Zachary Braiterman

Against Holocaust-Sublime: Naive Reference and the Generation of Memory

To the generation that directly suffered the Holocaust or witnessed it at one remove, ethical imperatives to remember Auschwitz must have seemed and seem clear and simple; but not today when the burden of memory increasingly falls upon a public whose members were born after the events they recall. No longer the sole purview of survivors, memory more and more depends upon the varied work of artists, scholars and community functionaries (painters, writers, architects, sculptors, actors, filmmakers, historians, philosophers, literary critics, art historians, politicians, clergy, educators, philanthropists, ideologues). In the following pages, I build on the work of recent critics to make a philosophical point about how one remembers: with what sympathies, suspicions, critical methods, narratives, images, tone, language and affect. I start with the Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim for whom the Holocaust undermined “philosophy” by provoking wonder and astonishment. Identified by Fackenheim with revelation, these constitute affective sources against which Reason has allegedly sought to protect itself. Arthur Cohen advanced the same argument when he wrote, “There is something in the nature of thought—its patient deliberateness and care for logical order—that is alien to the enormity of the death camps.” Like so much reflection upon the Holocaust during the 1970s and 1980s, these sentiments unwittingly teetered on the edge of art. In fact, the attention to wonder and enormity that Fackenheim and Cohen find

Political Theory: Beyond Sovereignty?

The student of modern Jewish political theory is immediately faced with what may seem an insurmountable problem: almost all modern Jewish philosophers claim that Judaism is not centrally concerned with politics. By this they do not deny that Jewish people have been, and are, involved in modern political life. Rather, they claim that Judaism as Judaism was not historically and is not today concerned with political life. Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish thinkers have both made this claim. For Zionists, Zionism is the rejection of the nonpolitical character of Judaism and the Jewish past. Different as they are, Moses Hess, arguably the first socialist Zionist, and Zvi Yehudah Kook, arguably the first religious Zionist, agree that Jews need to throw off the shackles of exile in order to return Jews and Judaism to the political life of the Jewish nation. In contrast, for non-Zionists, such as Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig, the nonpolitical character of Judaism allows Jews and Judaism to coexist with (either comfortably with or alienated from) their contemporary political realities. In this way, the Zionist and non-Zionist positions are two sides of the same coin. And clearly, if Judaism is by definition not political, then the attempt to articulate a modern Jewish political theory of any sort would be meaningless at best.

“Into Life”??! Franz Rosenzweig and the Figure of Death

At the end of his short treatise Understanding the Sick and the Healthy , Franz Rosenzweig predicated the restoration of what he called healthy consciousness upon the recognition of death7apos;s sovereignty. “[One] must direct [ones] life to no other goal but death,” he wrote. “A healthy man has the strength to continue towards the grave. The sick man invokes death and lets himself be carried away in mortal fear.” Rosenzweig juxtaposed the Grim Reaper with weary life. The healthy understanding knows that death will dash life to the ground. Yet it takes comfort from knowing that death will accept it with open arms. In the end, eloquent life falls silent as the eternally taciturn one speaks, “Do you finally recognize me? I am your brother.”In his notes to the English translation, Nahum Glatzer remarks with shock, “This concluding chapter–on death–stands in a striking contrast to the final passage of The Star of Redemption.” As if to offset our texts more mordant tone, Glatzer then quotes verbatim the seemingly life-affirming paragraphs that conclude Rosenzweigs magnum opus. Glatzer is not the only commentator to emphasize the importance of life in Rosenzweigs system. Indeed, Else-Rahel Freund notes that The Star of Redemption begins with the phrase “from death” and concludes with the words “into life.”

No Parting Ways: The Crypto-Zionism of Judith Butler

Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism is a curious thing in amalgamating Jewish ethics in terms of self-dispersal and political critique. The book hits its mark by pressing in on Zionism from multiple margin-points. In the form of a negation, its author, Judith Butler, argues the case against Zionism as a historical form of settler-colonialism, while philosophically she positions Jewish ethics against political forms of sovereign power and state violence. As a construction, the utopian core of the project is to advance a common space for Jews and Palestinians as a non-sovereign, binational compact, to open up new forms of cultural, political, and social cohabitation. Readings of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Mahmoud Darwish, Emmanuel Levinas, and Edward Said are themselves exemplary. Iconic figures, they have been brought in by Butler from their place either at the margins or from outside the boundaries of Jewishness. Their purpose is to perform critical work in Jewish philosophy by calling into question static notions of Jewishness in the name of a just and capacious criticalcosmopolitanism. Historically, Butler’s own anti-Zionism recalls the ideological heyday of east European Jewish socialism and of liberal cosmopolitanism and Reform Judaism in central Europe before the Holocaust and then the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. But with no little irony, Butler’s critique of Zionism bears no little resemblance to Zionism itself, historically considered. Indeed, the interpenetration of Jewishness, secularism, and cosmopolitanism were bedrock principles in the classical Zionist theories penned by writers as diverse across the ideological spectrum as Theodore Herzl, Max Nordau, Joseph Hayyim Brenner, Micah Joseph Berdichevsky, A.D. Gordon, Martin Buber, and Vladimir Jabotinsky. While these figures go unnamed and unmentioned in Parting Ways, they all rejected static notions of Jewishness no less vociferously than does Butler today. These were the most important critics undermining models that pegged Jewishness as “religion,” be that the German Jewish liberal religion of ethical monotheism or the orthodox

The Emergence of Modern Religion: Moses Mendelssohn, Neoclassicism, and Ceremonial Aesthetics

It is almost a given that one cannot underestimate the radical changes shaping the creation of modern religion in the eighteenth century, a century recognized by most scholars as a period of profound transformation in politics, philosophy and the arts. Liberal religion emerges in climates marked by revolution and anticlericism in France, religious and philosophical Enlightenment in Germany, the rise of empiricism and democracy in England and the United States. Across Europe and the Atlantic, the period sees in the arts a shift to neoclassical (Greek and Roman) standards of style away from baroque religiosity and rococo “decadence.” But what was the nature of that transformation for modern Judaism in Germany? In the thought of Moses Mendelssohn, Enlightenment and Judaism were not separate features. I will try to show the philosophical coherence of the fusion. Mendelssohn believed that Judaism does have something vitally significant to contribute to human culture that reason cannot provide on its own. Overlooked by his critics, aesthetics and an aesthetic conception of Judaism play the key part in highlighting that abiding coherence of Mendelssohn’s contribution to modern religious thought, in which reason and revelation form parts of a variegated, single piece. Looking past the caricature that reduces Enlightenment to “the unhappy consciousness” of avid intellectualism, dogmatic rationalism, atomistic individualism, it is possible to see that eighteenth-century Germany was indeed the ideal environment for the reinvention of religion and, with it, the creation of modern Judaism. Nearly all historians of the Enlightenment understand the unique openness of Germany and the German Enlightenment to religion. This has been attributed to the abiding hold of some putative German metaphysical temperament, although Ernst Cassirer spoke more to the point when he surmised that it was Leibnizian philosophy that acted as the “medium” within which modern religious thought could develop, as it was Leibniz who sought

Chapter Three Lessing in Jerusalem: Modern Religion, Medieval Orientalism, and the Idea of Perfection

How does the “medieval” function as a bearer of Jewish identity in a changing secular world? Each chapter in Encountering the Medieval in Modern Jewish Thought addresses a different Jewish return to the medieval by using a language of renewal.

Maimonides and the Visual Image after Kant and Cohen

Abstract In this paper, I attempt to consider Jewish philosophy in opposition to the anti-ocularcentrism that defined the German Jewish philosophical tradition after Kant, namely the idea that Judaism—or at least its philosophical expression in Maimonidean philosophy—is aniconic and cognitively abstract. I do so by attempting to rethink the epistemic-veridical place of the imagination and visual experience in the Guide of the Perplexed. Once the imagination has been disciplined by reason, is there any cognitive status to an image or sound that the eye or the ear perceives, and to that mental faculty that combines and recombines such impressions? Is the sight or sound of revelation a hallucination or just a mere figure of speech? Does it bear any relation to a spiritual reality external to the human mind and finite physical existence? To address these questions I explore the visual images, both iconic and aniconic-abstract, that distinguish the Guide. There is no getting past the visual imagination, although I am not sure Maimonides would have recognized it as such. Even when he leaves behind figurative visual cues such as the false image-work of the undisciplined imagination or the appearance of angels and images of God found in lower grades of prophecy, he turns to another visual register, namely the “abstract art” of pure, dazzling light. In regard to these questions, Maimonides was more Greek than German, ascribing, cautiously, penultimate cognitive status to the visual imagination.

Peter Eli Gordon. Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003. 357 pp.

This important study of Franz Rosenzweig is among the first book-length forays into the silence surrounding Martin Heidegger in modern Jewish thought. In seeking to establish an elective affinity between these two thinkers, Gordon subverts the firewall established by Karl Löwith between Rosenzweigs passion for eternity and Heideggers focus on the pure temporality of human existence (Dasein). In doing so, he bucks the link in contemporary Jewish philosophy between Rosenzweig and Levinas, in which an ethics based on a good beyond Being upends ontology as first philosophy. In Gordons reading, eternity is to the Jewish people as Dasein is to Being. Jewish existence, understood ontologically, not metaphysically, assumes the uncanny, ungrounded, and self-sustaining character of Heideggerian authenticity. Ontologically radical, eternity thus becomes like time, a this-worldly framework, constituting the ultimate horizon of redemption.

Leora Batnitzky. Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. x, 281 pp.

This is a fantastic book, certain to stimulate many debates, and not just about its subject, Franz Rosenzweig. At the heart of Batnitzkys text is an argument about religious truth and the form it takes in the modern world, about “idolatry” and “representation.” As understood by the author, the law against idolatry did not mean for Rosenzweig what it meant for Maimonides and Hermann Cohen; it does not reflect the epistemological conundra that go into the presentation of a God who outstrips all sensual image and mental representation. Instead, Batnitzky takes idolatry to mean the act of fixing upon one single image, thereby limiting Gods freedom to appear in different forms. In this light, the term representation gets pulled away from the German Vorstellung (i.e. with the presentation of an abstract truth) and aligned with the verb vertreten (suggesting how one represents that truth through ones very being, ones own physical existence and image).

Joseph Soloveitchik and Immanuel Kant's Mitzvah-Aesthetic

In the following pages, I will address the relationship between Jewish thought and aesthetics by bringing Joseph Soloveitchik into conversation with Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Judgment remains an imposing monument in the history of philosophical aesthetics. While Buber and Rosenzweig may have been more accomplished aesthetes, Soloveitchiks aesthetic proves closer to Kants own. In particular, I draw upon the latters distinction between the beautiful and the sublime and the notion of a form of indeterminate purposiveness without determinate purpose. I will relate these three figures to Soloveitcchiks understanding of halakhah and to the ideal of performing commandments for their own sake (li-shemah). The model of mitzvah advanced by this comparison is quintessentially modern: an autonomous, self-contained, formal system that does not (immediately) point to extraneous goods, such as spiritual enlightenment, personal morality, or social ethics. The good presupposed by this system proves first and foremost “aesthetic.” That is, immanent to the system. Supererogatory goods enter into the picture only afterward as second-order effects.