Modern Jewish Ethics since 1970: Writings on Methods, Sources, and Issues [Paperback]

The field of Jewish ethics is never far from foundational questions about how to do Jewish ethics  and these questions are inseparable from other kinds of scholarly conclusions or prescriptions. In part because Jewish ethics is inherently deliberative, the volume is organized not by standalone essays but by small sets of curated conversations between scholars from different time periods, academic subfields, and religious commitments (or lack thereof).

These deliberate juxtapositions are to encourage scholars and students to develop similar meta-ethical analyses on Jewish ethics, broadly construed. Jewish ethics is not just a set of propositions or principles; nor can it be reduced to a single trajectory of thought or abstracted as an elaborate system of ideas. Jewish ethics is the field of study that engages Jewish texts, ideas, history, and experience in conversations about values and virtues, justice and good judgment, human relations and responsibilities. This volume presents some of those conversations to spark many more.

Acknowledgments

Introduction to the Volume

Part A: Theories and Methods

1. Doing Jewish ethics

Headnotes

Aharon Lichtenstein, from Does Jewish Tradition Recognize an Ethic Independent of Halakha? (1975)

Louis Newman, from Woodchoppers and Respirators: The Problem of Interpretation in Contemporary Jewish Ethics (1998)

Michal Raucher, from Conceiving Ethics: Reproductive Authority among Haredi Women (2020)

2. Forging Modern Norms from Jewish textual sources

Headnotes

Judith Plaskow, from Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (1990)

Elliot Dorff, from Love Your Neighbor and Yourself: A Jewish Approach to Modern Personal Ethics (2003)

Shaul Magid, from Ethics Differentiated from the Law(2005)

3. Ethics and Law

Headnotes

Robert Cov