The Essential Hayim Greenberg
Essays and Addresses on Jewish Culture, Socialism, and Zionism
Hayim Greenberg author Mark A Raider editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:The University of Alabama Press
Published:28th Feb '17
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Though well known to many scholars and critics in the field of Judaic studies, Hayim Greenberg remains unknown to many. Since his death in 1953, Greenberg’s contributions to modern Jewish thought have largely fallen from view. In The Essential Hayim Greenberg: Essays and Addresses on Jewish Culture, Socialism, and Zionism, the first collection of Greenberg’s writings since 1968, Mark A. Raider reestablishes Greenberg as a prominent Jewish thinker and Zionist activist who challenged the prevailing orthodoxies of American Jewry and the Zionist movement.
This collection of thoroughly annotated essays, spanning the 1920s to the early 1950s, includes Greenberg’s meditations on socialism and ethics, profiles of polarizing twentieth-century figures (among them Trotsky, Lenin, and Gandhi), and several essays investigating the compatibility of socialism and Communism. Greenberg always circles back, however, to the recurring question of how Jews might situate themselves in modernity, both before and after the Holocaust, and how Labor Zionist ideology might reshape the imbalances of Jewish economic life.
Alongside his role as an American Zionist leader, Greenberg maintained a lifelong commitment to the vitality of the Jewish diaspora. Rather than promoting Jewish autonomy and statehood, he argued for fidelity to the Jewish spirit. This collection not only means to restore Greenberg to his previous stature in the field of Judaic Studies but also to return a vital and authentic voice, long quieted, to the continuing debate over what it means to be Jewish.
The Essential Hayim Greenberg provides an accessible text for scholars, historians, and students of Jewish Studies, religion, and theology.
“Mark A. Raider’s book is a thoughtful collection of Hayim Greenberg’s spiritual and ideological, national and universal worldview as one of the most original Zionist thinkers, who promoted the theory of a balanced double Jewish collective existence as an exile (galut) people, even in free countries, and as a national entity in their historical land, the State of Israel.”
—Yosef Gorny, author of The State of Israel in Jewish Public Thought: The Quest for Collective Identity|“By framing the life of Hayim Greenberg through a brilliant introduction and then gathering the works of Greenberg together, Mark A. Raider has performed the singular service of bringing one of the most thoughtful and engaged public Jewish intellectuals and Zionist thinkers of the twentieth century back to life. This is a critical volume for anyone interested in modern Jewish and Zionist intellectual history and thought as well as Israel-Diaspora Jewish relations. Scholars and activists alike are indebted to Raider for this book.”
—David Ellenson, author of Jewish Meaning in a World of Choice: Studies in Tradition and Modernity and After Emancipation: Jewish Religious Responses to Modernity
ISBN: 9780817319359
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 1095g
632 pages