The Essential Hayim Greenberg

Essays and Addresses on Jewish Culture, Socialism, and Zionism

Edited by Mark A. Raider; Introduction by Mark A. Raider; Foreword by Paul Mendes-Flohr; By Hayim Greenberg

SERIES: Jews and Judaism: History and Culture

University of Alabama Press

Though well known to many scholars and critics in the field of Judaic studies, Hayim Greenberg remains relatively unknown. Since his death in 1953, Greenberg’s contributions to modern Jewish thought have largely fallen from view. In The Essential Hayim Greenberg: Essays and Addresses on Jewish Culture, Socialism, and Zionism, the first collection of Greenberg’s writings since 1968, Mark A. Raider reestablishes Greenberg as a prominent Jewish thinker and Zionist activist who challenged the prevailing orthodoxies of American Jewry and the Zionist movement.

This collection of thoroughly annotated essays, spanning the 1920s to the early 1950s, includes Greenberg’s meditations on socialism and ethics, profiles of polarizing twentieth-century figures (among them Trotsky, Lenin, and Gandhi), and several essays investigating the compatibility of socialism and communism. Greenberg always circles back, however, to the recurring question of how Jews might situate themselves in modernity, both before and after the Holocaust, and how Labor Zionist ideology might reshape the imbalances of Jewish economic life.

Alongside his role as an American Zionist leader, Greenberg maintained a lifelong commitment to the vitality of the Jewish diaspora. Rather than promoting Jewish autonomy and statehood, he argued for fidelity to the Jewish spirit. This volume not only seeks to restore Greenberg to his previous stature in the field of Judaic studies but also to return a vital and authentic voice, long quieted, to the continuing debate over what it means to be Jewish.

The Essential Hayim Greenberg provides an accessible text for scholars, historians, and students of Jewish studies, religion, and theology.

Reviews
Author

Mark A. Raider’s work on the American Jewish experience, modern Jewish history, Zionism, and Israel are well known among scholars from across disciplines as meaningful contributions to multiples areas of study. It is no surprise, then, that Raider has done it again with his most recent book on the selected works of Hayim Greenberg. Greenberg’s essays and addresses are nothing short of a treasure trove of modern and contemporary Jewish thought, and Raider’s translation, organization, and contextualization make Greenberg and his considerable corpus available to English language readers like never before.’
—The American Jewish Archives Journal

‘Mark A. Raider’s book is a thoughtful collection of Hayim Greenberg’s spiritual and ideological, national and universal worldview as one of the most original Zionist thinkers, who promoted the theory of a balanced double Jewish collective existence as an exile (galut) people, even in free countries, and as a national entity in their historical land, the State of Israel.’
—Yosef Gorny, author of The State of Israel in Jewish Public Thought: The Quest for Collective Identity

By framing the life of Hayim Greenberg through a brilliant introduction and then gathering the works of Greenberg together, Mark A. Raider has performed the singular service of bringing one of the most thoughtful and engaged public Jewish intellectuals and Zionist thinkers of the twentieth century back to life. This is a critical volume for anyone interested in modern Jewish and Zionist intellectual history and thought as well as Israel-Diaspora Jewish relations. Scholars and activists alike are indebted to Raider for this book.’
—David Ellenson, author of Jewish Meaning in a World of Choice: Studies in Tradition and Modernity and After Emancipation: Jewish Religious Responses to Modernity

Mark A. Raider is the author or coeditor of numerous books, among them The Emergence of American Zionism, The Plough Woman: Records of the Pioneer Women of Palestine, American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise, and Nahum Goldmann: Statesman without a State.

Related Titles