What is the role of Judaism and Jewish existence in America? And what role does America play in matters Jewish? This anthology considers these questions and offers a look at how the diverse body of Jewish thought developed within the historical and intellectual context of America.

In this volume, editors Michael Marmur and David Ellenson bring together the distinctive voices of those who have shaped the bold and shifting soundscape of American Jewish thought over the last few generations. The contributors tackle an array of topics including theological questions; loyalty and belonging; the significance of halakhic, spiritual, and ritual practice; secularization and its discontents; and the creative recasting of Jewish peoplehood. The editors are careful to point out how a plurality of approaches emerged in response to the fundamental ruptures and challenges of continuity posed by the Holocaust, the establishment of the state of Israel, and the civil rights movement in the twentieth century.

This volume also includes a wide swath of the most distinctive currents and movements over the last eighty years: post-Holocaust theology, secular forms of Jewish spirituality, ultra-orthodoxy, American neo-orthodoxy, neo-Hasidism, feminism and queer theory, diasporist critiques of Zionism, and Zionist militancy. This collection will serve as both a testament to the creativity of American Jewish thought so far, and as an inspiration for the new thinkers of its still unwritten future.

In a searing critique of the War on Drugs and other attempts to eradicate "getting high," Lenson ventures outside the conventional genres of drug writing and looks at the drug debate from a lost, and often forbidden, point of view: the user's. Walking a fine line between the antidrug hysteria prevalent in our culture and an uncritical advocacy of drug use, he describes in provocative detail the experiences and dynamics of drugs of pleasure and desire. "Drug epicurean David Lenson claims the 'Just Say No' campaign of the Reagan years was an attempt to explicitly end rational discourse on the subject. The man's own whacked-out but brilliant 'discourse,' On Drugs makes philosophical points about narcotics that also apply to java and hooch. Lenson argues that once all mood-altering substances are eliminated, sobriety becomes a meaningless term." --Voice Literary Supplement "On Drugs is heterodox and iconoclastic to the core."--Boston Phoenix "In the national debate and reevaluation of attitudes toward drugs, this is a different kind of contribution, one that is speculative, discursive, and visionary." --Library Journal "Lenson's magnificent book is a perceptive mapping of the rippling waves of undiscovered solar systems within our brain. It will comfort the fearful and guide the unprepared. A classic!" --Timothy Leary "Lenson analyzes our culture's love-hate relationship with mood-altering substances from the user's point of view in On Drugs. He writes about the differences between 'drugs of desire' (mainly cocaine, crack, and speed) and 'drugs of pleasure' (mainly marijuana and hallucinogens. The former he sees as reflecting the main ideology of Western culture--consumerism--in that frequent users tend to fixate on acquiring more to the exclusion of everything else, while the latter tend to interdict the consumerist mind-set by letting users savor everyday activities and objects already at hand." --Utne Reader "The best work I've read on drugs comes from outside the cultural studies-loop. In his remarkable On Drugs, David Lenson, who teaches comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, uses a phenomenological approach to describe the effects of various drugs. What does it feel like to be high on pot, coke, LSD? What, if anything, is to be gained from them? What are the costs? What attracts individuals to different drugs? One of Lenson's theses, brilliant and controversial, is that some kinds of drugs deliver us from the consumer world view into realms of contemplation--and are officially despised in part for doing so. What the guardians of official culture cannot tolerate, Lenson suggests, is any form of consciousnes that rises above getting and spending. What are we to do about the drug crisis? Lenson's advice is invaluable: Throw words at it, he says, lots of words. We need to use the cultural-studies movement to break the intellectual and classroom silence on drugs. We need to re-educate ourselves about drugs, and in so doing help educate our students." --Chronicle of Higher Education David Lenson is professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is also a rock and blues musician who has played saxophone with John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy, and Junior Wells.

Why have some great modern artists—including Picasso—produced their most important work early in their careers while others—like Cézanne—have done theirs late in life? In a work that brings new insights, and new dimensions, to the history of modern art, David Galenson examines the careers of more than 100 modern painters to disclose a fascinating relationship between age and artistic creativity.

Galenson’s analysis of the careers of figures such as Monet, Seurat, Matisse, Pollock, and Jasper Johns reveals two very different methods by which artists have made innovations, each associated with a very different pattern of discovery over the life cycle. Experimental innovators, like Cézanne, work by trial and error, and arrive at their most important contributions gradually. In contrast, Picasso and other conceptual innovators make sudden breakthroughs by formulating new ideas. Consequently, experimental innovators usually make their discoveries late in their lives, whereas conceptual innovators typically peak at an early age.

A novel contribution to the history of modern art, both in method and in substance, Painting outside the Lines offers an enlightening glimpse into the relationship between the working methods and the life cycles of modern artists. The book’s explicit use of simple but powerful quantitative techniques allows for systematic generalization about large numbers of artists—and illuminates significant but little understood features of the history of modern art. Pointing to a new and richer understanding of that history, from Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism and beyond, Galenson’s work also has broad implications for future attempts to understand the nature of human creativity in general.

Jacob Katz (1904–1998) was one of the greatest Jewish historians of the twentieth century. A pioneer of new foci and methods, Katz brought extraordinary insights to many aspects of Jewish life and its surrounding contexts.

With a keen eye for both “forests” and “trees,” Katz transformed our understanding of many areas of Jewish history, among them: Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle Ages, the social-historical significance of Jewish law, the rise of Orthodoxy in Germany and Hungary, and the emergence of modern anti-Semitism. In this volume, ten leading scholars critically discuss Katz’s work with an appreciation for Katz’s importance in reshaping the way Jewish history is studied.