Alan Mittleman

Jewish Polity and American Civil Society: Communal Agencies and Religious Movements in the American Public Square (review)

American Jewish History, 2002

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Judaism

Turner/The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion, 2010

Weber's Politics as a Vocation: Some American Considerations

Notre Dame JL Ethics & Pub. Pol'y, 2006

Content-Length: 980913 Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=20_Notre_Dame_J.L. _Ethics_&_Pub... more

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From Private Rights to Public Good: The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism in Judaic Perspective

Contemporary communitarian thought critiques liberalism for the latter's anemic conception of com... more Contemporary communitarian thought critiques liberalism for the latter's anemic conception of community. Liberalism requires a doctrine of community and common good in order to ground its predilection for distributive justice. For communitarians, liberalism here tries to square a circle. Mishnah, Talmud, and Maimonides anticipate this contemporary debate by conceiving of community and common good in a way thick enough to allow for distributive justice, yet limited enough to preserve individual rights. This essay first explores the roots of the argument between liberals and communitarians. After noting some of the basic issues which divide them, it then considers some Jewish legal texts which illustrate how the Jewish tradition, in a non-philo sophical way, addresses the same concerns. Democracy has been the most valued form of regime in the West for at least the past two centuries and liberalism has been its normative orientation. While not identical, democracy and liberalism have often been paired. Democracy requires liberal ism ? or something like it ? for democracy is only a means and

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Mishpat Hamelukhah" and the Jewish Political Tradition in the Thought of R. Shimon Federbush

leader, proposed a blueprint for reconciling Jewish law with the law of modern, democratic

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Lenn E. Goodman: An Intellectual Portrait

Lenn E. Goodman: Judaism, Humanity, and Nature, 2015

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The Character of Hope

Hope in a Democratic Age, 2009

Theorizing Jewish Ethics

Studia Humana, 2014

The concept of Jewish ethics is elusive. Law occupies a prominent place in the phenomenology of t... more The concept of Jewish ethics is elusive. Law occupies a prominent place in the phenomenology of traditional Judaism. What room is left for ethics? This paper argues that the dichotomy between law and ethics, with regard to Judaism, is misleading. The fixity of these categories presumes too much, both about normativity per se and about Judaism. Rather than naming categories “law” and “ethics” should be seen as contrastive terms that play a role in fundamental arguments about how to characterize Judaism.

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The Problem of Holiness

Journal of Analytic Theology, 2015

Holiness is an important but problematic concept for religious discourse. It is unclear what it m... more Holiness is an important but problematic concept for religious discourse. It is unclear what it means, both in classical texts and in contemporary usage. Holiness seems to signify a property in some cases and a relation in others. The Bible itself preserves a range of usages. Some of these are ontological: holiness as a would-be property inheres in objects, places, persons, or times. Other uses are imputed: holiness connotes a status that human beings ascribe to things. The range of use can be explicated by the concept of a social or institutional reality developed by Searle. Social facts entail valuations, intentions, and practices; they presuppose a basis of brute fact. A plausible contemporary view of holiness will link ontological and axiological commitments in such a way as to express the underlying goodness of being.

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Dignity and Democracy

Is Judaism Democratic?, 2018

Max Weber's Conception of Covenant in Ancient Judaism, with Reference to the Book of Judges

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Making the Case for the Soul in an Age of Neuroscience

Harvard Theological Review, 2014

Modern philosophy has been inhospitable to the soul. In the English-speaking world, the dominant ... more Modern philosophy has been inhospitable to the soul. In the English-speaking world, the dominant tendency, since Hobbes and Locke, has been to subordinate the mental to the physical. Even where mental phenomena are granted real existence, they are construed as effects of underlying physical processes. To explain them is to identify their physical causes. Physicalist approaches to the mind cannot but see the soul as, in Gilbert Ryle's derisive phrase, a “ghost in the machine.” It is an unwanted leftover from a religious age with a bygone philosophical psychology. To the extent that mental entities do any explanatory work, modern philosophy favors “mind” over “soul.”

Adrienne M. Martin, How We Hope: A Moral Psychology

Society, 2014

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Some German Jewish Orthodox Attitudes Toward the Land of Israel and the Zionist Movement

German Orthodoxy in the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods presents an interesting case study in Jewis... more German Orthodoxy in the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods presents an interesting case study in Jewish attitudes toward Israel and the diaspora. The German Orthodox minority, no more than ten to twenty percent of German Jewry after World War I, participated with the majority of German Jews in a whole-hearted affirmation of German culture (in German Zionist parlance: Galutbejahung). As with

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Capitalism in religious zionism

Society, 2006

M&amp;quot; odern anti-Semitism has always been critical of the Jewish share in economic life... more M&amp;quot; odern anti-Semitism has always been critical of the Jewish share in economic life. The .ancient and medieval theme of a predatory, conspiratorial, and avaricious foreign nation active in the midst of an innocent Christendom received a modern articulation among thinkers of all stripes. From Karl Marx on the left to Werner Sombart on the right, the critique traced ostensibly

The Significance of Judaism for the Religious Progress of Humanity" by Hermann Cohen: An Introduction and Translation

Modern Judaism, 2004

Cohen's task was to tailor his presentation of Judaism to the moral and political opinions o... more

The Durability of Goodness

Judaic Sources and Western Thought, 2011

No Fear of Foundations: Reflections on Human Rights in Contemporary Jewish Philosophy

The Heythrop Journal, 2009

Contemporary philosophical treatments of the idea of human rights exhibit what might be called a ... more

The Job of Judaism and the Job of Kant

Harvard Theological Review, 2009

The presents its chief protagonist in two discrepant ways: Job the patient and Job the rebel. Anc... more The presents its chief protagonist in two discrepant ways: Job the patient and Job the rebel. Ancient Jewish interpretations of Job praise Job the patient and condemn, or at least do not praise, Job the rebel. Modern Jewish interpretations, by contrast, praise Job the rebel and scant the patient, pious Job of the frame story. Job the rebel becomes a model of sincerity or authenticity, a chief value of modernity. Job the patient and pious sufferer so celebrated by antiquity is at best an ambivalent figure.

The Jew in Christian Culture" by Hermann Cohen: An Introduction and Translation

Modern Judaism, 2003

The late social theorist Edward Shils directs us to consider the complex relations among religiou... more

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