Roundtable discussion: "The Age of Possibilities: Jews and Modern Empires in a Contemporary Perspective" (original) (raw)
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This international symposium focuses on the decades from 1880-1950, a time of cultural, political, and economic ferment in Euro-American Jewish communities, when thinkers, writers, and artists generated a host of platforms and ideas about what shape the Jewish future would take in the twentieth century. Leading scholars gather to present papers and discuss the wide array of possibilities for Jewish life – many now forgotten – that this vibrant, often stormy period generated, and to consider how these trends both emerged from and further shaped the era’s views of what the future would hold.
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, "History, Exile and Counter-History: Jewish Perspectives," Prasenjit Duara, Viren Murthy, and Andrew Sartori (eds.), A Companion to global Historical Thought (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014): 126-135.
The Jewish Future – Commentary Magazine
Commentary Magazine, 2015
The Jewish people are in the initial stages of a demographic revolution, a change so profound and historic in nature that it will reshape the contours, character, and even the color of Jewry. Around the world, an unprecedented awakening is taking place. Descendants of Jews from all walks of life are looking to return to their roots and embrace their heritage. Israel and the Jewish people must reach out to them and welcome them back into our midst - for their sake and for ours.
Introduction: Thinking Jewish Modernity
2016
"Modernity," Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1859, "is the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable." 1 As one side of art, modernity is also one side of history, and thus one side of Jewish history. In all these cases, modernity connotes a state of mind more than it indicates a historical period or structural condition. As a catalyst for latenineteenth-century critical thinking, modernity takes up the promises, limitations, and failures of the Enlightenment as they reconstitute themselves in a postrevolutionary, bourgeois age. Thinking about modernity involves a complex relation to time, in which the past appears as both distant and relevant, the future at once promising and vague. Makers of Jewish Modernity offers original portraits of thinkers, writers, artists, and leaders who founded, formed, and transformed the twentieth century and laid down intellectual, cultural, and political foundations for the world ahead of us. These forty-three portraits understand intellectual and political biographies in the context of the life-worlds of their protagonists-in other words, in terms of the mutualities of texts and contexts, space and time, thought and action, inheritance and transformation. Modern Jewish experience forms a dimension of our post-Enlightenment world. The term "Judaism" is, in English, immediately problematic as a noun alongside of which "Jewish" is the adjective. "Judaism" often connotes religion and religious texts and laws rather than a more fluid category of general cultural and intellectual inheritance. A bagel, as the saying goes, is not the Talmud. The more general category of Jewish culture in relation to the world at large is often referred to by the awkward word "Jewishness." There is no simple replacement for the powerful and polysemic German term Judentum, which strikes the tone and meaning we would engage here. Moreover, it should escape no one that the word Judentum, and its implicit claim of a strong religious as well as secular cultural world, came from the nation that subsequently sought to destroy precisely the powerful hybrid that it had nurtured. Introduction t h i n k i n g j e w i s h m o d e r n i t y
201902-The Study on Ancient Israel and Its Relevance for Contemporary Politics.pdf
The Oxford Handbook of Max Weber, 2019
and Keywords When Max Weber began his work on the historical importance of the relationship between the Protestant ethic and modern capitalism, he committed himself to the most enduring of his theoretical interests, the economic ethic of the most important religions. Investigating central issues in Max Weber's study on ancient Judaism, this chapter points to its relevance for the understanding of contemporary populism. For this purpose, two key aspects of his work are emphasized: this religion's rationality-inescapable for the understanding of Western modernity-and the charisma of the biblical prophets, based on their social and political position as well as on the affective bond they formed with the masses. Both aspects provide important insights for the assessment of contemporary populist movements.