Shaul Magid
Biographic Data
| ID | 495642 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shaul Magid |
| GIVEN NAMES | Shaul |
| FAMILY NAME | Magid |
| SIGNATURE | MAGID S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University Press |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8125-6240 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
What Does the Jewish Left Want
“Three Generations Are All That Exist in Any Moment in Time”: Historical Progress and Generational Ascent in R. Shlomo Elyashiv
This essay engages the kabbalistic thought of R. Shlomo Elyashiv on the question of generational descent and ascension, arguing that he offers a kabbalistic rendering of generational ascent that counters the traditional notion of generational descent. The essay then compares his view with that of Rav Kook
The Sin of Ending Exile: Bar Kokhba, Shabbtai Zvi and the Modern Heresiology of Zionism
Some Reflections on "Transfer" from Herzl to Trump
Judeopessimism: Antisemitism, History, and Critical Race Theory
This essay coins a term “Judeopessimism,” engaging questions of some of the contemporary writing on antisemitism and its claim to be historical in nature through the lens of critical race theory, specifically Afropessimism and its offshoots, which make claims of anti-Blackness as political ontology. Is some of this writing on antisemitism really making theological or political ontological claims of “eternal antisemitism” refracted in a less volat…
Being a Nation State in the Twenty-First Century: Between State and Synagogue in Modern Israel. By Shuki Friedman
Journal Article Being a Nation State in the Twenty-First Century: Between State and Synagogue in Modern Israel. By Shuki Friedman Get access Being a Nation State in the Twenty-First Century: Between State and Synagogue in Modern Israel. By Shuki Friedman. Brookline, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2023. 115pp. $129.00. Shaul Magid Shaul Magid Dartmouth College Hanover, New Hampshire, USA Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this…
Beyond Zionism and Anti-Zionism: A Future of the American Jewish Left and the Negation of the 'Negation of the Diaspora
This essay engages the challenges and future of the New Jewish Anti-Zionist Left in America. How has anti-Zionism become an expression of progressive Jewishness and in what ways is this anti-Zionism itself a product of the Zionization of American Judaism in the past half century? The essay then turns to ask the ways progressive Jewish America can move past anti-Zionism and in doing so move past Zionization and begin to construct a New Radical Jew…
Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism
Is Torah Study a Sin? The Necessity of Averah Lishma in R. Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar
This essay explores the question of averah lishma (sin for the sake of heaven) in Hungarian Hasidism, in particular in the works of Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar. The hasidic tradition deems averah lishma not only as inevitable, but as a necessary redemptive act whereby the righteous can eradicate evil by temporarily entering into it. Through a fascinating series of hermeneutical moves, Teitelbaum addresses the difficulty of how to determine when ave…
Communism, Zionism, Arabism, and America: Meir Kahane on Soviet Jewry in a Global Countercultural Register / Comunismo, Sionismo, Arabismo Y América: Meir Kahane Sobre El Judaísmo Soviético En Un Regi…
This essay engages the thought of US rabbi Meir Kahane (1932–1990), a provocative, militant, and, to many, demonized figure in postwar American Judaism. Among his other interventions in Jewish life in the 1960s and 1970s, Kahane played a major role in the movement for Soviet Jewry that occupied Jews from the early 1960s through the early 1980s when the USSR loosened its restrictions on Jewish emigration. I suggest that, for Kahane, the movement f…
The Afterlives of Meir Kahane: A Response
In this response to the essays in the symposium on my book Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical I tried to clarify and expand some of the thoughtful and astute themes in the remarks of my interlocutors, especially about how the book was not intended to be about one figure but rather an intervention into postwar American and Israeli Judaism through the lens of a maligned figure who is ignored by most Ame…
An Ethics of Unseen Consequences: Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav's Sefer Ha‐Middot
This essay is a close examination of one of Nahman of Bratslav's early and largely unexamined texts, Sefer ha‐Middot . The question it addresses is whether one can call this a study of “ethics” or, in Jewish nomenclature, musar , a work that seeks to cultivate human behaviors and describe ethical formation. In addition, it asks whether Sefer ha‐Middot can be called a text of “virtue ethics” given its focus on virtues and their enactment. The essa…
Domesticating Hasidism: Neo-Hasidism, Modernity, and the Postmodern Turn
This essay critically engages various contemporary readings of Hasidism. It examines what I call a “domesticating” orientation in Hasidic research, a quasi-apologetic move to read the academic study of Hasidism back into a normative Orthodox framework. I argue this is, in part, a resistance to what I call a “neo-Hasidic” orientation of a previous generation, scholars who sought to use Hasidism as the basis for their modern, existentialist, and re…
Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical
The life and politics of an American Jewish activist who preached radical and violent means to Jewish survivalMeir Kahane came of age amid the radical politics of the counterculture, becoming a militant voice of protest against Jewish liberalism. Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League in 1968, declaring that Jews must protect themselves by any means necessary. He immigrated to Israel in 1971, where he founded KACH, an ultranationalist and racis…
Loving Judaism through Christianity
This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia examines the life choices of two Jews who loved Christianity. Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, born into an ultra-Orthodox, nineteenth-century rabbinic dynasty in Lithuania, spent much of his life writing a Hebrew commentary on the Gospels in order to document and argue for the symmetry or symbiosis that he perceived between Judaism and Christianity. Oswald Rufeisen, from a twentieth-centu…
The “Ethnic Jew” and Judaism in America according to Felix Adler, Josephine Lazarus, and Mordecai Kaplan
Defining Christianity and Judaism from the Perspective of Religious Anarchy
This essay explores Martin Buber’s rendering of Jesus and the Ba‘al Shem Tov as two exemplars of religious anarchism that create a lens through which to see the symmetry between Judaism and Christianity. The essay argues that Buber’s use of Jesus to construct his view of the Ba‘al Shem Tov enables us to revisit the “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity through the category of the religious anarchist
Between Zionism and Friendship: The Correspondence between Gershom Scholem and Joseph Weiss
Between Zionism and Friendship:The Correspondence between Gershom Scholem and Joseph Weiss Shaul Magid I For a man as complex and full of conviction as Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), friendship could not have been easy. Aside from his groundbreaking scholarship, Scholem led an intensely active personal life that included a number of close (and often tortured) friendships that are documented in voluminous correspondence.1 In addition, he had close r…
Christian Supersessionism, Zionism, and the Contemporary Scene: A Critical Reading of Peter Ochs's Reading of John Howard Yoder
Postliberal theology has been a topic of considerable theological debate over the past few decades. In his 2011 book Another Reformation , Peter Ochs deploys a postliberal theological model for the purpose of developing a sophisticated understanding of the future of interreligious relations. Ochs argues that postliberal theology is a reparative theology focusing on alleviating human suffering. He argues that the Christian idea of supersessionism …
Tribal Trouble: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel. By Dov Waxman
It is common knowledge today that no one can write a book about the Israel-Palestine conflict that its readers would consider unbiased. This conflict, now over seventy years old, is a touchstone for Jewish identity, global politics, anti-Semitism, race relations, and Islamophobia. Both the complexity and seeming intractability of the conflict, which involves two peoples fighting over the same territory, each with strong narratives to support thei…
David B. Ruderman. A Best-Selling Hebrew Book of the Modern Era: The Book of the Covenant of Pinḥas Hurwitz and Its Remarkable Legacy
When I was studying in a Kabbalah yeshiva (seminary) in Jerusalem in the early 1980s, there was a book that surreptitiously went around the circle of young twenty-something students, especially those with a college education, for extracurricular reading. The book was by an author none of us knew, Pinḥas Hurwitz of Vilna, and the title of the book was Sefer ha-Brit (The Book of the Covenant [1797]). We were told that this book was by a modern Kabb…
Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity, and the Construction of Modern Judaism
Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity, and the Construction of Modern Judaism
Hasidism Incarnate argues that much of modern Judaism in the west developed under what it calls a “Christian gaze,” that is, reacting to Christianity by defending Judaism, positing that Judaism is unlike Christianity. This is done, ironically, while modern Judaism is being constructed as quite similar to Christianity in terms of its ethos, aesthetics, and attitude toward ritual and faith. Hasidism, unlike Judaism in Western Europe, is not develop…
Liora R. Halperin, Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948
Journal Article Liora R. Halperin, Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948 Get access Liora R. Halperin, Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014) 313 + xiv pp. Index. Liora R. Halperin, Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014) 313 + xiv pp. Index.…
Butler Trouble
Who is an Anti-Semite? Someone who hates Jews too much.—Jewish-Hungarian proverbBut Zionism was a calculated risk in that it brought about the destruction of the reality of exile. The foes of Zionism certainly saw the risk more clearly than the Zionists.—Gershom Scholem, interview with Muki TsurEverybody is somebody's Jew. And today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.—Primo Levi, Il Manifesto The debate surrounding Judith Butler's work…
From Sainthood to Selfhood in American Judaism: Artscroll's New Jewish Hero and Jewish Renewal's Functional Rebbe
Alex de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, first published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840, remains an important resource for understanding the ways in which American democracy serves its citizens. As an outsider from France, de Tocqueville traveled around the U.S. in 1831 in quest of reasons why representative democracy succeeded in America and failed in so many other places. In an essay entitled “Judaism and Democracy in America,” Alan Mittlem…
The Role of the Secular in Abraham Joshua Heschel's Theology: (Re)Reading Heschel After 9/11
The task is to humanize the sacred and to sanctify the secular. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Israel: An Echo of Eternity Before religion can humanize man, man must humanize religion. Mordecai Kaplan, The Religion of Ethical Nationhood
In Search of a Critical Voice in the Jewish Diaspora: Homelessness and Home in Edward Said and Shalom Noah Barzofsky'sNetivot Shalom
This article explores the perception of Israel and Zionism in the diasporic imagination. I argue that the dominance of Israel as a tool of diasporic Jewish identity has impeded Diaspora Jews from developing their own identity alongside, yet distinct from, Israel. I use the work of Edward Said and the late Slonimer Rebbe, Shalom Noah Barzofsky, as lenses through which to view the notion of exile as a positive and constructive social and ideologica…
Mysticism, History, and a "New" Kabbalah: Gershom Scholem and the Contemporary Scene
The academic discipline of Jewish mysticism has become one of the most robust in the field of Jewish Studies. Rarely has there been a disciple in the academy that has been so dominated by one individual, in this case Gershom Scholem. Scholem not only initiated the field, he also drew its boundaries and set the terms of scholarly method and debate. And, he became a subject in the field as well as a contributor. This essay explores Scholem's ideas …
The Politics of (Un)Conversion: The "Mixed Multitude" ( Erev Rav ) as Conversos in Rabbi Hayyim Vital's Ets Ha-Daat Tov
Where there is no narrative, there is no history. Benedicto Croce Sometimes legends make reality, and become more important than the facts. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children The historian's function must be to understand myths that people live by, because these myths have often a tenuous link to reality, though they are placed within reality. George Mosse, Nazism: A Historical and Comparative Analysis of National Socialism New Historicism and t…
“Gershom Scholem's Ambivalence Toward Mystical Experience and His Critique of Martin Buber in Light of Hans Jonas and Martin Heidegger”
Through the Void: The Absence of God in R. Naḥman of Bratzlav's Likkutei MoHaRan
Although not usually viewed as a manifestation of modern spirituality, hasidism strikingly resembles a product of the spiritual and ideological reorientation of Western religion in the post-Copernican world. Largely unaware of the philosophical and theological changes in European intellectual culture, many of the hasidic masters exhibited a sensitivity to the existential plight of humankind in the modern world
Hasidism and Existentialism? A Review Essay
Gedalyah Nigal, Magic, Mysticism, and Hasidism
From Theosophy to Midrash: Lurianic Exegesis and the Garden of Eden
Until now, the academic study of Lurianic kabbala has largely pursued three roads of inquiry. The first, following Scholem, has been the study of Lurianic kabbala as a mystical and eschatological response to the historical events of the Jewish expulsion from Spain in 1492, an event viewed as the root of the mystical heresy of Shabbtai Tzvi. The second pathway has been the scholarly analysis of Lurianic teaching as the most extreme example of kabb…
‘A Thread of Blue’: Rabbi Gershon Henoch Leiner of Radzyń and his Search for Continuity in Response to Modernity
The Spinozistic Spirit in Mordecai Kaplan's Revaluation of Judaism
Journal Article THE SPINOZISTIC SPIRIT IN MORDECAI KAPLAN'S REVALUATION OF JUDAISM Get access Shaul Magid Shaul Magid JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF AMERICA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Modern Judaism - A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience, Volume 20, Issue 2, May 2000, Pages 159–180, https://doi.org/10.1093/mj/20.2.159 Published: 01 May 2000
God's Voice from the Void: Old and New Studies in Bratslav Hasidism
Hasidism on the margin: Reconciliation, antinomianism, and messianism in Izbica/Radzin Hasidism
Shaul Magid explores one of the most provocative and radical traditions of Hasidic thought, the school of Izbica and Radzin, that Rabbi Gershon Henokh founded in nineteenth-century Poland. Magid traces the intellectual history of this strand of Judaism into the present. He puts the Hasidism of Izbica-Radzin in context and provides a model for inquiry into other forms of Hasidism
The Politics of (Un)Conversion: The "Mixed Multitude" ( Erev Rav ) as Conversos in Rabbi Hayyim Vital's Ets Ha-Daat Tov
Where there is no narrative, there is no history. Benedicto Croce Sometimes legends make reality, and become more important than the facts. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children The historian's function must be to understand myths that people live by, because these myths have often a tenuous link to reality, though they are placed within reality. George Mosse, Nazism: A Historical and Comparative Analysis of National Socialism New Historicism and t…
In Search of a Critical Voice in the Jewish Diaspora: Homelessness and Home in Edward Said and Shalom Noah Barzofsky's Netivot Shalom
This article explores the perception of Israel and Zionism in the diasporic imagination. I argue that the dominance of Israel as a tool of diasporic Jewish identity has impeded Diaspora Jews from developing their own identity alongside, yet distinct from, Israel. I use the work of Edward Said and the late Slonimer Rebbe, Shalom Noah Barzofsky, as lenses through which to view the notion of exile as a positive and constructive social and ideologica…
In Search of a Critical Voice in the Jewish Diaspora: Homelessness and Home in Edward Said and Shalom Noah Barzofsky'sNetivot Shalom
This article explores the perception of Israel and Zionism in the diasporic imagination. I argue that the dominance of Israel as a tool of diasporic Jewish identity has impeded Diaspora Jews from developing their own identity alongside, yet distinct from, Israel. I use the work of Edward Said and the late Slonimer Rebbe, Shalom Noah Barzofsky, as lenses through which to view the notion of exile as a positive and constructive social and ideologica…
From Metaphysics to Midrash: Myth, History, and the Interpretation of Scripture in Lurianic Kabbala
Introduction: Kabbala, New Historicism, and the Question of Boundaries The Lurianic Myth: A Playbill 1. Genesis And Adam's Sin Was (Very) Great: Original Sin in Lurianic Exegesis 2. Exodus The Other Israel: The Erev Rav (Mixed Multitude) as Conversos 3. Leviticus The Sin of Becoming a Woman: Male Homosexuality and the Castration Complex 4. Numbers Balaam, Moses, and the Prophecy of the Other: A Lurianic Vision for the Erasure of Difference 5. Deu…
The Role of the Secular in Abraham Joshua Heschel's Theology: (Re)Reading Heschel After 9/11
The task is to humanize the sacred and to sanctify the secular. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Israel: An Echo of Eternity Before religion can humanize man, man must humanize religion. Mordecai Kaplan, The Religion of Ethical Nationhood
Introduction: Jewish Life and Letters in the Ottoman Empire
»Vielmehr bietet [der Kommentar] auf höchstem Niveau eine substantielle Auseinandersetzung mit den Hintergründen, den Zusammenhängen, der Theorie und der Praxis des Grundgesetzes. Besseres lässt sich von einem Verfassungskommentar nicht sagen.“ Herbert Günther Staaatsanzeiger für das Land Hessen 2018 (50), 1494–1495
Constructing Women from Men: The Metaphysics of Male Homosexuality Among Lurianic Kabbalists in Sixteenth-Century Safed
»Vielmehr bietet [der Kommentar] auf höchstem Niveau eine substantielle Auseinandersetzung mit den Hintergründen, den Zusammenhängen, der Theorie und der Praxis des Grundgesetzes. Besseres lässt sich von einem Verfassungskommentar nicht sagen.“ Herbert Günther Staaatsanzeiger für das Land Hessen 2018 (50), 1494–1495
Mysticism, History, and a "New" Kabbalah: Gershom Scholem and the Contemporary Scene
The academic discipline of Jewish mysticism has become one of the most robust in the field of Jewish Studies. Rarely has there been a disciple in the academy that has been so dominated by one individual, in this case Gershom Scholem. Scholem not only initiated the field, he also drew its boundaries and set the terms of scholarly method and debate. And, he became a subject in the field as well as a contributor. This essay explores Scholem's ideas …
The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: The Modern Era
From Sainthood to Selfhood in American Judaism: Artscroll's New Jewish Hero and Jewish Renewal's Functional Rebbe
Alex de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, first published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840, remains an important resource for understanding the ways in which American democracy serves its citizens. As an outsider from France, de Tocqueville traveled around the U.S. in 1831 in quest of reasons why representative democracy succeeded in America and failed in so many other places. In an essay entitled “Judaism and Democracy in America,” Alan Mittlem…
The King Is Dead [and has been for three decades], Long Live the King: Contemporary Kabbalah and Scholem's Shadow
"The King Is Dead [and has been for three decades], Long Live the King":Contemporary Kabbalah and Scholem's Shadow Shaul Magid Jonathan Garb . The Chosen Will Become Herds: Studies in Twentieth Century Kabbalah. Translated by YaffaBerkovitz-Murciano. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. xi + 218. Pinchas Giller . Shalom Shar'abi and the Kabbalists of Beit El. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. viii + 199. There is a myth tha…
The “Ethnic Jew” and Judaism in America according to Felix Adler, Josephine Lazarus, and Mordecai Kaplan
Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity, and the Construction of Modern Judaism
Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity, and the Construction of Modern Judaism
Hasidism Incarnate argues that much of modern Judaism in the west developed under what it calls a “Christian gaze,” that is, reacting to Christianity by defending Judaism, positing that Judaism is unlike Christianity. This is done, ironically, while modern Judaism is being constructed as quite similar to Christianity in terms of its ethos, aesthetics, and attitude toward ritual and faith. Hasidism, unlike Judaism in Western Europe, is not develop…
Liora R. Halperin, Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948
Journal Article Liora R. Halperin, Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948 Get access Liora R. Halperin, Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014) 313 + xiv pp. Index. Liora R. Halperin, Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014) 313 + xiv pp. Index.…
Butler Trouble
Who is an Anti-Semite? Someone who hates Jews too much.—Jewish-Hungarian proverbBut Zionism was a calculated risk in that it brought about the destruction of the reality of exile. The foes of Zionism certainly saw the risk more clearly than the Zionists.—Gershom Scholem, interview with Muki TsurEverybody is somebody's Jew. And today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.—Primo Levi, Il Manifesto The debate surrounding Judith Butler's work…
Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (38 works) · Philosophy (33 works) · Theology (30 works) · Judaism (29 works) · History (20 works) · Religious studies (19 works) · Political science (18 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Art (16 works) · Law (16 works)