Tradition and Contemporary Experience

One of the fundamental questions confronting Jews in our time is whether and under what conditions Jewish survival is possible in a free society. The situation seems to reduce itself to an either or proposition: choose either Judaism at the expense of the world or the world at the expense of Judaism. This book addresses itself to this dilemma in the belief that it is possible both to live a meaningful and creative Jewish life and to live it in the modern world. The exploration of this central problem brings to light a variety of concomitant issues. such as, the nature of Jewish tradition; its present validity; the flexibility of the Jewish heritage; the relation of tradition to man today: the function and applicability of Jewish “law"; the meaning of the State of Israel for those Jews living outside it. Jewish educators on and off campus have long felt the need for a publication that would. in a single volume. present informed discussions of those questions most often raised about modern Jewish life. The twenty-five essays presented here are meant to illustrate what a number of contemporary Jewish scholars, educators, and observers of Jewish life, often with sharply diverging viewpoints, consider to be the relevance of the Jewish tradition in the light of 4 contemporary experience. - The contributors are Benjamin Kahn, Milton Konvitz, Alfred Jospe, Henry Fischel, Mordecai M. Kaplan, Will Herberg, Lou Silbennan, Manfred Vogel, Maurice Zigmond, Norman Frirner, Arthur Lelyveld, Richard Israel, Robert Gordis, Ernst Simon, Jakob Petuehowski, Ira Eisenstein, Maurice Pekarsky, Avreham Harman, and Milton Himmelfarb. Rabbi Alfred Jospe, editor of this and other books in the Hillel Library series, is Director of Program and Resources for the B’nai B'rith Hillel Foundations in Washington. D.C. He is the author of Judaism on the Campus and numerous articles and essays in the field of Jewish thought and life.