Mikhail Krutikov, "Yiddish Culture Barely Touched Upon in ‘The New Jewish Canon’"
David Shasha
Doubling-Down on White Jewish Supremacy at The Forward: How Do You Say CHUTZPAH in Yiddish?
I have not been saying much about The Forward under Jodi Rudoren, because Sephardim do not figure in her racist plans at all.
It is all White Jewish Supremacy, all the time.
She published the following gem that expresses just what an Ashkenazi ethnocentrist she really is:
The complete article follows this note.
The author of the article is a Russian expert in Yiddish at the University of Michigan:
https://lsa.umich.edu/slavic/people/faculty/krutikov.html
And he certainly has every right to criticize any aspect of the just-published anthology The New Jewish Canon by Yehuda Kurtzer and Claire Sufrin:
https://www.academicstudiespress.com/emunot/the-new-jewish-canon
Indeed, I have discussed it myself in an article that presents Kurtzer’s “New Talmud” attack on Peter Beinart and its HASBARAH racist implications:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/ytx5ztODWRA/m/MiqL6_6fBQAJ
The complete article follows this note.
I also included a piece he and Sufrin wrote on the book for Tikvah Tablet in SHU 972:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/new-jewish-canon-2
That article also follows this note.
But it fascinates me that Professor Krutikov thought to focus solely on Yiddish culture, when in point of fact the book completely excludes Sephardic culture!
Did he not notice that exclusion, or is he too an Ashkenazi ethnocentrist that does not see Sephardim as part of Jewish culture?
I do wonder what Jewish Currents editor Arielle Angel would make of it in her “Post-Sephardic” world:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Q82jUjKiHMk/m/EYOCbUQAAwAJ
And of course, there is Kurtzer’s Shalom Hartman Institute colleague Mijal Bitton, who is even more “Post-Sephardic” than Angel:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/blWoxt23bvk/m/ZAMDGuYsAgAJ
That sort of covers all the Right Wing and Left Wing bases, where Sephardim are a figment of their own imaginations!
I was then struck by a Forward event on Anti-Racism announced the same day that the Yiddish complaint article was published:
https://forward.com/culture/458448/december-1-anti-racism-the-solution-or-part-of-the-problem/
Here is a description of the event:
In the wake of the George Floyd murder, the call for racial justice and equality has become amplified and increasingly widespread across the nation. One solution has been the “anti-racist” philosophy, popularized by writers like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. But a new “anti-woke” Black intelligentsia has been pushing back against what they say is a racial essentialism baked into the anti-racist theory.
It is critical to note that in the wake of the Yiddish attack on The New Jewish Canon, meaning that there is not enough Ashkenazi culture in the current Jewish discourse, that we get a Forward tutorial on the New Corporate Anti-Racism Industry featuring the au courant ideas of our friends Robin DiAngelo and Black Separatist Ibram X. Kendi:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/c1_dJkCTKhw/m/Zq36INbHBwAJ
When we juxtapose the Yiddish complaint article with the Anti-Racism event, we see the sheer duplicity of Rudoren and her deplorable White Jewish Supremacy and its mind-numbing CHUTZPAH.
“Racial Justice” and “Equality” are relative terms at The Forward, as they have always been.
It is required to include African-Americans there, but not Sephardim.
But let us not be fooled, in spite of all the PC sugarcoating, Rudoren is clearly on the side of the racists who exclude us from the discourse and our rightful place at the Adult Jewish Table, as they continue to whine about their own inclusion and PC orthodoxy.
David Shasha
Yiddish Culture Barely Touched Upon in ‘The New Jewish Canon’
By: Mikhail Krutikov
What were the most important Jewish texts of the last 40 years? What did the Jewish opinion-makers have to say about the most important issues of Jewish survival? Yehuda Kurtzer and Claire Sufrin attempt to answer these questions in a collection of 70 selected documents called “The New Jewish Canon: Ideas and Debates, 1980-2015.”
The editors describe their project as “a kind of search for order in chaos.” They explain that their focus is on the topics of religion, jurisprudence and politics in America and Israel. They did not take into consideration culture, because that would make the question of Jewishness too complicated and their project would have become “unwieldy.”
The goal of the collection is to determine the status of Jewish debates around certain issues such as the role of ritual law in Jewish life and the religious, legal and political aspects of the occupied territories in Israel, Jewish identity in America, the place of the Holocaust in Jewish memory, the search for new modes of spirituality, and so forth. The original documents are printed in short excerpts and are accompanied by scholarly interpretations that explain the significance of each source.
The selected texts reflect a wide diversity of opinions and positions. At the same time, the ideological disposition of the editors is perfectly clear: They sympathize with the liberal wing of Modern Orthodoxy, which is wary of using religion for nationalist purposes.
Each section of the book deals with a specific theme. The chronological order of the documents allows the reader better to understand the development of the relevant debates. The first section is dedicated to Israeli politics, because the editors believe, in fact, that “the new rise of nationalism, especially as it is mapped onto religion, is an essential theme of the contemporary State of Israel for both for its ideological adherents and its critics.” Here one finds strong formulations of both positions, for example, in the public dispute between two distinguished American rabbis and former friends, Meir Kahane and Yitz (Irving) Greenberg, which took place at the Hebrew Institute in Riverdale, New York, in 1988.
Professor Shaul Magid analyzes the logic and rhetoric of each speaker in his analysis of that debate. Kahane had contended, on the basis of religious law, that democracy in Israel is a right for the Jews, not the Arabs. Peace, he argued, will come only in the time of the Messiah, and until then Israel must fight for its existence. Greenberg contended that Israel must remain a democratic state for all citizens and that this is the foundation of its political existence. Magid concludes: “The audience was sympathetic to Greenberg here, but in the end, their own anxiety about a liberal solution in Israel turned them largely back to Kahane.”
The impact of Yiddish culture on American Jewish society is barely discussed in the book, however. The central theme of the section, “History, Memory and Narrative,” is the role of collective memory in American Jewish life. Two chapters do touch on the issue of Yiddish but basically as a language of murdered Jews. Naomi Seidman’s article from 1996 analyzes the difference between the Yiddish and French version of Eli Wiesel’s autobiographical novel Un di velt hot geshvign (“Night” in French and in English). In his commentary on Seidman’s article, Leib Smokler writes that it “called attention to the grand implication of storytelling on our own self-understanding. Storytellers cannot be separated from the stories they tell, the events to which they bear witness.”
The other document that touches on Yiddish is Dr. Dara Horn’s interpretation of Ruth Wisse’s polemical article, “How Not to Remember and How Not to Forget” (2008). Wisse criticizes the exhibit in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for omitting the rise of Israel out of the ruins of European Jewry. Horn’s contention is somewhat different. She criticizes American Holocaust memory for emphasizing the murder of European Jews rather than their lives before the Holocaust. She appeals to the reader: “Consider how many educated American Jews could name three concentration camps — and compare that with how many could name three Yiddish authors?” By selecting these texts by Seidman and Wisse for the “New Jewish Canon,” the message is clear: for the American Jewish intelligentsia, Yiddish is primarily associated with the Holocaust.
The last part of the collection considers Jewish identity and socialization in America from several perspectives — religious, feminist, sociological and political. Here the absence of culture feels like a real omission. It speaks of personal experiences, offering opinions and expertise, and wrangles over various issues. But one doesn’t see how these experiences, opinions, and debates are reflected in cultural creativity.
This is probably the most important departure from convention by the editors of “New Jewish Canon.” Until recently the multilingual Jewish culture truly occupied a distinguished place in Jewish life. But in the opinion of the editors of this new canon, culture is a complicated concept, because of an inability to provide a clear distinction between what is “Jewish” and what isn’t. It would seem, accordingly, that culture is no longer an important component of a contemporary Jewish identity.
From The Forward, November 15, 2020
Tikvah Tablet on the Warpath against Peter Beinart: Yehuda Kurtzer Says Yavneh is a Myth!
It was certain that Tikvah Tablet Alana Newhouse would respond quickly to the Peter Beinart One State controversy.
Here are the two examples of her keen HASBARAH prowess:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/the-jews-of-privilege
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/belief/articles/memory-malpractice-beinart
The first article condescendingly calls Beinart a spoiled Diaspora Jew who has relinquished Zionism because he is living off the fat of the land.
It is not news to us; we have seen it in the recent Tikvah Tablet past, with this gem from Michael Lind attacking Black Lives Matter protesters as spoiled rich kids:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/hub-city-riot-ninjas
But I am far more interested in the second article by Yehuda Kurtzer of the White Jewish Supremacist Shalom Hartman Institute.
The complete article follows this note.
As his bio at the end of the article notes, the racist Kurtzer is co-editor of the new volume, The New Jewish Canon:
https://www.academicstudiespress.com/emunot/the-new-jewish-canon
The complete TOC follows his article.
Naturally, the book comes with the Leora Batnitzky Straussian Seal of Approval:
Anyone interested in contemporary Judaism will benefit from this diverse and dynamic collection. The book’s commentarial structure performs the creation of a new canon of Jewish ideas while also inviting readers to participate in current debates about Jewish politics, history, religion, and identity.
“Diversity” might not really be the right word for it!
One look at the TOC and it is clear that White Jewish Supremacy is not an inaccurate term for who Kurtzer is and what he does. He is fully committed to fully removing Sephardim from the contemporary Jewish discourse. The collection of 70 primary texts are all by Ashkenazim, unless you count Primo Levi and A.B. Yehoshua.
And his only putative Sephardic contributor, one out of scores of Ashkenazim, is our dear friend, the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community self-hater Mijal Bitton, who has in recent times played the role of Uncle Tom for many White Jewish Supremacist institutions and media outlets:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/mijal/davidshasha/L267qR8lPqE/tztAITSGBAAJ
Hartman Bitton has apparently written a Social Science demolition of the SY community, but refuses to make her NYU dissertation public:
https://dissexpress.proquest.com/dxweb/results.html?QryTxt=&By=&Title=&pubnum=13426422
We can only wonder why that might be!
As would be expected, Kurtzer was very careful to leave out any Sephardic intellectual, literary, or religious material from his deplorable book.
The following passage from his tendentious Tikvah Tablet article “Memory Malpractice” is one of those primo giveaway moments I have anxiously been waiting for:
What then is Yavne? Yavne is the one most oft-cited and still-elusive metaphors of the Jewish tradition. Historians have long been skeptical of the Talmud’s account of Yohanan ben Zakkai’s escape from a divided Jerusalem and immediate constituting of the rabbinic order to replace the hegemony of the Temple, because that process of transition probably took closer to a few hundred years, and because the embers of Jewish nationalism didn’t die out quite so quickly, and because there was powerful rhetorical value—centuries later—to retroject the Yavne story as a myth of origins for a rabbinic movement still rising in power.
It appears that Kurtzer is reading the “New Talmudists”:
https://nes.berkeley.edu/Web_Boyarin/BoyarinArticles/98%20Tale%20of%20Two%20Synods%20(2000).pdf
He is certainly not reading Jose Faur and Emmanuel Levinas and the Jewish Post-Modernism!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1NQdm28qvvXQnNIeEJ3aGdSSjQ/view?ths=true
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XWNPnJU7ZjavXKNzSH8d3suz3a7L89UqHyf4ISlwgTU/edit
Jewish Humanism is apparently not for him.
And Sephardim even less.
But he is very much in with the “New Talmudism,” which serves his atavistic purposes quite adequately.
I have addressed the very 19th century German Historicism and its nihilistic values in my article on Timothy Snyder, Jewish Humanism, and Tyranny:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LPbxxP_kkV536tPTvMpsUE9feBgoBSa7QEP8iXXDHIk/edit
In addition, I detailed the various anti-rabbinic, neo-Christian academic trends in my introduction to the Maimonides Resources special newsletter:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qihywNGjZbuPEY4-cbQ1g02-nOoaCL2Ug0G2qZ12t64/edit
The academics have taken out their Anti-Semitic Wellhausian scalpel to the Talmudic tradition in order to complete the job that the Protestant Documentary Hypothesis began with its vicious evisceration of the Hebrew Bible.
The aggressive Zionist Kurtzer proudly allies himself to the deniers of the Yavneh story, as he calls it a “myth.”
Indeed, I am wondering whether or not Kurtzer sees the racist and ethnocentric underpinnings of Zionism as a “myth” as well?
https://www.amazon.com/Founding-Myths-Israel-Zeev-Sternhell/dp/0691009678
Is he familiar with the work of Benedict Anderson?
In Anderson’s classic 1983 book Imagined Communities he dealt with problem of Modernity and atavism:
Nationalism is a modern phenomenon, even though many people think of their nations as ancient and eternal; it is universal (everyone has a nation), even though each nation is supposedly utterly distinctive; and it is powerful (so much so that people will die for their countries), even though on close inspection it is hard to define.
It is a theme that we see expanded in Jonathan Boyarin’s brilliant 1990 article “Hegel’s Zionism,” which identifies that very German Positivism as the source of the “ancient” ideas of the Eastern European Zionists:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lSRWr_HxyPFCH1aoUDx5sWW7qJFlloCk/view?ths=true
And while Kurtzer might be diligently reading Daniel Boyarin and his other Hartman colleague Christine Hayes, it appears that he does not know the late Ze’ev Sternhell and his seminal 1997 book The Founding Myths of Israel. Indeed, the very first chapter of that classic work is dedicated to analyzing the Zionist “Negation of the Diaspora”; exactly what Kurtzer is up to in his attack on Beinart.
Myth, it appears, is in the eye of the beholder:
We have now a Jerusalem struggling in its nascence since its rebirth—not a society irredeemably corrupt that it needs to be reborn again. What we need now is not Yavne. If Beinart is to draw a more apt historical analogy to his own convictions, I would suggest he look instead to Bar Kochba. Yes, Bar Kochba! Roughly 70 years after the destruction of the Temple and the origin of the Yavne myth, with nostalgia for Temple times still alive and the new alternatives still struggling to take root, the Jewish people got to relitigate the original question—to revision a new Jewish commonwealth.
Kurtzer denies Yohanan Ben Zakkai, but is promoting Bar Kochba militancy!
Or is he?
Meantime, at the time of Bar Kochba, all the rational and reasonable people thought that his little war against Rome and his rebooting of Jewish nationalism was a bad idea. Yavne was imperfect, but it represented a start, a foundation; the continued attachment to a road not taken was in its own right a utopian attachment that was actually undermining the very collective commitment to the existing project that needed the Jewish people behind it to succeed. By this point Yavne wasn’t even in Yavne anymore! The rabbinic movement was iterating itself through the Galilee; it couldn’t ultimately hold water against Bar Kochba’s tantalizing, morally coherent vision that was the original vision, the one that got away.
But relitigating the historical question in real life was not charming or thrilling the way that reading alternate history sometimes inclines us to believe. The Bar Kochba rebellion was perhaps the single greatest disaster in Jewish political history. The sages—those of the bourgeois, Isaiah Berlin, liberal Zionist politics; the incrementalists, the believers in the slow pace of change, the architects of the Yavne vision; the losers in the debate with the Bar Kochbas, desperate in their effort not to revisit the past or to invite retribution—the sages describe the bloodshed as so severe and grotesque that it spilled to the sea for miles and miles. A horse sunk to its nostrils in the blood that was shed in the Bar Kochba rebellion. Thank God for Yavne, in retrospect; it never would have been able to get off the ground again, without that head start.
Kurtzer’s PILPUL is indeed quite twisted: He looks to Bar Kochba for inspiration, then calls him a “disaster,” but continues to attack Liberal Zionists like Martin Buber and Beinart. He does not at all see the irony in presenting Yavneh Rabbinic Pacifism as the necessary prelude to Zionist Spartan Militarism.
It is clear that the “New Talmudism,” as I have argued, is part and parcel of the vicious attack on rabbinic tradition, which is being used to promote the most reactionary form of Zionist messianic eschatology.
At a time when we need to look more carefully at the differences between Torah Judaism and Secular Zionism, the HASBARAH crowd is doubling-down on their racism and Jewish ethnocentrism. The idea that the Sephardic tradition might have some part to play in the process is not even a possibility.
And that is the Tikvah Tablet way!
David Shasha
Memory Malpractice: Peter Beinart, the Future of Israel, and the Meaning of Yavne
By: Yehuda Kurtzer
“One state” versus “two states” as the aspirational goal for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is back in the news again. This is not because there is actually movement that might make either of these final status arrangements very likely in the imminent future; in fact, the Israeli government’s hinted-at annexation plans appear to be on hold, and the only thing that looks inevitable is the perpetuation of a bad status quo. It is back in the news, though, because another American Jewish intellectual—this time, Peter Beinart—has surfaced to tell of his own political conversion from believing in two states for Israelis and Palestinians, to becoming a supporter of a single binational state.
Beinart’s essay, as principally intended for Jewish audiences, uses the allusion to Yavne—the birthplace of a new rabbinic Judaism in the first century—as the rhetorical conceit to frame his argument. It may seem a minor quibble to contest this metaphor as the anchor of a response; after all, the core of Beinart’s essay is the political future and the enduring suffering of a Palestinian people under indefinite occupation, and no Israeli political will to do anything otherwise; these are challenges with deeper moral urgency than the rhetoric that surrounds it. It is an afflicting and indicting reality for Jews and Zionists of our generation. We watch, often helplessly, as the story of a state that inhabits a huge place in our identities and in our consciousness seals its own failed future with either annexation or creeping indefinite occupation, against the better judgment of all its military and security establishment, and against the moral judgment of nearly the entire international community—including many of its beloved friends.
But the metaphor matters more than it may seem. In one of the most striking giveaways of the whole essay, Beinart admits that the political hero around which his new vision for Israel-Palestine is built—Ayman Odeh, the leader of the Joint List—still believes in two states. (The casual dismissal of Odeh’s actual politics in exchange for making him a metaphor is breathtaking in its own right.) I often criticize the organized Jewish community for maintaining narrower boundaries for legitimate dissent about Israel and its policies than exist within the actual Israeli Knesset. It is thus an extraordinary claim to say that two states have failed because of the failure of political leadership—even though the overwhelming consensus of the rational and reasonable still believe in it as the only viable long-term vision for security and dignity for both Israelis and Palestinians—and to call on as its replacement a position with zero plausibility among the electorate who will need to put it in place, and who will be most implicated by it. So it is true: We are not really talking about politics at all. We are talking about storytelling, the big narrative at play; and what it means for all of us—most especially the author—to be a character in it. Israel-Palestine is always infuriatingly this way: It is hard to tell when we are talking politics but are really talking about history, memory, and narrative, and when the other way around. I am certain, for instance, that the Palestinians certainly don’t envision their future in reference to a dusty coastal village from the first century.
What then is Yavne? Yavne is the one most oft-cited and still-elusive metaphors of the Jewish tradition. Historians have long been skeptical of the Talmud’s account of Yohanan ben Zakkai’s escape from a divided Jerusalem and immediate constituting of the rabbinic order to replace the hegemony of the Temple, because that process of transition probably took closer to a few hundred years, and because the embers of Jewish nationalism didn’t die out quite so quickly, and because there was powerful rhetorical value—centuries later—to retroject the Yavne story as a myth of origins for a rabbinic movement still rising in power. But we can leave actual history aside, and talk about memory; that’s the terrain we are in, the use of the myths of the Jewish past to lace our politics with authenticity, to embolden the change agents of the present to believe that they are not merely endorsing an implausible and heretical politics but to position them as the iconoclasts of Jewish history. Not the bad ones, the false messiahs; the good ones, the sages, the ones who change the present away from the corrupt past and toward an uncertain, morally superior future.
It is so strange, in an essay that tries to convince us that if the State of Israel willingly changes itself from being a Jewish state to a binational state it will not have to endure violence along the way, and in an essay that so openly gaslights contemporary Jewry about our recent traumas as to argue that survivalist fears are merely post-traumatic stress, that Beinart adduces a metaphor for a new vision for Israel that requires envisioning the previous version in ashes. The talmudic rabbis themselves knew how audacious and even ruthless was Yohanan ben Zakkai’s request: Rabbi Yosef, or maybe it was Rabbi Akiva, is shocked. How, in a position of opportunity, does the sage not beg for the Jewish people? The answer is feeble, and telling: In that moment, Yohanan ben Zakkai took what he could get. Yavne, even for its descendants, required the mass death, dislocation, and—above all—disappointment for the Jewish people, the symbol twinned to Jerusalem of what could not endure, and what had to replace it. Is this the level that the first Jewish commonwealth in 2,000 years has reached? Is this its fate, after these 53 years of disappointments?
The only way the metaphor makes sense, truly, is to see that it is not the current State of Israel that Beinart envisions in the coffin escaping Jerusalem: It is he himself, and the school of former Zionists (mostly in Diaspora) who have lost faith in the project. Isn’t Yavne Diasporic, after all? The metaphor relies on its protagonist and author seeing everyone else and their politics irredeemably corrupt; and seeing as his only choice the decision to not work through any of their politics because of their current implausibility, and to opt instead for a different orthodoxy with no political viability, but with a self-affirming integrity. It is a conversion story, and a story of departure. And while I empathize with Beinart’s struggle—to be a liberal Zionist today is to feel often ashamed, and frequently embarrassed—I still find it perverse to see in modern Israel-Palestine, site of an irreconcilable conflict and a thousand conflicting narratives, the irredeemable corruption of the ancient Temple; and to see one’s own escape from its failed politics as the pathway to an altogether new Zionism.
Here’s the great tragic irony of all of this: It is fair game for us as modern Jews to imagine new Yavnes 2,000 years after the first Yavne. But this particular attempt to claim it, to see in this generation the moment for a radical rebirth of the Jewish future, ignores the fact that we are still of the first generations in thousands of years to experience anything close to the radical turnabout of Yavne that transformed Jewish history, culture, political destiny, and the very meaning of Judaism itself—namely, the very creation of the State of Israel itself in 1948. For Yavne to be Yavne, as Beinart acknowledges, requires that the historical moment reflect a wholesale departure from a thousand years of Jewish precedent. Isn’t statehood and sovereignty after 2,000 years of Diaspora and dispossession what we have in mind? And not, perhaps, the failure over a 30-year span of the particular mechanics of the two-state solution to take root in political feasibility?
No: For contemporary Jews, Jewish sovereignty is our Yavne, as hard as that may be to fathom. As the original Yavne didn’t end Jewish nationalism, our modern Yavne did not draw to a close Diasporism; as the original Yavne innovated a new Judaism for new political realities while sustaining the memory of the former, our modern Yavne has transformed the very idea of Judaism in ways that many of us struggle to recognize. Even Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the patron saint of the post-Zionists and a far more trenchant critic of Israeli nationalism than any of us, recognized that Zionism in the form of self-determination and sovereignty was the great revolutionary turnabout of modern Jewish history. As much as he detested the religious apparatus associated with a Jewish state, for Leibowitz the fundamental project of the state was that it constituted our “being fed up with being ruled by goyim.” Sovereignty was a revolution; and a challenge, and an opportunity. And the future of the project would depend on the bookshelf and the policies that would turn that opportunity into a referendum for the moral character of the Jewish people.
This has been, and must remain, the impossible hill for liberal Zionism to try to live on. Zionism’s sine qua non is some expression of sovereign self-rule that translates self-determination into a framework that departs from Diasporism. On top of that commitment, as its refinement and its goal, is this unprecedented opportunity for the Jewish people to shape its existential destiny. Yavne was not the relinquishing of power, it was a power play; it has happened in our lifetime, and now the Talmuds need to be written. The next phase of our new rabbinic project is to take sovereignty, power, and the control of a public square seriously, and to figure out how to religiously, authentically, and morally run a society on those foundations. Now is not a moment to escape that challenge.
It is telling that Beinart acknowledges that nothing beyond an area code organizes the people of Israel and Palestine under one cultural or national umbrella. This is, of course, because of Yavne as well: The birth of the State of Israel in 1948 did not merely produce the apparatus of a nation-state with dispassionate political infrastructure. It also inaugurated, for the Jewish people, a new and robust national and cultural identity that takes strength from the state and grants meaning back to it as well. I fear that the fixation on Israel’s political failures and the attempt to displace its political culture with a framework of equality—not advancing the cause of equality through the state but replacing the state with another version—is precisely because too many of us cannot access that proprietary cultural-national heritage, emblematic of the state and one of its Yavne miracles, in its native idiom.
It is also ironic that Beinart uses the birthplace of Jewish pluralism to make a case for such radical division in and among the Jewish people. Shaye Cohen has argued that Yavne represents the domestication of Jewish disagreement, in embedding pre-70 sectarianism into a system that prevents its dissolution of the people. Jewish pluralism, in any reading, is an instrument for Jewish peoplehood—a vehicle to sustain an unwieldy people with deep political and ideological disagreements with one another. I understand when people want to let go of pluralism because they feel it is a moral discourse that suppresses dissent and is too silent in the face of injustice. But to claim Jewish pluralism as the foundation for staking a political claim that stands against the overwhelming majority of Jews, as an instrument for sowing division?
Perhaps the most egregious sacrifice Beinart makes here, however, is that of the Jewish people’s suffering: from the past, and in the future. The Jews who remembered the first century—even, or especially those, who embraced revolutionary thinkers like Yohanan ben Zakkai, and went along with a vision for a new Judaism—more than remembered the catastrophe that preceded their own revolution. They embedded the consciousness of what they lost into the Judaism that emerged. Yes, the Holocaust changed the modern Jewish consciousness about the right not just to self-determination in a homeland, but also to sovereignty, and for the need for control of our political and military destiny. Treating this as trauma to be overcome—claiming that we have entirely foisted genocidal interests on Palestinians because of the Holocaust, that we have nothing to fear about a radical transformation of the Jewish political future—misreads the Jewish relationship to history even as it paternalistically dismisses Palestinian agency for what Palestinians might do in pursuit of their own political future. We Jews live history; we remember it; we are transformed by it.
Meantime, at the time of Bar Kochba, all the rational and reasonable people thought that his little war against Rome and his rebooting of Jewish nationalism was a bad idea. Yavne was imperfect, but it represented a start, a foundation; the continued attachment to a road not taken was in its own right a utopian attachment that was actually undermining the very collective commitment to the existing project that needed the Jewish people behind it to succeed. By this point Yavne wasn’t even in Yavne anymore! The rabbinic movement was iterating itself through the Galilee; it couldn’t ultimately hold water against Bar Kochba’s tantalizing, morally coherent vision that was the original vision, the one that got away.
But relitigating the historical question in real life was not charming or thrilling the way that reading alternate history sometimes inclines us to believe. The Bar Kochba rebellion was perhaps the single greatest disaster in Jewish political history. The sages—those of the bourgeois, Isaiah Berlin, liberal Zionist politics; the incrementalists, the believers in the slow pace of change, the architects of the Yavne vision; the losers in the debate with the Bar Kochbas, desperate in their effort not to revisit the past or to invite retribution—the sages describe the bloodshed as so severe and grotesque that it spilled to the sea for miles and miles. A horse sunk to its nostrils in the blood that was shed in the Bar Kochba rebellion. Thank God for Yavne, in retrospect; it never would have been able to get off the ground again, without that head start.
Simply put: There is only one way through this story of indefinite occupation and an enduring conflict, and it includes the validation of the story of the Jewish people, which includes its transformation by Zionism in the 20th century. Beinart makes light in the opening of his essay of those Jews whose Judaism is premised on pro-Israelism; I agree that this can become thin, and coercive. But it is not crazy to me that the single most transformative event of Jewish history since Yavne would have a lingering, commanding effect on many of us. We invalidate our own history and our own story at our peril, especially if we do so in order to validate the story of Palestinians.
This is a further irony: The counterhistory, the revolutionary turnabout that Beinart seeks, remedies the Jewish past and present in order to make room for the story of Palestinians, suggesting that the two—in their current and authentic forms—are irreconcilable! How can we envision a shared future for Israelis and Palestinians when we have to suppress and transform one in order to accommodate the other? Two states, for all their failings, grant each people a right to their story and a right to their destiny.
Beinart’s second-to-last paragraph is his truest. I believe deeply that our redemption as the Jewish people, and the integrity of our national story, cannot be complete with the continued oppression of the Palestinian people, the denial of their history and their future, and with the prevention of their redemption. But the only way forward is through our Zionism, and not in its flattening. We are the inheritors of a revolutionary moment of Jewish history, the third generation since Yavne. I am not prepared to allow today to be Yavne and in so doing to make 1948 into hurban for the Jewish people, as it was for Palestinians. Perhaps our best wisdom, still, is one of the key intellectual legacies of the sages of Yavne themselves: When two claim a garment, and both can validate their claims, and neither can be falsified: Let them bear witness, and let them divide it.
Yehuda Kurtzer is president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, and co-editor (with Claire Sufrin) of the forthcoming The New Jewish Canon.
From Tablet magazine, July 10, 2020
Appendix: The New Jewish Canon Table of Contents
Introduction: “The State of Jewish Ideas: Towards a New Jewish Canon”
I. Jewish Politics and the Public Square
1. Michael
Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, 1985
Essay: William Galston
2. George
Steiner, “Our Homeland, the Text,” 1985; Judith Butler, “Judith Butler’s
Remarks to Brooklyn College on BDS,” 2013
Essay: Julie Cooper
3. Jonathan
Woocher, Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews,
1986
Essay: Sylvia Fishman
4. Benny
Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949,
1987; and The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem
Revisited, 2004;Ari Shavit, “Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with
Benny Morris,” 2004 and “Lydda, 1948,” 2013
Essay: Daniel Kurtzer
5. Irving
(Yitz) Greenberg vs. Meir Kahane, Public Debate at the Hebrew Institute of
Riverdale, 1988
Essay: Shaul Magid
6. Yeshayahu
Leibowitz, Eliezer Goldman (ed.), Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish
State, 1992
Essay: Joshua Shanes
7. Israeli
Supreme Court Part 1: Israeli Knesset Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, 1992;
Aharon Barak, “A Judge on Judging: The Role of a Supreme Court in a Democracy,”
January 2002
Essay: Yigal Mersel
8. Aharon
Lichtenstein, “On the Murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin z”l,” 1995
Essay: David Wolkenfeld
9. Aviezer
Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism,
1996
Essay: Yehuda Magid
10. Israeli
Supreme Court Part 2: The Israeli Supreme Court sitting as the High Court of
Justice, Horev v. Minister of Transportation, 1997; The Israeli Supreme Court
sitting as the High Court of Justice: Baruch Marzel v. Jerusalem District
Police Commander, Mr. Aharon Franco, 2002
Essay: Donniel Hartman
11. Samuel
G. Freedman, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry,
2000
Essay: Noam Pianko
12. Breaking
the Silence Testimonies, Founded in 2004
Essay: Sarah Anne Minkin
13. Steven
M. Cohen and Jack Wertheimer, “Whatever Happened to the Jewish People?,” 2006
Essay: Erica Brown
14. Yitzhak
Shapira and Yosef Elitzur, Torat HaMelekh, 2009
Essay: Hillel Ben-Sasson
15. Moshe
Halbertal, “The Goldstone Illusion,” 2009
Essay: Elana Stein Hain
16.
Peter Beinart, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” 2010
Essay: Sara Yael Hirschhorn
17. Daniel
Gordis, “When Balance Becomes Betrayal” and Sharon Brous, “Lowering
the Bar,” 2012
Essay: Yehuda Kurtzer
18. Matti
Friedman, “An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth,” 2014
Essay: Rachel Fish
II. History, Memory and Narrative
1. David
Hartman, “Auschwitz or Sinai?,” 1982
Essay: Rachel Sabath Beit Halachmi
2. Yosef
Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, 1982
Essay: Alexander Kaye
3. Emil
Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 1982
Essay: Benjamin Pollock
4. Robert
M. Cover, “The Supreme Court, 1982 Term—Foreword: Nomosand
Narrative,” 1983
Essay: Christine Hayes
5. Kahan
Commission (Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Events at the Refugee
Camps in Beirut), 1983
Essay: Yehuda Kurtzer
6. Amos
Oz, In the Land of Israel, 1983
Essay: Wendy Zierler
7. David
Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History, 1986
Essay: Judah Bernstein
8. Elie
Wiesel, Acceptance Speech, on the Occasion of the Award of the Nobel Peace
Prize in Oslo, 1986
Essay: Claire E. Sufrin
9. Primo
Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 1986
Essay: Sarah Cushman
10. Irving
(Yitz) Greenberg, “The Third Great Cycle of Jewish History,” 1987
Essay: Joshua Feigelson
11. Deborah
Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust, 1993; Yaffa Eliach, There
Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok,
1998
Essay: Yehuda Kurtzer
12. Haym
Soloveitchik, “Rupture and Reconstruction,” 1994
Essay: Yehuda Kurtzer
13. Naomi
Seidman, “Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage,” 1996
Essay: Erin Leib Smokler
14. Dabru
Emet, New York Times, 2000
Essay: Marcie Lenk
15. Jonathan
Sarna, American Judaism: A History, 2004
Essay: Marc Dollinger
16.
David Weiss Halivni, Breaking the Tablets: Jewish Theology After the
Shoah,2007
Essay: Daniel H. Weiss
17. Ruth
Wisse, “How Not to Remember and How Not to Forget,” 2008
Essay: Dara Horn
18. Yossi
Klein Halevi, Like Dreamers, 2013
Essay: Hannah Kober
III. Religion and Religiosity
1. Joseph
Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 1983
Essay: Shlomo Zuckier
2. Yehoshua
Yeshaya Neuwirth, Shemirath Shabbath Kehilchathah, 1984
Essay: David Bashevkin
3. David
Hartman, A Living Covenant: The Innovative Spirit in Traditional
Judaism, 1985
Essay: David Ellenson
4.
The Complete Artscroll Siddur, 1984
Essay: David Zvi Kalman
5. Neil
Gillman, Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew,
1990; Eugene Borowitz, Renewing the Covenant: A Theology for the
Postmodern Jew, 1991
Essay: Michael Marmur
6. Rachel
Adler “In Your Blood, Live: Re-visions of a Theological Purity,” 1993
Essay: Gail Labovitz
7. Rodger
Kamenetz, The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet’s Rediscovery of Jewish
Identity in Buddhist India, 1994
Essay: Or Rose
8. Avivah
Gottleib Zornberg, Genesis: The Beginning of Desire, 1995
Essay: Shira Hecht-Koller
9. Abraham
Joshua Heschel, Susannah Heschel (ed.), Moral Grandeur and Spiritual
Audacity, 1996
Essay: William Plevan
10. Noam
Zion and David Dishon, A Different Night: The Family Participation
Haggadah, 1997
Essay: Emily Filler
11. Mendel
Shapiro, “Qeri’at HaTorah by Women: A Halakhic Analysis,” 2001
Essay: Tova Hartman
12. Jonathan
Sacks, Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations,
London: Continuum,2002
Essay: Michal Raucher
13. Rav
Shagar, Broken Vessels, 2004
Essay: Tomer Persico
14. Arthur
Green, Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition, 2010;
Daniel Landes, “Hidden Master,” 2010; Arthur Green and Daniel Landes, “God,
Torah, and Israel: An Exchange,” 2011
Essay: Samuel Hayim Brody
15. Elie
Kaunfer, Empowered Judaism: What Independent Minyanim Can Teach Us
About Building Vibrant Jewish Communities, 2010
Essay: Shawn Landres and Joshua Avedon
IV. Identities and Communities
1. Menachem
Mendel Schneerson, Letter to the Jewish Community of Teaneck, 1981
Essay: Jonathan Sarna
2. Blu
Greenberg, On Women and Judaism: A View from Tradition, 1981
Essay: Rachel Gordan
3. Harold
Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, 1981; Alan Lew, This
is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of
Transformation, 2003
Essay: Joshua Ladon
4. Evelyn
Torton Beck (ed.), Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, 1982;
Susannah Heschel (ed.), On Being a Jewish Feminist, 1983
Essay: Claire E. Sufrin
5. Paul
Cowan with Rachel Cowan, Mixed Blessings: Overcoming the Stumbling
Blocks in an Interfaith Marriage, 1988
Essay: Samira Mehta
6. Judith
Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective,
1990
Essay: Judith Rosenbaum
7. Letty
Cottin Pogrebin, Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in
America, 1991
Essay: Arielle Levites
8. Barry
Kosmin, “Highlights of the CJF 1990 National Jewish Population Survey,”
1991; “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” 2013
Essay: Mijal Bitton
9. Joseph
Telushkin, Jewish Literacy, 1991; Paula Hyman, “Who is an
Educated Jew?” 2002; Vanessa Ochs, “Ten Jewish Sensibilities,” 2003
Essay: Hannah Pressman
10. Yaakov
Levado, “Gayness and God: Wrestlings of an Orthodox Rabbi,” 1993
Essay: Zev Farber
11.
Leonard Fein, “Smashing Idols and Other Prescriptions for Jewish Continuity,”
1994
Essay: Aryeh Cohen
12. Steven
M. Cohen and Arnold M. Eisen, The Jew Within: Self, Family, and
Community in America, 2000
Essay: Alan Brill
13. A.
B. Yehoshua, “The Meaning of Homeland,” 2006
Essay: James Loeffler
14.
Elliot N. Dorff, Daniel S. Nevins, and Avram I. Reisner, “Homosexuality, Human
Dignity, and Halakhah: A Combined Responsum for the Committee on Jewish Law and
Standards,” 2006
Essay: Jane Kanarek
15. Noah
Feldman “Orthodox Paradox,” 2007; Jay Lefkowitz, “The Rise of Social Orthodoxy:
A Personal Account,” 2014
Essay: Elli Fischer
16. Tamar
Biala and Nechama Weingarten-Mintz (eds.), Dirshuni: Midrashei Nashim,
2009
Essay: Sarah Mulhern
17. Leon
Wieseltier, “Language, Identity, and the Scandal of American Jewry,” 2011
Essay: Jon Levisohn
18. Ruth
Calderon, Inaugural Knesset Speech, “The Heritage of All Israel,” 2013
Essay: Yossi Klein Halevi
19. Rick Jacobs, “The Genesis of Our Future,” 2013
Essay: Dan Friedman
What Should Go in the New Jewish Canon?
By: Yehuda Kurtzer and Claire Sufrin
If periods in Jewish history can be described in reference to major themes, then contemporary Judaism deserves its own place in the timeline, and we are bidden to characterize and understand its defining ideas. Contemporary Judaism constitutes something of a paradox. On the one hand, the late 20th and early 21st centuries witness a great Jewish “settling down” after the ruptures, revolutions, disruptions, and dislocations of the mid-20th century. The majority of Jews in the world are found now split between Israel and North America and experiencing a new Jewish economic and political stability based in remarkable social, economic, and political conditions. Patterns of migration over the last three centuries, the destruction of Eastern European Jewry in the Holocaust, and the mass exodus of Middle Eastern Jewry to Israel since its founding, have resulted in the overwhelming majority of world Jewry now living between these twin poles. One dominant story of contemporary Jewishness is thus a story of at-home-ness both in Israel and America.
On the other hand, this very stability—in demographics, geography, and relative security—has enabled the flourishing of new diversities in ideological and political foments within these two primary sites of Jewish community. Stability generates entropy. And as a result, Jewish life in North America and Israel is witnessing large-scale and fast-moving change in the realms of identity (who is a Jew?), ideology (what is Jewishness?), and infrastructure (what are the institutions of Jewish life in and through which Judaism is lived, studied, and practiced?).
In short: We are living in a period of the mass production and proliferation of Jewish ideas. Even while Jewish life is incredibly diverse, it is also increasingly unstable. While it can be frightening for some, mass instability in the structures of Jewish community and identity enables and exhibits new forms of Jewish expression: some that are entirely new, and many that constitute the remaking of the textual and ideological traditions inherited from the past. In this process, the nature of Jewish authority is being transformed, both within the formal power structures of established institutions as well as in less formally structured communities that can also produce (and control) what constitutes authoritative Jewish knowledge.
Meantime, the modes and means of the production of ideas are changing dramatically as well. The digital revolution has created new and cluttered public squares: American, Israeli, and Jewish. The mass culture of blogging has a democratizing quality to it, as it shortens the distance between writer and reader and the time between the inception or incubation of an idea and its publication. The same culture also risks diminishing the quality and meaning of the written word, and certainly eliminates the implication that publication necessarily grants or recognizes authority. And the possibility for misrepresentation and falsehood—either deliberate or accidental—has dramatically increased. This means that the structures of authority and authenticity are teetering at the same time as there are many new claimants to authority and authenticity, and this contributes to both the calcification and reification of structures of authority in some parts of the Jewish world, and the total collapse of authority structures in others.
The New Jewish Canon is an effort both to acknowledge the revolutionary times in which we are living and to offer a conceptual roadmap to make sense of all these changes. It combines some of the best writing from the late 20th and early 21st centuries with perspectives drawn from some of the best scholars of Jewish thought today. Together, these writings continue an ages-old conversation on what it might mean to be Jewish, to live a Jewish life, to be part of a Jewish community, or to identify with the Jewish people.
In studying the Jewish past, we often seek to identify the tension between continuity, on the one hand, and change, on the other. The discipline of studying Jewish ideological and behavioral trends is also pulled in two directions, between what “Judaism” is said to be and what Jewish people actually do. But the central story of contemporary Jewish life appears to be one of fast-moving change, which departs from the past both in its relationship to time and the pace of change, and in challenging our attempts to understand Jewish life holistically. This contrast between the past and the present helps shape some of what we see as dominant contemporary ideas, as Jews struggle with how the pace of change is influencing the production of ideas and the evolution of communities; and as we witness implicit contests between the sociologists, the historians, and the philosophers on the authority and capacity to best describe and understand the present moment.
From the standpoint of Jewish intellectual history, it is also hard to classify and understand the most recent period. Are we still in the period known as modernity? Have we entered postmodernity? Or perhaps we are further still, in a post-postmodernity? Do any of these terms help us to make sense of what we see before us? Older anthologies of modern Jewish thought—whether focused on post-Holocaust Jewish thought, the Jewish political tradition, the history of Halacha, or other themes—often end in the 1970s. They tend to focus on the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and the birth of the State of Israel, and in so doing they confine the story of Jewish thought to the mid-20th century and its particular challenges. The ideas of the late 20th and early 21st centuries still entail a rethinking of Judaism prompted by these twin massive historical events, to be sure, and they thus represent a form of continuity with the thematic centerpieces of the recent past; but they also demonstrate a shift to wider theaters of politics, law, theology, and religious practice that imply some rupture and some opening of new conceptual possibilities for Israel and the Jewish people. The canon of Jewish ideas continues to develop and grow relative to new challenges faced by the Jewish people. Enough time has elapsed—enough new ideas have been articulated—that it is time to expand the canon more formally with a volume like this.
A canon project represents a kind of search for order in chaos. Like all other forms of boundary-drawing, it bears witness to an underlying culture of complexity and anxiety. It is hegemonic, to be sure, but maybe—if conducted with transparency—it can still be useful. Forming and naming a canon is also an act of authority, imposing a false superstructure atop a set of disparate ideas and disconnected written pieces, and of course also drawing exclusionary lines that separate—whether intentionally or more arbitrarily—between what counts as “in” and what counts as “out.” The process of canon formation combines the descriptive and the prescriptive: Some pieces find themselves in the canon because they are already known to be “canonical,” having acquired value from their widespread familiarity or because they are considered foundational to the emergence of later ideas and/or to shaping the discourse. Other texts find their way into the canon because the canon-formers, whether consciously or not, are making explicit decisions to elevate their status, to hold them alongside those texts that are more universally acknowledged as canonical, and in doing so to change the arc of an intellectual history. The postmodern canon-former differs from the canon-formers of the past only in the self-awareness and transparency through which this unscientific exercise is undertaken. And as with any such exercise, we completely anticipate the most obvious criticism of this project: why this and not that?
Though the term “canonization” has religious connotations, our choice to include the work of any particular scholar or writer in the selection of primary texts is not an endorsement, morally or otherwise, of them, their ideas, or their actions. Our goal in this book is to capture the dominant ideas and debates of the period 1980-2015. At times this has meant including the work of individuals who are known to have committed bad acts in their personal and/or professional lives or whose ideas we personally find offensive or even dangerous. In some cases, these opinions or actions are plainly essential to why the ideas were important enough to merit inclusion, as with authors who promoted violence or advanced radical or polarizing ideas that had major ramifications for Jewish and/or Israeli society. In other cases, there is probative value in juxtaposing the bad acts of the author with their ideas, and some of our commentators do just this. In yet other instances, it is more challenging to draw a direct line between the bad acts of individuals and the substance of their ideas or their popularity as authors with lay and scholarly audiences. In all cases, we struggled with the impossibility of separating the artist from the work. This “tarnished legacy” problem is not unique to us but beguiles the history of literature, art, philosophy, and more. For our book, the stakes of this debate are intensified by the fact that we are working with living subjects, whose legacies are not fully established; and in a political and ideological climate where the stakes of these choices are ripe for contention.
But beyond the behaviors of our authors, the choices to include—to “canonize” this text or that—was a loaded exercise. To take a previous moment in Jewish history as a point of comparison: The creation of the biblical canon by the early rabbis, and then the rabbinic canon by later rabbis, constituted careful sets of choices from within a vast sea of biblical forebears, Second Temple literature, and the literary output of these rabbis themselves. The rabbis were making choices, sometimes self-evidently and with unapologetic self-awareness (as in Mishnah Yadayim 3:5). We can speculate as to the political circumstances or ideological dispositions animating certain choices made by the rabbis about what belonged in the Bible or in the Talmud, though we are not fully privy to the larger cultural context in which they worked and how it might have circumscribed the range of their own canonizing power. At the same time, as several historians have demonstrated, rabbinic power was not entirely the product of their own making, but emerged as a result of their positioning within their particular societies, which was enabled by imperial structures. That is, the rabbis were also aided in the forming of their canons by history and political circumstances beyond their own control.
Canon formation is always an interplay of hegemonic decisions made by the canonizers with purpose and intent, and forces beyond the canonizers that they themselves might not even be able to see. To think that we can escape such forces in our own time would be an act of foolish hubris. But to refuse to canonize would be to submit entirely to these forces. And so we proceeded in our task with both humility and confidence. We are humble because we anticipate that readers of later generations will see things in our choices that we cannot ourselves see; we are confident because we believe our work will be meaningful even to its very first readers. While there is only one Bible and only two Talmuds, perhaps this book might in some small way shape the Jewish identities and ideologies of Jews who will follow us. Time will tell.
The material gathered in the New Jewish Canon is organized chronologically within a few major themes that characterize the zeitgeist: Jewish Politics and the Public Square; History, Memory, and Narrative; Religion and Religiosity; and Identities and Communities. By organizing Jewish thought into these categories, we seek to enable the reader to trace the conceptual evolution of specific issues that continue to matter in our own time.
The central theme in Jewish Politics and the Public Square is the shift, as has become clear in the past decade, of the State of Israel functioning as an organizing force in American Jewish life toward it becoming the most powerful disorganizing force, as demonstrated today in both the widespread narrative of the “distancing” of American Jews from Israel, as well as in the ways that Israel serves as the site for intracommunal conflict in the American Jewish community. At the same time, politics have long served as the dominant discourse of the Israeli public square, with prevailing questions about the character of its democracy, the fight for religious pluralism, and the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians. The new rise of nationalism, especially as it is mapped onto religion, is an essential theme of the contemporary State of Israel for both its ideological adherents and its critics. Violence and the threat of violence—both corollaries of power—course throughout this section, whether in the costs of occupation, in the acts and ideologies of internecine zealotry, or even in the emergence of a drumbeat hostility that now characterizes public discourse on Israel. And Israeli law also emerges as a critical instrument to understand contemporary debates about the nature of Israeli democracy and its applicability to questions of enabling or choosing between different visions of Jewishness in the Israeli public square, and the applicability of Israeli and international law as part of Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank. Our volume includes several examples and critical analysis of the enormous legacy of Chief Justice Aharon Barak of Israel’s Supreme Court, a tenure which raised significant enduring controversy in Israeli society around the question of judicial activism.
The Jewish conversation about History, Memory, and Narrative has been heavily informed by Yosef Yerushalmi’s articulation of a distinction between the first two terms in his book Zakhor and has played out in the unfolding interpretation of the meaning of recent history for contemporary Jews. Here we find major developments in the culture of preservation of the legacy of the Holocaust. This includes analysis of the principal architects and exhibits of this culture as well as their discontents, and the emerging awareness of all the ways that contemporary Judaism shatters the legacy of the inherited and mimetic past even as it desperately tries to preserve it. Here too we encounter the twin legacies of the emergence of the American and Israeli experiences from the precariousness of the previous century, and the efforts—some still nascent—to try to define some coherent narratives and leitmotifs that tell its story most effectively.
In the section on Religion and Religiosity, using Martin Buber’s terms differentiating between the lived experience of the holy (religiosity) and the instantiation of the holy in fixed forms (religion), we witness the end of the great first phase of postwar theology and its attempts to grasp with a rapidly unfolding pace of change, and the emergence of new forms of theology, prayer, and ritual that situate themselves squarely in the late modern and postmodern turn. It can be argued that both Israeli and American Jewish societies are in the midst of a religious revival, as American Jews shift away from the “peoplehood” identification that dominated Jewish life in the 20th century and seek new forms of identifications and affiliations that privilege sincerity and experience, and as Israeli Jews wrestle with the politics of hadatah—a phenomenon that often appears in the news to describe charged efforts to lead toward a religious awakening in Israeli society. Throughout the global Jewish world, the rise of ultra-Orthodoxy also bears witness to a reclassification of the place of religion and its dominant expressions within the broader sector of Jewish identity.
The Identities and Communities section bears witness most explicitly to the entropic shifts in Jewish identity in both North America and Israel, and in particular the aftereffects of the widespread embrace of intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews, the intermixing (especially in Israel) of Jewish ethnicities, the demise of the idea of a single shared Jewish language and culture, the influence of major shifts in the understanding of gender and sexuality, and the emergence of a desperate search by American Jews for content and frameworks through which to understand and transmit Jewishness to its next generation, often perceived as being increasingly disinterested. Coursing through these two sections is also a reckoning with the continued force that Halacha, Jewish law, continues to have for a growing percentage of the Jewish public, even as its defining questions exhibit a distinctly contemporary set of interests, and even as the nature of Jewish legal authority in the modern world is contested and affirmed differently in different communities.
Each section is organized chronologically based on the publication date of the primary texts. This allows for fluid understanding of the evolution of certain ideas, but also can be a bit confusing as there are multiple overlapping intellectual histories between the different sections. In some cases, we have also grouped together several independent primary texts if they reflect similar themes, so that they might be analyzed together. This emphasis on chronology also helps us understand the influence of the new forms of media and publication vehicles on the proliferation of ideas, as in some cases the internet-based publications near the end of the chapters will make implicit and explicit use of the earlier material. The internet often stretches the applicability and visibility of earlier ideas to radically new audiences. The transformation in how ideas are disseminated is one of the major new ideas itself in the history of Jewish knowledge that is being written about the present moment, and this collection captures merely the earliest phase of this ideological revolution.
As in any act of canonization, there is a lot left out. This collection privileges the American Jewish and Israeli experiences, and the reality of contemporary Jewish life as defined primarily by these two poles, as its own idea, and as a departure from the previous history of more diverse diasporas. If these contemporary conditions were once merely the product of population migrations in the 20th century, they are now a defining characteristic of contemporary Jewry. We have thus focused on Israeli and American ideas, and we have privileged the relationship between these two poles in our volume. The collection leaves out “culture,” broadly construed, and also remains intentionally lean on academic Jewish scholarship, including a few such books and essays but leaving out even those works of scholarship in Jewish studies that have represented paradigm shifts in their subfields. The works in this collection largely present a direct line between their ideas and their impact on the Jewish general public; and while new research in rabbinics, for instance, may travel through rabbinical school education and inform thousands of Jews who encounter Talmud through their rabbis, with only few exceptions do such works of scholarship travel directly to end users or course quickly into Jewish sensibilities. Our book also includes excerpts from works that are already broadly understood to be canonical and ones whose canonical status is yet to be tested by the arc of history. In this respect, as throughout, we acknowledge that we are not passive chroniclers of this moment, but making active, if sometimes contentious, choices.
The boldest claim of the book, however, is its underlying case for itself, in the attempt to capture and analyze a moment in progress whose ramifications cannot be fully known; and to do so in print, despite the elastic opportunity offered by publishing it online. The claims of the book about what is important and what is not are so easily contestable, and intellectual history actual moves pretty fast and may ultimately make its own autonomous choices about what “mattered.” Our book will have a companion website where we invite others to suggest pieces that we missed; like any authors, we have had many moments since the book went to press where we realized something we missed, or when we regretted this inclusion or that exclusion. But we believe that these lacunae are also part of the story, and that the finality of print is part of the story as well. Again, the classical rabbis provide a powerful analogy. At the heart of the rabbinic project is the “oral tradition”; at a critical moment in history, for reasons debated by the sages and historians, that oral tradition became a written tradition as well. This was likely motivated by a wide set of anxieties and transitions—a sense of loss, the emergence of new technologies, adaptations in identity. It also came with its own losses, as can be seen in the fear of codification, and within the editorial choices that would inevitably come with the transformation of the oral into the written.
But the emergence of the Mishnah—the first codified rabbinic “document”—did not erase the traditions with which its components had lived as part of the oral tradition. All serious commentators and scholars who have engaged with the ideas of the Mishnah and with its literary and legal choices have done so together with the peer texts of its time, the beraitot that appear in the Talmud or the later compilation, the Tosefta. In fact, the very existence of these alternate texts helps us to make sense of the Mishnah and to interrogate its choices. No canon, especially an open one like ours, really closes debate; it merely provides a useful framework for those who follow to investigate its boundaries, a heuristic for readers of the present and future to make sense of the past.
Ours is also a moment of uncertainties—about which ideas dominate our societies and communities, about how ideas are expressed, and about who is empowered to lead. Our canon, now in print, does not resolve these uncertainties. But perhaps its very publication attests to them; and hopefully, it provides a starting point to understand how we got here, and where we go next.
From Tablet magazine, September 22, 2020