“A thoughtful perspective on humans' capacity for moral behavior.” — Kirkus Reviews “A comprehensive introduction to religious skepticism.” — Publishers Weekly In What It Means to Be Moral: Why Religion Is Not Necessary for Living an Ethical Life , Phil Zuckerman argues that morality does not come from God. Rather, it comes from us: our brains, our evolutionary past, our ongoing cultural development, our social experiences, and our ability to reason, reflect, and be sensitive to the suffering of others. By deconstructing religious arguments for God–based morality and guiding readers through the premises and promises of secular morality, Zuckerman argues that the major challenges facing the world today—from global warming and growing inequality to religious support for unethical political policies to gun violence and terrorism—are best approached from a nonreligious ethical framework. In short, we need to look to our fellow humans and within ourselves for moral progress and ethical action. “In this brilliant, provocative, and timely book, Phil Zuckerman breaks down the myth that our morality comes from religion—compellingly making the case that when it comes to the biggest challenges we face today, a secular approach is the only truly moral one.” —Ali A. Rizvi, author of The Atheist Muslim

A study of the 12th-century evolution of innovative anti-Jewish stereotypes and their impact on subsequent Western thought. The 12th century was a period of significant change and dislocation in the West; it witnessed the interaction of new societal circumstances and a prior ideational legacy, similar to events in the 19th-20th centuries. This interaction produced an innovative view of Jews which was fated to influence anti-Jewish perceptions up to the present. In the period of societal change, persecutory patterns emerged, directed at diverse societal outgroups, among them the Jews. The 12th-century stereotypes were permanently absorbed into the historic legacy of Christian anti-Jewish thinking. These stereotypes were based on a perception of Jewish hatred of Christianity and Christians, and that Jews commit acts of anti-Christian violence generated by this purported hatred (e.g. ritual murder, abuse of Christian symbols, moneylending abuses). The most pernicious anti-Jewish imagery involves stereotypes alleging mortal threats posed by Jews. States that every new stage in the evolution of anti-Jewish thinking is marked by dialectical interplay between a prior legacy of negative stereotypes and the realities of a new social context.

The conflict between Haskalah and hasidism was one of the most important forces in shaping the world of Polish Jewry for almost two centuries, but our understanding of it has long been dominated by theories based on stereotypes rather than detailed analysis of the available sources. In this award-winning study, Marcin Wodziński challenges the long-established theories about the conflict by contextualizing it, principally in the Kingdom of Poland but also with regard to other parts of eastern Europe. Covering the period from the earliest anti-hasidic polemics in the late eighteenth century through to the post-Haskalah movements of the twentieth century, it follows the development of this important conflict in its central arena. Using source materials (including many hitherto unknown documents) in Polish and five other languages, Wodziński has succeeded in reconstructing the way the conflict expressed itself. Identifying the motives, the methods, and the consequences of the conflict as it was played out in five Polish towns (Lódz, Opoczno, Piotrków, Warsaw, and Warta), he shows that it was primarily informed by non-ideological clashes at the level of local communities rather than by high-level ideological debates. Much attention is also devoted to the general characteristics of hasidism and the Haskalah, as well as to the post-Haskalah movements. Here too Wodziński challenges the ideologically charged assumptions of a generation of historians who refused to see the advocates of Jewish modernity in nineteenth-century Poland as an integral part of the Haskalah movement. Extensive consideration is given to the professional, social, institutional, and ideological characteristics of the Polish Haskalah as well as to its geographic extent, and to the changes the movement underwent in the course of the nineteenth century. Similar attention is given to the influence of the specific characteristics of Polish hasidism on the shape of the conflict, especially as regard the size of the movement and the evolution of hasidic communal involvement. In consequence the book presents a synthesis that offers both breadth and depth, contextualizing its subject matter within the broader domains of the European Enlightenment and Polish culture, hasidism and rabbinic culture, tsarist policy and Polish history, not to mention the ins and outs of the Haskalah itself across Europe. An extensive appendix presents translations of nineteen important and hitherto unknown sources of relevance to a nuanced understanding of many aspects of nineteenth-century Jewish history in Poland and eastern Europe more generally.