The Jews and Their Future A Conversation on Judaism and Jewish Identities

by Benbassa, Esther; Attias, Jean-Christophe

• ISBN13: 9781842773918
• ISBN10: 1842773917
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-09-18
• Publisher: Zed Books

Summary

Esther Benbassa and Jean-Christophe Attias pose a number of controversial questions that challenge prevailing myths and attitudes about Judaism, upsetting conformist discourses and received ideas. What if the Jews were not the "descendants" of the Hebrews? What if the Jewish Book was more the Talmud than the Bible? What if medieval judeophobia could not be identified with modern anti-Semitism? What if orthodoxy was not a return to cultural origins but a new creation? What if Zionism had succeeded precisely thanks to its failures? What if the time had come to stop denying the tensions between Israel and the Diaspora? Between Ashkenazis and Sephardis? Between fundamentalists and liberals? And what if, in particular, the transformation of the memory of the Holocaust into a civil religion was now the main barrier to the universalism that, with exile and the celebration of life, has always been the heart of Jewish experience? This provocative and illuminating dialogue explores the very foundations of Jewish culture, with the spirit of inquiry and freedom of thought the authors believe will invigorate current debates.

Author Biography

Esther Benbassa and Jean-Christophe Attias are Professors of Jewish Histrory and Culture at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sorbonne, Paris.

Table of Contents

A note of thanks	vi
Preface to the English edition	vii
Introduction	1	(22)
What does it mean to be a Jew?	23	(25)
Modernity and Jewishness	48	(14)
From anti-Judaism to anti-Semitism	62	(11)
Jewish nationalism and Zionism	73	(13)
Remembering the genocide: a new civil religion?	86	(13)
Ashkenazis and Sephardis: exchanging looks	99	(9)
Judaism, Christianity, Islam: combining differences	108	(15)
Secularization and Jewish morality	123	(8)
Being a woman and Jewish	131	(8)
To remain Jewish, to become Jewish again, or to reinvent Judaism?	139	(9)
Diaspora identities, Israeli identities	148	(21)
From communal affirmation to the temptation to withdraw	169	(4)
Israel seen from within and from the Diaspora	173	(6)
Jewish intellectual freedom and the weight of conformism	179	(9)
Fascination with suffering or the challenge of life: a critical choice	188	(5)
A bibliographical guide	193	(8)
Index	201