Leora Batnitzky

Schoenberg's Moses Und Aron and the Judaic Ban on Images

This article argues that Schoenbergs monumental opera Moses und Aron reflects a broader German-Jewish concern with the philosophical meaning of the Second Commandment and its relation to German-Jewish identity. By way of the aesthetic theory of the German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen, the article analyzes Moses und Aron and suggests that Cohens theory offers a context through which to understand the philosophical and cultural underpinnings of Schoenbergs music and drama. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the social and political milieu in which Moses und Aron was created and its implications for understanding Schoenbergs and the German-Jewish intellectual struggle for identity.

Rosenzweig's Aesthetic Theory and Jewish Unheimlichkeit

The aesthetic theory in Franz Rosenzweigs Star of Redemption remains a conundrum to Rosenzweigs interpreters, both in terms of its relation to the Jewish philosophical tradition and in terms of its German cultural and philosophical context.1 Can the Stars emphasis on aesthetics be reconciled with the Jewish philosophical traditions, and most particularly with the German-Jewish, aversion to image-making? Does the Star even have a unified aesthetic theory, or are there several aesthetic theories reflected in the three parts of the Star? If the Star can be said to have a unified aesthetic theory, is it significantly different from any of a number of Rosenzweigs Romantic influences, and Schellings most specifically?2 This essay attempts to address these issues by way of two interrelated claims. First, I argue that the Stars aesthetic theory bears its closest resemblance to Hermann Cohens, in form though not in content. Second, recognizing this formal affinity between what I label Rosenzweigs and Cohens ethical monotheisms points to the connection between Rosenzweigs

Translation as Transcendence: A Glimpse into the Workshop of the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible Translation

With the publication of an English translation of Martin Bubers and Franz Rosenzweigs essays on biblical translation and method, the Englishspeaking world finally has a glimpse into the workshop of the BuberRosenzweig translation of the Hebrew Bible into German. There is something undeniably odd, however, about a translation of essays on translation, in which the particular points of the texts translated refer only to the details and technicalities of languages other than the readers own. What is interesting is that this strangeness adds to what Buber and Rosenzweig sought to achieve with their translation: to make the German alien by means of the Hebrew. They believed that the task of the translator must be to create distance for the reader, not to bridge it. Indeed, this notion of translation is most important for the Bible, the book of all books, whose translation must remind the reader, if nothing else, of its original. Behind these ideas, and the particular strategies that go with them, is a complex theological vision accompanied by an intricate philosophy of language. Although some of the essays in this book were first published separately,

From Resurrection to Immortality: Theological and Political Implications in Modern Jewish Thought

Hans Jonas began his 1961 Ingersoll Lecture by acknowledging the “undeniable fact” “that the modern temper is uncongenial to the idea of immortality.” 1 Jonas nonetheless concluded his lecture by affirming that “although the hereafter is not ours … we can have immortality … when in our brief span we serve our threatened mortal affairs and help the suffering immortal God.” 2 While he may not have realized it, Jonass words capture what I shall argue is the dominant view of immortality in modern Jewish thought. Underlying this view is an effort to refute materialist conceptions of human existence without committing to any particularly theological or traditionally metaphysical notion of immortality.

Is Conversion a Human Right?: A Comparative Look at Religious Zionism and Hindu Nationalism

EDUCATION Ph.D., Princeton University (Religion), 1996 M.A., Princeton University (Religion), 1993 Antioch International Buddhist Studies Program, Bodh Gaya, India (Buddhist Philosophy), 1988-1989 B.A., cum laude, Barnard College, Columbia University (Philosophy), 1988 B.A., with honors, Jewish Theological Seminary of America (Bible), 1988 Honors Thesis: “Selection and Election in the Bible in the Context of Spinoza’s Philosophy”

Mordecai Kaplan as Hermeneut: History, Memory, and His God-Idea

n an insightful article on Mordecai M. Kaplan and process theology, Jacob Staub, past academic dean of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, rightfully notes that “any attempt to extract a single, consistent, ‘authentic’ essence from all of the various theological formulations by Jewish teachers through the ages is a perilous task indeed.”1 As students of Jewish thought and intellectual history know, not only are there a wide variety of Jewish theological expressions but many, if not most, of these expressions preclude, by their own selfunderstandings, other Jewish theological views. Just to mention one twentieth-century example, Martin Buber’s (1878–1965) description of the dialogical encounter between the human being and God is fundamentally opposed to Hermann Cohen’s (1842–1918) notion that God is and cannot be anything but an idea that regulates human moral action.2 In the context of Kaplan, and specifically Kaplan’s God-idea, Staub takes the diversity of Jewish theological views of God to show that the question to be asked about Kaplan’s theology is not whether it is authentically Jewish but whether it “provides a meaningful system of Jewish living.”3 I

The Image of Judaism: German-Jewish Intellectuals and the Ban on Images

The question of whether God can be represented visually or otherwise is a question as old as Jewish thought itself. In this essay, I focus on some of the ways in which GermanJewish intellectuals formed an image of Judaism through an argument about the second commandment ban on image making. This argument and its subsequent image of Judaism became a major philosophical, aesthetic, and political theme for GermanJewish intellectuals. By GermanJewish intellectuals, I refer not only to Jewish intellectuals living in Germany but also to German speaking Jews in other lands. I will suggest that a number of important, early twentieth century German-speaking Jewish intellectuals measured both their relation to and distance from German culture through an interpretation of the second commandment ban on images. On the one hand, the interpretation of the second commandment as an all out ban on visuality represented for GermanJewish thinkers a kind of hyper-rationality and thus the confluence between Judaism and modernity. At the same time, however, GermanJewish thinkers also presented the purported hyper-rationality of the second commandment as a way of understanding modern antisemitism and thus the distance between Judaism and German society.

Introduction: Icon, Image, and Text in Modern Jewish Culture

In recent years, scholars of Judaism have increasingly turned to consider the relationship between Judaism and art. These studies include, but are by no means limited to, Richard Cohens Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (California, 1998), Elliot Wolfsons Through a Speculum that Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton, 1994), Vivian Manns Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts (Cambridge, 2000), Kaiman Blands The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations of the Jew (Princeton, 2000), and Margaret Olins, The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art (Nebraska, 2002). Scholarly interest in the relation between Judaism and art stems not only from a consideration of contemporary Jewish artistic expression, but perhaps even more fundamentally from an explicit or implicit reaction to nineteenth-century European musings on this relation. Particularly in the GermanJewish context, the question of Judaisms relation to art was paramount, not only within internal Jewish debates about the meanings of modern Jewish identity but also in conversations, between Jews and nonJews alike, about Judaisms compatibility with modernity in particular and the history of western civilization more generally. Contemporary scholarly attempts to retrieve strands of pre-modern Jewish theological and philosophical affirmations of vision and visuality, such as Blands, Manns and Wolfsons, mentioned above, are themselves predicated on the nineteenth and twentieth-century scholarly denials of visuality in Jewish thought and culture, as is Richard Cohens attempt to detail Jewish interaction with the visual arts and the role of visual