the teens are obligated to take a course of study prior to the trip to gain insight into the historical elements of the Holocaust and of the subsequent establishment of the State of Israel. In many instances, these classes range from six to fourteen sessions, at about two hours per session.The Difficulties of Holocaust CommemorationEarly on, many Jewish educators, rabbis, and survivors strongly opposed instituting a program that was so dramatically connected to the second greatest tragedy in Jewish history. (The first was the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem). The Jewish Education Bureau in Boston led much of the opposition, not wanting Jewish money spent in Poland, thereby giving what they considered to be the world's most anti-Semitic country an economic windfall. In addition, many rebuked the use of the Holocaust as a vehicle for teaching Jewish identity, calling it contrary to Jewish philosophy and ideology (e. …

Book Review: Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein

Book Review: Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein

Differences over Darwinism: American Orthodox Jewish Responses to Evolution in the 1920s

Rabbis have offered a variety of reactions to evolutionary theory since On the Origin of Species was published in 1859. The current article focuses on the differences of opinion on Darwinism among American Modern Orthodox rabbis in the wake of the Scopes “Monkey Trial” that captured headlines in 1925. It illustrates that some rabbis in this group proposed that evolution could be easily integrated into Jewish philosophy, while others claimed that it was outside the bounds of a worldview that accepted a divinely created and guided universe. It is argued here that those who adopted this later view did so, at least in part, because of an approach that differentiated between the emerging American “modern” and “ultra” Orthodoxies based solely on cosmetic grounds, rather than ideological ones, and identified Darwinism with an ideological assault against all streams of Orthodox Judaism.

Finding the Prophetic in Failure

In recent decades, a body of literary writing has emerged in which religious questions are foregrounded. This body of writing and the criticism connected with it is increasingly referred to as postsecular. In E. L. Doctorow’s City of God, the characters and the text perform the struggle of reading prophetically, as it is defined in the writings of Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. In his time, Buber urged not a return to existing models of the religious, but a turn toward prophetic reading, which is founded in relation. Literary writing of this postsecular moment, including City of God, is likewise engaged in a reconceptualization of the religious. Doctorow’s novel conveys the idea that engaging the religious involves failure, but that it is through failure that we are pushed to a new modality of reading.

‘Carnal Israel and the Primacy of Touch’

The chasm between body and spirit coupled with an undervaluation of the body is often attributed to the Biblical heritage. However, the kabbalistic tract The Holy Letter (13th century) argues that the Greeks are to blame for this tendency, notably Aristotle. The Letter defends the touch as the most important of all the senses, against Aristotle (the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who follows Aristotle in this regard) who considers the touch the most animal-like sense. This is precisely the reason why, according to the author of the Holy Letter, touch is the eminent way to sanctify life, e.g. in the act of sexuality. By degrading touch one denigrates creation as willed by God.

Teaching Beginning Teachers to ‘Think What We Are Doing’ in Indigenous Education

Working with beginning teachers to assist them to begin to ‘think what we do’ (Arendt, 1998) in both mainstream and Indigenous education is problematic. This is particularly so because the majority of our teacher candidates, and indeed most of their university lecturers, are positioned close to the racial, social and cultural centre of Australian education. That is, teachers and teacher educators tend to be white, middle class, educationally successful, and accepting of the main premises and assumptions, purposes and values of formal schooling in Australia. This proximity to the centre can lead to an inability to question ideas and practices that, while everyday and seemingly innocuous, are frequently dangerous and destructive for those at the margins. In this article, we illustrate the normative power of hegemonic ideas by using aspects of the teen fiction The Hunger Games as an analogy for ‘thoughtless’ and unquestioning acceptance of authority. We then describe and discuss a pedagogic practice used within the Master of Teaching program at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. The practice is designed to challenge normative understandings about Australian history, teaching Indigenous Australian students, and to encourage engagement with the German-American Jewish philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt's provocative question ‘What are we doing?’ (Arendt, 1998, p. 5). We conclude the article with a challenge to re-think current policies and practices in the education of Indigenous Australians.

Time and History as Parameters of Liberation: Some Indications from Levinas and N?g?rjuna

‘Historicity’, the realisation that cultural values, religious beliefs and scientific ideas are historically conditioned, transformed the study of religions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The fusion of ontology, phenomenology and hermeneutics revealed an existential dimension of historicity, which was expressed innovatively—if enigmatically—by the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in his critiques of Husserl and Heidegger. Underlying the concepts of history and narrative is the problem of understanding time. For Levinas, this is bound up with the encounter of self and other (in his terms: the entry of the Other into the Same, thereby opening a perspective on the Infinite and awakening consciousness). Unlike Heidegger, Levinas understood death on the basis of time, not vice versa, and his explorations into the relationships of time, death and the other amount to a transformation of the presuppositions on which Christian faith and theology have been based for centuries. Buddhism, seen through the prism of Na4ga4rjuna’s dialectic, deconstructs these presuppositions in an even more radical way; the question is, at what cost? Only a careful understanding of non-dualism and the two levels of truth, conventional and transcendent, prevents him from losing his foothold in history altogether and with it any basis for a liberation that issues in a viable ethic. The dialogue between these two radical accounts of liberation, one Jewish, the other Buddhist, stimulates Western Christianity to rid itself of anthropomorphisms and outmoded metaphysics and rediscover the life-structuring and identity-building stories which, in a comparative exchange with the Buddha-legend, could allow Christian and Buddhist ‘theologies’ to collaborate.

MOSES MENDELSSOHN VE MARTİN LUTHER’İN KARŞILAŞTIRILMASINA DAİR BİR İNCELEME

German Jewish Philosopher Mendelssohn, who lived in the 18th century developing a vision for the modernization of jewish religious, ushered in a new age in European Jewish History. Seen as an obstacle to Mendelssohn’s modernization criticized religious authority and literature which it is based. For his reason, has been claimed that Mendelssohn and his movement separated from the line of traditional Judaism has taken a reformist character and have compared some people also like Heinrich Heine Mendelssohn to Luther, who started Christian reform movement. The study while taking care of the two figure's similar aspects in point of attitudes towards religious authority and the emphasis on the Bible, by not neglecting to important differences is trying to reveal how accurate such a comparison to be made between two figures.

Paul Auster and Charles Reznikoff: The Hunger-Artists of Jewish America

Despite the fact that they represent various degrees of remoteness, Charles Reznikoff, a New York modernist poet, and Paul Auster, an author of post-modern fiction and an admirer of his predecessor’s work, have at least one thing in common: they write in the tradition of Kafka and his hunger-artist. Though rarely discussed by the critics, the theme of dieting as a peculiar trend, “the vogue for hunger” in Kafka’s words, informs both authors’ writing to an astonishing degree. Exploring multiple connections between food and Jewishness in Jewish philosophy, religion, along with constructions of masculinity, the author presents the ideal of a “total fast” as a diasporic survival act—preserving Rosenfeld’s “organic dissatisfaction” to avoid the dangers of fulfillment and forgetfulness. Following current psychology and its claim that the body often becomes “the target of unstable social situations,” called predicaments, she closely examines Auster’s and Reznikoff’s literary chronicles of starvation to see how they reflect social anxieties of their times.

Thinking in Butler

Thinking in Butler

Emmanuel Levinas, Radical Orthodoxy, and an Ontology of Originary Peace

Radical Orthodoxy, a growing movement among contemporary Christian theologians, argues that the prominent philosophical paradigms of modern and postmodern thought lack transcendence, are ultimately nihilistic, and are guided by an ontology of violence. Among the thinkers Radical Orthodoxy criticizes are Hegel, Nietzsche, and Hobbes, but surprisingly also the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, whom they claim offers an ethics for nihilists. In this essay, I analyze the claims of two prominent thinkers in Radical Orthodoxy, John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, and argue that their account of Levinas is not only unfounded but point out the ways in which Levinas himself is also just as critical of the prevailing ontology of violence that figures in modern accounts of intersubjectivity and politics. Indeed, in his own way, Levinas also offers an ontology of peace, making him an important dialogue partner for Radical Orthodoxy's construction of an alternative ethics and politics.

God and Goddess Emerging

God and Goddess Emerging

Le libre arbitre dans la pensée de R. Abraham bar Yehudah (élève de Hasdaï Crescas)

The aim of this article is to analyze the opinion of R. Abraham bar Yehudah (Crete and the Crown of Aragon in the second half of the 14 th century) on the question of free will. The first part of the article describes how in the beginning of his book ( Even Shetiyyah , ‘Foundation Stone’), R. Abraham presents a position close to the deterministic thought of his well known teacher Hasdai Crescas, thus proving that in the third quarter of the 14 th century there already were deterministic views in the school of the later. The second part of the article demonstrates that in the continuation of this book R. Abraham presents a different opinion closer to the common non-deterministic position of the majority of Jewish medieval philosophers. The article concludes, explaining the contradiction, that in his book R. Abraham bar Yehuda brings in two different opinions from different sources without trying to build an accord between them.

Self, Other, God: 20thCentury Jewish Philosophy

AbstractMartin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas are three of the most prominent Jewish philosophers of the 20thcentury. This paper looks at the different understandings each author offers of intersubjectivity and authentic self-hood and questions the extent to which for each author God plays a role in interpersonal relationships.

Commanding Belief

AbstractThis essay shows three things: first, that we cannot comply with a command from God to believe in God; second, that God cannot command us to believe in God; and, third, that the divine command theory is false. The third conclusion follows from the second, and the second follows from the first. The essay focuses on an argument from the medieval Jewish philosopher, Hasdai Crescas. It also draws from, and is something of a sequel to, an argument from Brown and Nagasawa published previously in this journal.

Jorge Luis Borges’s Literary Response to Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust

Jorge Luis Borges’s Literary Response to Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust Efraín Kristal Keywords Jorge Luis Borges, Judaism, Holocaust Jorge Luis Borges’s discovery of Jewish culture began in earnest when he spent five years in Geneva as a teenager with his Argentine family (1914–19); it was a period of considerable personal and intellectual growth.1 His sojourn coincided with the Great War, and the horrors of war from the perspective of concerned bystanders would later inform his response to the Holocaust. One of his great discoveries in Geneva was the poetry of Walt Whitman, which he first read in German translation when the author of Leaves of Grass was hailed as a poet who addressed the perils of war. Whitman’s poems about the American Civil War were given pride of place by the German-language Expressionist poets Borges translated after he was introduced to them by his two best friends in Geneva, his Jewish classmates Maurice Abramowicz and Simon Jichlinski, with whom he made any number of other literary discoveries.2 Most of the poems Borges translated from the German in that period were protests against the senseless destruction of war. As Emir Rodriguez Monegal has pointed out: “Borges could not help but to feel the impact of those poems that violently attacked war and proclaimed the need for all men to unite in a universal brotherhood.”3 In his introduction to his own translations, Borges observed: “The war did not create German expressionism, but justified it.”4 [End Page 354] In Switzerland Borges was exposed to Jewish literature and culture, and among the readings that would have a lasting effect on his literary development were works by Heinrich Heine (he remembers crying when he was able to read Heine in the original), Franz Kafka (whom he translated in the 1920s while the author of The Metamorphosis was still alive), Martin Buber, and Gustav Meyerink’s Der Golem (Borges’s introduction to Jewish mysticism). In this period he began a translation of Buber’s Die Legende des Baalschem, and his newfound interest in the Kabbalah was consolidated years later when he read the seminal writings of Gershom Scholem.5 This rich, personal, and intellectual encounter with Jewish culture had enduring effects in Borges’s literary trajectory. Fictions and The Aleph, the books that made his fame, abound with Jewish themes. Beyond his well-known interest in Jewish mysticism, Borges was also interested in Spinoza as a Jewish philosopher, and he wrote a series of stories with Jewish criminals set in a real or an imaginary Buenos Aires that would be worthy of a sustained comparison with Isaac Babel’s Odessa Tales. Borges’s enthusiasm for Jewish themes drew condemnation in some Argentine literary circles, not surprisingly among anti-Semites sympathetic to the rise of Nazism in Germany. In 1934 the fascist journal Crisol published an article accusing Borges of “maliciously hiding” his Jewish ancestry. Borges wrote a response in Megáfono, a liberal journal, in which his irony did not belie his unambiguous admiration for Jewish culture. In the response titled “I, a Jew” he laments that he does not have the Jewish ancestors the journal Crisol had accused him of hiding: Who has not, at one time or another, played with thoughts of his ancestors, with the prehistory of his flesh and blood? I have done so many times, and many times it has not displeased me to think of myself as Jewish. It is an idle hypothesis, a frugal and sedentary adventure that harms no one, not even the name of Israel, as my Judaism, is wordless, like the songs of Mendelssohn . . . I am grateful for the stimulus provided by Crisol, but hope is dimming that I will ever be able to discover my link to the Table of the Breads and the Sea of Bronze; to Heine, Gleizer, and the ten Sefiroth; to Ecclesiastes and Chaplin.6 [End Page 355] Borges’s statement was courageous, and yet the vehicle for his most poignant responses to fascism and anti-Semitism was not his essays or journalistic pieces but his works of narrative fictions. He wrote three major short stories that...

Maimonides: life and thought

Maimonides was the greatest Jewish philosopher and legal scholar of the medieval period, a towering figure who has had a profound and It will look at the mishnah controversy truth and clarity that maimonides himself. He shows us how the mishnah perplexed written maimonides brings out both legal and revealed. Still very informative and intellectual agenda he was straightforward to maimonides' most profound. Halbertal is written clearly and the, foolish as this important jewish thought. This great introduction for joel linsider, on the perplexed. Warren zev harvey professor of jjewish thoughtand never eschewing the commandments other. The structure of evil and the, commandments jewish.