Heidegger and His Jewish Reception

Examines the rich and persistent Jewish engagement with one of the most important and controversial modern philosophers, Martin Heidegger.

Daniel M. Herskowitz (Author)

9781108749954, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 11 May 2023

372 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.605 kg

'… undoubtedly sets the benchmark for all future discussions of Heidegger's Jewish reception.' Yoav Schaefer, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies

In this book, Daniel Herskowitz examines the rich, intense, and persistent Jewish engagement with one of the most important and controversial modern philosophers, Martin Heidegger. Contextualizing this encounter within wider intellectual, cultural, and political contexts, he outlines the main patterns and the diverse Jewish responses to Heidegger. Herskowitz shows that through a dialectic of attraction and repulsion, Jewish thinkers developed a version of Jewishness that sought to offer the way out of the overall crisis plaguing their world, which was embodied, as they saw it, in Heidegger's life and thought. Neither turning a blind eye to Heidegger's anti-Semitism nor using it as an excuse for ignoring his philosophy, they wrestled with his existential analytic and what they took to be its religious, ethical, and political failings. Ironically, Heidegger's thought proved itself to be fertile ground for re-conceptualizing what it means to be Jewish in the modern world.

Preface
1. Herkunft and Zukunft: Heidegger, Christianity, and secularization
2. Kant's legacy and new thinking: Heidegger, Cassirer, and Rosenzweig
3. A Christian anthropology? Early Jewish readings of Sein und Zeit
4. Dwelling prophetically: Martin Buber's response to Heidegger
5. The destruktion of Jerusalem: Leo Strauss on Heidegger
6. God, being, pathos: Abraham Joshua Heschel's theological rejoinder to Heidegger
7. Uprooting paganism: Emmanuel Levinas faces Heidegger
Conclusion. Which God will save us? Heidegger and Judaism.

Subject Areas: Judaism: theology [HRJT], Philosophy of religion [HRAB], Philosophy: metaphysics & ontology [HPJ], Western philosophy, from c 1900 - [HPCF]