“Against the Stream: Conservative Ideas and the Jewish Future”
with Alan Rubenstein
American Jews find themselves in a state of flux. Faced on the one hand with a progressivism increasingly hostile to the State of Israel as the national expression of Jewish particularity, and on the other, with a conservatism increasingly doubtful that the maximization of liberty is the proper goal of politics, American Jews lack a stable political foundation for their double commitment to the American and the Zionist projects.
In this three session course, we will study essays that aim to provide such a foundation. The first two make the case for the renewal of Jewish commitment to America and Israel. Meir Soloveichik advises us to take Lincoln as the national healer and statesman who best demonstrated through speech and deed that Enlightenment liberalism and Biblical morality can, and indeed must, go hand in hand. Next, Ruth Wisse makes the case for Zionism as the only coherent Jewish political movement capable of understanding and combatting anti-Semitism. If Soloveichik reminds us of the dangers of abandoning the universalism of the American project, Wisse reminds us that to abandon Jewish particularism would be even more short-sighted and dangerous. Finally, Eric Cohen brings these two perspectives together to argue that Americans, both Jewish and Christian, should look to the Jewish State as a model for how to balance tradition and modernity.
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Meir Soloveichik: “Lincoln’s Almost Chosen People”
Series: Contemporary Perspectives on Jews and Conservatism | Click here to read the essay
Ruth Wisse: “The Functions of Anti-Semitism”
Series: Contemporary Perspectives on Jews and Conservatism | Click here to read the essay
Eric Cohen: “The Message From Jerusalem”
Series: Contemporary Perspectives on Jews and Conservatism | Click here to read the essay
Alan Rubenstein
Alan Rubenstein was educated in Liberal Arts at St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD, and also at Georgetown University. He was a senior consultant for the President’s Council on Bioethics and currently serves as Hanson Scholar of Ethics at Carleton College in Northfield, MN. At Carleton, he teaches ethical thought through close reading of great literature of the West—in particular, Plato, the Hebrew Bible, and Shakespeare. He is currently Director of University Programs for the Tikvah Fund. His published essays have focused on the philosopher Hans Jonas, the Hebrew Bible, and Judaism in middle America. He is married and a father of three children.