Relationship, Power, and Holy Secularity: Rabbi Yitz Greenberg and American Jewish Life, 1966-1983

How did American Jews in the 1960s and 70s experience and develop their relationship to tradition? How did their relationships with parents and grandparents, and with narratives, histories, and cultural memories conveyed or obscured or forgotten by those forebears, inform and shape their identities and actions? How did discourses about contemporary events such as the Holocaust, the state of Israel, and the Vietnam War inflect their individual and collective sense of self? We are beginning to ask these questions as we begin to write the history of these years. Investigating them sheds light on our understanding of American Jewry and American religion.;This dissertation explores these questions through an examination of the thought, teaching, and work of Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg (b. 1933), and his influence on American Jewish life, between 1966-1983. I examine in detail four major historical moments, including: Greenberg's 1966 debate with Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein at Yeshiva University over the focus of contemporary Jewish orthodoxy; the movements for ecumenical Jewish-Christian dialogue, and interdenominational Jewish dialogue, of the late 1960s; the anti-Vietnam War movement at Yeshiva University; and the development of media portrayals of the Holocaust and American Jews in the late 1970s and early 1980s.;Throughout the historical account, I explore the development of key concepts in Greenberg's thought that would achieve influence through his extensive teaching and writing, including: his understanding of humans created b'tzelem elohim (in God's image); his conceptualization of halakha, Jewish law, as a model for an ethic of the exercise of governmental power, and as itself a discourse and process subject to political action; his understanding of modernity as a call to a theology of "holy secularity;" and his post-Holocaust notion of a voluntary covenant between the Jewish people and God. All of these concepts took root in Greenberg's conceptualization of history and the relationship of the present with the past, which I demonstrate is central to understanding his influence and the reception of his ideas, and thus sheds light on essential questions animating American Jewish life in these years.