Yehuda Kurtzer - The New Jewish Canon

Emunot: Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah

Series Editor: Dov Schwartz (Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan)

Editorial Board:

Ada Rapoport Albert (University College, London)

Gad Freudenthal (CNRS, Paris)

Gideon Freudenthal (Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv)

Moshe Idel (Hebrew University, Jerusalem)

Raphael Jospe (Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan)

Ephraim Kanarfogel (Yeshiva University, New York)

Menachem Kellner (Haifa University, Haifa)

Daniel Lasker (Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva)

THE
NEW
JEWISH
CANON

IDEAS & DEBATES 1980-2015

Edited by Yehuda Kurtzer and Claire E. Sufrin

Boston
2020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kurtzer, Yehuda, editor. | Sufrin, Claire E., editor.

Title: The New Jewish canon / edited by Yehuda Kurtzer and Claire E. Sufrin.

Description: Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2020. | Series: Emunot: Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah

Identifiers: LCCN 2020009720 (print) | LCCN 2020009721 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644693605 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644693612 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644693629 (adobe pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Jews--Intellectual life. | Judaism--20th century. | Judaism--21st century. | Jewish philosophy--20th century. | Jewish philosophy--21st century. | Jews--History--1945

Classification: LCC DS113 .N39 2020 (print) | LCC DS113 (ebook) | DDC 305.892/4--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009720

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009721

Copyright 2020 Academic Studies Press

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-64469-360-5 (hardback)

ISBN 978-1-64469-361-2 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64469-362-9 (electronic, Adobe PDF)

ISBN 978-1-64469-470-1 (ePUB)

Cover design by Dov Abramson

Book design by PHi Business Solutions

Published by Academic Studies Press.

1577 Beacon Street

Brookline, MA 02446, USA

www.academicstudiespress.com

To our teachers, who taught us the canons that we have inherited; and to our students, who will surely compile and write the ones that will emerge.

Acknowledgments

A great many people were involved with contributing to, aiding, stewarding, and supporting this massive project with its so many discrete components.

Multiple research assistants moved this project along from inception to completion by gathering and typing excerpts, tracking down citations, coordinating with authors, acquiring permissions, organizing the manuscript, and scheduling countless video conferences between editors working in two different time zones. Daniel Atwood and Talia Harcsztark helped get the project off the ground. Josh Flink collected the bulk of the excerpts and was a valuable thought-partner in helping to define this body of primary sources. Hannah Kober and Sam Hainbach stewarded the project towards completion. We are grateful to all of these emerging scholars for their support, their hard work, and for the various marks their own learning has left on the final product. Our gratitude as well to Naomi Adland, Tova Serkin, and Rob France for their leadership of the iEngage summer internship program at the Shalom Hartman Institute, which brought several of these folks into our orbit.

This book has also benefited from the help and support of many individuals at the Shalom Hartman Institute, including Daniel Price, the librarian of the Institute in Jerusalem, who aided in tracking down many references and citations; Miri Miller and Becca Linden, who have supported the production of this book as a project of the Institute; and the program and marketing team at SHI for integrating the book into programming at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. The Shalom Hartman Institute also supported the project financially, especially by providing funding towards permissions, subvention, and publicity; and we are grateful to the staff and board of the Institute and especially the leadership of Donniel Hartman who supported and encouraged this project throughout.

We also thank Claires colleagues at the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies at Northwestern University for their encouragement and support of this project. The collections of the Northwestern University Libraries came through in many a bibliographic pinch. Special thanks to Alissa Schapiro and Arielle Tonkin for their help generating ideas for cover art and to Barry Sufrin for his good counsel.

Erica Brown, Ariel Picard, Sonja Pilz, and Shlomo Zuckier submitted essays that for various reasons could not be included in the final manuscript, and we appreciate both their time and their flexibility. We thank the authors and publishers of the material reprinted in this book for granting us permission to do so.

The dozens of scholars who submitted essays have endured a long and winding timeline as this book has grown and evolved, and we thank them for their patience in the process!

Dov Schwartz welcomed The New Jewish Canon into Emunot: Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah, the series he edits for Academic Studies Press. ASP has been a wonderful partner in producing the book; we thank Kate Yanduganova and Kira Nemirovsky especially, as well as the many editors and others who shepherded our manuscript through the stages of its production. Finally, we thank Dov Abramson and his studio for their thought partnership in designing a cover that communicates the purpose and pathos of the volume.

As we have envisioned The New Jewish Canon as a teaching tool, the book has benefited from a variety of contexts in which its ideas and choices have been explored together with students and colleagues. This includes a convening at SHI NA on post-Holocaust Jewish thought in 2014, organized by Yehuda and Rabbi Dr. Joshua Feigelson, where we first began exploring the idea of a canon of contemporary Jewish thought; a study group in New York taught by Yehuda and organized by Abigail Pogrebin; a reading group at SHI NA for David Hartman Center Fellows, organized by Rabbi Sarah Mulhern; and countless of our own classes where we have read and taught contemporary sources. We thank our students for helping us refine the parameters of this project, and helping us understandand now make possible for others to understandthe significance of living through a period of an expanding canon.

Some of the very best Jewish learning does not happen in seminar rooms, synagogues, or online but at home around the kitchen table or sitting on the couch. We thank our most important learning-partners and supporters: Stephanie Ives and Noah, Jesse, and Sally Ives-Kurtzer; and Michael Simon and Jacob and Ethan Simon.

Finally, we want to thank you, our reader, for picking up this very large book; for reading it in whatever way you choose, whether cover to cover, or by following the thread of a particular interest, or by opening it at random and reading whatever you find on the page. We beg your forgiveness in advance for quibbles you may have about what we chose to include and what we excluded; we know the book is imperfect. It is intended to start, not close, the conversation.

Introduction

The State of Jewish Ideas: Towards a New Jewish Canon

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 twentieth and early twenty-first centuries witness a great Jewish settling down after the ruptures, revolutions, disruptions, and dislocations of the mid-twentieth 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 stabilityin demographics, geography, and relative securityhas enabled the flourishing of new diversities in ideological and political foments