TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schmidt, Imanuel Clemens
T1  - A Secular Tradition
BT  - Horace Kallen on American Democracy in the United States and Israel
JF  - PaRDeS : Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies in Germany
JF  - PaRDeS : Zeitschrift der Vereinigung für Jüdische Studien
N2  - This article focuses on the social philosopher Horace Kallen and the revisions he made to the concept of cultural pluralism that he first developed in the early 20th century, applying it to postwar America and the young State of Israel. It shows how he opposed the assumption that the United States’ social order was based on a “Judeo-Christian tradition.” By constructing pluralism as a civil religion and carving out space for secular self-understandings in midcentury America, Kallen attempted to preserve the integrity of his earlier political visions, developed during World War I, of pluralist societies in the United States and Palestine within an internationalist global order. While his perspective on the State of Israel was largely shaped by his American experiences, he revised his approach to politically functionalizing religious traditions as he tested his American understanding of a secular, pluralist society against the political theology effective in the State of Israel. The trajectory of Kallen’s thought points to fundamental questions about the compatibility of American and Israeli understandings of religion’s function in society and its relation to political belonging, especially in light of their transnational connection through American Jewish support for the recently established state.
KW  - modern Jewish history
KW  - United States
KW  - Israel
KW  - 20th century
KW  - Horace Kallen
KW  - cultural pluralism
KW  - intellectual history
KW  - moderne jüdische Geschichte
KW  - USA
KW  - Israel
KW  - 20. Jahrhundert
KW  - Horace Kallen
KW  - kultureller Pluralismus
KW  - Geistesgeschichte
Y1  - 2021
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-532868
SN  - 978-3-86956-520-0
SN  - 1614-6492
SN  - 1862-7684
IS  - 27
SP  - 85
EP  - 100
PB  - Universitätsverlag Potsdam
CY  - Potsdam
ER  -