Judaism articles from January 2003

Judaism archives from January 2003

The Lonely Woman of Faith.
January 1, 2003... THIS, OF COURSE, IS NOT QUITE WHAT RAV SOLOVEITCHIK had in mind. His essay, The Lonely Man of Faith, does not make gender its obvious topic of concern. Nevertheless, in its aspect as a commentary on the creation stories of Genesis, it oddly...

A forum for the discussion of Jewish ethics.
January 1, 2003... THE SOCIETY OF JEWISH ETHICS (SJE) IS DEDICATED, IN the words of its by-laws, to "promote scholarly work in the field of Jewish ethics... to encourage and improve the teaching of Jewish ethics... to promote an understanding of Jewish ethics...

Mosaic liberalism.
January 1, 2003... THERE ARE TWO GREAT STRANDS IN THE IDEA OF liberty, positive and negative, as they are called. They tug against one another but also intertwine and support one another vitally. Both are Biblically and classically rooted, although their...

Our shifting/stable task: from "Choosing a Sex Ethic" to today.
January 1, 2003... ROMANTICISM ASIDE, THE LATTER YEARS OF THE SIXTIES were, in fact, a time of extraordinary ethical ferment, one in which people not only were concerned about a broad range of issues but sought to act upon their decisions concerning them. Sexual...

Metamorphosis.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... Franz and I are having coffee at Nona cafe. It wasn't something we planned-- I spotted him with those bat ears leaning over an espresso clearly in the throes of a panic attack and moved to his table. He barely notices me,...

At the limits: reflections on Halivni on the Shoah.
January 1, 2003... DAVID WEISS HALIVNI'S "PRAYER IN THE SHOAH" (JUDAISM 50 (2001): 268-291) is a powerful address to the Shoah in Orthodox Jewish terms--by implication, in religious terms as such. Penetrating and enlightening as it is, however, Halivni's...

Kaddish for the Warsaw Jewish cemetery.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... Dead souls cling like bats with decayed claws To the underside of verdant trees, Squeaking "Remember me, remember, me," Words mere withered wind blown away. Moist lichen coats sunken tombstones With green paws...

Nazis, Jews, Czechs in Sudetenland: a memoir.
January 1, 2003... "CLEANING THAT TEAPOT AGAIN? HOW OFTEN DO I have to tell you not to touch it? It goes with the tea set. Don't you understand German?" "But, I thought," interrupted Alma--but she didn't get a chance to finish her sentence, for my mother...

Both the dove and the serpent: Hadassah's work in 1920s Palestine (1).
January 1, 2003... ZIONIST HISTORIANS HAVE NOT LOOKED UPON THE 1920s for instruction or inspiration. They saw the Jewish community in Palestine/Israel as endangered, what with the Arab riots of 1921, uncertainties about the British mandate, and the failure of...

Jew's harp: David in Copenhagen.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... After thirty years I left my kibbutz in the Galil for Stine's Copenhagen. She spoke a tongue I'd never heard, tied me with talk of a place she defined by smoothing her hand over mine. You ask what an Israeli is doing in Denmark, and I...

[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and the complexities of Yiddish translation.
January 1, 2003... IN 1928, THE GREAT YIDDISH POET, YANKEV GLATSHTEYN, wrote a piece for the journal [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ("In zikh") entitled [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ("If Joyce had written Yiddish: A Par Ode"). (1) In it, he played...

Hitler's professors, Arafat's professors.
January 1, 2003... In Hitler and his comrades we discern the spirit of clarity without residue, of honesty toward the outer world, and simultaneously of inner unity.... This, however, is exactly the spirit which we early recognized and...

The perils of p'shat.(Current Theological Writing)(reviews of Torah commentaries)(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE JEWISH PUBLICATION Society (JPS) and the Conservative movement has long been close and mutually supportive. For example, most of the executives of the JPS have come from the movement and most of the scholars who...

Hearing Voices: Spirited Texts, Historical Memory, and the Postmodern Soul.(Scars of the Spirit: the Struggle Against Inauthenticity)(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity. BY GEOFFREY H. HARTMAN. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Reading Hartman's work not only provides vistas of new materials and challenges, but also expands my own sense of a...

Postzionism and its Neighbors.(The Postzionism Debates: Knowledge and Power in Israeli Culture; The Fence and the Neighbor: Emmanuel Levinas, Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Israel Among the Nations)(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... The Postzionism Debates: Knowledge and Power in Israeli Culture. By LAURENCE J. SILBERSTEIN. New York: Routledge, 1999. The Fence and the Neighbor: Emmanuel Levinas, Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Israel Among the Nations. By ADAMZACHARY NEWTON....

A History of Jewish Time.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish Calendar, Second Century BCE--Tenth Century CE. By SACHA STERN. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. "Sod ha-ibbur--the secret of intercalation" is the ancient term designating the...

Communications.(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2003... DEAR EDITOR: Edward Alexander's review of Kaddish by Leon Wieseltier (Fall 1999) offers me the opportunity for a dissenting comment. Yes, among Jews it is customary for the oldest son to recite the kaddish after the death of his father or...

Communications.(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2003... TO THE EDITOR: In the matter of Abraham's faith-propelled near-sacrifice (not murder) of Isaac, Jon Levenson's ("Abusing Abraham: Traditions, Histories, and Modern Misinterpretations," Judaism, Summer 1998) theodicy does not deal with the...