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Call It English identifies the distinctive voice of Jewish American literature by recovering the multilingual Jewish culture that Jews brought to the United States in their creative encounter with English. In transnational readings of works from the late-nineteenth century to the present by both immigrant and postimmigrant generations, Hana Wirth-Nesher traces the evolution of Yiddish and Hebrew in modern Jewish American prose writing through dialect and accent, cross-cultural translations, and bilingual wordplay.

Jewish legal and political thought developed in conditions of exile, where Jews had neither a state of their own nor citizenship in any other. What use, then, can this body of thought be today to Jews living in Israel or as emancipated citizens in secular democratic states? Can a culture of exile be adapted to help Jews find ways of being at home politically today? These questions are central inLaw, Politics, and Morality in Judaism, a collection of essays by contemporary political theorists, philosophers, and lawyers. How does Jewish law accommodate--or fail to accommodate--the practice of democratic citizenship? What range of religious toleration and pluralism is compatible with traditional Judaism? What forms of coexistence between Jews and non-Jews are required by shared citizenship? How should Jews operating within halakha (Jewish law) and Jewish history judge the use of force by modern states? The authors assembled here by prominent political theorist Michael Walzer come from different points on the religious-secular spectrum, and they differ greatly in their answers to such questions. But they all enact the relationship at issue since their answers, while based on critical Jewish texts, also reflect their commitments as democratic citizens. The contributors are Michael Walzer, David Biale, the late Robert M. Cover, Menachem Fisch, Geoffrey B. Levey, David Novak, Aviezer Ravitzky, Adam B. Seligman, Suzanne Last Stone, and Noam J. Zohar.

Originally published in 1959, The Faith of a Heretic is the most personal statement of the beliefs of Nietzsche biographer and translator Walter Kaufmann. A first-rate philosopher in his own right, Kaufmann here provides the fullest account of his views on religion. Although he considered himself a heretic, he was not immune to the wellsprings and impulses from which religion originates, declaring it among the most vital and radical expressions of the human mind. Beginning with an autobiographical prologue that traces his evolution from religious believer to \"heretic,\" the book touches on theology, organized religion, morality, suffering, and death—all examined from the perspective of a \"quest for honesty.\" Kaufmann also subjects philosophy's faith in truth, reason, and absolute morality to the same heretical treatment. The resulting exploration of the faiths of a nonbeliever in a secular age is as fresh and challenging as when it was first published. In a new foreword, Stanley Corngold vividly describes the intellectual and biographical milieu of Kaufmann's provocative book.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Early Beginnings “Part and Parcel of American History” Zionism and American Judaism Denominational Distinctions Conclusion Bibliography

This paper addresses the common theme of an ethics of concern for the poor which we find in the three monotheistic religions. This theme is a central concern of the prophets in the three religions. We can, therefore, speak a monotheistic “Prophetic Ethics” through which the cause of the poor is championed and the abuses of the institutions of monarchy, priesthood, and social organizations, which often ignore the poor, are criticized. Criticizing bastions of power and championing the cause of the poor is a thankless task, which often brings abuse and pain to the prophet. But there is an austere religious kind of spirituality that attends the prophet’s work that brings to the prophet a unique kind of holy joy unknown to the profane sensibilities of the secular person.

Unlike the extensive discussion and analysis devoted to Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity2 and his anthropological materialism, Feuerbach’s later “Diet-materialism”3 has been marginalized, if not outright ignored.4 The Feuerbach who so influenced Marx by bringing the speculative dialectic from its transcendent perch down to earth by locating the working of the dialectic in the mystification, alienation, and objectification (or projection, Vergegenstandlichung) of human sensibility and sensuousness is well known. Less well known is the thinker who shifted from seeing human interaction with the external world in the facultative terms of reason, will, and heart to physiological terms such as digestion: the world is incorporated—digested—by the human and thereby transformed into human consciousness. In Feuerbach’s later work, “eating” (das Essen) replaced “love” (die Liebe)5 as the master trope of human speciesbeing, of the relationship between body and mind, between self and other. Drawing upon the insights of the Greeks before him, who defined animals, gods, and humanity (as well as other peoples) by what they ate, respectively raw food, ambrosia, and bread, Feuerbach would define the human by that fundamental physiological process and practice.6 Emblematic of this change was his punning coinage of the apothegm, “you are what you eat” (Der Mensch ist, was er isst: lit. man is what he eats; 1850).

For the most part studies of Bible translations have not taken into account the social and religious environment in which the translators worked. This article, by contrast, highlights several factors that were influential in the production of an important Jewish version of the Hebrew Bible. It is essentially a study of the seven individuals who served as editors of the JPS Bible translation, with emphasis on the interplay of personalities and of institutional loyalties. Greatest emphasis is placed on the perspective of Max L. Margolis, who served as editor-in-chief of this project. It is shown that the translation as a whole, the renderings of individual passages, and even the wording of the title-page and Preface cannot be fully understood without this knowledge of how the translators worked. Even though the 1917 JPS translation is no longer widely used, the study of its translators is highly relevant for present-day discussions of the process by which a sacred text is rendered from one language into another.

Robert Alter reviews a newly-published commentary on the Pentateuch from the Jewish Publication Society of America (JPS), \"The JPS Torah Commentary,\" with commentaries by Nahum M. Sarna, Baruch A. Levine and Jacob Milgrom.