Heidegger and Jewish Thought

Edited by Elad Lapidot and Micha Brumlik

Once a prophet of critical, "other" thought, Heidegger has now for many become the epitome of the unthinkable, in the light of the Black Notebooks controversy. The unthinkable here is anti-Semitism. The encounter between Heidegger and the Jews has thus come to signify - very much in the spirit of Heidegger's own anti-Judaism - the end of thought. The present volume resists this view by positing not only Heidegger but also the Jewish people as representing thought. The encounter between Heidegger and various traditions of Jewish thought is conceived here as a conversation inter alia, an exchange between real or perceived "others": others to the philosophical tradition, to mainstream modernity, to Western Christian metaphysics, to each other, and even to themselves. The conversation takes shape in this volume as a symposium of seventeen essays by leading scholars both of Heidegger's philosophy and of Jewish Studies.

Introduction, Elad Lapidot / Part I: Heidegger Thinks the Jews / 1. Beyond Apocalyptic Logos, Joseph Cohen & Raphael Zagury-Orly / 2. Heidegger and Marx: A Phantasmatic Dialectic, Peter Trawny / 3. Everyday Life, Hatred of Jews, and the Identitarian Movement, Micha Brumlik, translated by Daniel Fischer / 4. 'Whitewashed with Moralism': On Heidegger's Anti-Americanism and Anti-Semitism, Gregory Fried / 5. Being and the Jew: Between Heidegger and Levinas, Donatella Di Cesare, translated by Richard Polt / Part II: Heidegger and Jewish Thinkers / 6. Den Anderen Denken - Being, Time and the Other in Emmanuel Lévinas and Martin Heidegger, Eveline Goodman-Thau / 7. Groundlessness and Worldlessness: Heidegger's Anti-Semitism and Jewish Thought, Dieter Thomä / 8. Heidegger's Judenfrage, Babette Babich / 9. Heidegger as a Secularized Kierkegaard: Martin Buber and Hugo Bergmann Read Sein und Zeit, Daniel Herskowitz / Part III: Heideggerian and Jewish Thought / 10. Heidegger's Seyn/Nichts and the Kabbalistic Ein Sof, Elliot Wolfson / 11. Fruits of Forgetfulness: Politics and Nationalism in the Philosophies of Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger, Yemima Hadad / 12. How Else Can One Think Earth? The Talmuds and Pre-Socratics, Sergey Dolgopolski / 13. Of Dwelling Prophetically: On Heidegger and Jewish Political Theology, Michael Fagenblat / 14. People of Knowers on the Political Epistemology of Heidegger and R. Chaim of Volozhin, Elad Lapidot