This book is any­thing but an intro­duc­tion. One can­not claim as an intro­duc­tion a work that cov­ers only those thinkers who con­tributed to the author’s the­sis. The appro­pri­ate title is ​“Oliv­er Leaman’s Approach to Jew­ish Thought.” 

Lea­man begins his the­sis with the now trendy post-mod­ern approach of there being no set prin­ci­ples in Judaism. His ratio­nale is the same as all oth­er post-mod­ernists who see lack of con­cor­dance as com­pelling proof of the impos­si­bil­i­ty of an objec­tive truth. The fresh­ness of his par­tic­u­lar approach lies in the argu­ment that, in fact, there are con­stants in Jew­ish thought. These con­stants are what he iden­ti­fies as the recur­ring con­tro­ver­sies that tran­scend time and remain at the heart of cur­rent philo­soph­i­cal and intel­lec­tu­al debate. How­ev­er, the most inter­est­ing part of the book is the author’s con­clu­sion. His the­sis leads him to the rad­i­cal idea that the ide­al con­nec­tion to Judaism is not the self-cen­tered pop-Kab­bal­ah cul­tur­al fast-food­ism that char­ac­ter­izes the mod­ern Amer­i­can Jew’s con­nec­tion with his or her her­itage. Rather, a true con­nec­tion with a mul­ti­fac­eted reli­gion, one that insures its con­ti­nu­ity, is one that is based on inter­ac­tion with texts and philoso­phies, cou­pled with healthy com­mu­nal participation.