Postmodernity marks a time of creative conflict when the voices of the other, previously rendered silent by the majority, are prominently heard. What effect has postmodernism had on Judaism?

The neat narratives and metanarratives of the Jewish past are being questioned and deconstructed, allowing for different versions of Jewish history to emerge. For example, a postmodern exploration of the place of women in Talmudic culture can upset portraits of women as powerless and rabbis as closed off to female experience thereby helping to secure a place for women today. Similarly, an analysis of Zionism using concepts drawn from postmodern thinkers problematizes such basic Zionists concepts as nation, exile, and normalization, and raises significant questions concerning the relationship of Israel and the diaspora.

The twelve contributors, including Daniel Boyarin, Elliot R. Wolfson, and Laurence J. Silberstein, shed new light on the central texts and issues of Judaism through their postmodern interpretations. They offer up provocative perspectives on Bible and Midrash; Talmud and Halakhah; Kabbalah; Zionism; the Holocaust; feminism; literature; pedagogy; and liturgy.

Postmodern Jewish thinkers understand their Jewishness differently, but they all share a fidelity to what they call the ?Torah? and to communal practices of reading and social action that have their bases in rabbinic interpretations of biblical narrative, law, and belief. Thus, postmodern Jewish thinking is thinking about God, Jews, and the world?with the texts of the Torah?in the company of fellow seekers and believers. It utilizes the tools of philosophy, but without their modern premises. Moreover, this form of Jewish thinking provides resources for philosophically disciplined readings of scripture by Jews, Christians, and Moslems seeking alternatives to the reductive discourses of secular academia, on the one hand, and to antimodern religious fundamentalisms, on the other. Postmodern Jewish Philosophy aims to utilize rabbinic modes of thinking to provide a model for ethical and religious thought in the twenty-first century, one which moves beyond the dichotomy of relativism and imperialism and is simultaneously definite and pluralistic.In Reasoning After Revelation: Dialogues in Postmodern Jewish Philosophy, three preeminent Jewish scholars debate the form and meaning of Postmodern Jewish Philosophy after the failures of the great secular ideologies of modern western civilization. Emulating the methods as well as the premises of Talmudic argumentation, the authors present their responses as dialogues joined by a common love of the rabbinic tradition of commentary and interpretation of the Bible. The composers, Peter Ochs, Robert Gibbs, and Steven Kepnes, contemplate where Judaism has been?and where it is headed: on what basis will modern Jews now reason about the meaning of Jewish existence and the relevance of age-old Biblical traditions to the moral and social crises of the twenty-first century? The dialogues are further enriched by a set of responses from leading Jewish philosophers: Elliot R. Wolfson, Edith Wyschogrod, Almut Sh. Bruckstein, Yudit Kornberg Greenberg, and Susan E. Shapiro.

Reading Scripture with Paul Ricoeur is a unique volume in which twelve diverse contributors illuminate and analyze Paul Ricoeur's personal religious faith and intellectual passion for Scripture. The co-editors, Joseph A. Edelheit and James F Moore, each studied with Ricoeur at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago and bring the perspectives of a rabbi and of a Lutheran pastor and theologian, respectively. This book engages topics such as translation, biblical hermeneutics, and prophecy, as well as specific scriptural passages: Cain and Abel, the Epistles, and a feminist reading of Rahab. It provides both students and scholars alike a new resource of reflections using Ricoeur's scholarship to illuminate and model how Ricoeur read and taught.

The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Theology offers an overview of Jewish theology, an aspect of Judaism that is equal in importance to law and ethics. Covering the period from antiquity to the present, the volume focuses on what Jews believe about God and also about the relation of God to humans and the world. Parts I and II cover exciting new research in Jewish biblical and rabbinic theology, medieval philosophy, Kabbalah (mysticism), and liturgy. Parts III and IV turn to modern theology with an exploration of works by leading figures, such as Rabbi Abraham I. Kook, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas, as well as the relation of theology to issues such as feminism and the Holocaust, and the relation of Judaism to other world religions. In Part V, the book explores how the insights of analytic philosophy have been integrated with Jewish theology.

The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Theology offers an overview of Jewish theology, an aspect of Judaism that is equal in importance to law and ethics. Covering the period from antiquity to the present, the volume focuses on what Jews believe about God and also about the relation of God to humans and the world. Parts I and II cover exciting new research in Jewish biblical and rabbinic theology, medieval philosophy, Kabbalah (mysticism), and liturgy. Parts III and IV turn to modern theology with an exploration of works by leading figures, such as Rabbi Abraham I. Kook, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas, as well as the relation of theology to issues such as feminism and the Holocaust, and the relation of Judaism to other world religions. In Part V, the book explores how the insights of analytic philosophy have been integrated with Jewish theology.

Liturgy, a complex interweaving of word, text, song, and behavior is a central fixture of religious life in the Jewish tradition. It is unique in that it is performed and not merely thought. Because liturgy is performed by a specific group at a specific time and place it is mutable. Thus, liturgical reasoning is always new and understandings of liturgical practices are always evolving. Liturgy is neither preexisting nor static; it is discovered and revealed in every liturgical performance.
Jewish Liturgical Reasoning is an attempt to articulate the internal patterns of philosophical, ethical, and theological reasoning that are at work in synagogue liturgies. This book discusses the relationship between internal Jewish liturgical reasoning and the variety of external philosophical and theological forms of reasoning that have been developed in modern and post liberal Jewish philosophy. Steven Kepnes argues that liturgical reasoning can reorient Jewish philosophy and provide it with new tools, new terms of discourse and analysis, and a new sensibility for the twenty-first century.
The formal philosophical study of Jewish liturgy began with Moses Mendelssohn and the modern Jewish philosophers. Thus the book focuses, in its first chapters, on the liturgical reasoning of Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig. However, it attempts to augment and further develop the liturgical reasoning of these figures with methods of study from Hermeneutics, Semiotic theory, post liberal theology, anthropology and performance theory. These newer theories are enlisted to help form a contemporary liturgical reasoning that can respond to such events as the Holocaust, the establishmentof the State of Israel, and interfaith dialogue between Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

The Text as Thou establishes Martin Buber's central concept of "I-Thou" as the heart of a dialogical theory of textual interpretation and a narrative method for explicating Jewish philosophy and theology. Part One takes up Buber's application of his hermeneutic method to the texts of Hasidism and the Bible and the way in which that method can be applied to secular texts as well. His development of a dialogical hermeneutics links Buber to such contemporary theorists as Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Bakhtin. Part Two demonstrates that narrative provides privileged access to Buber's thought. By the retelling of Hasidic tales, biblical stories, and autobiographical anecdotes with powerful immediacy and concreteness, Buber succeeds in a daring attempt to formulate a modern narrative Jewish theology. Taken together, Buber's dialogical hermeneutics and narrative theology constitute a key element in the contemporary revival of the Jewish midrashic imagination.