Judaism articles from January 2004

Judaism archives from January 2004

Produce your proof: Muslim exegesis, the Hadith, and the Jews.
January 1, 2004... AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, MANY MUSLIMS REFUSED to believe that the nineteen hijackers were even Muslim. Instead, they blamed this criminal act on a Jewish or Christian conspiracy against Islam. (1) Egyptian sociologist, Professor Sa'ad al-din...

Jews, Christians, and Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.
January 1, 2004... I HAVE A BOOK IN MY LIBRARY PUBLISHED BY THE JEWISH Publication Society of America in 1901. Inside the front cover, my great-grandfather, Isidore Langsdorf, has written his name in an elegant nineteenth-century hand. Either he gave the book to...

The Jew as Chattel in medieval Europe.
January 1, 2004... WHEN ROMAN LAW WAS SUPPLANTED BY CATHOLIC Canon law the Jews lost their right to practice their religion as citizens but not legal autonomy. At the start of the Middle Ages, when the pagans took over the western provinces of the Roman Empire,...

Peace, ethics, and the failure of Jewish liberalism.
January 1, 2004... SOME TIME AGO MY FAMILY AND I ATTENDED A RALLY for Israel in downtown San Francisco. The crowd was large and speeches from lay and religious Jewish officials were interspersed with songs. Although some of the music was uplifting I felt a...

Two women.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... When Leah sneaks in late at night, she brings almonds and figs, a taste of stolen wine. She tells me what we could make together if I would forget her sister. When I touch her and lick the cloud from her body, she quivers...

"No, it's not antisemitic": Judith Butler vs. Lawrence Summers.
January 1, 2004... ON SEPTEMBER 20, 2002 LAWRENCE H. SUMMERS, THE president of Harvard University, delivered to the Harvard community a speech deploring the upsurge of antisemitism in many parts of the globe: he specified synagogue bombings, physical assaults on...

Cain versus Abel.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2004... THE FRUIT OF THE FORBIDDEN TREE HAS LONG interested biblical readers and commentators. It is assumed that the fruit was an apple and a piece of this fruit got stuck in Adam's throat, hence the name Adam's apple for the larynx. The biblical...

Intertextuality and the Haftarot.(The JPS Bible Commentary: Haftarot)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... The JPS Bible Commentary: Haftarot, Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2002. ********** THE HAFTARAH, A READING FROM THE PROPHETS RECITED publicly on Sabbaths, festivals, and certain fast days after reciting the required...

The real, the theoretical, and the spiritual.(language and song)
January 1, 2004... MAN'S FIRST LANGUAGE WAS SONG. IN IMITATION OF THE birds. The idea was first proposed by Giovanni Battista Vico, a late seventeenthcentury Italian historian and philosopher. He believed that man's first language was in song-and that this...

Views of 1920s Palestine.
January 1, 2004... DURING THE FIRST DECADE OF THE BRITISH MANDATE, many American academics and intellectuals, both Jews and Christians, visited Palestine. They were interested in viewing the new Jewish experiments in agriculture, the development of new cities...

Against the tide.(Poem)
January 1, 2004... White cumulus above the night-- Does God keep watch, or is there none? Don't ask me--for I do not know, But go to sleep, my little one! That monster from grim centuries Walks the Earth's wheel in unchecked ease, The light of...

Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam: the "oasis of peace".(Biography)
January 1, 2004... NEVE SHALOM/WAHAT AL-SALAM WAS FOUNDED BY Father Bruno Hussar who envisioned a village where Jews, Muslims, and Christians would live together and learn to listen, understand, respect, and trust one another. Born in Egypt in 1911 to secular...

The miracle of Russian-Israeli theatre: from alienation to identity.(Gesher Theatre)
January 1, 2004... IN APRIL 1991, A FEW WEEKS AFTER THE FIRST GULF WAR, I was invited to see a Russian theatre show in Tel Aviv, as chair of a government committee that was allotting money to immigrant theatre groups. The members of the company all came to Israel...

From transmitting to transmuting holocaust trauma: a psychotherapist's view.
January 1, 2004... LIBERATION FROM THE CAMPS DID NOT SO SIMPLY liberate the survivor's mind to bear witness to the past--to know and be seen knowing. Not to be seen seeing was elemental in the psychotic, non-communicating universe of death camps and concentration...

We, the Jews of Dobre.
January 1, 2004... WE TALK AT NIGHT. IN THE BARBED FOREST NEAR Malkinia, in the groves near Dobre, in the pine trees above Giger's filled pits. Close to the filled pits--everything is close there--stands, tautly, a monument in honor of the dead of 1918-1920,...

After forty years.(Current Theological Writing)
January 1, 2004... ALMOST EXACTLY FORTY YEARS AGO, IVAN DEE, FOR Quadrangle, published a book I edited called "Rediscovering Judaism: Reflections on a New Theology." He not only accepted a volume that several others had rejected, he also edited it brilliantly and...

Passing for Jewish: the life and writings of Adah Isaacs Menken.(Infelicia and Other Writings)(Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Infelicia and Other Writings. By ADAH ISAACS MENKEN, edited by Gregory Eiselein. Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview Literary Texts, 2002. Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity. By RENEE MARIE...

Personal testimony.(Survival: The Story of a Sixteen-Year-Old Jewish Boy)(Flare of Memory: Stories of Childhood During the Holocaust)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Survival: The Story of a Sixteen-Year-Old Jewish Boy. By ISRAEL J. ROSENGARTEN. Translated from the Dutch. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Flare of Memory: Stories of Childhood During the Holocaust. Edited by ANITA BROSTOFF and...

Tanakh on the Lower East Side.(The Red Heifer)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... The Red Heifer. By LEO HABER. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001. Is there a Jewish sub-category of the Bildungsroman, the personal saga of childish wonderment metamorphosing into an adult point of view if not complete...

Marriage, old style.(Jewish Marriage in Antiquity)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Jewish Marriage in Antiquity. By MICHAEL SATLOW. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Scholars of Judaism face tremendous challenges when trying to describe Jewish life in antiquity. One challenge is the limited number of...

Jews and the Wagner problem.(Wagner: The Terrible Man and His Truthful Art)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Wagner: The Terrible Man and His Truthful Art. By M. OWEN LEE. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999 On May 31, 2001, as part of his musical contribution to the Israel Festival, Daniel Barenboim conducted the Berlin Staatskapelle...

Communications.(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2004... DEAR EDITOR: In "Antisemitism and the Muslim and Arab World (JUDAISM 2003 51:225-245), Neil J. Kressel offers a number of astute observations regarding the apparent degree of antisemitic vitriol in certain parts of the world. He also is...