The second volume of The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy provides a comprehensive overview of Jewish philosophy from the seventeenth century to the present day. Written by a distinguished group of experts in the field, its essays examine how Jewish thinking was modified in its encounter with modern Europe and America and challenge longstanding assumptions about the nature and purpose of modern Jewish philosophy. The volume also treats modern Jewish philosophy's continuities with premodern texts and thinkers, the relationship between philosophy and theology, the ritual and political life of the people of Israel and the ways in which classic modern philosophical categories help or hinder Jewish self-articulation. These essays offer readers a multi-faceted understanding of the Jewish philosophical enterprise in the modern period.

The impact of technology-enhanced mass death in the twentieth century, argues Zachary Braiterman, has profoundly affected the future shape of religious thought. In his provocative book, the author shows how key Jewish theologians faced the memory of Auschwitz by rejecting traditional theodicy, abandoning any attempt to justify and vindicate the relationship between God and catastrophic suffering. The author terms this rejection "Antitheodicy," the refusal to accept that relationship. It finds voice in the writings of three particular theologians: Richard Rubenstein, Eliezer Berkovits, and Emil Fackenheim.

This book is the first to bring postmodern philosophical and literary approaches into conversation with post-Holocaust Jewish thought. Drawing on the work of Mieke Bal, Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault, and others, Braiterman assesses how Jewish intellectuals reinterpret Bible and Midrash to re-create religious thought for the age after Auschwitz.

In this process, he provides a model for reconstructing Jewish life and philosophy in the wake of the Holocaust. His work contributes to the postmodern turn in contemporary Jewish studies and today's creative theology.

The Shape of Revelation explores the overlap between revelation and aesthetic form from the perspective of Judaism. It does so by setting the Jewish philosophy of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig alongside its immediate visual environment in the aesthetics of early German modernism, most notably alongside "the spiritual in art" as it appears in the art and art theories of Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Franz Marc. The modern shape of revelation-and "the spiritual in art" that emerges from this conversation-builds upon a vocabulary of form-creation, sheer presence, lyric pathos, rhythmic repetition, open spatial dynamism, and erotic pulse that was unique to Germany in the first quarter of the twentieth century. This study works to identify and critically assess the sensual root that is brought to bear upon the modern image of revelation and "the spiritual in art."