In the Image: Virtual Religion and Philosophical Talmud

In the Image sets Jewish philosophy and contemporary aesthetics and art in conversation with Talmudic texts.

Pulling contemporary Jewish thought from the Bible as a model of philosophical reflection, author Zachary J. Braiterman turns to the Babylonian Talmud as a nonrealist model of religious-philosophical discourse steeped in the virtual. This "philosophical Talmud" pushes past the conceptual traps of modern Jewish thought. In the Image conceptualizes Jewish philosophy as a nonsymbolic, nonrealist form of theoretical discourse that bends consciousness around unreal, virtual objects and imaginary worlds, simulation and surface appearance of bodies and objects. In the Image explores the human and human viscera, sacred place, anthropomorphism, iconophilia, and cosmopolitanism as elemental forms of religious thought.

A new way of conceptualizing Jewish philosophy and religion, In the Image probes into the aesthetic determination of religious thought and practice to see how the basic reality and "truth" of religion are constituted inside the image itself.

Zachary Braiterman is Professor in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University. He is the author of The Shape of Revelation: Aesthetics and Modern Jewish Thought and (God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought and coeditor of The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: The Modern Era. He lives in New York City.