Bücher der Reihe Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts

This book consists of a range of essays covering the complex crises, tensions and dilemmas but also the positive potential in the meeting of Jews with Western culture. In numerous contexts and through the work of fascinating individuals and thinkers, the work examines some of the consequences of political, cultural and personal rupture, as well as the manifold ways in which various Jewish intellectuals, politicians (and occasionally spies!) sought to respond to these ruptures and carve out new, sometimes profound, sometimes fanciful, options of thought and action. It also delves critically into the attacks on liberal and Enlightenment humanism. In almost all the essays the fragility of things is palpably present and the book touches on some of the ironies, problematics and functions of responses to that condition. The work mirrors the author's ongoing fascination with the always fraught, fragile and creatively fecund confrontation of Jews (and others) with European modernity, its history, politics, culture and self-definition. In a time of increasing anxiety and feelings of fragility, this work may be helpful in understanding how people at an earlier (and sometimes contemporary) period sought to come to terms with a similar predicament.

The Book of Job has held a central role in defining the project of modernity from the age of Enlightenment until today. This volume engages this question and offers new perspectives on the tragic bent of the Book of Job, on its dramatic irony, on Job's position as mourner, and the unique representation of the Joban body in pain.

This volume deals with the significance of the avant-garde(s) for modern Jewish culture and the impact of the Jewish tradition on the artistic production of the avant-garde, be they reinterpretations of literary, artistic, philosophical or theological texts/traditions, or novel theoretical openings linked to elements from Judaism or Jewish culture, thought, or history.

This collection features essays by leading scholars on the philosophical, theological, poetic and cultural aspects of lament, touching on the textual traditions of lament in Judaism, from Biblical, rabbinic and medieval iterations to contemporary Yemenite oral lamentations.

The Book of Job has held a central role in defining the project of modernity from the age of Enlightenment until today. This volume engages this question and offers new perspectives on the tragic bent of the Book of Job, on its dramatic irony, on Job's position as mourner, and the unique representation of the Joban body in pain.