Redemption and Jewish Modernity

Catalog description

How do modern Jewish literature and thought express the age-old idea and the human longing for redemption? How do they articulate redemption's various modes - personal and collective, successful and failed? How do writers and thinkers make sense of the desire for redemption in precarious times? This seminar situates the question of redemption in the context of nineteenth and twentieth centuries Jewish literature and philosophy, aiming at a better understanding of redemption in the modern age, and the subsequent disappointment and detachment from redemptive visions after the World Wars. Readings include selections from Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Karl Lowith, Simone Weil, Franz Kafka, S. Y. Agnon, A. B. Yehoshua, Judith Butler, and others.