🌟 Presented by the UC Davis Jewish Studies Program

Professor Shanes will present and discuss his book Orthodoxy: A Modern Denomination (forthcoming with Rutgers University Press).

In this history of Jewish Orthodoxy, Professor Shanes shows Orthodoxy to be no less a product of modernity than its religious and political competitors. Tracing the evolution of the varying communities claiming—and fiercely debating the boundaries of—Orthodoxy from its origins in Germany to Eastern Europe, the United States and Israel, this study explains how a traditional culture shared unreflexively by most Jews evolved into a self-conscious, voluntary religious-political identity maintained by a determined minority that viewed itself as authentically “religious.”