Description
Book SynopsisThe incongruence if not antagonism between modern liberalism and the Jewish sense of the world has been most notably articulated by Lionel Trilling. Certainly the imaginative limitations and intellectual smugness he discerned in his own ideological party found a parallel, in his view, in the embrace of liberalism by the American Jewish community. The consequences of that embrace entail both a superficial intellectual and religious culture and a misunderstanding of the social and political dimensions of Judaism. In Classical Liberalism and the Jewish Tradition, Edward Alexander engages in a wide-ranging exploration of the roots of the fundamental antagonism between liberalism and Jewish tradition from the nineteenth century to the present day.
Central to Alexander''s arguments is his incisive critique of the distortion of modern Judaism as a child of the Enlightenment and the notion that specifically Jewish concerns, whether with Zionism, the Holocaust, or sacred and s
Table of Contents
1: Politics; 1: John Stuart Mill and the Jews; 2: Disraeli and Marx: Stammgenosse ?; 3: Israeli Intellectuals and Israeli Politics; 4: Edward Said and the Modern Language Association; 5: The Lipstadt-Irving Trial: New Yorker Version; 2: Religion; 6: Dr. Arnold, Matthew Arnold, and the Jews; 7: George Eliot’s Rabbi; 8: A Talmud for Americans; 9: Irving Howe and Secular Jewishness: An Elegy; 10: Saying Kaddish; 3: Literature; 11: Jews in English Departments; 12: American History, 1950–70, by Philip Roth; 13: Do Jews Need a Literary Canon?; 14: I. B. Singer on the Couch
