Thank You
A link to
"How Not to Repair the World"
has been emailed to your friends.Abstract –
As anyone following the campaign rhetoric of Barack Obama and his supporters will have noticed, this has been a season for “repairing the world.” It is also a time, then, for reflecting on the course of an ancient Hebrew expression that is uttered three times a day in their prayers by religiously observant Jews; that plays a minor but interesting role in talmudic discourse; that was transformed into an important concept of Jewish mysticism in the late Middle Ages; that has become a buzz phrase of American Jewish liberalism; and that occurs in close to a quarter of the 40 short essays by a group of American Jewish intellectuals and social activists, all on the Left, appearing in a new book called Righteous Indignation.* Among the topics dealt with by these essays are: “Can Social Justice Save The American Jewish Soul?”; “Rereading Genesis: Human Stewardship of the Earth”; “Toxic Waste and the Talmud”; “Judaism, Oil, and Renewable Energy”; “A Jewish Vision for Economic Justice”; “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: Social Justice and Sexual Values in Judaism”; “Multiracial Jewish Families: A Personal and Political Approach to Justice Politics”; “Imitatio Dei and Shared Space: A Jewish Theological Argument for Sharing the Holy Land”; “Once Again: Genocide In Darfur”; and “‘Silence is Akin to Assent’: Judaism and the War in Iraq.”
© 2008 Commentary Inc.
