Judaism articles from June 1998

Judaism archives from June 1998

Abusing Abraham: traditions, religious histories, and modern misinterpretations.
June 22, 1998... For thousands of years, jews and christians have seen in the aqedah a supreme act of religious devotion. Some time afterward, God put Abraham to the test. He said to him, "Abraham," and he answered, "Here I am." And He said, "Take your...

Heschel in Vilna.(Jewish writer Abraham Joshua Heschel)
June 22, 1998... The zeal of the pious Jews was transferred to their emancipated sons and grandsons. The fervor and yearning of the Hasidim, the ascetic obstinacy of the Kabbalists, the inexorable logic of the Talmudists, were reincarnated in the supporters of...

Home.(poem)
June 22, 1998... You put the word in my mouth. You put a dime in my pocket, and added my name to the list of travelers, and cleared the mind for good traveling. You put the word in my mouth. At the end of the day, my life as your disciple was done. You put...

Israel: founding father.(poem)
June 22, 1998... Alone at dusk in the orchard with almond blossoms and gaps in his long memory-whole years marked solely by public events, his private life, during those black periods, lost somewhere inside him-, his body stumbles, his soul...

Eve's song: observations on the poetry of Else Lasker-Schuler.
June 22, 1998... "I persist, forgotten-in the poem" Her Life Born in Elberfeld in 1869 (or 1876, according to the poet), Else Schuler was educated mostly by private tutors. Losing her brother Paul in 1882 and her mother in 1890 shattered her protected...

These serious jests: American Jews and Jewish comedy.
June 22, 1998... For Freud jests, especially Jewish jests, were serious (Peter Gay)(1) Had Freud followed his dreams he surely would have been a stand-up comic. Imagine: a dark room in a comedy club in Vienna and here is this bearded comic rattling off his...

Taking hold of Deuteronomy.
June 22, 1998... My work has been shaped by conversations with Jews in synagogues and organizations around the country that I have had the privilege of addressing during the past decade. Those discussions convinced me that the dilemmas I have been wrestling...

Formative Judaism: what do we know and how.
June 22, 1998... While many Judaic religious systems competed from the time of the formation of the Hebrew Scriptures of ancient Israel at the beginning of the Second Temple period forward to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., from 70 onward a...

Alef.(poem)
June 22, 1998... For R. B. Sunday, far north the broad air leafless, farmstands hunch at the roadside boarded, murmur a brucha for last fruits - last pumpkin, last apple, last week; the chill Sabbath kept at bay returns to the schoolroom. A moment before...

How writers fought back: literature from the Nazi ghettos and camps.
June 22, 1998... Readers tend to be more familiar with writing on the subject of the Holocaust created after rather than during the war, and are generally unaware of the remarkable quantity of writing done in the ghettos and camps. As Yechiel Szeintuch...

The new Jewish feminism.
June 22, 1998... The first waves of jewish feminism were, not unexpectedly, angry, unnuanced, and often downright ignorant. The mood of early writers in that vein was rejectionist: to them the Torah and tradition were, essentially and irrevocably, sexist and...

B'nai B'rith-Sha'ar Zion Hospital in Jaffa (1891-1921): the first Jewish community hospital in Palestine.
June 22, 1998... Until the beginning of the 1880s, the Jewish community of Jaffa - an ancient Mediterranean port dating back to Biblical times, situated today adjacent to the city of Tel Aviv-comprised no more than 650 people.(1) Most were Sephardi(2) Jews who...

Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred.(Review)
June 22, 1998... By ROBERT S. WISTRICH. New York: Pantheon Books, 1991. While antisemitism(*) remains a threat to the well-being and even the physical existence of the Jewish people, as well as to the moral integrity of human society, attempts to account...

A Pariah People: The Anthropology of Antisemitism.(Review)
June 22, 1998... By HYAM MACCOBY. London: Constable, 1996. While antisemitism(*) remains a threat to the well-being and even the physical existence of the Jewish people, as well as to the moral integrity of human society, attempts to account for it will be...

The Satanizing of the Jews: Origin and Development of Mystical Anti-Semitism.(Review)
June 22, 1998... By JOEL CARMICHAEL. New York: Fromm, 1992. While antisemitism(*) remains a threat to the well-being and even the physical existence of the Jewish people, as well as to the moral integrity of human society, attempts to account for it will be...

Antisemitism.(Review)
June 22, 1998... By MILTON SHAIN. London: Bowerdean, 1998. While antisemitism(*) remains a threat to the well-being and even the physical existence of the Jewish people, as well as to the moral integrity of human society, attempts to account for it will be...