Podcast: Norman Podhoretz on Jerusalem and Jewish Particularity
June 29, 2016 | By: Norman Podhoretz
Press play below to listen to the podcast, download it in the iTunes Store, or stream it via Stitcher. In this podcast, Eric Cohen sits down with the legendary editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, to discuss his 2007 essay, “Jerusalem: The Scandal of Particularity.” The ancient capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem, has been the essential center of […]
Read MoreContemporary Problems in Ethics from a Jewish Perspective
June 27, 2016 | By: Hans Jonas
The Tikvah Fund is pleased to republish—for the first time online—one of the great ethicists and philosophers Hans Jonas’s forgotten forays into Jewish thought. Jonas argues that Judaism and scientism, the ideological faith in science as an authority in all realms of human life, are in opposition at the most basic levels. In their moral […]
Read MoreFaith in the Flesh
June 20, 2016 | By: R.R. Reno
As Catholic theologian, social critic, and First Things editor R.R. Reno sat in the synagogue pews one Saturday morning, watching his daughter assume her place in the people of Israel as a bat mitzvah, he was provoked to scrutinize his own Christian faith in light of the Judaism of his wife and children. In this […]
Read MoreJewish Education in a World Adrift
June 15, 2016 | By: Eliezer Berkovits
By the time Eliezer Berkovits wrote “Jewish Education in a World Adrift” in 1970, the “value system” that had sustained the West had collapsed. Relativism, nihilism, boredom, and permissiveness characterized the age–and the education of the young. Here Berkovits issues a call to arms, urging Jews to counter the nihilism of the broader culture by […]
Read MoreThe Jewish Mother
June 9, 2016 | By: Meir Soloveichik
Few Jewish doctrines sound as strange to modern ears as that of “matrilineal descent,” the notion that membership in the Jewish people is passed on through the mother even as other specific qualities of Jewishness (like whether one is a Levite) are passed on through the father. In “The Jewish Mother,” Rabbi Meir Soloveichik looks beyond sociological […]
Read MoreMarkets and Morals
June 7, 2016 | By: Jonathan Sacks
Friedrich Hayek, noted as one of the twentieth century’s greatest defenders of the free market, also made a case for religious traditions. In theory, the energetic, dynamic, disruptive market would seem to be at odds with the restraint, humility, and anti-materialism of revealed religion. Reflecting on Hayek’s praise for both religious order and market freedom, […]
Read MoreThe Religious Meaning of the Six Day War
June 6, 2016 | By: Norman Lamm, Michael Wyschograd, Pinchas Peli, Shear Yashuv Cohen and and Walter Wurzburger
What is the theological meaning of Israel’s improbable triumph in the Six Day War? In 1968, Tradition convened leading Jewish thinkers from both Israel and the United States to consider the religious significance of the reunification of Jerusalem. Rabbi Norman Lamm, Michael Wyschograd, Pinchas Peli, Rabbi Shear Yashuv Cohen, and Rabbi Walter Wurzburger all contributed reflections. Here is Michael […]
Read MoreConfrontation
May 31, 2016 | By: Joseph B. Soloveitchik
Interfaith engagement has many champions in our politics and in our philanthropies. For Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, not all interfaith engagement was to be cheered. In his profound theological reflection, “Confrontation,” he argued that communities of faith are characterized by separate and irreconcilable theologies. However, such communities may share certain interests and may work together in […]
Read MorePodcast: Meir Soloveichik on ”Confrontation”
May 31, 2016 | By: Meir Soloveichik
Press play below to listen to the podcast, download it in the iTunes Store, or stream it via Stitcher. The subject of this podcast is Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s classic 1964 essay, “Confrontation,” one of those rare, enduring masterpieces that is both a profound theological reflection on human nature, and an important work of Jewish communal policy. This essay—and […]
Read MoreEinstein: The Passion of Pure Reason
May 27, 2016 | By: Irving Kristol
What can we make of Albert Einstein? He was at once Jew and World Citizen, Zionist and pacifist, rationalist and mystic, characterized by “melancholic loneliness” and by “gaiety.” In 1950, a young Irving Kristol offered a “Unified Field Theory” of Einstein, seeing the vital history of the West bound up in the complexity of the great Jewish […]
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