It may seem odd to point out that the primary focus of the Jewish Studies literature is Judaism. After all, what else would it be? But this mono focus on Judaism omits the work of secular Jews who have been among the most important and influential contributors to every field in the arts and letters. Like a teenager after a breakup, the attitude is largely, “if you don't care about me, then I don't care about you.” If these thinkers reject their Jewishness, at least in their intellectual endeavors, why should those who study Jewishness devote time to them? As a result, Secular Jewish Studies is pursued with less vigor.

But doing so unnecessarily impoverishes the field. Jewishness is bigger than Judaism. It may be purely an accident of history that the great revolutionaries who launched modernity in their fields—Albert Einstein in physics, Emile Durkheim in sociology, Arnold Schoenberg in music, etc. just to name a few—were Jewish. But surely it is more than a mere accident. These were outsiders who emerged from a lived context to change the context in which we live. Art historians and historians of science will study their work relative to their peers, relative to their professional situation, but it ought to be the job of those in the Jewish Studies community to provide an even larger contextu alization. Secular Jews are Jews and their Jewishness needs to be understood in their lives and works.

One way to do that is to engage in the sort of bridge building that comprises this volume. By connecting secular Jewish thinkers and artists to Judaism, allows them to re-enter the tribe. Jews are proud of the famous Jews we know of or learn about. This sort of game provides a handle with which to ground that pride. This is not to say that we should deprive secular Jews of their secularity. That surely needs to be respected, but the associativity of this sort of project (without causal claims) allows secular Jews to be both secular and Jews.

This is a project we have been engaged in for a decade. Our initial work re-Judaizing a secular Jewish figure was our article, “Einstein's Jewish Science” and we followed that with treatments of Jerry Seinfeld and Rube Goldberg (this last piece required our co-author Olivia Handelman). This volume pre sents six more.

The writers of the Passover Haggadah brought together four passages from disparate portions of the Torah to frame the allegory of the four sons:

We can appropriate this passage for another use. The story of the four sons illustrates the four tasks of Jewish Studies.

The wise son's question represents Jewish Studies scholars hashing out matters related to Jewish law, Jewish custom, Jewish history and Jewish thought among themselves. This son is wise because he is one of the learned scholars discussing Jewish matters at a high level with other learned scholars. Like any proud Jewish family, we love to put our wise children in front of company. One can find Ruth Wisse, for example, not only on the pages of prestigious academic journals, but on radio and television. Jacques Derrida made no secret of the Talmudic influence on his deconstructive methodol ogy which spread to secular philosophy, literary theory and throughout the social sciences. The wise siblings own their Jewishness and it informs their questioning.

Judaism is a linguistic religion. The ancient Egyptians worshipped their Pharaohs, human beings with bodies who were made into gods. Other tribes had idols, material sculptures that they deified by placing supernatural powers into a natural object. But for Jews, there is only language.

The First Commandment, a set of words, demands that the focus of all belief be about words. God has no material body, no physical (much less physiological) depiction can be constructed. The closest thing Jews have to a representation is a name, an ordered arrangement of letters which they are forbidden from pronouncing. Jews have only a word and yet they are denied the opportunity of using it as they use other words. Instead of saying the sound of the word aloud, they utter the syllables hashem, the word for “the name.” The name itself, the linguistic representation of the Divine, is a vessel of its own divinity. The word contains the power of the thing the word desig nates, that is, there is no real distinction between word and object, between signifier and signified, at least for God Himself. What made Judaism unique among ancient religions is that it became about language.

Jews are called “the People of the Book.” A book, in one sense, is a material object, pages of printed paper or scrolls of inscribed sheepskin. And Jews treat each copy of their book as holy, precluded from touching it, indirectly conveying their affection and respect through kissing it.

Yet, in another sense, the book is not physical at all. The printed versions of the book are just that, versions, mere instantiations. The book is not in the publishing, it is in the ordering of letters and blank spaces. It is in the meaning—or better, the meanings—of the language. Every book is a collection of thoughts, that is, immateriality, that is somehow made material. It is something ephemeral that is yet capable of having traces turned into physical markings that are accessible to the senses which then go on to give rise once again to the ideas it contains. The immaterial made material only to then disclose its immateriality—how could one not see this process as profound, if not magical?

Nouns are persons, places or things. Verbs are words that describe actions. Hellenic-Christian thought focuses on the noun. It is based on the assertion that truth is a thing. Rabbinic Jewish thought focuses on the verb. It is based on the assertion that the seeking of truth is a process. It is the doing that is important. In the first half of the twentieth century, the high point of the Hellenic project was achieved by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead in their masterwork Principia Mathematica. In this monumental three-volume tome, they not only sought to find an absolutely firm foundation for mathematical truth, but did so with the creation of a first-order predicate logical language that became the arbiter of absolute truth. Their student, Ludwig Wittgenstein, sought to undermine their work by attacking it at its root. Philosophy is not to be the worship of a thing; philosophy is a process, a process that bears a striking resemblance to that of rabbinic Judaism.

Hellenic-Christian Thought

Classical Greek thought was fascinated with process. One could see the central question of ancient Greek thought as the need to account for change. The movement of objects near the Earth, the movement of the heavenly bodies, the reproduction of animals, the growth of living things, the choice of actions by individuals, the determinations of law by the polis and all of the questions of the great Hellenic thinkers sought to explain change.

Yet, while processes formed the content of their interest, it was rarely to be found in the answers proposed. With the exception of a few figures like Empedocles, the approach that dominated this period was teleology. All things possessed a telos, an end, an aim and a goal. Change is always change toward something, for the sake of something, an actualizing of potential contained within the thing. Classical Greek thought sought to turn the how into a what.

This commitment to teleology caused there to be two general camps. On the one side, following Heraclitus, were those who saw change as eternal because the telos was an asymptote, to be approached, but never achieved. All things are driven by their aim, to reach their full potential, but as good as they get, they will never quite embody its perfection.

Karl Marx has long been held up as the archetypal self-hating Jew. On the one hand, Marx's family was (before his father's conversion) very Jewish. Both his father and mother's sides included many rabbis going back generations. On the other hand, Marx was baptized at the age of six, received no Jewish education and is infamous for quotations such as “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.” Marx's contempt for Jews could not be clearer. Yet, despite this, we argue here that Karl Marx ought to be considered a Jewish thinker.

Scholars like Nathan Rotenstreich and David Nirenberg have distinguished anti-Semitism, that is, bias against Jews, from the separate notion of anti-Judaism, that is, the intention to remove Jewish thought from a full understanding of the development of the Western intellectual tradition. We will, on the one hand, follow other scholars in contending that while the anti-Judaism of Friedrich Hegel contributed to the anti-Semitism of many Young Hegelians like Marx and Bruno Bauer, Hegel was anti-Jewish, but not anti-Semitic. We contend that Marx, on the other hand, can nonetheless be reclaimed. A case can be made that he was anti-Semitic (although not in the usual way); but, when understood properly, Marx turns out not to be anti-Jewish. To the contrary, there is a meaningful sense of the concept of Jewish in which Marx can be very much thought to be a Jewish thinker.

Jewish, Greek and Christian Thought

To support the claim that Marx ought to be considered a Jewish thinker, it must be made clear what we will mean by the term “Jewish thinker” or “Jewish thought.” There are certainly straightforward examples that all would consider uncontroversial. Writers of Talmudic commentary, for example, would have to be considered “Jewish thinkers” on any reasonable account. But surely, the appellation should extend beyond religious writing. Martin Buber or Franz Rosenzweig's philosophical works surely are exam ples of Jewish thought, even those passages and elements that may be under stood from a context that is not explicitly Jewish as they are a part of a larger, coherent project in which Judaism plays a significant role.

The most important structural change to Judaism after the diaspora is the development of the reform, orthodox and conservative movements in nineteenth-century Europe. As reactions and counter-reactions to the developments of science, culture and politics of the time, these movements regularized distinct forms of Jewishness, each with their own practices and belief structures. They became corporate brands of Judaism, opening franchises in each community. Congregations became consumers with brand loyalty. Rabbis became managers and assistant managers, trained at approved Yeshivas in the specifics of corporate policy so as to satisfy the customers.

These divisions, and further ones that would follow, radically reshaped not only Jewish life moving out of the nineteenth century, but Judaism itself. It turned Judaism from a way of life for members of a nation into an organized religion for a set of believers. In this way, Judaism entered the same category as Christianity and Islam. It was now a flavor of faith with an associated metaphysics and ethics that could be compared and contrasted. This allowed Christianity not only to be a dominant religion, but also to define what it means to be a religion.

So overwhelming are the changes that came with the partitioning of Judaism, that little time is spent making sense of what was lost in seeking the economy of scale that comes with corporatization. The place to look are the Hassidic courts of central and eastern Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rabbis were wise men and seers, not mere customer ser vice representatives. They were scholarly entrepreneurs, each building and selling his own brand of Judaism, hustling and innovating, making Judaism dynamic.

The virtue of this approach was enunciated in a place one would not expect, the works of Ayn Rand. A secular thinker of Jewish heritage, Rand's objectivism is thoroughly committed to eliminating anything mystical or supernatural, exactly that upon which the Hassidic worldview is based. Yet, the content of Rand's beliefs, her picture of epistemic growth, the mechanism by which we come to gain understanding in the world, turns out to be exactly the same. Committed to the Enlightenment notion of a marketplace of ideas, human progress requires great individuals who transcend the moment, who yield to nothing but the creative spirit, who lead through the force of their individual greatness.

In the 1990s, Judith Butler helped launch Queer Studies as an academic field. Her masterwork Gender Trouble not only challenged the mainstream understanding of sex, gender and sexuality, but showed that even the feminist thinkers at the time were keeping themselves trapped in an orthodox notion of gender.

Butler challenged orthodoxy. This is not only meant in the sense of taking on entrenched received views, but in the deeper sense in which the contemporary Jewish movement of orthopraxy is taking on Jewish orthodoxy. The word orthodoxy means correct belief and orthopraxy means correct action. Like Jewish orthopraxy writers such as Jeffrey Radon and Sherwin Wine who argue that Judaism is not a set of beliefs one must hold but rather to be Jewish is to engage in certain ways of acting, Butler argues that gender is not some culturally imprinted way of thinking that comes from being socialized as a man or woman but rather that gender “is a doing,” a set of prescribed behaviors within political structure which pre-determines the boundaries of allowable and meaningful acts. Just like the Jewish orthorpraxy writers, Butler takes what you do to determine what you are.

Butler is a secular Jewish writer, but she had a religious upbringing, albeit a contentious one. She went to a Jewish day school, but got into trouble for talking back to the teachers and cutting classes.

Peter Singer may be the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century in terms of cultural impact beyond the academy. His book Animal Liberation combined philosophical argumentation with muckraking reporting that launched the animal rights movement. Changes in commercial and scientific testing, the mainstreaming of vegetarianism, and reductions in factory farm ing cruelty coupled with the rise of free-range farming are all direct results of his philosophical work over four decades.

Singer is Australian, but his family was originally Austrian.

As the grandchild of victims of the Shoah, Singer became deeply concerned with the wellbeing of the vulnerable. As one of the most well-known ethicists of the twentieth century, he has been thoroughly committed to utilitarianism, a moral system that contends that moral rightness and wrongness is a result of the sum total of good and bad consequences, of pain and pleasure, generated by deliberate human actions. Every time we act, we change the world. Our actions have effects. Some of the effects are good and some are bad. Morality, through the principle of utility, demands that we choose our actions to create the best possible world when we democratically consider the wellbeing of everyone equally. No one is less than. Everyone's interests are considered equally.

This approach to ethics comes to us from late Enlightenment figures like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. They argued that morality is not a matter of sentiment, but of reason. In this way, Singer follows his own grand father who perished in the camps.

There is a terrible, tragic irony in the fact that my grandfather (a classical scholar and a member of Freud's inner circle) spent his whole life trying to understand his fellow human beings, yet seems to have failed to take sufficiently seriously the threat that overwhelmed Vienna's Jewish community and ultimately led to the loss of his own life.