Kenneth Hart Green – författare

Explores the impact on Jews and Judaism of the crisis of modernity, analyzing modern Jewish dilemmas and providing a prescription for their resolution.This is the first book to bring together the major essays and lectures of Leo Strauss in the field of modern Jewish thought. It contains some of his most famous published writings, as well as significant writings which were previously unpublished. Spanning almost 30 years of continuously deepening reflection, the book presents the full range of Strauss's contributions as a modern Jewish thinker.These essays and lectures also offer Strauss's mature considerations of some of the great figures in modern Jewish thought, such as Baruch Spinoza, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Theodor Herzl, and Sigmund Freud. They also encompass his incisive analyses and original explorations of modern Judaism (which he viewed as caught in the grip of the "theological-political crisis"): from German Jewry, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust to Zionism and the State of Israel; from the question of assimilation to the meaning and value of Jewish history. In addition Strauss's two sustained interpretations of the Hebrew Bible are also reprinted.These essays and lectures cumulatively point toward the "postcritical" reconstruction of Judaism which Strauss envisioned, suggesting it rebuild along Maimonidean lines. Thus, the book lends credence to the view that Strauss was able to uncover and probe the crisis at the heart of modern Jewish thought and history, perhaps with greater profundity than any other contemporary Jewish thinker.

Fackenheim was one of the most philosophically serious, knowledgeable, and provocative contemporary Jewish thinkers.  His original focus as a philosophical theologian was mainly on revelation, but in his later work he concerned himself primarily with the wide-ranging  implications of the  Holocaust. In this book, Kenneth Hart Green examines Fackenheim's intellectual trajectory and traces how and why he focused so intently on the Holocaust.  He explores the deeper thought that Fackenheim developed about the Holocaust, which he construed as a cataclysmic event that ruptured history and one that also brought about a change in the very structure of being. As Green demonstrates, the Holocaust, according to Fackenheim's interpretation, changes how we view all things, from God to man to history. It also radically affects Judaism, Christianity, and philosophy, the major traditions that have shaped the Western world.

Recognized as one of the leading philosophers and Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century, Emil Ludwig Fackenheim has been widely praised for his boldness, originality, and profundity. As is well-known, a striking feature of Fackenheim’s thought is his unwavering contention that the Holocaust brought about a radical shift in human history, so monumental and unprecedented that nothing can ever be the same again. Fackenheim regarded it as the specific duty of thinkers and scholars to assume responsibility to probe this historical event for its impact on the human future and to make its immense ramifications evident.In Emil Fackenheim’s Post-Holocaust Thought and Its Philosophical Sources, scholars consider important figures in the history of philosophy – including Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and Strauss – and trace how Fackenheim's philosophical confrontations with each of them shaped his overall thought. This collection details which philosophers exercised the greatest influence on Fackenheim, and how he diverged from them.Incorporating widely varying approaches, the contributors in the volume wrestle with this challenge historically, politically, and philosophically in order to illuminate the depths of Fackenheim’s own thought.

The first book to deal with the Jewish thought of Leo Strauss.This is the first book to deal with the Jewish thought of Leo Strauss. Known primarily as one of the leading contemporary political thinkers, this book reveals another side of Leo Strauss-as one of the most important Jewish thinkers of the present century. The author presents the Jewish thought of Leo Strauss as powerful, original, and provocative, but also as essential for grasping the true character of Strauss's thought. His Jewish thought may prove to be the key to the proper understanding of his philosophic thought as a whole.