European Judaism

The introduction outlines the genesis and evolution of the two-year German Philosophy Seminar, setting the stage for the current special issue. Originating in 2019 at the University of London, the seminar initially focused on Martin Buber's philosophy, since his insights into dialogue and human relationality became once again topical and relevant in light of the recent broad and rapid changes in public and interpersonal communication. The 2020 shift to an online format due to the Covid-19 pandemic presented challenges but also facilitated global participation, fostering a virtual community. The seminar's success prompted its continuation, partnering with the Global Lehrhaus to explore contemporary themes in conjunction with Buber's philosophy. Across two academic years, sessions delved into Buber's ideas in dialogue with diverse perspectives such as Marxism, feminism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, communication theory, and contemporary social philosophy. The resulting publication captures these discussions, emphasizing the enduring relevance of Buber's concepts in today's context.

This article explores tensions between Judaism and Christianity as ethical traditions and what they can learn from each other if the Jewishness of Jesus is fully recognised. It investigates Judaism as a counter-cultural tradition to Christianity and secularised European modernities, drawing on Buber's Hasidism and his understanding of dialogue, relationship and everyday ethics. The author traces ethics as a practice of truth-telling as well as relating to show how justice is more than an individual virtue; it is a matter of community and the transformation of structural relationships of power, abuse and cruelty. It is through relating equally as ethical humans that we can hope to engage with different worlds.

This article conceptualises feminist conversations with Buberian dialogic philosophy while theorising intersubjectively intersectional dialogues with Carole Bell Ford's book, The Girls, drawing on stories of Jewish women in Brownsville, Brooklyn. The narrative extracts analysed grapple with some of the women's challenges of coming of age within migrant enclaves in the post-war period and these are deconstructed through a feminist and intersectional dialogic lens. In gendering Buber, the article also embraces the temporal and spatial configurations of dialogic migrancy in how it offers transversal, diachronic and synchronic contributions through the women's experiences of everyday life. The article also reflects on methodological innovations in how the combined approaches can offer deeper, more reflexive and nuanced understandings of intersubjective experiences concerning complex emotions, sensitive themes and challenging topics.

This article suggests that Buber's idea of the community may hint at an alternative to the more common foundations of political thought, usually grounded on notions of power or rationality. Showing how Buber's idea of the community developed from a neo-romantic form (in his early writings) to a principle informed by the dialogical dimension of human life (from I and Thou onwards), I will point out the vertical dimension of political life ensuing from Buber's discourse. A discussion of the theopolitical principle as expressed in Buber's Kingship of God will lead to the conclusion that, both descriptively and normatively, politics needs an openness to transcendence.

This article addresses a creative practice and philosophical line of enquiry that marked the culmination of Martin Buber's first period and was honoured as part of his commitment to community-building thereafter. The article will historicise this period of Buber's intellectual life, it will focus on his iconoclastic statements and gestures that were influenced by normative continental modernisms yet rooted in Jewish tradition, as well as his personal aesthetics, and will place Daniel (1913) at the heart of Buber's early creative emancipatory method. More importantly, it will seek to reframe a Buberian proposition that was abandoned because of the strictures and demands of the academic mannerisms of his time, but cannot be so easily dismissed in our own. It is an invitation for new work on Buber's own creative manifesto, here presented as the history of a practice that was set aside during Buber's academic ‘professionalisation’.

In this article I suggest how a moderated form of pause or withdrawal may yield relational fruit in contexts of interpersonal encounter. Consequently, I posit that mystical nothingness – otherwise known as Ayin in Jewish mystical lore – offers a promising way forward, and indicate how it may be synonymous with Buberian concreteness and inclusion. In conclusion, I explore the Tsaddik as a metaphor that highlights not only the relevance of Ayin or nothingness interpersonally, but also its complementarity with the I and Thou encounter as envisaged by Martin Buber.

The anti-dialogical nature of social media has exacerbated social divides while widening the gap between policy decisions and their lived implications. Effective interpersonal relationships – both a conduit and requisite of democracy – are arguably grounded in dialogue. As envisaged by Martin Buber, dialogue necessitates holding space for other subjectivities, constituting a humanistic approach to building trust and community. To build a healthy democracy, we thus need to reconceptualise the practical connections between dialogue, collaborative participation and public engagement. To this end, this article puts forth a two-pronged approach to the contribution of dialogue: by fostering presence while unsilencing marginalised voices. Specifically, we will explore the potential applications of Buberian dialogue within the practice of Structured Democratic Dialogue (SDD). As a methodology that both requires and facilitates trust-building absent in social media mechanisms, SDD promises a path towards greater inclusiveness and commitment core to the workings of deliberative democracy.

By disposition an outsider, Martin Buber had the requisite ‘civil courage’ to speak the truth as he saw it and thus the spiritual stamina to court the scorn of being marked an outsider, or worse. Accordingly, he called upon his fellow Zionists resolutely to reject the prevailing form of European nationalism and its self-righteous, self-centred pursuit of Realpolitik. The failure to eschew what Buber alarmingly called a ‘hypertrophic’ nationalism would perforce vitiate the very cure – the restoration of national dignity and spiritual renewal – that Zionism seeks to offer the ailing Jewish people. By adopting Realpolitik, a people can win the national rights for which it strove and yet fail to regain its spiritual health – because ‘nationalism, turned false, eats at its very marrow’. A nationalism of sacro egoismo – a political ethic that assumes that the pursuit of national self-interest is sacred and thus morally justified – spells not only spiritual evisceration but also political disaster.

Within the scope of this article, I interpret the Book of Job through Martin Buber's concept of dialogue. The Book of Job continues to pose unanswerable inquiries concerning the enigma of human suffering, the benevolence of God and the elusive origins of Evil. Rather than attempting to provide definitive answers to these eternal questions, I have chosen to shift the focus of my interpretation towards a process of dialogue itself, for I believe that within the pages of the Book of Job, the dialogue assumes a pivotal role. I create a dialogue between Martin Buber's philosophical essay, I and Thou, and the Book of Job in the interpretive process.

Resisting characterisations of cultural Zionism as a male intellectual movement located in the realm of ideas, Paula Winkler's Zionist writings foreground the role played by Jewish women in the home. Placing her writings in dialogue with those of her partner Martin Buber, this article argues that Winkler's vision of Zionism not only offers a more robust engagement with the concept of space, but also disrupts Buber's gendered division of Zionist labour and his view of the temporal unfolding of Zionism. In a significant contribution to cultural Zionist thought, Winkler anchors the movement in the material environment of the home, wherein the Jewish woman creates a transformative experience of the homeland that anticipates and facilitates the future success of Zionism.

In this article, we will use Martin Buber's ‘I and Thou’ concept to nurture empathy for future generations to come inside the classroom. In a modern world where a class's progress is measured by data and the robotisation of learning, we propose the use of Socratic dialogue as it allows for empathy to flourish, not just for students but for teachers as well. Learning through dialogue allows for everyone, both inside and outside the classroom, to learn how to have more empathy. This type of pedagogy creates a humanised approach to learning through the establishment of relationships. The way a student perceives the world around them, and the people in their life, must be nurtured with empathy for a better world.

Martin Buber's perspective on Zionism was rooted in the view that ‘two vital claims’ were ‘opposed to one another’. Stressing the role of justice and imagination during speeches at the Zionist Congresses of 1921 and 1929, his ‘prophetic’ perspective emphasised the indivisibility of politics and morality. Distinguishing between ’Israel’ (nationalism) and ‘Zion’ (a spiritual ideal) led him to advocate for a bi-national state in Palestine. He called the way the State of Israel came into being in 1948 as an entry into history through ‘a false gateway’.

Jonathan Lewis, Jewish Chaplaincy in the British Armed Forces: Captains of the Souls of Men 1892–2021, Vallentine Mitchell, 2022.

Jonathan Magonet et al., How Did Moses Know He Was a Hebrew? Hakodesh Press, 2021.

Jonathan Romain (editor), What Makes Me Angry: Howls of Rabbinic Rage . . . and Solutions, Movement for Reform Judaism, 2022.