“Black Art” & “Jewish Studies” (Darby English)

Posted on April 6, 2014 by zjb

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Art historian Darby English defines art history as “a way of actively caring for the objects of our culture.” There’s an interesting piece about him in the Sunday NYT art section. Art critic Deborah Solomon notes, “He likes to say, quoting the autocratic art critic Clement Greenberg, ‘You should never let a work of art get swallowed up in its category.’ On the other hand, Mr. English has made the work of black artists his category, or rather his official field of expertise.” 

The profile about art history and African American modern art reflects something similar in Jewish Studies, and even Jewish philosophy. Jewish Studies is a way to actively care for the objects of Jewish culture, “our culture” as the universal dimension of a particular culture. What are the “objects” of Jewish Studies and of Jewish philosophy? Texts, bodies, ideas about texts and bodies, concepts and physical artifacts.

English voiced a strong objection to including in this article any work by artist Jacob Lawrence, because the artist does not speak to him. The editors at the NYT overulled the objection, as will I. “The migration gained in momentum” (1940-1941) is actually a great painting, or at least I like it a lot. English dislikes in particular more than the work itself the flat-footed and sentimental uses to which the art has been put.

The same can be said for Jewish Studies and Jewish philosophy. Neither should ever get “swallowed up” in its category even as we recognize that this happens again and again in flat-footed and sentimental ways. But I think it’s also the case that the object stands out for itself.

 

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Modern Greek Orthodox (Looks Nothing Like a Church) (Saint Mary Magdalen Orthodox Church)

Posted on April 4, 2014 by zjb

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This charming little place off Columbus Avenue on W. 107th Street in New York looks nothing like a church. I like the website which you can see here. It’s modest and unpretentious, with nothing imposing about it. Unlike the simple building facade, the art inside is very distinctive. Brick, steel, and glass, the feel is comfortable and modern. That’s what a church (or synagogue)  should look like.

 

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(Type) Assimilation (Hannah Arendt)

Posted on April 3, 2014 by zjb

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About Hannah Arendt’s thesis re: anti-Semitism I’m caught. On the one hand, I think she is right to note among modern Jews the turn to and the trust placed in state authority, not “society.” On the other hand, I’m not sure that I share Arendt’s critical judgment, and I’m not sure this alignment was the cause so much as the consequence of anti-Semitism in society. Against Arendt, I think the “neutrality” of the nation-state proved a more secure guarantor of rights in modern Jewish political life than “society.” I think it’s probably true to say that this is true until this very day.

What I think Arendt gets much better in Antisemitism is the analysis of German Jewish assimilation at the cusp point between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The Jews, Arendt reminds us, were welcomed as Jews into German Enlightenment society. Indeed, the new humanism represented by the likes Lessing and Nicolai, and also Herder, who “expressly wanted new specimens of humanity” (p.57). Assimilation at the end of the eighteenth century required that a Jew simultaneously be not like and to be a like a Jew, i.e. to be not like an “ordinary Jew,” but to be like an “exceptional one” (p.56).

This dynamical model of assimilation demanded the creation of a unique Jewish “type” that was “recognizable everywhere,” bearing the mark of “psychological attributes  and reactions, the sum total of which was to constitute ‘Jewishness.’” Exotic and foreign, half ashamed and half proud, attractive and entertaining, this “artificially complicated inner life” was to be “stange and exciting” in its “immediacy of self-expression and presentation” (p.67).  “The Enlightenment’s genuine tolerance and curiosity” as matched by and “replaced by a morbid lust for the exotic, abnormal, and different as such” (p.68).

I think Arendt’s analysis makes a lot of sense as to the specific case of Moses Mendelssohn, who she includes here in her discussion, as well as the more general way “difference” gets worked out and deployed in liberal society. With this or that variation, I think this dynamic is as true today as it was then. Exceptional Jews are always given to stand out over against the run of the mill ordinary Jews. But they have to retain that mark of a different Jewish “type” in order to be at all recognizable or interesting in any sort of meaningful way. Without the mark or type, they would not be exceptional.

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Jews, State Authority, & Society (Hannah Arendt Antisemitism)

Posted on April 2, 2014 by zjb

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It’s been argued by critics of Zionism that Zionism represents a new alignment of Judaism and Jewishness vis-à-vis state power. This represents a half truth. What’s new about Zionism is its alignment of Judaism and Jewishness with Jewish sovereign power. What’s not new is that the Jews in the modern period have seemed to have always sought to remain close to sovereign power. This was in part Arendt’s critique of modern western Jewry, its cooperation with the autocratic, enlightened despots going back to the 18th century, as well as the fealty of mainstream German Jewry to the Second Reich established under Bismarck, or the example of Disraeli. But one could add as well the fealty of many Russian Jews to the Bolshevik Party and to Communist regime, and the liberal leaning patriotic loyalties of mainstream American Jews to the New Deal and to the opportunities and freedoms made possible for Jews by big strong centralized government. Zionism would manifest a variant to this larger political pattern.

The key conceptual opposition determining Arendt’s analysis in Antisemitism is the one between “state” and “society.” For Arendt, anti-Semitism is a purely modern phenomenon (there is no “eternal anti-Semitism), and it has to be understood exclusively as a political phenomenon, not a social or an economic one, and it has nothing to do with nationalism per se. The origin of anti-Semitism was caused in part by the political decisions of “the Jews” to isolate themselves from society and to align themselves with state authority. When society came into conflict with the state, they came into conflict with the Jews as their target of first opportunity.

Indeed, the neutrality or the semi-neutrality of the state would have promised a reliable support for the civic rights of a minority community such as the Jews, a much more reliable support than “society.” But as a part I of her thesis on the Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt claims that twentieth century totalitarianism and modern anti-Semitism were both anti-nationalist, were in fact ideologically international, or at least pan-European, and that they both reflected and contributed to the decline of the nation-state and the destruction of the old elites and the old political order in Europe (see esp. p.28)

Arendt argues that the Jews were in some part responsible for the rise of anti-Semitism. First, she claims that the Jews, and by this I assume she means primarily western Jews, were politically incompetent, mostly because they were unaware of the tension between state and society (p.23). Attaching themselves to government as such, to authority as such, they isolated themselves from society, cutting themselves off from reality and rendering themselves weak (pp.14, 15). It is the putative aloofness, the closeness of familial ties, the tie to the private sphere of the oikos and what Arendt thought was the resulting lack of a larger and more capacious social connection, (between Jews and Jews, and between Jews and gentile society) that is at the center of Arendt’s critique of both political Zionism and German Jewish assimilation.

The tension between state and society is an interesting one, but as a theory of anti-Semitism, Arendt’s analysis is probably too bound to the case of western Jewry (Germany, France, England). I’m not sure it does much to explain anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, where there was no connection between the Jews and state authority for the very reason that Jews were never granted civic rights by state czarist authority. And I’m not sure how here the distinction between state and society works in relation to the United States. In western Europe, she writes, “The situation would have been entirely different if, as in the United States, equality of condition had been taken for granted; if every member of society –from whatever stratum –had been firmly convinced that by ability and luck he [sic] might have become the hero of a success story” (p.55)

The useful distinction between state and society begins to fall apart once it gets pushed too hard. Arendt claims that social discrimination against western Jews was, in fact, politically “sterile,” even if it did much to “poison” “the social atmosphere” and “perverting all social intercourse between Jews and Gentiles and had a definite effect on Jewish behavior” (p.55). By this effect, I suppose Arendt to have meant an isolating, self-segregating asocial impulse, for which, at the same time, she holds western Jewry responsible. But the assumption is that the Jews were not already marginal in society and that it was only in alignment with state power that turned society against the Jews.

What’s strange about the entire structure of the argument is the presumption that “social” discrimination is politically “sterile.” On its own I don’t entirely understand it, and I think the claim falls completely apart when Arendt turns her attention briefly to the United States and to race relations in America. Arendt writes, “It is one of the most promising and dangerous paradoxes of the American Republic that it dared to realize equality on the basis of the most unequal population in the world, physically and historically” (p.55). I don’t know how quite to unpack this statement. Was the term “American Republic” meant to compare the U.S. with the Weimar Republic? In what way are different racial “peoples” in American physically unequal? Did Arendt really mean unequal, or just “different” in appearance? In a footnote, she notes that in America, “the Negroes” have been the most unequal, “by nature and by history” (emphasis added), believing  that the Jews even in the United States are at risk, more politically endangered , precisely because they are less given to a “well known principle of separation” than are “Negroes or Chinese” (p.55n.1).

I think Arendt was right to identify the linkage between western Jews and state authority, and it makes a lot of sense of the hostility directed against Israel and Zionism on the part of the global left and by critical theorists with deep skepticism regarding political forms of state-sovereignty, as well as the way that hostility will often morph into classical anti-Semitism. But about Arendt I’m not sure what better option she saw for the Jews historically. Was it or was it not the case that anti-Semitism in “society” was a deeply engrained thing? This is, in part David Nirenberg’s case against Arendt in the first pages of the conclusion to his recent Anti-Judaism.

I would put the argument with Arendt this way. Perhaps it’s the case that her bobbling of race and the bobbling of anti-Semitism go hand in hand here. It’s at this point in the discussion when U.S. race relations (i.e. race in the “American Republic”) are raised that I begin to suspect that Arendt in her analysis of anti-Semitism did not take seriously enough the full “political” force of “social” discrimination that was prior to and determined the limited place for Jews as minority people in the public sphere of society prior to their political emancipation.

 

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White Green Spring (Morningside Park)

Posted on April 1, 2014 by zjb

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At Morningside Park, I think it was Monday. I like how the green bud and white bark offset each other.

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Patient Political Gesture: Law Liberalism and Talmud (Braiterman)

Posted on April 1, 2014 by zjb

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Here’s the introduction to the bit I wrote against political theology for Randi and Martin’s Judaism, Liberalism, and Political Theology. The diagrams are from the Talmud Shas, tractate Shabbat. You can find the whole essay in ms. form here as well as at my page at academia.edu.

Veering overtly into religion after 9/11, recent critical theory steers further and further from “Judaism.” The fact that this discourse and its contributors have made almost no impact upon Jewish thought before this publication stands in stark contrast to the saturation by Jewish categories of postmodern theory in the 1970s and 1980s, which in turn inundated Jewish thought. The postmodernism of “the jews,” “shibboleth,” “midrash,” “textuality,” and “ethics” gives way in more radical works by Agamben, Badiou, and Žižek to the alleged universalism of St. Paul and to the cautionary case of Carl Schmitt, an ultra-conservative German political thinker who made his mark in the 1920s, and who, despairing of the chaos threatening the liberal Weimar Republic, then sought to curry favor with the Nazis. Tracking the movement of theological concepts and religious energies into secular politics, the interest in political theology in critical theory explores a transposition first opened up by German philosophers writing before and after World War II. Paul’s faith in Christ is shown to limit or even break the force of law; while for Schmitt and those who turn to him from the ideological left, the state’s power to make political decisions and distinctions, and to except itself from the law, bears the power and authority once ascribed in Christian theology to God and miracle.

The general resistance to political theology in this essay and the alternative I pose to the radical political gesture exemplified in Žižek’s thought in particular signal what I believe to be a stubborn political and religious liberalism basic to most forms of modern and contemporary Judaism. Even as it rhetorically rejects what it purports to be abstract Enlightenment universalism and atomistic liberal individualism, modern and contemporary Jewish thought (from Mendelssohn to Buber to Borowitz and Plaskow) has always remained bourgeois to the extent it seeks out home or a semblance of home in the type of form-making nomoi, the patterns and prisms that more radical critical theorists seek to shatter. “Out of the sources of Judaism,” the core, under-theorized liberalism I want to articulate in this paper consists of three features. These are [1] commitment to law and structure, [2] refusal to cede absolute authority to any single center, figure or source, and [3] realization that dynamic political and religious nomoi are open, corrigible, and fragile.

In part, the confrontation with radical critical theory in this essay is meant to reposition Jewish thought out of Germany and away from theoretical contexts specific to the Weimar period. I hope to do this by suspending those theoretical points shared in common by early and mid-twentieth century Jewish thought and contemporary critical thought –a lingering modernist cum prophetic conception of revelation as overwhelming force that breaks through the hard shell of human subjectivity and social reification; a revelation whose only content is revelation, the revelation of its happening; and, more recently, fidelity to an event, the undeconstructible, messianicity without messianism, traumatic realism, the impossible, etc., etc.. The thought of Buber and Žižek will be paradigmatic. I will claim that in his argument against state power in the political theology of Schmitt, Buber fell prey to the trap of absolutism he himself wanted to reject. By granting absolute sovereignty to God, Buber was rendered powerless to undo, theoretically, the inevitable slippage from divine violence into the political violence exercised by a human sovereign. In contrast, the enthusiastic affirmation of political violence embraced by Žižek presumes a naïve belief in the power of a militant gesture to transform human society and culture.

Instead of prophetic religion and the absolute, I will set up “rabbinic parsing” as a formal prototype for a type of transcendental gesture essential to liberal politics and religion. The rabbis avoid the traps set by competing images of absolute power, divine or human, insofar as they understand the hedging of sovereign power, both human and divine. Two sets of texts from the Babylonian Talmud will be used to make this point. The first is a group of texts underscoring the limits of power, the power of God vis-à-vis the rabbis and the limits of the power of the rabbis vis-à-vis Jewish secular power. All forms of sovereign power, human and divine are hedged within competing lines of force. The second text is an odd “legal” text concerning the prismatic structuring and restructuring of a vegetable garden in which the law regarding “diverse seeds” as defined in the book of Leviticus is redefined in the rabbinic imagination. The rabbinic text indicates what is theoretically possible inside the four ells of law when the limits of law are recognized as fungible –just as much as it is recognized elsewhere what might not be practicable or possible outside the limit of the divine law of a self-enclosed paideic community.  

Between radicalism and conservatism, I will have made the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud cohabit with liberalism. The cohabitation is a virtual one, not a real one. A theoretical alternative to this or that “militant gesture” and the absolute in recent critical theory, the gesture marked out in these reflections represents a logic of the penultimate. It enlists what I would call a more “patient gesture” than the one marked out by Schmitt and those theoretical critics who have enlisted him from the left in order to tar liberalism with the brush of totalitarianism. I do not intend to draw any political consequences as to the politics of the Bavli. The Babylonian Talmud is not a workable political blueprint. The focus on space construction is instead interpreted as metapolitcal, marked by an expansive sense of structural possibility. In this formal gesture, modern liberal theorists might see a possible model for the design of a more inclusive political place than the ones envisioned in the Bavli itself.

In terms of strict political contents, next to nothing connects Talmud and liberalism. Just a cursory look at the deliberations whose ostensible contents are political and legal, especially those which touch upon relations between men and women, Jews and non-Jews, rabbis and common people (`amei ha’aretz), normativity and heresy will provide next to zero resource for theorists seeking to ground a coupling individual rights and cultural pluralism. Despite this or that ethical dictum claimed by liberal readers (“these and these are the words of the living God”), the only genuine equality in the Babylonian Talmud is internal to an elite circle of scholars. To bring the rabbis into conversation with modern liberalism would require tugging Talmud away from legal positivism towards a meta-halakhic conception that pays more attention to the foundational gestures at work in the arrangement of theoretical systems and virtual worlds. As indicated below, the more genuinely liberal gesture in Talmud is meta-political, observed in the intensive freedom ascribed to the formal unfolding internal to a Talmudic discussion. Attention goes not to any halakhic “end product,” but to dialectic as pure process. The limiting of human desire through divine law is its more conservative thrust, the making room for desire in law its more liberal impulse.

(Zachary Braiterman, “The Patient Political Gesture: Law Liberalism and Talmud” in Randi Rashkover and Martin Kavka (eds.), Judaism, Liberalism, and Political Theology, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014) , pp.241-3.

 

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Rabbi Aesthetics Outside Aprhrodite’s Bathhouse (Rachel Neis)

Posted on March 30, 2014 by zjb

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Shai Secunda and Yitz Landes kindly invited me to review for Talmud Blog Rachel Neis’s The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture: Jewish Ways of Seeing in Late Antiquity. It was a great pleasure to write for Shai and Yitz about Rachel. What makes Rachel’s work so interesting and why I am so absolutely taken by it is the intense immersion in three different worlds: art, philosophy, and Talmud. It used to be when scholars of rabbinic and Judaic Studies were asked about the aesthetics of the rabbis, all they could do was to point to the famous story of Rabban Gamliel in Aphrodite’s bathhouse. Generally they drew a blank when asked about the rabbis and their own aesthetic culture, the way in which the rabbis themselves shaped aesthetic worlds of their own invention

For the complete review, go here.  Here’s part of what I wrote:

I think today no further proof is needed than Rachel Neis’ The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture to realize that the study of rabbinics has left for good Aphrodite’s bathhouse and the facile association of art and aesthetics with idolatry and paganism. Part of the problem for an earlier generation of scholars may have well been not knowing where to look and what to look for in relation to what is, indeed, a complex relation between aesthetic, visual, and material culture.

Neis makes clear that aniconism is part of a larger regime of looking and viewing, that looking away is just one strategy that sits alongside other kinds of looking. Deeply immersed into contemporary visual theory, Neis points out that visuality is not just a physical or optical phenomenon. Visuality is instead prescriptive, filtered through cultural and political perspectives, including gender. God, eros, idols, and the sages themselves are the primary phenomena on view in The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture

[…]

Steeping the rabbis and ancient Jewish aesthetics in visual theory, The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture is a groundbreaking work. In importance, I would place this book alongside Elliot Wolfson’s A Speculum that Shines as a go-to work that should change the way all of us think about Judaism and the visual imagination. The signal contribution of this book is to have taken the study of rabbinic aesthetics out of Aphrodite’s bathhouse, placing it back into the Temple and its memory, into the lifeworld of the rabbis, as they imagined it; as they saw not just the object world of Roman paganism, but as they saw themselves as aesthetic subjects and aesthetic objects, or to paraphrase philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as both seers and seen. 

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Erasing Jews (Badiou & Zizek) (Response to Sarah Hammerschlag)

Posted on March 28, 2014 by zjb

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(Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting (Grey) (880-3), 2002

In her essay “Bad Jews, Authentic Jews, Figural Jews” for the volume Judaism, Liberalism, and Political Theology, Sarah Hammerschlag quotes Slavoj Zizek who writes about “the Jews.” If Jews, according to Zizek, are not to be “privileged as an empirical group,” (i.e. “inaccessible to other” and “ultimately of no relevance to them”), then they are to be conceived as a contingent bearer of a universal structure, which for Zizek implies the “dangerous conclusion” that isolate and assert this formal universal structure that one has to “eliminate, erase, the ‘empirical’ Jews” (cited on p.227).

Sarah claims that Zizek along with Badiou “misses” the point that the universal and the particular are more stubbornly imbricated. But I don’t think that’s true. They don’t “miss” the point. They reject it. Viewed one way, there should, in fact, be no inherent reason why one cannot suppress or erase a figure. If that’s an aesthetic choice, then it’s not really a political point of view anymore, no matter if it pretends to be one. What’s one left with then? Without any bright color, the “remainder” that’s left is a dull grey.

This seems like a bad choice for Jews and Judaism, either remote privilege and human irrelevance or elimination. Micro-antisemitic and micro-Nazi, the logic is totalitarian, not democratic. As an aesthetic and political choice, the bourgeois form of “representation” will have had more to offer Jews, Judaism, and democratic culture than does the final-solution alternative offered by Zizek.

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Careful What You Sow — BDS At Vassar Gets Ugly

Posted on March 27, 2014 by zjb

I would have been skeptical about the little bit of reporting I’ve seen about this episode in more rightwing news media,  except that it was confirmed by Mondoweiss, who was there. Jill Schneiderman, a professor of Earth Sciences at Vassar College was recently called to give public account about a planned trip to Israel and the West Bank to study water issues. After her classroom was picketed and her students intimidated, and she was basically called before “open forum” on the ethics of political activism, where Jewish students who spoke out were heckled by the large crowd of some 200 students (and faculty). Is this what BDS is going to look like? A kind of public shaming reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution? No “cardboard civility” at Vassar. And where’s Open Hillel? Even the intrepid anti-Israel, anti-Zionist Mondoweiss found the incident “unsettling.” He maintains that the  “belligerence might be necessary to a solution.” My bet is that this kind of hostility is going to rip out the guts of a university to no good effect. Kudos to Professor Schneiderman.

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Jewish Philosophy & Political Theology (Liberal-All-Too-Liberal)

Posted on March 27, 2014 by zjb

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Stepping back from Judaism, Liberalism & Political Theology, edited by Randi Rashkover and Martin Kavka has me convinced that, yes, after all, Jewish philosophy is liberal-all-too-liberal. Randi and Martin have put together a remarkable volume, representing  a first and overdue intervention by “Jewish philosophy” into the theoretical debates surrounding political theology, in this book, principally represented by Schmitt, Badiou, and Zizek. It would be an understatement to say that Judaism and Jewish philosophy have been underrepresented and mal-represented in this discourse, having to do with the militant antinomianism, anti-Jewish supersessionism, and the strong smell of totalitarianism that mark much of it. And maybe, as I argue in my contribution to this volume,  there is something basic and stubbornly liberal about modern Jewish thought and philosophy, especially in light of commitments to law as a philosophical concept or figure.

In a beautifully constructed critique of Walter Benjamin, Martin insists that the decision between the pessimism of political theology represented  by Benjamin and Taubes and the liberal optimism of Hermann Cohen “cannot be decided by an argument” (p.122). I’m not sure that’s true. At any rate, for the overall majority of contributors, it’s a certain kind of liberalism couple with a pronounced skepticism regarding political theology that ultimately gets decided for the form of Jewish philosophy to which this volume is given. Somewhat surprisingly, Levinas has a relatively limited presence in this volume. Is this a sign of things to come? The key philosophical resources are provided by Arendt, Buber, Cohen, and Spinoza, an interesting political constellation indeed.

To look at the book as synthetic whole, the argument assembled here is a challenge to political theology constructed out of Judaism, Jewish textual sources, and modern Jewish philosophy. It includes these main lines of argument, the sense or critique that [1] political theology is a violent philosophical formation that nihilates history (Kavka), [2] that political theology collapses the political and theological instead of seeing them as labile forms, separate forms that fold into each other (Gregory Kaplan), [3] that radical gestures and decisions marked out by political theology are undercut by more patient types of political gesture (Braiterman), [4] that the universalism advanced by political theology is more divisive, again more destructive, than the Jewish particularism it would oppose, and that these things, universalism and particularism are not separate but imbricated (Sarah Hammerschlag), [5] that it’s more case that theology reflects and follows upon political ideas and structures than it is the case that political ideas and structures (e.g. absolute authority) follows upon and reflects theology (e.g. omnipotence) (Bruce Rosenstock, Braiterman).

If there is  choice to be made between political theology, it would depend upon what one means by liberalism. If by liberalism one means the way it has been pegged by its critics as neutral and atomistic, and subsumed by “rights” then Jewish philosophy is not liberal. This is the way the editors present liberalism in the introduction to the volume, where the argument is made that the link between Judaism and liberalism is an arbitrary and unraveling one. But there’s no reason to think that Jewish philosophy is not liberal and indebted to the liberal state if one assumes by “liberalism” a more socially minded political formation based upon a productive tension between freedom and community.  I don’t see how to understand not just Spinoza, Mendelssohn, and Cohen, nor even Buber and Rosenzweig apart from this more nuanced model.

As always, I go back to Ernst Cassirer for a more capacious conception of liberalism, one that has less to do with laissez faire British capitalism, and more to do with twinned commitments to rights and obligations, to individual rights and social welfare. My friends the editors seem to be embarrassed by liberalism, as are many academics today. But I have trouble seeing beyond the bourgeois social roots and conceptual thinking of Jewish philosophy and the debt that Jews owe to the liberal state. One might go on to add what the Jews suffered when the liberal state collapsed in Europe in the twentieth century, and what I would argue is the threat posed to Judaism and to the Jews by those who would attack liberalism from both the right and the left. It’s not just a “stereotype” that American Jews track liberal and liberal-left in their political affiliations. This too is part of a tradition” that goes back to at least the New Deal and before. Make of it what you want. I think it’s a statistical “fact” for which there are arguments based on reasons that relate both to political self-interest and ethical principle.

Almost lastly, I hate the cover of the book. I’m told the options were worse, but with its rigid and ugly blocky forms, without any windows or any open portal to let in air, the architecture looks like a frozen piece of neo-classicism, taken from the past with no real presence. Is it supposed to represent law, tradition, and firm moral foundations? I don’t know. It looks crushing and conservative to me, as if the book was published by the Witherspoon Institute or some other super-conservative think tank. In contrast, the essays in this volume stand out, almost to a one, as advancing more loose, more liberal, and more giving types of philosophical and political form, assuming of course that what I mean by liberalism is not the same thing as laid out in the book’s introduction.

Judaism, Liberalism & Political Theology is a great polemical book, more polemical than maybe most of the individual contributors might have on their own either imagined or intended, and more on the side of liberalism than the book’s editors might have predicted. I’m not sure. There would seem to be a deep camaraderie of interest and purposed, and a single-minded and argumentative toughness, meant to make an intervention into what seems universally perceived by “Jewish philosophy” to be the hostile philosophical and political territorial terrain of political theology. No doubt I am overstating things, claiming this book for a kind of socially robust liberalism that may be the mere imagining of my own making. But I’m pretty sure that there is not very much in this book to align it against liberalism and for political theology.

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