Judaism in a Digital Age: An Ancient Tradition Confronts a Transformative Era

What is the next chapter in Judaism's story, the next step in its journey? The dramatic changes of recent decades invite us to explore what role Judaism is to play in this new era. As the digital future becomes the present, Danny Schiff makes the case that the period known as "modernity" has come to an end. Noting the declining strength of Conservative and Reform Judaism, the largest US Jewish movements of modernity, he argues for new iterations of Judaism to arise in response to the myriad of weighty questions that now confront us about what it means to be human. Here is an account of the digital age through a Jewish lens, in which Schiff examines Jewish teachings and traditions, exploring what moral insight they might have to offer in this period of great flux. He marshals the thought of well-known futurists such as Ray Kurzweil and Yuval Noah Harari to forecast the exponentially larger shifts in the human condition that lie ahead, and proposes that a countercultural Judaism couldhave renewed relevance in addressing some of the pressing issues that confront humanity in the twenty-first century.

Danny Schiff is the Foundation Scholar at the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh. He is the author of Abortion in Judaism (2002) and is a former member of the City of Pittsburgh Ethics Board and the Society of Jewish Ethics Board.