"Michael Morgan has served up an intellectual treat. These subtle and carefully reasoned essays explore the dilemmas of the post-modern Jew who would take history seriously without losing the commanding presence Israel heard at Sinai. Morgan's articulation of Jewish religious imperatives in a post- Holocaust world is clearly indebted to but goes beyond the work of Emil Fackenheim. The essay "Jewish Ethics After the Holocaust" is worth the price of the volume. Morgan's masterful parsing of the work of Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Strauss illumines the continuing challenge to liberal Judaism: how accommodate the subjectivity of the individual self without surrendering to relativism or losing transcendence. It is a pleasure to be nourished by a fresh mind exploring the tension between reason and revelation, history and faith." - Rabbi Samuel Karff. From the scientific revolution and the rise of modern philosophy to the Enlightenment and the Holocaust, modern events have stimulated new ways of understanding the central concepts and principles of Judaism.Is Judaism a timeless, universal set of beliefs or, rather, is it historical and contingent in its relation to different times and places? Do Jewish beliefs derive their meaning from texts and revelation or from rational argument and experience? Michael L. Morgan addresses major Jewish thinkers from the seventeenth century to the present who have wrestled with the moral and theological dilemmas that history poses for Jewish belief and identity. Among figures discussed are Baruch Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, Leo Strauss, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emil Fackenheim. By clarifying the tensions and dilemmas that characterize modern thinking about the nature of Judaism and Jewish experience, Morgan clears the way for Jews to appreciate their historical situation and yet locate enduring values and principles in a post-Holocaust world.