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The genius of Judaism / Bernard-Henri Lévy ; translated by Steven B. Kennedy.

by Lévy, Bernard-Henri, author.

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New York : Random House, [2017]

Judaism -- Philosophy.

Judaism -- Customs and practices.

xiv, 240 pages ; 24 cm

The glory of the Jews. The new guise of the oldest form of hate ; What should we do? What can we hope for? ; The strength of the Jews ; Jewish France ; How modern Judaism abolished the idea of revolution -- The temptation of Nineveh. What does it mean to be a Chosen People? ; Thus spake Jonah ; The Ninevites of Ukraine and Libya ; The lesson of Nineveh ; Does God arrive as an idea or through faith?

"For more than four decades, Bernard-Henri Lévy has been a singular figure on the world stage--one of the great moral voices of our time. Now Europe's foremost philosopher and activist confronts his spiritual roots and the religion that has always inspired and shaped him--but that he has never fully reckoned with. The Genius of Judaism is a breathtaking new vision and understanding of what it means to be a Jew, a vision quite different from the one we're used to. It is rooted in the Talmudic traditions of argument and conflict, rather than biblical commandments, borne out in struggle and study, not in blind observance. At the very heart of the matter is an obligation to the other, to the dispossessed, and to the forgotten, an obligation that, as Lévy vividly recounts, he has sought to embody over decades of championing "lost causes," from Bosnia to Africa's forgotten wars, from Libya to the Kurdish Peshmerga's desperate fight against the Islamic State, a battle raging as we speak. Lévy offers a fresh, surprising critique of a new and stealthy form of anti-Semitism on the rise as well as a provocative defense of Israel from the left. He reveals the overlooked Jewish roots of Western democratic ideals and confronts the current Islamist threat while intellectually dismantling it. Jews are not a "chosen people," Lévy explains, but a "treasure" whose spirit must continue to inform moral thinking and courage today. Lévy's most passionate book, and in many ways his most personal, The Genius of Judaism is a great, profound, and hypnotic intellectual reckoning--indeed a call to arms--by one of the keenest and most insightful writers in the world."--Jacket.

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