Tag Archives: messianism

(Wordle) The Messianic Idea (Nachmanides)

Posted on March 30, 2022 by zjb

How relatively important or non-important is the messianic idea in Judaism? In his reading of the participation of Nachmanides in the public dispute at Barcelona, Hyam Maccoby suggests not very much. The messiah is not “essential,” is not a fundamental, … Continue reading →

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From Messianism to Real Estate (American Jews & Jewish Settlements in the West Bank)

Posted on June 22, 2020 by zjb

Too long a tale to tell here, the origins of the Jewish settlement project in the occupied West Bank after the 1967 Six Day War was an indigenous phenomenon ideologically rooted in the Israeli religious right and the messianic imagination. … Continue reading →

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Bulls Will Then Be Offered at the Kasbah Messianic Grill (Thank God)

Posted on July 30, 2019 by zjb

At 251 WEST 85th Street, between Broadway and West End Avenue. From their website: Our story begins in New York City in the 1980s. The Dery brothers’ were born in Morocco and raised in Israel where they were greatly influenced by … Continue reading →

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Rabbi Eliezer Sadan (Rav Eli Sadan) – His Hands Remained Steady

Posted on July 16, 2017 by zjb

I would be almost sympathetic with normative appeals to “political theology” were it not for the fact that the leading activists actually at work on the ground are reactionary. For anyone interested in the intellectual center of gravity in contemporary … Continue reading →

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(Resurrection) Transhumanism (Steven Schwartzschild

Posted on May 9, 2017 by zjb

Forget rationalism, moral radicalism, or “the political.” Messianism entails nothing if not a “philosophy of life,” the resurrection of the dead, the creation of New Man or Extreme Man.  Viewing it from this perspective, I suspect that the esoteric doctrine … Continue reading →

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Messianism & Moral Radicalism (After the Holocaust) (Steven Schwarzschild)

Posted on May 8, 2017 by zjb

Avoiding him for years, I knew that reading Steven Schwarzschild’s Pursuit of the Ideal was going to be for me an unpleasant professional chore. He wrote an important article about “Jewish aesthetics” that appears in the volume. But that was … Continue reading →

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Drunken Messianic Burlesque (Passover)

Posted on April 14, 2017 by zjb

The Passover Haggadah and its seder proceeds along a narrative arc from slavery to the liberation of messianic redemption. Up until dinner, the traditional seder is conducted as a memorial to the Temple cult in Jerusalem, the restoration of which … Continue reading →

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The Political Messianic Idea Is An Incoherent Mess (Joseph Klausner)

Posted on February 20, 2017 by zjb

Going in, I thought that reading Joseph Klausner’s The Messianic Idea in Israel from Its Beginning to the Completion of the Mishnah would be just a professional chore, a look at an antiquarian piece of ideological historiography. An oddball of … Continue reading →

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(My Working Will Be the Work) Maintenance Art and the Messianic (Mierle Laderman Ukeles)

Posted on January 19, 2017 by zjb

As it turns out, Jewish ritual, the idea of the holy, informs much of this artist’s work and her thought. They cut against the grain of “messianism” in ways that are at once profound and ordinary. My introduction to her … Continue reading →

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Judaism is Not A Messianic Religion (Jacob Neusner)

Posted on January 18, 2017 by zjb

Jacob Neusner’s Messiah in Context: Israel’s History and Destiny in Formative Judaism should sheds a lot of critical light on the question of messianism that should be of cutting interest to anyone who works in the fields of modern Jewish … Continue reading →

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