Judaism, History, and the Environment

Dean Phillip Bell (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) is President/CEO and Professor of Jewish History at Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership. He teaches a wide range of courses in Jewish history and Jewish leadership and has delivered programs and workshops and led working groups on the theme of religion and the environment. He is author of dozens of scholarly articles and author or editor of more than a dozen books, including recently as co-author of Interreligious Resilience: Interreligious Leadership for a Pluralistic World with Michael S. Hogue (Bloomsbury, 2022).

• AcknowledgementsIntroductionPart 1: Historical Cases: Toward a Jewish Environmental History1. Earthquakes: Understanding Nature and Natural Disasters2. Plague as Natural Disaster3. Floods: From Theology to Technology—Understanding, Mitigation, and Prevention4. Learning with Fire5. Comparative Perspectives: Natural Disasters, Jews, and IslamPart 2: Disaster, History, and Religion: Tradition and Innovation6. Beyond History: Disasters and Crises in the Anthropocene7. History, Narratives, and Temporality 8. Religion and the Environment: Some Traditional Assessments and Applications9. Religion: New Conceptions and OpportunitiesPart 3: New Approaches in the Anthropocene10. Complexity, Polarization, and Resilience11. From Conceptual Challenges to Practical ApplicationsBibliographyIndex

This is an enormously erudite book, arguing in very compelling and accessible terms that history and religion matter a great deal and ought to be taken seriously by contemporary environmental and ecological thinking. Dean Phillip Bell applies fine historicist thinking to the Jewish sources and demonstrates the enormous possibilities of looking at classical and medieval sources both on their own terms and with an eye to present-day ethical, spiritual, philosophical, and theological problems.