Download or read book Contested Utopia written by Marc Rosenstein and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-03 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first book to examine the Jewish state through the lens of Jewish utopian thought, from its biblical beginnings to modernity, offers a fresh perspective on the political, religious, and geopolitical life of Israel. As Marc J. Rosenstein argues, the Jewish people's collective memories, desires, hopes, and faith have converged to envision an ideal life in the Land of Israel--but, critically, the legacy is a kaleidoscope of conflicting (and sometimes overlapping) visions. And after three millennia of imagining utopia, it is almost impossible for Jews to respond to Israel's realities without being influenced--even unconsciously--by these images. Charting the place of utopian thought in Judaism, Rosenstein then illustrates, with original texts, diverse utopian visions of the Jewish state: Torah state (Yavetz), holy community (based on nostalgic memories of the medieval community), national-cultural home (Lewinsky), "normal" state (Herzl), socialist paradise (Syrkin), anarchy (Jabotinsky), and a polity defined by Israel's historic or divinely ordained borders. Analyzing how these disparate utopian visions collide in Israel's attempts to chart policy and practice regarding the Sabbath, social welfare, immigration, developing versus conserving the land, and the Israel-Diaspora relationship yields novel perspectives on contemporary flashpoints. His own utopian vision offers a further entryway for both Israelis and Diaspora Jews into more informed and nuanced conversations about the "Jewish state."
Download or read book The Hebrew Utopia written by Walter Frederic Adeney and published by . This book was released on 1879 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Reading Utopia in Chronicles written by Steven Schweitzer and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2009-03-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This examination employs a literary approach in an attempt to address the coherence of Chronicles as a whole.
Download or read book The Quest for Utopia written by Zvi Y. Gitelman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exploration of the Jewish political tradition elucidates a long, rich, and diverse experience of both sovereignty and dispersed statelessness. It holds insights, as Zvi Gitelman points out in his introductory chapter, for anyone interested comparative and ethnic politics, Jewish history, and the prehistory of contemporary Israeli politics. Stuart Cohen analyzes the "covenant idea" and the constitutional character of ancient Israel, which had a profound influence on Western political thought through the medium of the Bible. Gerald Blidstein examines rabbinic strategies for accommodation to the realities of Jewish dispersion in the middle Ages, while Robert Chazan focuses on communal authority and self-governance in the same period. Jonathan Frankel and Paula Hyman move the study into modern times with attempts to characterize the diverse patterns of Jewish political culture and activity in different parts of Europe, in the process revealing the dynamics of political cultural influence. Finally, Peter Medding looks at the "new politics" of contemporary American Jews - as voters, as public officials, and as organizational actors.
Download or read book The Jewish Utopia written by Michael Higger and published by Baltimore, Md. : The Lord Baltimore Press. This book was released on 1932 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Spirit of Utopia written by and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2000-08 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I am. We are. That is enough. Now we have to start. These are the opening words of Ernst Bloch's first major work, The Spirit of Utopia, written mostly in 1915-16, published in its first version just after the First World War, republished five years later, 1923, in the version here presented for the first time in English translation. The Spirit of Utopia is one of the great historic books from the beginning of the century, but it is not an obsolete one. In its style of thinking, a peculiar amalgam of biblical, Marxist, and Expressionist turns, in its analytical skills deeply informed by Simmel, taking its information from both Hegel and Schopenhauer for the groundwork of its metaphysics of music but consistently interpreting the cultural legacy in the light of a certain Marxism, Bloch's Spirit of Utopia is a unique attempt to rethink the history of Western civilizations as a process of revolutionary disruptions and to reread the artworks, religions, and philosophies of this tradition as incentives to continue disrupting. The alliance between messianism and Marxism, which was proclaimed in this book for the first time with epic breadth, has met with more critique than acclaim. The expressive and baroque diction of the book was considered as offensive as its stubborn disregard for the limits of "disciplines." Yet there is hardly a "discipline" that didn't adopt, however unknowingly, some of Bloch's insights, and his provocative associations often proved more productive than the statistical account of social shifts. The first part of this philosophical meditation--which is also a narrative, an analysis, a rhapsody, and a manifesto--concerns a mode of "self-encounter" that presents itself in the history of music from Mozart through Mahler as an encounter with the problem of a community to come. This "we-problem" is worked out by Bloch in terms of a philosophy of the history of music. The "self-encounter," however, has to be conceived as "self-invention," as the active, affirmative fight for freedom and social justice, under the sign of Marx. The second part of the book is entitled "Karl Marx, Death and the Apocalypse." I am. We are. That's hardly anything. But enough to start.
Download or read book Chasing Utopia written by David Leach and published by ECW Press. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating, non-partisan exploration of an incendiary region Say the word “Israel” today and it sparks images of walls and rockets and a bloody conflict without end. Yet for decades, the symbol of the Jewish State was the noble pioneer draining the swamps and making the deserts bloom: the legendary kibbutznik. So what ever happened to the pioneers’ dream of founding a socialist utopia in the land called Palestine? Chasing Utopia: The Future of the Kibbutz in a Divided Israel draws readers into the quest for answers to the defining political conflict of our era. Acclaimed author David Leach revisits his raucous memories of life as a kibbutz volunteer and returns to meet a new generation of Jewish and Arab citizens struggling to forge a better future together. Crisscrossing the nation, Leach chronicles the controversial decline of Israel’s kibbutz movement and witnesses a renaissance of the original vision for a peaceable utopia in unexpected corners of the Promised Land. Chasing Utopia is an entertaining and enlightening portrait of a divided nation where hope persists against the odds.
Download or read book Redemption and Utopia written by Michael Lowy and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classic study of Jewish libertarian thought, from Walter Benjamin to Franz Kafka Towards the end of the nineteenth century, there appeared in Central Europe a generation of Jewish intellectuals whose work was to transform modern culture. Drawing at once on the traditions of German Romanticism and Jewish messianism, their thought was organized around the cabalistic idea of the “tikkoun”: redemption. Redemption and Utopia uses the concept of “elective affinity” to explain the surprising community of spirit that existed between redemptive messianic religious thought and the wide variety of radical secular utopian beliefs held by this important group of intellectuals. The author outlines the circumstances that produced this unusual combination of religious and non-religious thought and illuminates the common assumptions that united such seemingly disparate figures as Martin Buber, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukács.
Download or read book The Nowhere Bible written by Frauke Uhlenbruch and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-03-10 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bible contains passages that allow both scholars and believers to project their hopes and fears onto ever-changing empirical realities. By reading specific biblical passages as utopia and dystopia, this volume raises questions about reconstructing the past, the impact of wishful imagination on reality, and the hermeneutic implications of dealing with utopia – “good place” yet “no place” – as a method and a concept in biblical studies. A believer like William Bradford might approach a biblical passage as utopia by reading it as instructions for bringing about a significantly changed society in reality, even at the cost of becoming an oppressor. A contemporary biblical scholar might approach the same passage with the ambition of locating the historical reality behind it – finding the places it describes on a map, or arriving at a conclusion about the social reality experienced by a historical community of redactors. These utopian goals are projected onto a utopian text. This volume advocates an honest hermeneutical approach to the question of how reliably a past reality can be reconstructed from a biblical passage, and it aims to provide an example of disclosing – not obscuring – pre-suppositions brought to the text.
Download or read book Trouble in Utopia written by Dan Horowitz and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a thorough and detailed examination of Israeli institutions and how they function. It explains the decline in effectiveness of the government and the spread of cultural malaise in the Israel of the eighties. Horowitz and Lissak trace the integrative and disintegrative trends in Israel and show how a society that had laid the foundations for a cohesive Jewish nation-state became increasingly vulnerable to centrifugal forces. The book not only reflects a broad and comprehensive approach, but also focuses on themes that cut across institutional structures, such as the weakening of social and political cohesion in an overburdened polity.
Download or read book Utopianism A Very Short Introduction written by Lyman Tower Sargent and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-09-23 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are many debates about utopia - What constitutes a utopia? Are utopias benign or dangerous? Is the idea of utopianism essential to Christianity or heretical? What is the relationship between utopia and ideology? This Very Short Introduction explores these issues and examines utopianism and its history. Lyman Sargent discusses the role of utopianism in literature, and in the development of colonies and in immigration. The idea of utopia has become commonplace in social and political thought, both negatively and positively. Some thinkers see a trajectory from utopia to totalitarianism with violence an inevitable part of the mix. Others see utopia directly connected to freedom and as a necessary element in the fight against totalitarianism. In Christianity utopia is labelled as both heretical and as a fundamental part of Christian belief, and such debates are also central to such fields as architecture, town and city planning, and sociology among many others Sargent introduces and summarizes the debates over the utopia in literature, communal studies, social and political theory, and theology. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book Moses Levy of Florida written by C. S. Monaco and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ?
Download or read book The Ultimate World Order as Pictured in The Jewish Utopia With Slight Revisions written by Robert Henry Williams and published by . This book was released on 1951 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Ultimate World Order written by Robert Henry Williams and published by . This book was released on 2013-07 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Quest for Utopia written by Zvi Y. Gitelman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exploration of the Jewish political tradition elucidates a long, rich, and diverse experience of both sovereignty and dispersed statelessness. It holds insights, as Zvi Gitelman points out in his introductory chapter, for anyone interested comparative and ethnic politics, Jewish history, and the prehistory of contemporary Israeli politics. Stuart Cohen analyzes the "covenant idea" and the constitutional character of ancient Israel, which had a profound influence on Western political thought through the medium of the Bible. Gerald Blidstein examines rabbinic strategies for accommodation to the realities of Jewish dispersion in the middle Ages, while Robert Chazan focuses on communal authority and self-governance in the same period. Jonathan Frankel and Paula Hyman move the study into modern times with attempts to characterize the diverse patterns of Jewish political culture and activity in different parts of Europe, in the process revealing the dynamics of political cultural influence. Finally, Peter Medding looks at the "new politics" of contemporary American Jews - as voters, as public officials, and as organizational actors.
Download or read book Paths in Utopia written by Martin Buber and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1996-11-01 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this work, Buber expounds upon and defends the Zionist experiment - a federal system of communities on a co-operative basis. He looks to the anarchists Proudhon, Kropotkin and Gustav Landauer, but selects only that part of their doctrines appropriate to his case.
Download or read book Kabbalah and Meditation for the Nations written by Yitsḥaḳ Ginzburg and published by GalEinai Publication Society. This book was released on 2007 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ours is the first generation in modern times to understand the truly universal human condition and to seek to bring all peoples of the earth together in peace and harmony. We are the first generation to truly understand that we are faced with the challenge of either inhabiting our planet harmoniously or not inhabiting it at all. Filling our future is the fundamentalism that threatens to pit one religion against another. But, our different relationships and understandings of G-d should not be the reason for conflict but the source of goodwill in building our relationships with one another and our ability to understand others. The covenant with the Jewish people was not the first made between the Almighty and mankind. Before the revelation at Mt. Sinai, G-d commanded Adam and then made a covenant with Noah, giving them the guidelines for the universal religion of mankind. The most well-known part of this covenant is the seven universal commandments, or the Seven Noahide Laws. For this reason, Judaism and Jews do not proselytize, but rather seek to guide the nations of the world in developing their own relationship with the Almighty and implementing these potentially unifying laws of basic human nature. This book offers you a glimpse into the tremendous mystical power and meaning of G-d's covenant with humanity and the Seven Noahide Laws, as explained in Kabbalah. It focuses on their spiritual and inner dimensions and inspires a deeper look at our best hope for achieving world peace and a better future for all beings.
