Betraying Spinoza by Rebecca Goldstein

Betraying Spinoza by Rebecca Goldstein

Part of the Jewish Encounter series

In 1656, Amsterdam's Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, and, at the age of twenty-three, he became the most famous heretic in Judaism. He was already germinating a secularist challenge to religion that would be as radical as it was original. He went on to produce one of the most ambitious systems in the history of Western philosophy, so ahead of its time that scientists today, from string theorists to neurobiologists, count themselves among Spinoza's progeny.

In Betraying Spinoza, Rebecca Goldstein sets out to rediscover the flesh-and-blood man often hidden beneath the veneer of rigorous rationality, and to crack the mystery of the breach between the philosopher and his Jewish past. Goldstein argues that the trauma of the Inquisition' s persecution of its forced Jewish converts plays itself out in Spinoza's philosophy. The excommunicated Spinoza, no less than his excommunicators, was responding to Europe' s first experiment with racial anti-Semitism.

Here is a Spinoza both hauntingly emblematic and deeply human, both heretic and hero--a surprisingly contemporary figure ripe for our own uncertain age.

Rebecca A. is the editor. Goldstein is a professor of curriculum and teaching at Montclair State University in New Jersey, as well as the director of the Urban Teaching Academy. Her Ph.D. was awarded to her. from the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development at the University of Rochester, in teaching curriculum and change Student and teacher identity creation, concerns of democracy and social justice in urban schools, and the effects of No Child Left Behind on urban school reform and teacher education are among her research interests.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780805211597
ISBN 10	0805211594
Title	Betraying Spinoza
Author	Rebecca Goldstein
Series	Jewish Encounters Series
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Schocken Books
Year published	2009-08-11
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.