Jeff Israel

 

Jeff Israel is a second-year Ph.D. student in Ethics in the Divinity School

Jeff is from Baltimore, Maryland. He earned his B.A. from Oberlin College in 1999, with a major in Religion and in Jewish and Near Eastern Studies. He earned his M.A. from the Divinity School in 2003, spending 2002-2003 at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The Divinity School is an exceptionally welcoming environment for intellectually curious students. Faculty members tend to have broad interests to complement deep knowledge in their particular fields, and students are likewise encouraged to pursue multidisciplinary projects. For the most part, both the faculty and the administration take the cultivation of student scholarship very seriously. And, also of great importance, the student body seems to consist of thoughtful and earnest folk.

I am a student in the area of constructive studies; in particular, I work on ethics. The ethics faculty is extremely strong, providing a wide range of perspectives on philosophical ethics, social and political ethics, and theological ethics. It seems to me that the unifying thread holding together those of us who constructively pursue ethics is a desire to formulate normative ethical claims and judgments; however, the criteria for assessing the validity of these claims and judgments, the legitimacy and nature of their sources and foundations, and their ultimate efficacy are all under dispute. There is great excitement and creativity in this tension. Students and faculty alike seem to be driven by the central and controversial ethical questions of our time and, in particular, the fate of religion as it relates to these questions.

My own research project, in philosophical and social and political ethics, is situated in the following context: The right of self-determination of peoples, a human rights norm since the days of Woodrow Wilson, guarantees political sovereignty to groups based on shared ethnic and linguistic characteristics. In the process of advocating for this right, and once national self-determination is achieved, there may be a conflict between the imposition of a collective identity by the nation onto its citizens and the individual rights of its citizens. This is further complicated when national identity is saturated with religious elements or is fused with religious identity. Meanwhile, despite the persistence of twentieth-century claims of self-determination, a twenty-first century liberal view of globalization seems to promise the possibility of fluid national boundaries, complex identities, prosperous mobility, global human rights norms, and unprecedented individual freedom." The questions orienting my research then arise: is there an inherent and imminent conflict between persistent claims of the right of self-determination and globalization? Is this only a continuation of modern tensions between Romanticism and Enlightenment, nationalism and liberalism, or does contemporary globalization pose altogether new problems for ethnic and religious nationalists? As religion manifests itself through national and transnational movements, what sorts of ethical tools can arbitrate conflicts between competing authorities, sovereignties, truths, and rights?

While my own background is particularly deep with respect to Jewish nationalist and liberal responses to modernity (known as “the Jewish Question”), my current research extends to address the Jews and other groups in the contemporary context: the Palestinian Question, the Kurdish Question, the Irish Question, etc.

The Divinity School is particularly well-suited for my research because the study of religious, ethnic, and national identity, in ethical terms, requires precisely the sort of interdisciplinary scholarship that is encouraged at this institution. In particular, appreciation of the dynamics of religious identity requires a subtle understanding of religion on its own terms that may not be as accessible in other, more reductionist, disciplinary contexts.