To Leave Your Mark

This volume collects selected seminal essays and articles in five areas of enduring significance and contemporary relevance. Section I surveys Jewish life on the contemporary campus and Hillel's role in building a pluralistic center for "Judaism on the campus." Section II deals with Jewish education in the setting of the university, aiming at fostering Jewish commitment by making Jewish identity more meaningful, whereas academic Jewish Studies must aim at objectivity, not advocacy. Section III examines contemporary Jewish identity and inter-religious dialogue, beginning with different perspectives on the meaning of Jewish distinctiveness. Section IV consists of scholarly essays, dealing with Moses Mendelssohn's quest for a philosophic basis for Jewish identity in the modern world, the origins and growth of "Wissenschaft des Judentums" in German universities before the Nazi era, and a critical analysis of the German rabbinate in the years 1910-1939. Section V presents dimensions of Alfred Jospe's own thought, emphasizing not passive salvation by withdrawal from the world but active redemption of the world, "in defense of tomorrow." In a career spanning nearly four decades of national leadership in the Hillel Foundations, Alfred Jospe (1909-1994) was a prolific author and editor. Alfred Jospe received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Breslau (1932) and his rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau (1935). He served as a rabbi in Berlin 1936-1939, and emigrated to the U.S.A. in 1939. He was the author of dozens of articles and essays, and of an annotated English translation of Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem and Other Jewish Writings (1969). Among the books he edited are Tradition and Contemporary Experience: Essays on Jewish Thought and Life (1970); Studies in Jewish Thought: An Anthology of German Jewish Scholarship (1981).