Allan Arkush
Biographic Data
| ID | 583008 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Allan Arkush |
| GIVEN NAMES | Allan |
| FAMILY NAME | Arkush |
| SIGNATURE | ARKUSH A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Binghamton University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Daniel H. Weiss's newfound Mendelssohn: A covert theopolitical radical
Origins of the Kabbalah
Origins of the Kabbalah: Not Assigned
With the publication of The Origins of Kabbalah in 1950, one of the most important scholars of our century brought the obscure world of Jewish mysticism to a wider audience for the first time. A crucial work in the oeuvre of Gershom Scholem, this book details the beginnings of the Kabbalah in twelfth- and thirteenth-century southern France and Spain, showing its rich tradition of repeated attempts to achieve and portray direct experiences of God.…
Michael Walzer's Secular Jewish Thought
Although he has never assumed the mantle of a “Jewish thinker,” Michael Walzer has over a period of several decades articulated a comprehensive teaching rooted in philosophical reflection on the sources of Judaism and focused on the most important issues facing both Israel and the diaspora. At the core of his teaching lies a reiteration of what he takes to be the Jewish idea of justice, which he derives from the Bible and other ancient and mediev…
From Diaspora Nationalism to Radical Diasporism
In the first week of June 2007, on the fortieth anniversary of the Six Day War, the weekend supplement of Ha’aretz featured a dialogue between the journalist Ari Shavit and Avraham Burg, former chairman of the Jewish Agency, former Speaker of the Knesset, and a onetime candidate for leadership of the Labor Party. Having already expressed on numerous occasions his deep dissatisfaction with Israel's general trajectory, Burg went much further in thi…
Theocracy, Liberalism, and Modern Judaism
The paper examines the efforts of several Jewish thinkers to cope with the discrepancy between the inherently theocratic principles of their religion and the modern, liberal ideas with which they wished to bring Judaism into harmony. It focuses first on Moses Mendelssohn's attempt at the end of the eighteenth century to provide a rationale for the dissolution of Judaism's coercive, collectivist dimension and to render the Jewish religion fully co…
Drawing up The Jewish Social Contract
Drawing up The Jewish Social Contract Allan Arkush (bio) Keywords Allan Arkush, Drawing up The Jewish Social Contract, David Novak, Covenatal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory, Political Philosophy, the Social Contract, Political Theology Following the publication in 2000 of his Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory and in 2005 of The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theology, the American Canadian rabbi, sch…
Biblical criticism and cultural Zionism prior to the first world war
This essay examines the initial stages of the relationship between Jewish nationalism and modern biblical criticism. Its point of departure is Ahad Ha’am, the founder of cultural Zionism, who kept his distance from biblical criticism, and proceeds with Joseph Klausner, Ahad Ha’am’s successor as the editor of Ha-shiloah, who moved in the opposite direction by incorporating biblical criticism into his own writing and teaching. After examining the o…
The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy
Modern Jewish philosophy emerged in the seventeenth century, with the impact of the new science and modern philosophy on thinkers who were reflecting upon the nature of Judaism and Jewish life. This collection of essays examines the work of several of the most important of these figures, from the seventeenth to the late-twentieth centuries, and addresses themes central to the tradition of modern Jewish philosophy: language and revelation, autonom…
A Review of Oren Yiftachel, Ethnocracy?Land and Identity in Israel/Palestine
Reviewed by: Ethnocracy Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine Allan Arkush (bio) Oren Yiftachel , Ethnocracy Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006, 368 pp + 35 maps The one-word title of Oren Yiftachel's book has a disturbing ring to it. Most supporters of Israel are likely to take umbrage at the very idea that it should be characterized not as some kind of a democracy but as an "ethnocrac…
Tuvia Friling, Arrows in the Dark: David Ben-Gurion, the Yishuv Leadership, and Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust
Conservative Political Theology and the Freedom of Religion: The Recent Work of Robert Kraynak and David Novak
The Catholic political scientist Robert Kraynak and the Jewish scholar David Novak have recently written extended essays in political theology designed to remedy the deficiencies of liberal democracy. Kraynak seeks to demonstrate the superiority of the Augustinian doctrine of Two Cities to the inherently corrupting principles of liberalism. This medieval teaching underlies his support for what he calls “limited government under God.” Novak seeks …
Part Three: The West and the Rest
Part Three:The Rest and the West Allan Arkush (bio) In his preface to the entire volume, David Biale compares Cultures of the Jews to what he regards as its most closely related predecessors, Louis Finkelstein's The Jews: Their History, Religion and Contribution to Civilization and Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson's A History of the Jewish People. While expressing his admiration for both of these works, Biale makes it clear that he considers them to be, in…
On Justice: An Essay in Jewish Philosophy
Rethinking Zion and Modernity
I recently read two seemingly dissimilar books: Jerold Auerbach's Are We One?Jewish Identity in the United States and Israel, and Adam Seligman's Modernity's Wager. The first of these volumes deals exclusively with the predicament in which the world's largestJewish communities now find themselves, and the second consists of far-ranging ruminations on the destiny of humankind in modern times. After I had finished reading both books, however, I slo…
The Jewish State and Its Internal Enemies: "Yoram Hazony Versus Martin Buber and His "Ideological Children
The Jewish State and Its Internal Enemies: Yoram Hazony Versus Martin Buber and His ?Ideological Children
In war, said Churchill, the truth is so precious that it should not go abroad except with a bodyguard of lies. But wars are often won or lost, or caused or prevented, by what one does in time of peace. It is therefore a perfectly non-Machiavellian insight that there is no time in which the truth may not require a bodyguard of lies. This certainly complicates the task of discovering the truth and of distinguishing the just from the unjust dissembl…
Thinkers and Doers
The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Germans, and the Eighteenth-Century Study of Scripture
This text explores the early Jewish confrontations with modernity and burgeoning 18th-century interest in the study of Scripture, Edward Breuer examines the complex relationship between the Jewish and the German Aufklarung. revival of a textual and linguistic approach to Bible study among Jews, exemplified by the new translation and commentary published by Moses Mendelssohn, was largely reflective of the aesthetic and literary concerns of contemp…
Marketing Identities: The Invention of Jewish Ethnicity in Ost und West
The Questionable Judaism of Moses Mendelssohn
Renowned during the latter part of the eighteenth century as the German Socrates, Moses Mendelssohn today occupies only a minor place in most histories of philosophy. He is generally recognized by historians of Jewish religious thought, however, as the inaugurator of a new epoch. Even those who see little merit in his overall theological position readily grant that Mendelssohn is the founder of modem Jewish philosophy. In retrospect, it is rather…
Antiheroic Mock Heroics: Daniel Boyarin Versus Theodor Herzl and His Legacy
aniel Boyarin makes no pretense that his Unheroic Conduct is a work of disinterested, objective scholarship, a literary genre whose very existence he flatly denies.' His latest book can be better understood as an act of resistance, a part of a anticolonial aimed at changing ethos and culture (xviii, xxi). He wants persuade Jews reverse, at least in part, the Westernization process of which they have for centuries been victims. Since beginning of …
Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment
Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment
Voltaire on Judaism and Christianity
Voltaire's voluminous writings on religion contain, as is well known, a large number of attacks on the Jewish people and Judaism. Historians have offered a variety of explanations for this sustained animosity on the part of a great rationalist and proponent of religious toleration toward a people and a religion which continued, in his own day, to be victimized by unjust persecution. While much remains in dispute, there does seem to be general agr…
Antiheroic Mock Heroics: Daniel Boyarin Versus Theodor Herzl and His Legacy
aniel Boyarin makes no pretense that his Unheroic Conduct is a work of disinterested, objective scholarship, a literary genre whose very existence he flatly denies.' His latest book can be better understood as an act of resistance, a part of a anticolonial aimed at changing ethos and culture (xviii, xxi). He wants persuade Jews reverse, at least in part, the Westernization process of which they have for centuries been victims. Since beginning of …
From Diaspora Nationalism to Radical Diasporism
In the first week of June 2007, on the fortieth anniversary of the Six Day War, the weekend supplement of Ha’aretz featured a dialogue between the journalist Ari Shavit and Avraham Burg, former chairman of the Jewish Agency, former Speaker of the Knesset, and a onetime candidate for leadership of the Labor Party. Having already expressed on numerous occasions his deep dissatisfaction with Israel's general trajectory, Burg went much further in thi…
Voltaire on Judaism and Christianity
Voltaire's voluminous writings on religion contain, as is well known, a large number of attacks on the Jewish people and Judaism. Historians have offered a variety of explanations for this sustained animosity on the part of a great rationalist and proponent of religious toleration toward a people and a religion which continued, in his own day, to be victimized by unjust persecution. While much remains in dispute, there does seem to be general agr…
The Jewish State and Its Internal Enemies: Yoram Hazony Versus Martin Buber and His ?Ideological Children
In war, said Churchill, the truth is so precious that it should not go abroad except with a bodyguard of lies. But wars are often won or lost, or caused or prevented, by what one does in time of peace. It is therefore a perfectly non-Machiavellian insight that there is no time in which the truth may not require a bodyguard of lies. This certainly complicates the task of discovering the truth and of distinguishing the just from the unjust dissembl…
The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Germans, and the Eighteenth-Century Study of Scripture
This text explores the early Jewish confrontations with modernity and burgeoning 18th-century interest in the study of Scripture, Edward Breuer examines the complex relationship between the Jewish and the German Aufklarung. revival of a textual and linguistic approach to Bible study among Jews, exemplified by the new translation and commentary published by Moses Mendelssohn, was largely reflective of the aesthetic and literary concerns of contemp…
The Questionable Judaism of Moses Mendelssohn
Renowned during the latter part of the eighteenth century as the German Socrates, Moses Mendelssohn today occupies only a minor place in most histories of philosophy. He is generally recognized by historians of Jewish religious thought, however, as the inaugurator of a new epoch. Even those who see little merit in his overall theological position readily grant that Mendelssohn is the founder of modem Jewish philosophy. In retrospect, it is rather…
"Mendelssohn's "Jerusalem
Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History: A Review Essay
Journal Article POWER AND POWERLESSNESS IN JEWISH HISTORY: A REVIEW ESSAY Get access Allan Arkush Allan Arkush STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORKBINGHAMTON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Modern Judaism - A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience, Volume 8, Issue 1, February 1988, Pages 83–90, https://doi.org/10.1093/mj/8.1.83 Published: 01 February 1988
Origins of the Kabbalah
Michael Stanislawski. For Whom Do I Toil? Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. 263 pp
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Origins of the Kabbalah
One of the most important scholars of our century, Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) opened up a once esoteric world of Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah, to concerned students of religion. The Kabbalah is a rich tradition of repeated attempts to achieve and portray direct experiences of God: its twelfth-and thirteenth-century beginnings in southern France and Spain are probed in Origins of the Kabbalah, a work crucial in Scholem's oeuvre. The book is a c…
Judaism as Egoism: From Spinoza to Feuerbach to Marx
Journal Article JUDAISM AS EGOISM: FROM SPINOZA TO FEUERBACH TO MARX Get access Allan Arkush Allan Arkush STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BINGHAMTON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Modern Judaism - A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience, Volume 11, Issue 2, May 1991, Pages 211–224, https://doi.org/10.1093/mj/11.2.211 Published: 01 May 1991
Voltaire on Judaism and Christianity
Voltaire's voluminous writings on religion contain, as is well known, a large number of attacks on the Jewish people and Judaism. Historians have offered a variety of explanations for this sustained animosity on the part of a great rationalist and proponent of religious toleration toward a people and a religion which continued, in his own day, to be victimized by unjust persecution. While much remains in dispute, there does seem to be general agr…
Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment
Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment
Antiheroic Mock Heroics: Daniel Boyarin Versus Theodor Herzl and His Legacy
aniel Boyarin makes no pretense that his Unheroic Conduct is a work of disinterested, objective scholarship, a literary genre whose very existence he flatly denies.' His latest book can be better understood as an act of resistance, a part of a anticolonial aimed at changing ethos and culture (xviii, xxi). He wants persuade Jews reverse, at least in part, the Westernization process of which they have for centuries been victims. Since beginning of …
Thinkers and Doers
The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Germans, and the Eighteenth-Century Study of Scripture
This text explores the early Jewish confrontations with modernity and burgeoning 18th-century interest in the study of Scripture, Edward Breuer examines the complex relationship between the Jewish and the German Aufklarung. revival of a textual and linguistic approach to Bible study among Jews, exemplified by the new translation and commentary published by Moses Mendelssohn, was largely reflective of the aesthetic and literary concerns of contemp…
Marketing Identities: The Invention of Jewish Ethnicity in Ost und West
The Questionable Judaism of Moses Mendelssohn
Renowned during the latter part of the eighteenth century as the German Socrates, Moses Mendelssohn today occupies only a minor place in most histories of philosophy. He is generally recognized by historians of Jewish religious thought, however, as the inaugurator of a new epoch. Even those who see little merit in his overall theological position readily grant that Mendelssohn is the founder of modem Jewish philosophy. In retrospect, it is rather…
The Jewish State and Its Internal Enemies: "Yoram Hazony Versus Martin Buber and His "Ideological Children
The Jewish State and Its Internal Enemies: Yoram Hazony Versus Martin Buber and His ?Ideological Children
In war, said Churchill, the truth is so precious that it should not go abroad except with a bodyguard of lies. But wars are often won or lost, or caused or prevented, by what one does in time of peace. It is therefore a perfectly non-Machiavellian insight that there is no time in which the truth may not require a bodyguard of lies. This certainly complicates the task of discovering the truth and of distinguishing the just from the unjust dissembl…
On Justice: An Essay in Jewish Philosophy
Rethinking Zion and Modernity
I recently read two seemingly dissimilar books: Jerold Auerbach's Are We One?Jewish Identity in the United States and Israel, and Adam Seligman's Modernity's Wager. The first of these volumes deals exclusively with the predicament in which the world's largestJewish communities now find themselves, and the second consists of far-ranging ruminations on the destiny of humankind in modern times. After I had finished reading both books, however, I slo…
Conservative Political Theology and the Freedom of Religion: The Recent Work of Robert Kraynak and David Novak
The Catholic political scientist Robert Kraynak and the Jewish scholar David Novak have recently written extended essays in political theology designed to remedy the deficiencies of liberal democracy. Kraynak seeks to demonstrate the superiority of the Augustinian doctrine of Two Cities to the inherently corrupting principles of liberalism. This medieval teaching underlies his support for what he calls “limited government under God.” Novak seeks …
Part Three: The West and the Rest
Part Three:The Rest and the West Allan Arkush (bio) In his preface to the entire volume, David Biale compares Cultures of the Jews to what he regards as its most closely related predecessors, Louis Finkelstein's The Jews: Their History, Religion and Contribution to Civilization and Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson's A History of the Jewish People. While expressing his admiration for both of these works, Biale makes it clear that he considers them to be, in…
Tuvia Friling, Arrows in the Dark: David Ben-Gurion, the Yishuv Leadership, and Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust
Biblical criticism and cultural Zionism prior to the first world war
This essay examines the initial stages of the relationship between Jewish nationalism and modern biblical criticism. Its point of departure is Ahad Ha’am, the founder of cultural Zionism, who kept his distance from biblical criticism, and proceeds with Joseph Klausner, Ahad Ha’am’s successor as the editor of Ha-shiloah, who moved in the opposite direction by incorporating biblical criticism into his own writing and teaching. After examining the o…
The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy
Modern Jewish philosophy emerged in the seventeenth century, with the impact of the new science and modern philosophy on thinkers who were reflecting upon the nature of Judaism and Jewish life. This collection of essays examines the work of several of the most important of these figures, from the seventeenth to the late-twentieth centuries, and addresses themes central to the tradition of modern Jewish philosophy: language and revelation, autonom…
A Review of Oren Yiftachel, Ethnocracy?Land and Identity in Israel/Palestine
Reviewed by: Ethnocracy Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine Allan Arkush (bio) Oren Yiftachel , Ethnocracy Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006, 368 pp + 35 maps The one-word title of Oren Yiftachel's book has a disturbing ring to it. Most supporters of Israel are likely to take umbrage at the very idea that it should be characterized not as some kind of a democracy but as an "ethnocrac…
Drawing up The Jewish Social Contract
Drawing up The Jewish Social Contract Allan Arkush (bio) Keywords Allan Arkush, Drawing up The Jewish Social Contract, David Novak, Covenatal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory, Political Philosophy, the Social Contract, Political Theology Following the publication in 2000 of his Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory and in 2005 of The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theology, the American Canadian rabbi, sch…
Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (23 works) · Philosophy (23 works) · Theology (20 works) · Judaism (19 works) · History (17 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Religious studies (14 works) · Art (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Political science (11 works)