What constitutes American thought is obviously tooelusive to be encompassed by any one writer or groupof writers. Th e best that any attempt at intellectual historycan achieve is to indicate some of its traces in writtenrecords. This volume represents the eff orts of oneof America's leading philosophers to do just that. He isuniquely qualifi ed to do so, as his contemporary SidneyHook well understood. As Cohen noted, most of what people say and writeis dominated by linguistic forms or habits. Thus thedominance of the traditions and habits that make up theEnglish language has been the strongest single infl uence infashioning American thought as very largely a province ofBritish thought--despite the Declaration of Independenceand two wars. Cohen describes how American thoughtdeveloped from its British roots. It deals with refl ectivethought, i.e. with thought that is conscious of its problems,of its methods and of the widest general bearings of theresults obtained so far. Th e diverse subjects discussedrange from religious thinking to the scientifi c, and fromthe legal tradition to literary criticism. Among the important figures Cohen assesses areDewey, Santayana, Holmes, Brandeis, Whitehead, James,and Royce as well as those of men less well-known butsometimes equally infl uential. In its scope and insight,this book takes its own unique and important place inAmerican thought. Morris Raphael Cohen was a memberof the fabled department of philosophyat the City College of New York between1912 and 1938. He wrote numerous booksand articles including A Preface to Logic, ADreamer's Journey, Refl ections of a WonderingJew , and Law and Social Order . Felix S. Cohen , the son of the author,edited this volume. He was a lawyer andscholar known for his work in legal philosophy and Indian lawand policy. He worked in the solicitor's offi ce in the Departmentof the Interior under Franklin D. Roosevelt and is the authorof both The Handbook of Federal Indian Law and Readings inJurisprudence and Legal Philosophy .

David Ellenson prefaces this fascinating collection of twenty-three essays with a remarkably candid account of his intellectual journey from boyhood in Virginia to the scholarly immersions in the history, thought, and literature of the Jewish people that have informed his research interests in a long and distinguished academic career. Ellenson, President of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, has been particularly intrigued by the attempts of religious leaders in all denominations of Judaism, from Liberal to Neo-Orthodox, to redefine and reconceptualize themselves and their traditions in the modern period as both the Jewish community and individual Jews entered radically new realms of possibility and change. The essays are grouped into five sections. In the first, Ellenson reflects upon the expression of Jewish values and Jewish identity in contemporary America, explains his debt to Jacob Katz's socio-religious approach to Jewish history, and shows how the works of non-Jewish social historian Max Weber highlight the tensions between the universalism of western thought and Jewish demands for a particularistic identity. In the second section, "The Challenge of Emanicpation," he indicates how Jewish religious leaders in nineteenth-century Europe labored to demonstrate that the Jewish religion and Jewish culture were worthy of respect by the larger gentile world. In a third section, "Denominational Responses," Ellenson shows how the leaders of Liberal and Orthodox branches of Judaism in Central Europe constructed novel parameters for their communities through prayer books, legal writings, sermons, and journal articles. The fourth section, "Modern Responsa," takes a close look at twentieth-century Jewish legal decisions on new issues such as the status of woemn, fertility treatments, and even the obligations of the Israeli government towards its minority populations. Finally, review essays in the last section analyze a few landmark contemporary works of legal and liturgical creativity: the new Israeli Masorti prayer book, David Hartman's works on covenantal theology, and Marcia Falk's Book of Blessings. As Ellenson demonstrates, "The reality of Jewish cultural and social integration into the larger world after Emancipation did not signal the demise of Judaism. Instead, the modern setting has provided a challenging context where the ongoing creativity and adaptability of Jewish religious leaders of all stripes has been tested and displayed."

Long before there were Jewish communities in the land of the tsars, Jews inhabited a region which they called medinat rusiya, the land of Russia. Prior to its annexation by Russia, the land of Russia was not a center of rabbinic culture. But in 1772, with its annexation by Tsarist Russia, this remote region was severed from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; its 65,000 Jews were thus cut off from the heartland of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Forced into independence, these Jews set about forging a community with its own religious leadership and institutions. The three great intellectual currents in East European Jewry--Hasidism, Rabbinic Mitnagdism, and Haskalah--all converged on Eastern Belorussia, where they clashed and competed. In the course of a generation, the community of Shklov—the most prominent of the towns in the area—witnessed an explosion of intellectual and cultural activity. Focusing on the social and intellectual odysseys of merchants, maskilim, and rabbis, and their varied attempts to combine Judaism and European culture, David Fishman here chronicles the remarkable story of these first modern Jews of Russia.

This book explores two millennia of south Indian Tamil civilization, with a special emphasis on the way Tamil speakers and literati understood the unique features of their language and the major cultural themes articulated in Tamil over this long time span. Tamil is one of the great world languages, with its 80 million speakers, its ancient, classical past, and the profound richness of its cultural traditions, which spread throughout South Asia and beyond to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia and, today, to a large Tamil Diaspora scattered around the globe. Presented in the format of a south Indian musical composition, the chapters take the reader through the whole of Tamil cultural history, from its beginnings at the end of the first millennium B.C. through the stunning poems of love and war known as "Sangam Poetry", the burst of intense religious movements in the mid-first-millennium A.D., the Chola period of imperial expansion, and into late-medieval and modern times, including present-day Tamil politics and the vast cultural production of Chennai, Madurai, and Tanjavur. The treasures of the Tamil language deserve a wide audience--thus the book is aimed at readers with no special knowledge of India no less than at speakers and connoisseurs of Tamil. Translated verses and spicy stories of poets, lovers, musicians, warriors and kings fill the pages of this book, which paints a wide-angle, panoramic canvas of one of the most creative civilizations in the history of South Asia as it evolved and transformed itself from the distant past up to our own generation.--