Judaism, pluralism & public reason

Abstract

Central values of Judaism and the historical experience of Jews are sources of strong Jewish support for democracy, especially in the United States, where Jews did not have to wait for citizenship and rights to be conferred on them–and possibly withdrawn. Judaism is strongly committed to the political order in the United States and to the pluralistic, dynamic civil society it helps make possible. Jews have the freedoms that others have, and those freedoms resonate with fundamental Jewish values in ways that matter even to nonpracticing Jews. Moreover, there are reasons to regard the Constitution’s nonestablishment neutrality as comparing very favorably with a notion of public reason as a political approach to the question of state and church relations. Neutrality does not impose upon or require bracketing of individuals’ constitutive commitments and their conceptions of what matters most integrally to them. Public reason is vulnerable to that troubling possibility.