Download the class reading here.

Download readings by Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Emanuel Rackman

Winchester Sources Bibliography

Modernity deeply affected Judaism. Before the modern era, Judaism meant a unity of religion, nation, and culture. After the birth of modernity, Jews increasingly chose their Judaism and not only received it but created it. As a result we now can speak of Judaisms, not just Judaism. This seminar analyzes and assesses the ideas and impact of four such modern Judaisms.

Session 1: Response to Modernity: Reform Judaism
Reform Judaism emphasized liberalism in its classical understanding of freedom from church and from state. Individuals should possess the autonomy to create a Judaism, both in term of beliefs and behaviors. This also involved the redefinition of Judaism as more about religion than as about peoplehood.

Watch class recording - Reform Judaism

Session 2: Response to Reform: Orthodoxy
If modernity involved the liberation of the person from church and state, what happens to the notion of religious tradition? Orthodoxy tested this proposition as idea and as practice. It insisted that Jews could become modern in political terms re. allegiance to the state they lived, yet continue faithfully to believe and to live as traditionalist Jews, even as enclaves more than communities.
 
Session 3: Conservative Judaism
Conservative Judaism combines eternity and time. To use more religious/theological terms it speaks of both God and Torah as determining what Judaism is as well as History and Community, i.e. what the Jewish people do and say Judaism is. That understanding both connects it to and separates it from Reform on the one hand and Orthodoxy on the other.  

Watch class recording - Conservative Judaism

Lesson 4: Reconstructionism
Through the ideas of Mordecai Kaplan we will consider Reconstructionism. It emphasised the centrality of Jewish peoplehood as the creator of Judaism and as the ongoing embodiment of it, and a religion with a very different sort of God.

Watch class recording - Reconstructionism

Rabbi David Starr, PhD is the Executive Director of Tzion, a Program for Israel Literacy, and a Research Associate of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry, Brandeis University.  He previously served as Scholar in Residence for Israel Education & Programs at Gann Academy.  He was the founding Dean of Me’ah and Vice President at Hebrew College, and teaches history and religion for the Wexner Heritage Program.  David currently is writing a biography of Solomon Schechter and a study of Me’ah and its impact on adults and community.  He holds a doctorate in history and Jewish studies from Columbia, and rabbinic ordination from JTS.