Works
His doctoral dissertation was later published, in 1974, as The Ordeal of Civility. [4] No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste was published in 1978.
In The Ordeal of Civility, Cuddihy explicates the wrenching process of adjusting to modernity experienced by the shtetl Jews of the Pale in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who had to adapt quickly from a tribal culture to a modern Protestant civil culture rather than slowly adjusting over the centuries. It is in this context that he locates the efforts of Jewish intellectuals, such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Claude Lévi-Strauss to facilitate the transition by providing a cohesive narrative that attempts to universalize the experience and thus provide an apologia to both the in-group of Jews and the out-group of gentiles. [5] [6]
In No Offense, a critique of American civil religion, [7] Cuddihy argues that Catholic and Jewish intellectuals in America gave up the distinctive religious claims of Catholicism and Judaism, respectively, in the interests of not offending the Protestant majority. Cuddihy views various intellectual critiques of modernity - both conservative and radical - as the product of resentment against the more successful, enlightened, Protestant majority.
Sociology of religion is the study of the beliefs, practices and organizational forms of religion using the tools and methods of the discipline of sociology. This objective investigation may include the use both of quantitative methods and of qualitative approaches.
Karl Mannheim was an influential Hungarian sociologist during the first half of the 20th century. He is a key figure in classical sociology, as well as one of the founders of the sociology of knowledge. Mannheim is best known for his book Ideology and Utopia (1929/1936), in which he distinguishes between partial and total ideologies, the latter representing comprehensive worldviews distinctive to particular social groups, and also between ideologies that provide support for existing social arrangements, and utopias, which look to the future and propose a transformation of society.
Leo Strauss was a German American scholar of political philosophy who specialized in classical political philosophy. Born in Germany to Jewish parents, Strauss later emigrated from Germany to the United States. He spent much of his career as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he taught several generations of students and published fifteen books.
The Frankfurt School is a school of sociology and critical philosophy associated with the Institute for Social Research, founded at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1923. Active in the Weimar Republic during the European interwar period, the Frankfurt School initially comprised intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents dissatisfied with the contemporary socio-economic systems of the 1930s. The Frankfurt theorists proposed that social theory was inadequate for explaining the turbulent political factionalism and reactionary politics occurring in 20th-century liberal capitalist societies, such as Nazism. Critical of both capitalism and of Marxism–Leninism as philosophically inflexible systems of social organization, the School's critical theory research indicated alternative paths to realizing the social development of a society and a nation.
In sociology, secularization is a multilayered concept that generally denotes "a transition from a religious to a more worldly level." Most versions of secularization do not lead to atheism, irreligion, nor are they automatically anti-thetical to religion. Secularization has different connotations such as implying differentiation of secular from religious domains, the marginalization of religion in those domains, or it may also entail the transformation of religion as a result of its recharacterization.
Jewish atheism refers to the atheism of people who are ethnically and culturally Jewish. Contrary to popular belief, the term "Jewish atheism" is not a contradiction because Jewish identity encompasses not only religious components, but also ethnic and cultural ones. Jewish law's emphasis on descent through the mother means that even religiously conservative Orthodox Jewish authorities would accept an atheist born to a Jewish mother as fully Jewish.
Sociology as a scholarly discipline emerged, primarily out of Enlightenment thought, as a positivist science of society shortly after the French Revolution. Its genesis owed to various key movements in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of knowledge, arising in reaction to such issues as modernity, capitalism, urbanization, rationalization, secularization, colonization and imperialism.
Gerhard Emmanuel "Gerry" Lenski, Jr. was an American sociologist known for contributions to the sociology of religion, social inequality, and introducing the ecological-evolutionary theory. He spent much of his career as a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he served as chair of the Department of Sociology, 1969–72, and as chair of the Division of Social Sciences, 1976-78.
Moishe Postone was a Canadian historian and social theorist. He was a professor of history at the University of Chicago, where he was part of the Committee on Jewish Studies.
"On the Jewish Question" is a response by Karl Marx to then-current debates over the Jewish question. Marx wrote the piece in 1843, and it was first published in Paris in 1844 under the German title "Zur Judenfrage" in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher.
Shiksa is an often disparaging, although not always, term for a Gentile woman or girl. The word, which is of Yiddish origin, has moved into English usage and some Hebrew usage, mostly in North American Jewish culture.
The terms "self-hating Jew" and "self-loathing Jew" are used to describe a Jew whose viewpoints on any specific matter are perceived as antisemitic. This phenomenon is also known as auto-antisemitism. Recognition of the concept gained widespread currency after German-Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing published his 1930 book Der jüdische Selbsthaß, which sought to explain a perceived inclination among Jewish intellectuals towards inciting antisemitism by stating their views about Judaism. More recently, this spotlight on antisemitism motivated by self-hatred within the Jewish diaspora is said to have become "something of a key term of opprobrium in and beyond Cold War–era debates about Zionism" in light of how some Jews may despise their entire identity due to their perception of the Arab–Israeli conflict.
The Merton thesis is an argument about the nature of early experimental science proposed by Robert K. Merton. Similar to Max Weber's famous claim on the link between Protestant work ethic and the capitalist economy, Merton argued for a similar positive correlation between the rise of Protestant Pietism and early experimental science. The Merton thesis has resulted in continuous debates.
Jonathan Irvine Israel is a British writer and academic specialising in Dutch history, the Age of Enlightenment and European Jews. Israel was appointed as Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, in January 2001 and retired in July 2016. He was previously Professor of Dutch History and Institutions at the University College London.
Jewish assimilation refers either to the gradual cultural assimilation and social integration of Jews in their surrounding culture or to an ideological program in the age of emancipation promoting conformity as a potential solution to historic Jewish marginalization. In Israel, Hitbolelut is a derogatory term that mainly refers to the highly uncommon Jewish interfaith couples within it, which in turn gets local criticism for and marked as anti-Zionism (anti-Israel); especially when the coupling is done with the clashing nationalism of Arabs who are predominantly Muslims and of Palestinian ancestry – mainly because of the ongoing Arab–Israeli conflict, which began even prior to the declaration of independence by the State of Israel in 1948.
Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. More simply put, sociology is the scientific study of society. It uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order and social change. While some sociologists conduct research that may be applied directly to social policy and welfare, others focus primarily on refining the theoretical understanding of social processes and phenomenological method. Subject matter can range from micro-level analyses of society to macro-level analyses.
The sociology of Jewry involves the application of sociological theory and method to the study of the Jewish people and the Jewish religion. Sociologists are concerned with the social patterns within Jewish groups and communities; American Jewry, Israeli Jews and Jewish life in the diaspora. Sociological studies of the Jewish religion include religious membership, ritual and denominational patterns. Notable journals include Jewish Social Studies, The Jewish Journal of Sociology and Contemporary Jewry.
Norman Friedman is an American sociologist and the former chairman of the Department of Sociology at California State University, Los Angeles.
The Young Hegelians, or Left Hegelians (Linkshegelianer), or the Hegelian Left, were a group of German intellectuals who, in the decade or so after the death of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in 1831, reacted to and wrote about his ambiguous legacy. The Young Hegelians drew on his idea that the purpose and promise of history was the total negation of everything conducive to restricting freedom and reason; and they proceeded to mount radical critiques, first of religion and then of the Prussian political system. They rejected anti-utopian aspects of his thought that "Old Hegelians" have interpreted to mean that the world has already essentially reached perfection.
Miriam Anna Leonard is Professor of Greek Literature and its Reception at University College, London. She is known in particular for her work on the reception of Greek tragedy in modern intellectual thought.
