Judaism articles from June 2004

Judaism archives from June 2004

Judaism and the future of religion in America: a symposium in response to Dana Evan Kaplan's American Reform Judaism.(Editorial)
June 22, 2004... DANA EVAN KAPLAN'S BOOK PRESENTS A CONTROVERSIAL portrait of the contemporary American Reform movement. As editor of JUDAISM, I asked leaders of the various American Jewish religious streams to comment on his book, as a means of focusing a...

Trends in Reform and their broader implications.
June 22, 2004... THE REFORM MOVEMENT HAS CONTRIBUTED SIGNIFICANTLY to Jewish life, and its future course is bound to affect the fate of Jews in the United States and around the world. Beginning in early nineteenth-century Germany, when an insular...

An Orthodox perspective.
June 22, 2004... A WISE MAN IN MY FORMER SYNAGOGUE HAD A BRIEF description of the three streams of American Judaism which is particularly instructive as a framework for a response to Kaplan's American Reform Judaism. He posited the classic man from Mars who...

An insider view: a defense of theological imprecision.(American reform judaism by Dana Kaplan)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... AMERICAN REFORM JUDAISM: AN INTRODUCTION BY DANA Evan Kaplan constitutes a noteworthy academic achievement. The book is remarkable in both its breadth and depth, and will surely become the definitive work on this largest American Jewish...

Reform Judaism and the Judaism of Reform Jews: a Conservative perspective.
June 22, 2004... A JEWISH RIP VAN WINKLE WHO HAD FALLEN ASLEEP IN 1955 and awoke half a century later would be dumbfounded by the reversal of fortune experienced by each of the major Jewish religious movements. Who could have imagined in the middle of the...

The identified patient: placing the Reform movement in a broader family context.
June 22, 2004... IF AMERICAN JUDAISM COULD BE TREATED IN A FAMILY therapy setting, Reform Judaism might well play the part of the "identified patient," the member of the family whose symptoms carry the distress and the issues that reside within the larger...

Shout rather than whisper: a Jewish Renewal perspective on Reform.
June 22, 2004... THE BOOK--DESPITE THE CRITICISMS OF RABBI YOFFIE AT the end and of Rabbi Hertzberg at the beginning--is correct in its hints at what the Reform movement needs, but far too timid in saying so. In order to make any difference at all to the...

Thinking about American Reform Judaism.
June 22, 2004... MY BOOK FOCUSES ON DESCRIBING THE CHANGES OF contemporary American Reform Judaism since Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie declared "a new Reform revolution" at the Union of American Hebrew Congregations general assembly in Orlando, Florida in December 1999....

A discovery: the Venice Minhogimbukh.(Yiddish book published in Europe)
June 22, 2004... FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, WHILE LOOKING FOR ILLUSTRATIONS to use in my first Judaica project, The Harvard Hillel Sabbath Songbook, I came across reproductions of several Renaissance woodcuts in an old Jewish encyclopedia. Their source was given as...

Two paradoxes: reflections on history and belief.
June 22, 2004... Religious Certainty The study of the Bible as carried out in a university context raises awkward questions for those who come to that endeavor from the ranks of committed believers. At the outset, even before one line of text has been...

Why some ask why.(Social psychologists, Kohlberg (1927-1986) and Milgram (1933-1984) dramatically broadened our understanding of how "ordinary people" can end up doing terrible things; holocaust survivors)
June 22, 2004... THE SECOND WORLD WAR FUELED A PERIOD OF unprecedented technological innovation. At war's end the inertia generated by the mobilization of resources for the development of military technology continued to spawn waves of scientific research, now...

History re-edited.(Visas, Jewish refugees in Shangai)
June 22, 2004... IT WAS A DINNER GUEST AT OUR HOUSE, IN MAY OF last year, who casually mentioned that his University student daughter had been asked to help locate German passports dating to the Nazi period with stamped visas to Shanghai, China. Since I had...

Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide: reflections on the Polish edition.
June 22, 2004... WHEN GERMANY INVADED POLAND ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, Poland's population, extrapolated from the last pre-War census of 1931, was approximately 33,000,000. The census distinguished the "nationalities" of those who were counted--identifying...

Bus ride of the living, or, what I did on my summer vacation.(Polish Jews)
June 22, 2004... IF WE ARE NOT HOPEFUL ABOUT THE FUTURE, THERE IS NO point learning about the past. Getting out of bed in the morning implies hope for the future, so there IS value in learning about the past. Really, there is. Now you know how I talked myself...

The changing lessons of the Holocaust.(Books)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... THE YEAR 2005 MARKS THE SIXTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF the end of the events we now know as the Holocaust or the Shoah. Called upon for a book-jacket blurb for Gunnar Paulsson's Secret City, one of the books reviewed here, however, well-known...

Religious metaphor and its denial in the poetry of Yehuda Amichai.
June 22, 2004... THE POETRY OF YEHUDA AMICHAI (1924-2000) IS ON one level a critical revaluation of Judaism. The loss of faith and the denial of religious metaphor illumine the discontent that hurt him into poetry. Cut adrift from Jewish orthodoxy, prone to...

Growing up Jewish in Ferrara: the fiction of Giorgio Bassani, a personal recollection.(From All Their Habitations)
June 22, 2004... GIORGIO BASSANI'S FERRARA MAY BE, AS AN AMERICAN critic has called it, a "semiotic labyrinth," but it is no doubt a very faithful representation of this city, of its history and topography. Actually, the success of his works, especially of his...

Heschel's "Torah from Heaven".(Current Theological Writing)(Judaism)
June 22, 2004... SUSANNAH HESCHEL WRITES IN HER FORWARD TO "Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations": "It seems clear that, for my father, Torah min Hashamayim was not simply another tome, nor was it a conventional work of scholarship. Rather...

Human, in parts.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Human Parts. By Orly Castel-Bloom, translated by Dalya Bilu. Boston: David R. Godine, 2003. Orly Castel-Bloom has been an important voice in Israeli literature since her first collections of stories were published in the late 1980s. Her...

Modern Jews and French citizens.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Jay R. Berkovitz. Rites and Passages: The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Culture in France, 1650-1860. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Berkovitz has produced an interesting and unusual book. He focuses on the inner life...