The last several years have seen a sharpening of debate in the United
States regarding the problem of steadily increasing medical
expenditures, as well as inflation in health care costs, a scarcity of
health care resources, and a lack of access for a growing number of
people in the national health care system. Some observers suggest that
we in fact face two crises: the crisis of scarce resources and the
crisis of inadequate language in the discourse of ethics for framing a
response.
Laurie Zoloth offers a bold claim: to renew our chances of achieving
social justice, she argues, we must turn to the Jewish tradition. That
tradition envisions an ethics of conversational encounter that is deeply
social and profoundly public, as well as offering resources for
recovering a language of community that addresses the issues raised by
the health care allocation debate.
Constructing her argument around a careful analysis of selected classic
and postmodern Jewish texts and a thoughtful examination of the Oregon
health care reform plan, Zoloth encourages a radical rethinking of what
has become familiar ground in debates on social justice.