The New Jewish Canon
“This is a rich collection that provides a window into many of the key debates that have raged, and still rage, in the Jewish world. It raises many provocative questions about the nature of contemporary Judaism and its future.” —Martin Green, Jewish Book Council
The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been a period of mass production and proliferation of Jewish ideas, and have witnessed major changes in Jewish life and stimulated major debates. The New Jewish Canon offers a conceptual roadmap to make sense of such rapid change. With over eighty excerpts from key primary source texts and insightful corresponding essays by leading scholars, on topics of history and memory, Jewish politics and the public square, religion and religiosity, and identities and communities, The New Jewish Canon promises to start conversations from the seminar room to the dinner table.
The New Jewish Canon is both text and textbook of the Jewish intellectual and communal zeitgeist for the contemporary period and the recent past, canonizing our most important ideas and debates of the past two generations; and just as importantly, stimulating debate and scholarship about what is yet to come.
Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer is the President of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, and a leading thinker and author on the meaning of Israel to American Jews, on Jewish history and Jewish memory, and on questions of leadership and change in American Jewish life. He is also the author of Shuva: The Future of the Jewish Past (Brandeis, 2012).
Dr. Claire E. Sufrin is a scholar of religion specializing in modern Jewish thought and theology. She is Associate Professor of Instruction and Assistant Director of Jewish Studies in the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies at Northwestern University.
