Description:
This volume offers a critical engagement with the thought of Rabbi Dr. Irving "Yitz" Greenberg, one of the most thoughtful and earnest voices to emerge from within American Orthodoxy. It examines his lifelong and complex encounter with the Modern Orthodox stream of American Judaism and the extent to which his teachings functioned as "the road not taken."
Brief description: Adam S. Ferziger is an award-winning scholar of modern and contemporary Judaism. He holds the S.R. Hirsch Chair for Research of the Torah with Derekh Erez Movement in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel, and is head of its Center for the Study of Judaism in Israel and North America. He is a senior associate at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University of Oxford, UK, and is co-convener of the annual Oxford Summer Institute on Modern and Contemporary Judaism.
Review Quotes: "The book mirrors the man. Like Rabbi Irving Greenberg, Yitz Greenberg and Modern Orthodoxy: The Road Not Taken is scholarly yet accessible, critical yet constructive, focused yet with broad sensibility. The newly published essay collection critiques the rabbi's ideas while appreciating their redemptive qualities. It charts the twists and turns of Modern Orthodoxy since the 1950s and explores Greenberg's up-and-down relationship with established Orthodoxy. The book also casts a wider light on issues that have exercised American Jews during that time: fitting into American culture, religious pluralism, feminism, the Holocaust, Zionism and modern sexuality. It's the story of American Jewry coming of age, with perceptive commentary on its sociology, theology and ethics."
-- Eugene Korn, The Jewish Week