Happiness and Unhappiness as a “Jewish Question”

Happiness is multiple, conflicting ideas—often changing from context to context with each change presaging a cascade of different meanings and interpretations. In this essay I shall try to link a number of them in a manner that is not causal but, I hope, rather evocative. I want to begin with a specific "Jewish" turn in the history of the concept of happiness at the close of the nineteenth century—one that turns out not to be very "Jewish" in its origin—and conclude with some thoughts on Michael Jackson and our need to understand happiness in the twenty-first century.