Alan Mittleman
Biographic Data
| ID | 701563 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alan Mittleman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alan |
| FAMILY NAME | Mittleman |
| SIGNATURE | MITTLEMAN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Jewish Theological Seminary |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 68 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
What I Learned and Didn’t Learn at the RRC
There is an old joke about Reconstructionist Jews. It goes: What do Reconstructionists do on Simchat Torah? Answer: They listen to a lecture on joy. I heard this joke when I was a student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) between 1976 and 1981. At the time, Reconstructionists told this joke about themselves. They enjoyed, it seems, having a bit of fun at their own expense. Whether Reconstructionists have such a sense of humor toda…
Human Nature & Jewish Thought
This book explores one of the great questions of our time: How can we preserve our sense of what it means to be a person while at the same time accepting what science tells us to be true—namely, that human nature is continuous with the rest of nature? What, in other words, does it mean to be a person in a world of things? This book shows how the Jewish tradition provides rich ways of understanding human nature and personhood that preserve human d…
Conclusion
This concluding chapter returns to the theme of the worth or dignity of human life. What are the implications, in the face of the contemporary challenges of biotechnology and scientistic materialism, of a Jewish understanding of human nature and human dignity for our common human future? It argues that the ambivalence of the Jewish tradition toward human nature is an attitude well worth cultivating. We are holy—and capable of unimaginable evil. J…
Does Judaism Condone Violence?: Holiness and Ethics in the Jewish Tradition
Are Persons Free to Choose?: Judaism's Case for Why Persons Matter
This chapter explores a key dimension of the portrayal developed in Chapter 2—namely, moral agency. Against the hard determinism of modern scientism, classic Jewish sources affirm in a nuanced way the concept of free will. Since these sources have also sometimes endorsed a “soft-determinist” view (sometimes known as compatibilism ), there is some common ground to be found on this complicated issue. How can we continue to embrace a belief in free …
Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere , by Lenn E. Goodman: An Appreciation and Critique
Religious pluralism is preferable to what has been called liberal monism. But what orders the value of religious pluralism? To what other values must it respond? This paper explores the nature and limits of religious pluralism with respect to some concrete cases and argues that religious pluralism must be ordered to a conception of the common good.
Making the Case for the Soul in an Age of Neuroscience
Modern philosophy has been inhospitable to the soul. In the English-speaking world, the dominant tendency, since Hobbes and Locke, has been to subordinate the mental to the physical. Even where mental phenomena are granted real existence, they are construed as effects of underlying physical processes. To explain them is to identify their physical causes. Physicalist approaches to the mind cannot but see the soul as, in Gilbert Ryle's derisive phr…
The Problem of Religious Violence
The problem of violence in the name of God is ancient. Judaism sought to limit religious extremism by bringing it under the jurisdiction of law
Judaism: Covenant, Pluralism, and Piety
This chapter contains sections titled: Defining Terms Covenant Pluralism Piety Bibliography
Hope in a Democratic Age
How and why should hope play a key role in a 21st-century democratic politics? This book offers a philosophical exploration of the theme, contending that a modern construction of hope as an emotion is deficient. It revives the medieval understanding of hope as a virtue, reconstructing this in a contemporary philosophical idiom. In this framework, hope is less a spontaneous reaction than it is a choice against despair; a decision to live with conf…
The Job of Judaism and the Job of Kant
The presents its chief protagonist in two discrepant ways: Job the patient and Job the rebel. Ancient Jewish interpretations of Job praise Job the patient and condemn, or at least do not praise, Job the rebel. Modern Jewish interpretations, by contrast, praise Job the rebel and scant the patient, pious Job of the frame story. Job the rebel becomes a model of sincerity or authenticity, a chief value of modernity. Job the patient and pious sufferer…
Hope in a Democratic age: Philosophy, Religion, and Political Theory
A philosophical study of hope as a resource for the tasks of citizenship in a liberal, democratic society. It contends that the modern philosophical construction of hope as an emotion is deficient; it reconstructs the medieval understanding of hope as a virtue in a contemporary philosophical idiom
Ruth R. Wisse, Jews and Power
If the writing of Jewish history is often motivated by the search for a usable past, the writing of Jewish political history is doubly so. Perhaps because the attention to political things is more recent, works of political history are less subtle in masking the interests that motivate their composition. The attention to political things, although appearing in nineteenth century Jewish historiography, for example, in a seminal essay by Graetz, is…
Capitalism in religious zionism
The torah as a suicide pact
"The Significance of Judaism for the Religious Progress of Humanity" by Hermann Cohen: An Introduction and Translation
Journal Article “The Significance of Judaism for the Religious Progress of Humanity” by Hermann Cohen: An Introduction and Translation Get access Alan Mittleman Alan Mittleman Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Modern Judaism - A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience, Volume 24, Issue 1, February 2004, Pages 36–58, https://doi.org/10.1093/mj/kjh002 Published: 01 February 2004
The Jew in Christian Culture' by Hermann Cohen: An Introduction and Translation
1Muhlenberg College
Toleration, Liberty, and Truth: A Parable
In August of 1790, the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, received George Washington's justly famous letter on religious liberty. Responding to the Jews' congratulations on his presidency, Washington offered a concise but stirring enunciation of the novelty of American liberty: The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy…
Pluralism: Identity, Civility, and the Common Good
Journal Article PLURALISM: IDENTITY, CIVILITY, AND THE COMMON GOOD Get access Alan Mittleman Alan Mittleman MUHLENBERG COLLEGE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Modern Judaism - A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience, Volume 21, Issue 2, May 2001, Pages 125–145, https://doi.org/10.1093/mj/21.2.125 Published: 01 May 2001
Leo Strauss and Relativism: The Critique of Max Weber
Leo Strauss criticizes Max Weber as an historicist whose relativism mars the ethical quality of his work. Strauss suggests that Weber escapes this presumptive relativism by a religious route, namely, by grounding values in revelation and by professing to await another revelation which would save us from relativism. This paper argues, in Weber's defence, against the charges of relativism and historicism. Strauss slights Weber's own understanding o…
Politics of Torah, The: The Jewish Political Tradition and the Founding of Agudat Israel
Founded in Germany in 1912, Agudat Israel was the first comprehensive, international political movement among Orthodox Jews. This study examines the forces that led to its formation, setting its history into the context of both the millennial Jewish political tradition and the Jewish struggle with the disenchanting effects of modernity. Mittleman shows that from its formation to the present, Agudah has represented the political interests of the m…
Modernity within Tradition: The Social History of Orthodox Jewry in Imperial Germany
"Lubarsky, "Tolerance and Transformation
Beyond Innocence and Redemption: Confronting the Holocaust and Israeli Power: Creating a Moral Future for the Jewish People . Marc H. Ellis
Conflicting Vision: Spiritual Possibilities of Modern Israel. David Hartman
Are Persons Free to Choose?: Judaism's Case for Why Persons Matter
This chapter explores a key dimension of the portrayal developed in Chapter 2—namely, moral agency. Against the hard determinism of modern scientism, classic Jewish sources affirm in a nuanced way the concept of free will. Since these sources have also sometimes endorsed a “soft-determinist” view (sometimes known as compatibilism ), there is some common ground to be found on this complicated issue. How can we continue to embrace a belief in free …
Leo Strauss and Relativism: The Critique of Max Weber
Leo Strauss criticizes Max Weber as an historicist whose relativism mars the ethical quality of his work. Strauss suggests that Weber escapes this presumptive relativism by a religious route, namely, by grounding values in revelation and by professing to await another revelation which would save us from relativism. This paper argues, in Weber's defence, against the charges of relativism and historicism. Strauss slights Weber's own understanding o…
"The Significance of Judaism for the Religious Progress of Humanity" by Hermann Cohen: An Introduction and Translation
Journal Article “The Significance of Judaism for the Religious Progress of Humanity” by Hermann Cohen: An Introduction and Translation Get access Alan Mittleman Alan Mittleman Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Modern Judaism - A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience, Volume 24, Issue 1, February 2004, Pages 36–58, https://doi.org/10.1093/mj/kjh002 Published: 01 February 2004
The Jew in Christian Culture' by Hermann Cohen: An Introduction and Translation
1Muhlenberg College
Pluralism: Identity, Civility, and the Common Good
Journal Article PLURALISM: IDENTITY, CIVILITY, AND THE COMMON GOOD Get access Alan Mittleman Alan Mittleman MUHLENBERG COLLEGE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Modern Judaism - A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience, Volume 21, Issue 2, May 2001, Pages 125–145, https://doi.org/10.1093/mj/21.2.125 Published: 01 May 2001
Jews and Separationism
Reading the results of the Williamsburg Charter Survey on Religion and Public Life gives me, a rabbi, an opportunity to assess the views of my rabbinic colleagues. While the survey did not test for general Jewish opinion, it did sample one hundred rabbis and contrast them with other religious and professional elites. Rabbinic opinion no doubt differs in degree from general Jewish opinion, but it probably does not differ in kind. We can find, I th…
Between Kant and Kabbalah: An Introduction to Isaac Breuer's Philosophy of Judaism
Halakhah and Politics: The Jewish Idea of a State. Sol Roth
Beyond Innocence and Redemption: Confronting the Holocaust and Israeli Power: Creating a Moral Future for the Jewish People . Marc H. Ellis
Conflicting Vision: Spiritual Possibilities of Modern Israel. David Hartman
"Lubarsky, "Tolerance and Transformation
Modernity within Tradition: The Social History of Orthodox Jewry in Imperial Germany
Politics of Torah, The: The Jewish Political Tradition and the Founding of Agudat Israel
Founded in Germany in 1912, Agudat Israel was the first comprehensive, international political movement among Orthodox Jews. This study examines the forces that led to its formation, setting its history into the context of both the millennial Jewish political tradition and the Jewish struggle with the disenchanting effects of modernity. Mittleman shows that from its formation to the present, Agudah has represented the political interests of the m…
Leo Strauss and Relativism: The Critique of Max Weber
Leo Strauss criticizes Max Weber as an historicist whose relativism mars the ethical quality of his work. Strauss suggests that Weber escapes this presumptive relativism by a religious route, namely, by grounding values in revelation and by professing to await another revelation which would save us from relativism. This paper argues, in Weber's defence, against the charges of relativism and historicism. Strauss slights Weber's own understanding o…
Pluralism: Identity, Civility, and the Common Good
Journal Article PLURALISM: IDENTITY, CIVILITY, AND THE COMMON GOOD Get access Alan Mittleman Alan Mittleman MUHLENBERG COLLEGE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Modern Judaism - A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience, Volume 21, Issue 2, May 2001, Pages 125–145, https://doi.org/10.1093/mj/21.2.125 Published: 01 May 2001
Toleration, Liberty, and Truth: A Parable
In August of 1790, the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, received George Washington's justly famous letter on religious liberty. Responding to the Jews' congratulations on his presidency, Washington offered a concise but stirring enunciation of the novelty of American liberty: The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy…
The Jew in Christian Culture' by Hermann Cohen: An Introduction and Translation
1Muhlenberg College
"The Significance of Judaism for the Religious Progress of Humanity" by Hermann Cohen: An Introduction and Translation
Journal Article “The Significance of Judaism for the Religious Progress of Humanity” by Hermann Cohen: An Introduction and Translation Get access Alan Mittleman Alan Mittleman Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Modern Judaism - A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience, Volume 24, Issue 1, February 2004, Pages 36–58, https://doi.org/10.1093/mj/kjh002 Published: 01 February 2004
The torah as a suicide pact
Capitalism in religious zionism
Ruth R. Wisse, Jews and Power
If the writing of Jewish history is often motivated by the search for a usable past, the writing of Jewish political history is doubly so. Perhaps because the attention to political things is more recent, works of political history are less subtle in masking the interests that motivate their composition. The attention to political things, although appearing in nineteenth century Jewish historiography, for example, in a seminal essay by Graetz, is…
Hope in a Democratic Age
How and why should hope play a key role in a 21st-century democratic politics? This book offers a philosophical exploration of the theme, contending that a modern construction of hope as an emotion is deficient. It revives the medieval understanding of hope as a virtue, reconstructing this in a contemporary philosophical idiom. In this framework, hope is less a spontaneous reaction than it is a choice against despair; a decision to live with conf…
The Job of Judaism and the Job of Kant
The presents its chief protagonist in two discrepant ways: Job the patient and Job the rebel. Ancient Jewish interpretations of Job praise Job the patient and condemn, or at least do not praise, Job the rebel. Modern Jewish interpretations, by contrast, praise Job the rebel and scant the patient, pious Job of the frame story. Job the rebel becomes a model of sincerity or authenticity, a chief value of modernity. Job the patient and pious sufferer…
Hope in a Democratic age: Philosophy, Religion, and Political Theory
A philosophical study of hope as a resource for the tasks of citizenship in a liberal, democratic society. It contends that the modern philosophical construction of hope as an emotion is deficient; it reconstructs the medieval understanding of hope as a virtue in a contemporary philosophical idiom
Judaism: Covenant, Pluralism, and Piety
This chapter contains sections titled: Defining Terms Covenant Pluralism Piety Bibliography
The Problem of Religious Violence
The problem of violence in the name of God is ancient. Judaism sought to limit religious extremism by bringing it under the jurisdiction of law
Making the Case for the Soul in an Age of Neuroscience
Modern philosophy has been inhospitable to the soul. In the English-speaking world, the dominant tendency, since Hobbes and Locke, has been to subordinate the mental to the physical. Even where mental phenomena are granted real existence, they are construed as effects of underlying physical processes. To explain them is to identify their physical causes. Physicalist approaches to the mind cannot but see the soul as, in Gilbert Ryle's derisive phr…
Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere , by Lenn E. Goodman: An Appreciation and Critique
Religious pluralism is preferable to what has been called liberal monism. But what orders the value of religious pluralism? To what other values must it respond? This paper explores the nature and limits of religious pluralism with respect to some concrete cases and argues that religious pluralism must be ordered to a conception of the common good.
Human Nature & Jewish Thought
This book explores one of the great questions of our time: How can we preserve our sense of what it means to be a person while at the same time accepting what science tells us to be true—namely, that human nature is continuous with the rest of nature? What, in other words, does it mean to be a person in a world of things? This book shows how the Jewish tradition provides rich ways of understanding human nature and personhood that preserve human d…
Conclusion
This concluding chapter returns to the theme of the worth or dignity of human life. What are the implications, in the face of the contemporary challenges of biotechnology and scientistic materialism, of a Jewish understanding of human nature and human dignity for our common human future? It argues that the ambivalence of the Jewish tradition toward human nature is an attitude well worth cultivating. We are holy—and capable of unimaginable evil. J…
Philosophy (19 works) · Judaism (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Theology (12 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (11 works) · Religious studies (11 works) · Politics (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works)