Judaism articles from January 2000

Judaism archives from January 2000

Early Jewish History in Italy.
January 1, 2000... AFTER HIS VICTORY IN THE FIRST JEWISH WAR TITUS sent back to Italy many thousands of Jewish slaves. Some went to Rome and the records also indicate a large number were shipped to the ports of Apulia (now called Puglia), the extreme southeastern...

Rachel Morpurgo.(19th-century Italian Jewish poet)
January 1, 2000... THE ITALIAN JEWISH POET RACHEL MORPURGO, A MEMBER of the prominent Luzzatto family, [1] was born in Trieste in 1790, and died in 1871, at the age of eighty-one. Rachel's Hebrew poems were published in her lifetime in the Hebrew literary journal...

A Visit to Casale Monferrato.
January 1, 2000... TURIN, MILAN, LAKE COMO, VERONA, VENICE--THESE are places in northern Italy that many of us have heard of. But Casale Monferrato? However, as my wife Mindell and I discovered on our recent two-week trip to northern Italy, Casale Monferrato's...

Jewish Lives: Rita Levi-Montalcini.
January 1, 2000... "HOW COULD YOU GO BACK TO A COUNTRY THAT persecuted you, that took away your citizenship, your profession, where you had to live underground to survive?" She was watering her plants, dozens of coral and crimson plants, in the living-room of the...

Under a Tree in Santa Cruz.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... You want to be an absence in my life, like the moon penetrating from a distance, no marks that show. Remember our pleasure. Tie me to the redwood tree. Tell me slowly how long how deep. Wife, child, husband,...

Emissaries in the Promised Land: Manya Shohat, Chaim Arlosoroff, and Enzo Sereni in the USA.
January 1, 2000... THE STUDY OF ZIONISM IN THE AMERICAN SETTNG IS not a simple, straightforward matter. To begin with, American Zionism is a term that continues to elude scholarly consensus. Can a movement that produced barely a trickle of Jewish immigrants to...

Buber: Mysticism Without Loss of Identity.(philosopher Martin Buber)
January 1, 2000... "He (the hasid) elevates their needs before he satisfies them." Martin Buber, My Way to Hasidism [1] MORDECAI MARTIN BUBER, THE FOREMOST OF MODERN Jewish thinkers known to the world at large, was born in Vienna in 1878. At the age of...

Prayer and the Uses of Meditation.
January 1, 2000... THE JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY REQUIRED RABBINICAL students to spend one year in Israel, and we decided to go the following fall. One day, shortly before we left, Norman Fischer (Abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center) was in New York for a...

Don't Ask, Son.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... Some people come to hear the story, the wonders and the signs, the rationale of rituals gory, and read between the lines the tale they wish to hear: the wise the wicked and the plain, the one who does not ask, four...

Among the Jewish Descendants of Kaifeng.
January 1, 2000... KAIFENG IS ABOUT THE SAME DISTANCE AND DIRECTION from Beijing that Knoxville, Tennessee, is from the District of Columbia. And there are other similarities between Kaifeng and Knoxville. Kaifeng has about five percent of greater Beijing's...

Moses at the Millennium.
January 1, 2000... A GENERATION AGO MOSES SEEMED TO BE A REAL person in a real historical setting. Even his name was Egyptian. His story fit the archeological assumptions of the time. Great scholars like William Foxwell Albright and Nelson Glueck believed that...

Between Jerusalem and Albion.(Review)
January 1, 2000... New Stories for Old: Biblical Patterns in the Novel. By HAROLD FISCH. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake. By HAROLD FISCH. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. A generation ago, before...

Mystic Tales.(Review)
January 1, 2000... Mystic Tales from the Zohar. By ARYEH WINEMAN, with Papercut Art by DIANE PALLEY. Philadelphia/Jerusalem: Jewish Publication Society, 1997. Many years ago, when I first looked into an English translation (by Sperling and Simon) of the...

The Malamud Factor: Recent Jewish Short Fiction.(Review)
January 1, 2000... For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. By NATHAN ENGLANDER. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. Foreign Brides. By ELENA LAPPIN. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Apples from the Desert: Selected Stories. By SAVYON LIEBRECHT. New...