17. Contemporary Jewish Thought

2008 ◽  
pp. 406-432
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Thought

Freud and Jewish Dreaming

2001 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Frosh
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Creative Activity ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Biblical Figures

This paper describes some links between Freud's creative activity in The Interpretation of Dreams and his identification with the biblical figures of Joseph and Moses. In particular, it draws on traditional Jewish thought on the relationship between prophecy and dreaming, and on the characters of Joseph and of Moses. It is argued that The Interpretation of Dreams shows Freud exploring aspects of his gendered and cultural identity and finding a place for himself as a provocative and iconoclastic ‘dreamer’ in the Jewish tradition.

Book Reviews

2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 162-166
Author(s):  
Jonathan Magonet ◽  
Albert H. Friedlander ◽  
Evelyn Friedlander
Keyword(s):  
Spiritual Life ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
The Many

The Art of Public Prayer: Not for Clergy Only (second edition), Lawrence A. Hoffman, Sky-Light Paths Publishing, Woodstock, VT, 1999, 270 pp., $17.95, ISBN 1-893361-06-3A Heart of Many Rooms: Celebrating the Many Voices within Judaism, David Hartman, Jewish Lights Publishing, Woodstock, VT, 1999, 298 pp, $24.95, ISBN 1-58023-048-2Moses - The Prince, the Prophet: His Life, Legend and Message for Our Lives, Rabbi Levi Meier, Woodstock, VT, Jewish Lights Publishing, 1998, 224 pp., $23.95, ISBN 1-58023-013-XVoices from Genesis: Guiding Us Through the Stages of Life, Norman J Cohen, Woodstock, VT, Jewish Lights Publishing, 1998, 179 pp., $21.95, ISBN 1-879045-75-3These Are the Words: A Vocabulary of Jewish Spiritual Life, Arthur Green, Woodstock, VT, Jewish Lights Publishing, 1999, 304 pp. (hc), $21.95, ISBN 1-58023-024-5New Voices in Jewish Thought: a collection of essays edited by Keith Harris with a foreword by Jonathan Webber. Volume Two, London, Limmud Publications, 1999, 101 pp., ISBN 0-9532273-2-4Lebendiges Judentum II - Predichtung und Betrachtnung eines Rabbines 1990-1995, Israel Aaron Ben Yosef, Arbeiten von Ursula Harver und Rahel Rosenzweig, Erhaus gegeben von Erhard Roy Wien, Hartung-Gorre Verlag Konstanz, 1999, 219 pp., DM44. ISBN: 3-89649-382-5

Holiness in Jewish Thought

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Jewish History ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Philosophical Reflection ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Life

Holiness is a challenge for contemporary Jewish thought. The concept of holiness is crucial to religious discourse in general and to Jewish discourse in particular. “Holiness” seems to express an important feature of religious thought and of religious ways of life. Yet the concept is ill defined. This collection explores what concepts of holiness were operative in different periods of Jewish history and bodies of Jewish literature. It offers preliminary reflections on their theological and philosophical import today. The contributors illumine some of the major episodes concerning holiness in the history of the development of the Jewish tradition. They think about the problems and potential implicit in Judaic concepts of holiness, to make them explicit, and to try to retrieve the concepts for contemporary theological and philosophical reflection. Holiness is elusive but it need not be opaque. This volume makes Jewish concepts of holiness lucid, accessible, and intellectually engaging.

The Diremption of Love: Gillian Rose on Agency, Mortality, and Hegelian Feminism

Hypatia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-328
Author(s):  
Asaf Angermann
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Law And Morality ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gillian Rose ◽  
Power And Powerlessness ◽  
Philosophical Writings ◽  
British Philosopher

Gillian Rose (1947–1995) was an influential though idiosyncratic British philosopher whose work helped introduce the Frankfurt School's critical theory and renew interest in Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Jewish thought in Anglo‐American philosophy. After years of relative oblivion, her life and thought have recently received new attention in philosophy, sociology, and theology. However, her work's critical Hegelian contribution to feminist philosophy still remains unexplored. This article seeks to reassess the place and the meaning of feminism and gender identity in Rose's work by addressing both her philosophical writings and her personal memoir, written in the months preceding her untimely death. It argues that although Rose's overall work was not developed in a feminist context, her philosophy, and in particular her ethical‐political notion of diremption, is valuable for developing a critical feminist philosophy that overcomes the binaries of law and morality, inclusion and exclusion, power and powerlessness—and focuses on the meaning of love as negotiating, rather than mediating, these oppositions.

Joseph Soloveitchik and Immanuel Kant's Mitzvah-Aesthetic

AJS Review ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zachary Braiterman
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Social Ethics ◽  
Formal System ◽  
Order Effects ◽  
Critique Of Judgment ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Personal Morality ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Ideal

In the following pages, I will address the relationship between Jewish thought and aesthetics by bringing Joseph Soloveitchik into conversation with Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Judgment remains an imposing monument in the history of philosophical aesthetics. While Buber and Rosenzweig may have been more accomplished aesthetes, Soloveitchik's aesthetic proves closer to Kant's own. In particular, I draw upon the latter's distinction between the beautiful and the sublime and the notion of a form of indeterminate purposiveness without determinate purpose. I will relate these three figures to Soloveitcchik's understanding of halakhah and to the ideal of performing commandments for their own sake (li-shemah). The model of mitzvah advanced by this comparison is quintessentially modern: an autonomous, self-contained, formal system that does not (immediately) point to extraneous goods, such as spiritual enlightenment, personal morality, or social ethics. The good presupposed by this system proves first and foremost “aesthetic.” That is, immanent to the system. Supererogatory goods enter into the picture only afterward as second-order effects.

Jewish Theology for a Postmodern Age

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Feldmann Kaye
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
World View ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Ultimate Truth ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Single Objective

In the postmodern, relativist world-view with its refutation of a single, objective, and ultimate truth, it has become difficult if not impossible to argue in favour of one's own beliefs as preferable to those of others. This study is one of the first English-language books to address Jewish theology from a postmodern perspective, probing the question of how Jewish theology has the potential to survive the postmodern onslaught that some see as heralding the collapse of religion. Basing the book's arguments on both philosophical and theological scholarship, the author shows how postmodernism might actually be a resource for rejuvenating religion. The author's response to the conception of theology and postmodernism as competing systems of thought is based on a close critical study of Rav Shagar (Shimon Gershon Rosenberg) and Tamar Ross. Rather than advocating postmodern ideas, the book analyses their writings through the lens of the most radical of continental postmodern philosophers and cultural critics in order to offer a compelling theology compatible with that world-view. Whether the reader considers postmodernism to be inherently problematic or merely inconsequential, this book demonstrates why reconsidering these preconceptions is one of the most pressing issues in contemporary Jewish thought.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document