Richard L. Claman has written and lectured, for the past 20 years, on various issues in contemporary Jewish philosophy. In particular, his work draws upon concepts from modern Anglo-American political/moral philosophers (such as Isaiah Berlin’s concept of objective value pluralism, and John Rawls’ notion of a ‘decent’ state) in order to illuminate, by contrast, the assumptions underlying classical Rabbinic thinking, so as then to try to better understand the ‘transition to modernity’, the philosophical options open to us today, and the importance of Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State to our ‘religious’ lives. For his ‘day job’, he is head of business litigation at a New York City law firm. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and has also studied at JTS and Tel Aviv University.
