In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Third Pillar: Essays in Judaic Studies
  • Michael P. Kramer (bio)
Geoffrey Hartman , The Third Pillar: Essays in Judaic Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 236 pp.

Originally published during the resurgence of Jewish studies in the 1980s and 1990s, these post-Wissenschaft essays on the Bible, Midrash, and Jewish education resonate anew in our current, postsecular moment. While the titular argument for the recognition of Jewish culture as the third pillar of Western civilization (alongside the classical and Christian) asks us to chisel through the calcified, secular residue of supercessionist and sublationist thinking to reveal the buried treasure of the Judaic "other within," Hartman's broader, concurrent theme is the uneasy situation of sacred texts (and religion in general) in the demystifying atmosphere of the secular university. Without relinquishing his own scholarly secularity, he champions a mode of commentary grounded in rabbinic thought that defamiliarizes the Bible and restores its spiritual otherness, leaving us standing in awe before, say, the "mathematical sublime" of the Book of Numbers, presciently bringing us closer to what Habermas recently called "an awareness of what is missing, of what cries out to heaven." [End Page 372]

Michael P. Kramer

Michael P. Kramer directs the Anne Shachter Smith Memorial Project in Literature at Bar-Ilan University. He is the author of Imagining Language in America and coeditor of the Cambridge Companion to Jewish-American Literature; Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries; and The Turn around Religion in America.

...

pdf

Share