Applying Jewish Ethics

Reviews / Votes

Applying Jewish Ethics: Beyond the Rabbinic Tradition offers readers a long-overdue interdisciplinary interpretation of Jewish ethics accompanied by a clear account of how Jewish moral concepts can expand our basic understandings of today's most thorny social problems. Wolf and Thompson make a clear and concise case for why applied ethics needs Jewish ethics. Their carefully curated anthology counters misconceptions about Jewish ethics with accessible explanations of basic Jewish moral principles. Contributors to the volume illustrate the normative power of these principles through a series of engagements with questions of environmental justice, immigration, gender justice, queer identities, and more. Anyone curious about Jewish applied ethics should start with this book! -- Alison Bailey, Illinois State University With Applying Jewish Ethics: Beyond the Rabbinic Tradition, co-editors Jennifer A. Thompson and Allison B. Wolf have created a masterful interdisciplinary text demonstrating how Jewish social justice is deeply relevant to our time. This collection takes an ancient and complex system of Jewish ethics and applies it to contemporary social challenges, underscoring how millennia-old ideas are profoundly pertinent to today's gargantuan problems, whether linked to gender, immigration, queerness, socioeconomics, race, or the environment. Perhaps most significantly, Thompson and Wolf have revealed that the textual canon of Jewish ethics serves as a nexus of thought for Jews and non-Jews, the secular and religious, and lay people and scholars alike. -- Aaron J. Hahn Tapper, University of San Francisco and author of Judaisms: A Twenty-First-Century Introduction to Jews and Jewish Identities