David Biale: 5 books

Not in the Heavens traces the rise of Jewish secularism through the visionary writers and thinkers who led its development. Spanning the rich history of Judaism from the Bible to today, David Biale shows how the secular tradition these visionaries created is a uniquely Jewish one, and how the emergence...

A new biography of the seminal twentieth-century historian and thinker who pioneered the study of Jewish mysticism and profoundly influenced the Zionist movement Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) was perhaps the foremost Jewish intellectual of the twentieth century. Pioneering the study of Jewish...

The first comprehensive history of the pietistic movement that shaped modern Judaism This is the first comprehensive history of the pietistic movement that shaped modern Judaism. The book’s unique blend of intellectual, religious, and social history offers perspectives on the movement’s...

Enlightenment and Secularism is a collection of twenty eight essays that seek to understand the connection between the European Enlightenment and the emergence of secular societies, as well as the character or nature of those societies. The contributors are drawn from a variety of disciplines including...

To shed light on the tensions he observed between Jewish perceptions of power versus political realitieswhich "are often the cause of misguided political decisions," like Israel's Lebanese WarBiale analyzes Jewish history from the point of view of politics and power. The author of...