Jewish Liberalisms

Political liberalism is in a state of crisis. Many of its central institutions and principles – the nation-state, the rights-bearing citizen, egalitarian democracy, religious and racial pluralism, bodily emancipation, historical progress – have lost legitimacy or fractured under the pressure of global economic, environmental, technological, and demographic shifts. Liberalism’s supposedly eternal verities have been proven to be contingent outgrowths of specific historical moments and concrete human choices about what liberal modernity should and could look like. In this seminar, we seek to explore the Jewish liberal imagination, past and present, in order to construct a model of the common political future.

This seminar is led by James Loeffler.