Yitz Greenberg and Modern Orthodoxy: The Road Not Taken

by Adam Ferziger (Editor), Miri Freud-Kandel (Editor), Steven Bayme (Editor)

Overview

This volume offers a critical engagement with the thought of Rabbi Dr. Irving "Yitz" Greenberg, one of the most thoughtful and earnest voices to emerge from within American Orthodoxy. It examines his lifelong and complex encounter with the Modern Orthodox stream of American Judaism and the extent to which his teachings functioned as "the road not taken."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781618116147
Publisher:	Academic Studies Press
Publication date:	09/24/2019
Pages:	310
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Adam S. Ferziger is an award-winning scholar of modern and contemporary Judaism. He holds the S.R. Hirsch Chair for Research of the Torah with Derekh Erez Movement in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel, and is head of its Center for the Study of Judaism in Israel and North America. He is a senior associate at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University of Oxford, UK, and is co-convener of the annual Oxford Summer Institute on Modern and Contemporary Judaism.

Miri Freud-Kandel, a scholar of the theological development of modern and contemporary Judaism with a particular focus on Orthodox Judaism in Britain, is Fellow in Modern Judaism in the Faculty of Theology & Religion at the University of Oxford. She is also co-convener of the annual Oxford Summer Institute on Modern and Contemporary Judaism.

Steven Bayme serves as National Director of the Contemporary Jewish Life Department, American Jewish Committee and as Director of its Dorothy and Julius Koppelman Institute on American Jewish-Israeli Relations. He is also Visiting Faculty, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah in Riverdale, NY.

Table of Contents

Editors’ Introduction
Adam S. Ferziger, Miri Freud-Kandel, and Steven Bayme

A Personal Retrospective

Modern Orthodoxy and the Road Not Taken: A Retrospective View
Irving (Yitz) Greenberg

Part One: Law and Theology

History and Halakhah
Steven Katz

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg’s Covenantal Theory of Bioethics
Alan Jotkowitz

Irving Greenberg’s Theology of Hybrid Judaism
Darren Kleinberg

On the Meaning and Significance of Revelation for Orthodox Judaism
James Kugel

Divine Hiddenness and Human Input: The Potential Contribution of a Postmodern View of Revelation to Yitz Greenberg’s Holocaust Theology
Tamar Ross

Modern Orthodoxy and Religious Truth
Marc B. Shapiro

On Revelation, Heresy, and Mesorah—from Louis Jacobs to the TheTorah.com
Miri Freud-Kandel

Part Two: Past and Present

What Is “Modern” in Modern Orthodoxy?
Alan Brill

Can Modern Orthodoxy Survive?
Jack Wertheimer

Where Have All the Rabbis Gone? The Changing Character of the Orthodox Rabbinate and its Causes
Samuel C. Heilman

Modern Orthodox Responses to the Liberalization of Sexual Mores
Sylvia Barack Fishman

“The Road Not Taken” and “The One Less Traveled”: The Greenberg–Lichtenstein Exchange and Contemporary Orthodoxy
Adam S. Ferziger

Index
Editors and Contributors

Editorial Reviews

The book mirrors the man. Like Rabbi Irving Greenberg, Yitz Greenberg and Modern Orthodoxy: The Road Not Taken is scholarly yet accessible, critical yet constructive, focused yet with broad sensibility. The newly published essay collection critiques the rabbi’s ideas while appreciating their redemptive qualities. It charts the twists and turns of Modern Orthodoxy since the 1950s and explores Greenberg’s up-and-down relationship with established Orthodoxy. The book also casts a wider light on issues that have exercised American Jews during that time: fitting into American culture, religious pluralism, feminism, the Holocaust, Zionism and modern sexuality. It’s the story of American Jewry coming of age, with perceptive commentary on its sociology, theology and ethics.”
— Eugene Korn, The Jewish Week

“This work provides an excellent introduction to the critical issues surrounding Modern Orthodoxy’s encounter with the rapidly changing contemporary world.”

—Randall C. and Anne-Marie Belinfante, AJL Reviews

From the Publisher