Judaism, Liberalism, and Political Theology

Judaism, Liberalism, and Political Theology provides the first broad encounter between modern Jewish thought and recent developments in political theology. In opposition to impetuous associations of Judaism and liberalism and charges that Judaism cannot engender a universal political order, the essays in this volume propose a new and richly detailed engagement between Judaism and the political. The vexed status of liberalism in Jewish thought and Judaism in political theology is interrogated with recourse to thinking from across the Continental tradition.

Introduction Randi Rashkover and Martin Kavka
Part I. Judaism and Liberalism
1. Spinoza and the Possibility Condition of Modern Judaism, Jerome Copulsky
2. Plato Prophesied the Revelation: The Philosophico-Political Theology of Strauss’
Philosophy and Law and the Guidance of Hermann Cohen, Dana Hollander

3. What Do the Dead Deserve?: Towards A Critique of Jewish Political Theology,
Martin Kavka

4. The Zionism of Hannah Arendt 1941-1948, Eric Jacobson

Part II. Messianism, Miracle and Power
5. Power and Israel in Martin Buber’s Critique of Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology,
Gregory Kaplan

6. The Political Theology of Ethical Monotheism, Daniel Weidner
7. The Miraculous Birth of the Given, Daniel Brandes

Part III. Ethics, Law and the Universal
8. Bad Jews, Authentic Jews, Figural Jews, Sarah Hammerschlag
9. The Patient Gesture: Law, Liberalism, and Talmud, Zachary Braiterman

Part IV. The Mosaic Distinction
10. Reason within the Bounds of Religion, Robert Erlewine
11. The Impossibility of the Prohibition of Images, Oona Eisenstadt
12.From Distortion to Displacement: Freud and the Mosaic Distinction, Brian Britt
13. Monotheism as a Political Problem, Bruce Rosenstock

Contributors
Index