Reported by Mitchell Kabakow for Flatiron Hot! News

Last Tuesday, the 26^th of June, I attended a lecture on Jewish political tradition at the Center for Jewish History, located at 15 West 16th Street, New York City, just blocks from the New York City Seminar and Conference Center. The Center for Jewish History is one of New York’s most important Jewish cultural institutions, housing one of the largest collections of Jewish texts and artifacts in the world. The event was organized to promote volume three of the four-part series Jewish Political Tradition, a collaborative project between Michael Walzer of Princeton, Menachem Lorberbaum of Tel Aviv university, and Noam Zohar of Bar Ilan University that has been nearly two decades in the making. Speakers at the event included editors Michael Walzer and Menachem Lorberbaum, as well as Suzanne Last Stone, a Professor at Cardozo Law School.

The discussion, as well as the third volume of The Jewish Political Tradition focused on the topic of community and its role in Jewish political thought. The speakers made it clear that one of their main goals was to dispel the notion held by many of the more conservative members of the Jewish scholarly community that there had been no Jewish politics or history from the time of the exile to the founding of the modern state of Israel. They argue that the halakha, or Jewish community, served as something of a portable political entity that united and governed the Jewish people in their century of exile. This community, or rather collection of many communities, had a distinct political tradition that carries over into Jewish thought and society to this day.

The speakers argued that the history of Jewish political tradition has much to teach the modern reader. Professor Stone stated that many of the questions we struggle with today are a continuation of a 2000-year-old debate. The halakha was a community of many communities, an idea that resonates now more than ever in our increasingly multicultural and interconnected world. Nations like Israel or the United States that are made up of many immigrant communities still struggle to find balance between community autonomy and the power of the state.

Probably one of the most important aspects of the discussion was its accessibility to the layperson. Much of the discourse surrounding Jewish history is both hard to fully grasp to those outside of the yeshivas and can also be hyper-partisan towards one group or another. The speakers emphasized that two of their main goals in writing Jewish Political Tradition are to write a book that is accessible to those without a yeshiva education and to promote a calmer and more educated discussion of Jewish history and culture. The Center for Jewish History holds a number of fascinating lectures available to the public along with its incredible library and exhbitions. Jewish Political Tradition Volume Three: Community is available now online and in stores.