Jewish thought and rhetoric may have dominated the Jewish
people's way of life for years, but what happens when a Jewish state is
established, whose laws and authorities are not necessarily based on that same
Jewish tradition?
Jewish-Israeli Political Thought is a collection of studies
exploring the tension between Israeli and Jewish political philosophy, the
relationship between the Jewish people's collective and personal past and
present, individual identity and its place in the traditional Jewish
collectiveness, and the intermediary role of the ancient Hebrew language in the
dialogue between the past and the present.
The chapters in this book were written by young scholars of different
religious, and sometimes cultural and lingual backgrounds; however, they all
live in modern-day Israel, and they all question the relation between
traditional-Jewish and modern-Israeli political thought. The diversity of the
writers enables a broad and unique perspective on the status of Jewish
tradition in contemporary political thought in Israel.
The book provides a window into various spatial and temporal horizons in the course of a Jewish tradition that is constantly being re-examined and re-discovered.