February 27, 2020
Podcast: Mark Gottlieb on Jewish Life in the Shadow of the Sexual Revolution
The rabbi joins us to talk about the great theologian Eliezer Berkovits and his distinct vision of Jewish sexual ethics.
This Week’s Guest: Mark Gottlieb
Life in the year 2020 is lived in the shadow of the sexual revolution. The radical changes in sexual mores and family life that American society experienced in the 1960s and 1970s still reverberate today, having made their impact on everything from popular culture and public education to religious life and the most divisive political controversies.
What caused this massive social revolution? How should Jews think about what it has meant for their own way of life? And what vision of sex, romance, and family can Judaism offer the world? These are the questions the late theologian Eliezer Berkovits took up in “A Jewish Sexual Ethics,” an essay first published in 1976 and included in a posthumous 2002 volume of his Essential Essays on Judaism.