The Assimilation of Tikkun Olam

Levi Cooper's The Assimilation of Tikkun Olam is a scholarly historical study tracing how the originally narrow rabbinic legal concept of tikkun olam, meaning specific legal provisions made for the good order of society, was gradually reinterpreted over the twentieth century into the much broader contemporary sense of social justice and world repair now common in liberal Jewish usage. Cooper's method is close textual history, tracing the phrase's actual usage across centuries of rabbinic literature against its later popular meaning. As a study specifically of semantic and conceptual change, it makes a well-documented case about how the phrase's usage shifted, a finding some contemporary users of the modern sense have received as a useful historical corrective and others have read as understating continuity between the concept's older and newer meanings.