Modern Jewish Thought

The seminar offers a survey of key moments in modern Jewish thought. It deals with the challenges and opportunities that modernity presented Jewish existence, and how these were addressed by Jewish thinkers from Baruch Spinoza and Moses Mendelssohn to Emmanuel Levinas and feminist thinkers. We will discuss the relationships between continuity and break, transformation and renewal that features modern Jewish thought in relation to its medieval articulations as well as in relation to various philosophical and theological traditions, and investigate how Judaism and Jewishness are redefined by means of present-day conceptual frameworks.