Jewish Family Ethics Textbook

The Jewish Family Ethics Textbook is the first ethics book to address social media and technology ethics through a Jewish lens, guiding teachers and students of all ages in mining classical and modern Jewish texts to inform ethical decision-making. It tackles challenges in parent-child relationships, personal and academic integrity, social media, sexual intimacy, conception, abortion, and end of life, with case studies and multifaceted texts from tradition to modernity.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 382 pages
Publication date: 01 October 2021
Publisher: Jewish Publication Society

Judaism provides us with unique and often conflicting perspectives on contemporary moral dilemmas. How can we use social media without harming others? Should people be allowed to have children through cloning? Should doctors assist us in ending our lives?

The Jewish Family Ethics Textbook is the first ethics book to address social media and technology ethics through a Jewish lens, while also teaching the additional skills of analyzing classical Jewish texts. It guides teachers and students of all ages in mining classical and modern Jewish texts to inform ethical decision-making. The book is both sophisticated and accessible, tackling challenges in parent-child relationships, personal and academic integrity, social media, sexual intimacy, conception, abortion, and end-of-life. Case studies, largely drawn from real life, concretize the dilemmas. Multifaceted texts from tradition (translated from Hebrew and Aramaic) to modernity build on one another to shed light on the deliberations. Questions for inquiry, commentary, and a summation of the texts' implications for the case studies deepen and open up the dialogue.

In keeping with the tradition of maḥloket, preserving multiple points of view, Rabbi Neal Scheindlin explains, "We need not accept any of our forebears' ideas uncritically. The texts provide opportunities to discover ideas that help us think through ethical dilemmas, while leaving room for us to discuss and draw our own conclusions."

Weight: 584g
Dimension: 218 x 229 x 27 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780827613232