Rabbi Josh Yuter

From one of the country's most respected religion reporters, a paradigm-shifting discussion of how the Religious Left is actually the moral compass that has long steered America’s political debates, including today.Since the ascendancy of the Religious Right in the 1970s, common wisdom holds that it is a coalition of fundamentalist powerbrokers who...

What motivates violence? How can good and compassionate people hurt and kill others or themselves? Why are people much more likely to kill or assault people they know well, rather than strangers? This provocative and radical book shows that people mostly commit violence because they genuinely feel that it is the morally right thing to do. In perpet...

The Passover and its rite are central in the history of Judaism and Christianity. Explaining hot the Passover evening celebration, the seder, became one of the most popular Jewish rituals, Baruch M. Bokser shows how it was based on and transformed a biblical sacrificial meal. Bokser demonstrates the significance of the motif of Passover inb ancient...

New York Post Best Book of 2016We often think of our capacity to experience the suffering of others as the ultimate source of goodness. Many of our wisest policy-makers, activists, scientists, and philosophers agree that the only problem with empathy is that we dont have enough of it.Nothing could be farther from the truth, argues Yale researcher P...

"One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades." —John Gray, New York Times Book ReviewHailed as "a magisterial critique of top-down social planning" by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastr...

Most works on moral psychology direct our attention to the positive role morality plays for us as individuals, as a society, even as a species. In What's Wrong with Morality?, C. Daniel Batson takes a different approach: he looks at morality as a problem. The problem is not that it is wrong to be moral, but that our morality often fails to produce ...

Is Judaism a religion, a culture, a nationality--or a mixture of all of these? In "How Judaism Became a Religion," Leora Batnitzky boldly argues that this question more than any other has driven modern Jewish thought since the eighteenth century. This wide-ranging and lucid introduction tells the story of how Judaism came to be defined as a religio...

Updated to include the Black Lives Matter movement, the presidency of Barack Obama, the rise of hate speech on the Internet, and moreSince the publication of the first edition of Critical Race Theory in 2001, the United States has lived through two economic downturns, an outbreak of terrorism, and the onset of an epidemic of hate directed against i...

From the days of Plato, the problem of the efficacy and adequacy of the written word as a vehicle of human communication has challenged mankind, yet the mystery of how best to achieve clarity and exactitude of written expression has never been solved. The most repercussive instance of this universal problem has been the exegesis of the law embodied...