Judaism articles from June 1999

Judaism archives from June 1999

A Historical Perspective.
June 22, 1999... MANY RECENT OBSERVERS HAVE EXPRESSED PESSIMISM about the uniquely Judaic religious and ethnic identity of the Jewish people in America. According to Alan Dershowitz, "[t]he good news is that American Jews--as individuals-have never been more...

Conversion and the American Jewish Agenda.
June 22, 1999... I'D LIKE TO STATE CLEARLY AT THE OUTSET, THAT I AM NOT opposed to conversion or to converts. To the contrary, the National Jewish outreach program, which I direct, has offered thousands of converts, potential converts, and intermarried couples...

The Mitzvah to Encourage the Convert.
June 22, 1999... RABBI DANA KAPLAN S INFORMATIVE ESSAY ENUMERATES the lamentations of "the ever dying people," a dirge supported by surveys and studies in the last decade and reiterated in sermons and lectures from the pulpit and platform. The bete noir has...

Conversion Today.
June 22, 1999... FOR The PAST FORTY YEARS AT LEAST, VOICES IN WORLD Jewry have argued for a more open, unapologetic approach to conversion of the unchurched to Judaism. That such viewpoints have been heard with hardly even whispers of reproach both within and...

Revisionism and the Rav: The Struggle for the Soul of Modern Orthodoxy.
June 22, 1999... THERE IS A MAJOR STRUGGLE CURRENTLY TAKING PLACE within the modern Orthodox community, a struggle over the correct understanding of the person and teachings of Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik, ztz"l, better known simply as the Rav. The Rav, one of...

Errata.(Spring 1999)(Brief Article)(Correction Notice)
June 22, 1999... In "Leviticus: Drawing Near the Other," by Susan E. Shapiro (Spring 1999), the words "plaid stars" should read "plaid skirts," p. 228. We regret this error.

Transparent Generations.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... Jerusalem Always calls me a dream, a whisper, a scream I try Where is my passport? Where is my plane? Hearing, conversations of her citizens Spoken In moving cars Sleeping children listening from...

Hitler Over My Head.(Short Story)
June 22, 1999... A FEW WEEKS BEFORE MY TENTH BIRTHDAY, I PINNED A photo of Hitler over my bed. I had clipped the picture from the boys' monthly Jugendlust, to which my classmates and I subscribed in third grade. Jugendlust carried a full-page picture of one of...

Translating the Holocaust: For Whom Does One Write?
June 22, 1999... ACT AND IDEA IN THE NAZI GENOCIDE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED in 1990. I began to write the book a decade before that with two purposes in mind. The first of these came from my belated awareness of the violent absence caused by the Nazi genocide...

Defiant Muse: Feminist Hebrew Poetry.
June 22, 1999... "TEN PORTIONS OF SPEECH CAME DOWN TO THE WORLD--nine of them were women's," according to a Hebrew maxim in one of the texts of the rabbis of Late Antiquity. The opposite, however, seems to be true of writing. Although the Hebrew language takes...

The Jews of Ireland.
June 22, 1999... WHEN WE SPENT A YEAR IN DUBLIN IN THE 1980s, A neighbor worried that we were so far from home, friends, and relations. She was glad to hear that American friends were to pay us a brief visit and asked their name. "Bloom," I told her. "Bloom,"...

Reforming Reform Judaism.
June 22, 1999... IN 1885 IN PITTSBURGH, A SMALL GROUP OF REFORM radical rabbis led by David Einhorn and his sons-in-law Emil G. Hirsch and Kaufmann Kohler, produced a document that was to mold American Judaism for decades to come. Its authors were profoundly...

Opposition As True Friendship: Edward Alexander and Irving Howe.(Review)
June 22, 1999... Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew. By EDWARD ALEXANDER. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. To ask those born after the 1940s what position a public intellectual should assume is to risk, at the very least, being labeled quaint;...

Coring the Center: Reflections on the "Jewish Periphery".(Review)
June 22, 1999... The Roots of Antisemitism in South Africa. By MILTON SHAIN. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. In August, 1996 I had the chance to join with colleagues from around the globe in a conference hosted by the Kaplan Centre for...