[.ca] Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German ... (ISBN 0520246365)

Controversial and Convincing:
This exemplary work of scholarship focuses on the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig - the last of the great German Jewish thinkers before World War II. Gordon's book provides the most coherant and honest assessment to date. The larger point here is that we have to stop telling the story of modern German-Jewish thought as if it occurred in isolation from the story of modern German thought. Gordon takes issue with the standard view of Jewish thinkers as 'trapped" in a German intellectual context that rejected them, and he provides a truly welcome corrective to the fashionable idea that Jewish philosophy is a pristine and isolated island of "ethics" fixated upon the theme of alterity. Until now, interpretators made Rosenzweig out to be a hero of authentic Jewish identity. They tended to confirm the argument of Emmanuel Levinas, who claimed that Rosenzweig was a thinker of ethical transcendence (just like Levinas himself). Gordon has provided a thorough refutation of this view, and he shows, through a careful reconstruction of Rosenzweig's masterwork, The Star of Redemption, that Rosenzweig was much more closely allied with German thought, especially with the sort of holist, post-Nietzschean discourse of finitude and authenticity developed some years later by Heidegger in Being and Time. It may upset those who would rather think about Rosenzweig as some sort of pious sage, rather than a philosopher. But Gordon's point is that Rosenzweig was really a post-Nietzschean modernist, who was trying to develop a new, post-metaphysical idea of religious life as (in Gordon's words) "redemption-in-the-world." Gordon's book is at times tough-going, but on the whole remarkably lucid, particularly when explaining ideas from Rosenzweig or Heidegger. He always proves his points with great quotations from Rosenzweig and Heidegger, and from other thinkers from the Weimar period. The chapters on the Star of Redemption are superb, though lit-crit types may prefer the chapter on the translation of the Bible by Buber and Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig and Heidegger may be seen as the most controversial and convincing study of modern German and Jewish thought ever written.