Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers Online
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Hava Tirosh-Samuelson
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Aaron W. Hughes
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The Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers Online is the online version of Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers. The series showcases outstanding Jewish thinkers who have made lasting contributions to constructive Jewish philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. Each volume is devoted to one particular thinker and is meant to show the thinker’s relationship to the Jewish philosophical past and to contemporary Jewish existence. Each volume follows the same structure: an overview essay, several seminal essays by the philosopher, an interview with the editors, and a select bibliography of 120 items. Together the volumes in the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will feature the diversity and vitality of contemporary Jewish philosophy, will stimulate discussion on Jewish philosophical response to contemporary challenges, and will chart new paths for Jewish philosophy in the 21st century.
Available in print and electronically, the books in the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will be ideal for use in diverse educational settings (e.g., college-level courses, rabbinic seminaries, adult Jewish learning, and interreligious dialogue).
The series Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers is generously supported by the Baron Foundation.
The series has published an average of 8,5 volumes per year since 2013.
The title list and free MARC records are available for download here.
Available in print and electronically, the books in the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will be ideal for use in diverse educational settings (e.g., college-level courses, rabbinic seminaries, adult Jewish learning, and interreligious dialogue).
The series Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers is generously supported by the Baron Foundation.
The series has published an average of 8,5 volumes per year since 2013.
The title list and free MARC records are available for download here.
Please contact our sales team for more information on prices and licensing.
Michael Fishbane is Nathan Cummings Distinguished Service Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Trained in biblical studies and the ancient Near East at Brandeis University, he has written on rabbinic interpretation, medieval Jewish philosophy and mysticism, Hasidism, modern Jewish philosophy, and Hebrew poetry. His earlier groundbreaking historical work has provided the foundation for his more recent constructive hermeneutic theology. Among his numerous books are the award-winning Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (1985) and Kiss of God (1994), Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking (2003), and Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology (2008). He is, in addition, an elected member of the American Academy of Jewish Research and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Translator:
This volume features Eliezer Schweid’s philosophy of Judaism for a secular age. The volume brings together four of Schweid’s most original and influential philosophical essays and an interview with him that together express his fundamental outlook: the faith of a secular Jew, freely choosing loyalty to his or her national culture and drawing on Jewish heritage to inform how to act responsibly toward one’s neighbor, one’s people, the world, and God. The themes span the gamut of Schweid’s life work: the existential loneliness of the modern Jew; Judaism as a culture; faith in light of the Holocaust; and appreciation for secular humanism with awareness of its shortcomings, given the enduring legacy of the Jewish biblical heritage.
David Shatz is the Ronald P. Stanton University Professor of Philosophy, Ethics, and Religious Thought at Yeshiva University. With rabbinic ordination earned at Yeshiva University and a Ph.D. with distinction in philosophy from Columbia University, Shatz is committed to integrating Judaism and secular wisdom. An analytic philosopher as well as a Jewish philosopher, he has written extensively on free will, ethics, epistemology, medieval and modern Jewish philosophy, and philosophy of religion. His writings cover such topics as autonomy, altruism, philosophical skepticism, science and Judaism, peer review, theodicy, biblical interpretation, Maimonides, modern rabbinic figures, messianism, fanaticism, religious diversity, and theology. Shatz is also editor of the MeOtzar HoRav series, which publishes manuscripts of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and is editor of the Torah u-Madda Journal.
This volume features the thought and writings of Rabbi David Novak, the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies, Professor of the Study of Religion, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. Novak is a leading Jewish theologian, ethicist, and scholar of Jewish philosophy and law. Natural Law and Revealed Torah presents the work of Novak, a thinker interested in the intersection of traditional Judaism and the modern world, especially how religious Jews can simultaneously exist within the liberal and democratic nation state yet remain separate from its tradition of secularism.
David R. Blumenthal is Jay and Leslie Cohen Professor of Judaic Studies at Emory University. He has contributed greatly to the growth of Jewish Studies, the place of Judaism in Religious Studies, interreligious dialogue, and the reframing of Judaism in light of the Holocaust, postmodernism, and poststructuralism. For Blumenthal, theology is an ongoing reflection about everything we believe and do in the context of the living tradition.
Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff, the Sol and Anne Dorff Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Rector of American Jewish University in Los Angeles, is one of today’s leading Jewish ethicists. Writing extensively on the intersection of law, morality, science, religion, and medicine, Dorff offers an authoritative and non-Orthodox interpretation of Jewish law. As a leader in the Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, he has shaped the religious practices of Conservative Jews. In serving on national advisory committees and task forces, he has helped to articulate a distinctive Jewish voice on contested bioethical and biomedical issues. An analytic philosopher by training, Dorff has endorsed pluralism, arguing that Jewishness best flourishes in the context of American pluralism, and he has worked closely with non-Jews to advance religious pluralism in America.
Eugene B. Borowitz is Sigmund L. Falk Distinguished Professor of Education and Jewish Religious Thought at Hebrew Union College in New York. A rabbi, teacher of rabbis, and a theologian, Borowitz has been an important spokesperson for non-Orthodox forms of Judaism, Reform Judaism in particular. Over seven decades, Borowitz has explored the centrality of God in Jewish existence, the normative force of Jewish law, the meaning of the Covenant, the distinctiveness of Jewish life, and the meaning of Jewish personhood for non-Orthodox Jews. Adopting the language of religious existentialism, he has reflected on the relational nature of human existence, on the one hand, and human self-determination on the other.
Rethinking God and Ethics presents influential essays by Borowitz and explains his contribution to Jewish religious thought in the 20th century.
Brill mourns the death of Professor Eugene Borowitz, of blessed memory, in January 2016. The LCJP honors his valuable contribution to Jewish theology, ethics, and education.
Rethinking God and Ethics presents influential essays by Borowitz and explains his contribution to Jewish religious thought in the 20th century.
Brill mourns the death of Professor Eugene Borowitz, of blessed memory, in January 2016. The LCJP honors his valuable contribution to Jewish theology, ethics, and education.
This volume features the thought and writings of Jonathan Sacks, one of today’s leading Jewish public thinkers. It brings together an intellectual portrait, four of his most original and influential philosophical essays, and an interview with him. This volume showcases the work of Sacks, a philosopher who seeks to confront and offer solutions to the numerous problems besetting Judaism and its confrontation with modernity. In addition, the reader will also encounter an important social philosopher and proponent of interfaith dialogue, who articulates how it is possible to cultivate a culture of civility based on the twin notions of the dignity of difference and the ethic of responsibility. Jonathan Sacks has been Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from September 1991 to September 2013 and a member of the House of Lords since 2009.
Judith Plaskow, Professor of Religious Studies Emerita at Manhattan College in New York, is a leading Jewish feminist theologian. She has forged a revolutionary vision of Judaism as an egalitarian religion and has argued for the inclusion of sexually marginalized groups in society in general and in Jewish society in particular. Rooted in the experience of women, her feminist Jewish theology reflects the impact of several philosophical strands, including hermeneutics, dialogical philosophy, critical theory, and process philosophy. Most active in the American Academy of Religion, she has shaped the academic discourse on women in religion while critiquing Christian feminism for lingering forms of anti-Judaism.
Moshe Idel, the Max Cooper Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Senior Researcher at the Shalom Hartman Institute, is a world-renowned scholar of the Jewish mystical tradition. His historical and phenomenological studies of rabbinic, philosophic, kabbalistic, and Hasidic texts have transformed modern understanding of Jewish intellectual history and highlighted the close relationship between magic, mysticism, and liturgy. A recipient of two of the most prestigious awards in Israel, the Israel Prize for Jewish Thought (1999) and the Emmet Prize for Jewish Thought (2002), Idel’s numerous studies have uncovered persistent patterns of Jewish religious thought that challenge conventional interpretations of Jewish monotheism, while offering a pluralistic understanding of Judaism. His explorations of the mythical, theurgical, mystical, and messianic dimensions of Judaism have been attentive to history, sociology, and anthropology, while rejecting a naïve historicist approach to Judaism.
Avi Sagi is Professor of Philosophy at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, and Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, Israel. A philosopher, literary critic, scholar of cultural studies, historian and philosopher of halakhah, public intellectual, social critic, and educator, Sagi has written most lucidly on the challenges that face humanity, Judaism, and Israeli society today. As an intertextual thinker, Sagi integrates numerous strands within contemporary philosophy, while critically engaging Jewish and non-Jewish philosophers. Offering an insightful defense of pluralism and multiculturalism, his numerous writings integrate philosophy, religion, theology, jurisprudence, psychology, art, literature, and politics, charting a new path for Jewish thought in the twenty-first century.
Elliot R. Wolfson is Professor of Religious Studies and the Marsha and Jay Glazer Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A scholar of Jewish mysticism and philosophy, he uses the textual sources of Judaism to examine universal philosophical topics such as the function and processes of the imagination, the paradoxes of temporality, and the mystery of poetic language. Working at the intersection of disciplines and refusing to reduce texts to their simple historical contexts, Wolfson puts texts spanning diverse temporal, cultural, and religious periods in creative counterpoint. His sensitivity to language reveals its fragility as it simultaneously points to the uncertainty of meaning. The result is a creative reading of both Judaism and philosophy that informs and is informed by poetic sensibility and philosophical hermeneutics.
Rabbi J. David Bleich is Professor of Talmud (Rosh Yeshiva) at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, an affiliate of Yeshiva University, as well as the Director of its Postgraduate Institute for the study of Talmudic Jurisprudence and Family Law. In addition, he holds the Herbert and Florence Tenzer Chair of Jewish Law and Ethics at Yeshiva University and is Professor of Law at the Cardozo School of Law. A foremost authority on Jewish law and ethics, he has written extensively on medical ethics, Jewish law and contemporary social issues, and the interface of Jewish law and the American legal system. As the spiritual leader of Congregation B’nai Jehuda in Manhattan, Rabbi Bleich teaches weekly Talmud classes and lectures on Jewish law and philosophy.
Lenn E. Goodman is Professor of Philosophy and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Trained in medieval Arabic and Hebrew philosophy and intellectual history, his prolific scholarship has covered the entire history of philosophy from antiquity to the present with a focus on medieval Jewish philosophy. A synthetic philosopher, Goodman has drawn on Jewish religious sources (e.g., Bible, Midrash, Mishnah, and Talmud) as well as philosophic sources (Jewish, Muslim, and Christian), in an attempt to construct his own distinctive theory about the natural basis of morality and justice. Taking his cue from medieval Jewish philosophers such as Maimonides, Goodman offers a new theoretical framework for Jewish communal life that is attentive to contemporary philosophy and science.
Menachem Kellner is an American-born scholar of Jewish philosophy, an educator, and a public intellectual who lives in Israel. For over three decades he taught at the University of Haifa, where he held the Sir Isaac and Lady Edith Wolfson Chair of Jewish Religious Thought as well as several high-level administrative positions. Currently he teaches Jewish philosophy at Shalem College, Israel’s first liberal arts college, which seeks to integrate Western and Jewish texts. Trained in ethics and political philosophy, Kellner specializes in medieval Jewish philosophy, arguing that Maimonides’ rationalist universalism should serve as the ideal for contemporary Jewish life. Creatively fusing Zionism, modern Orthodoxy, and democracy, his vision of Judaism is open to and engaged with the modern world.
Norbert M. Samuelson is Harold and Jean Grossman Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. Trained as an analytic philosopher, he went on to establish the Academy of Jewish Philosophy in 1980, which contributed greatly to the professionalization of Jewish philosophy in America. An ordained Reform rabbi, a constructive theologian, and a public intellectual, Samuelson has insisted that philosophy is the very heart of Judaism and that in order to survive in the 21st century Judaism must rethink itself in light of contemporary science. Through his scholarship and organizational work he has brought a Jewish voice to the dialogue of religion and science. Viewing Jewish philosophy as central to the understanding of the Jewish past, Samuelson has explicated the philosophical dimension of Judaism, from the Bible to the present.
Arthur Green is Rector of the post-denominational Rabbinical School and Irving Brudnick Professor of Jewish Philosophy and Religion at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts. Originally ordained as a Conservative rabbi, Green considers himself a neo-Hasidic Jew, identifying with none of the established Jewish denominations. He combines historical knowledge of the Jewish mystical tradition with an original constructive theology. Recognized as both a rabbi and a scholar, Green has sought to make spiritual pursuit an essential part of committed Jewish life. Through scholarship, educational work, and popular teaching, he has contributed to the growth and vitality of Judaism in America and helped promote neo-Hasidism as Jewish spirituality for the 21st century.
Menachem Fisch is the Joseph and Ceil Mazer Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Director of the Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies, and former Chair of the Graduate School of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He is also the Senior Fellow of the Kogod Center for the Renewal of Jewish Thought at the Shalom Hartman Institute, Jerusalem. Trained in physics, philosophy, and the history and philosophy of science, Fisch has confronted epistemological questions and applied his answers to Jewish philosophy, integrating it into the larger discourse of rationality, normativity, religion, politics, and science. His work brings a creative combination of historical, philosophical, and critical insights to an analysis of Talmudic texts, thereby establishing a new and original understanding of rabbinic legal reasoning and religious commitment.
Tamar Ross is Professor of Jewish Philosophy (Emerita) at Bar-Ilan University. She has written extensively on the Musar movement, the thought of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the ideology of Mitnagedism, and the relationship of Orthodoxy and feminism. Conversant with classical rabbinic sources and analytic philosophy, she champions the notion of cumulative revelation in pursuit of a non-foundationalist notion of truth, both religious and scientific. Responding to the feminist critique, she articulates an original and constructive Jewish theology sympathetic to the later stages of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and to complementary motifs in Jewish mysticism. Her philosophy of halakha similarly builds on post-positivist legal theory, demonstrating the transformative influence of women's direct input on a legal system previously managed exclusively by men.
Michael L. Morgan is an Emeritus Chancellor Professor at Indiana University and the Senator Jerahmiel S. and Carole S. Grafstein Visiting Chair in Jewish Philosophy at the University of Toronto. On the faculty of Indiana University for his entire career, he has also held Visiting Professorships at the Australian Catholic University, Northwestern University, Princeton University, Stanford University, and Yale University. A historian of philosophy informed by the continental and analytic philosophical traditions, Morgan has reflected on the key challenge of our day: how is objectivity possible in light of the historicity of human life? An interpreter of both “Athens” and “Jerusalem,” Morgan has written on ancient Greek philosophy, modern Jewish philosophy, post-Holocaust theology and ethics, Zionism, and Messianism.
Hava Tirosh-Samuelson is Professor of History, Irving and Miriam Lowe Professor of Modern Judaism, and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.
Aaron W. Hughes is Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester.
Aaron W. Hughes is Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester.