Judaism articles from June 2006

Judaism archives from June 2006

A message from Murray Baumgarten.(Editorial)
June 22, 2006... JUDAISM, now in its 55th year of publication, has helped Jewish learning take root in the language and life of our republic. The insights and habits of scholarly inquiry greet us here in American English, and thus attest to the participation of...

Editor's corner.(Editorial)
June 22, 2006... When he assumed the reins of JUDAISM 11 years ago, my predecessor, Murray Baumgarten, expressed his desire to expose an ever-wider audience to the texts and conversations that made up the first 5,755 years of Jewish life and to make this...

Whither scholarship? The rabbinate vs. the academy.
June 22, 2006... A TOPIC VIRTUALLY DEMANDING THOROUGH EXPLOration is the extraordinary proliferation of departments of Jewish studies on American college campuses and the endowment over the last 50 years of ever more chairs in Judaica. There also has been a...

Confusing Judaism and Christianity in contemporary Chinese letters.
June 22, 2006... WITH THE OPENING OF CHINA TO THE WEST IN THE 1980s, knowledge of and interest in Jews and Judaism began to spread beyond the intelligentsia in ways not possible before. The escalated introduction of foreign cultures led the Chinese to discover...

Dispensing medical marijuana: some halachic parameters.
June 22, 2006... A PHYSICIAN'S TASK IS TO HEAL THE SICK AND TO DO no harm. (2) Jewish medical oaths as well as the Hippocratic oath constantly emphasize the palliative aspect of medical care. (3) Jewish law (halachah) has codified the role of the physician, and...

How Zayde Met Bubbe.(Poem)
June 22, 2006... You were twenty-two when your mother and you left Dzaloshitz. For you it was forever. That was 1915. Your betrothed stayed behind and waited for you to send for her. In Milwaukee, the Lower North Side, noisy with immigrants,...

Krieger v. Mittelman and Jewish perceptions of the refugee in the early cold war.(Benjamin Krieger vs. Majer Mittelman)
June 22, 2006... ON THE MORNING OF JUNE 20, 1950, ACCORDING TO an account appearing in Life magazine, Benjamin Krieger glanced out the window of his Brooklyn fish store and spotted someone he thought he knew. He rushed out of the store, seized the startled man,...

Beyond the fourth wave: contemporary anti-Semitism and radical Islam.
June 22, 2006... THE TERM "ANTI-SEMITISM," AS MANY OF US REALIZE, is the wrong term for what we try to describe and analyze. It is inane nonsense, because there is no "Semitism" one can be "anti" to. There are Semitic languages, and you can hardly be against...

Profiles of acculturation: Jewish communities in 19th-century Germany.(From All Their Habitations)
June 22, 2006... SINCE MOVING TO WICHITA, KAN., I HAVE BECOME increasingly interested in the communal life of civic and religious organizations. My interest derives, in part, from Wichita's proximity to the Bible Belt, a place where "church life" occupies a...

Prayer shawl.(Poem)
June 22, 2006... My father spins, I am calm. I bend, he is stubborn. He has faith. I visit him in Miami Beach. He lends me his old tallis. I fly home, drape it over a chair, sketch on crisp paper the sheer cloth, folds, wrinkles, tight...

Touching the infinite through liturgy.(Prayer Matters)
June 22, 2006... SYNAGOGUES CONSTITUTE ONE OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE'S signal contributions to its own history. The weekly Sabbath witnesses God's role in that history, through three seminal rituals performed in synagogues. Sabbath sanctification (Kiddush) over wine...

My problem with the Amidah.
June 22, 2006... OUR CENTRAL PRAYER, THE AMIDAH, IN ITS WEEKDAY form, exemplifies at the highest level the combination of prayer as praise and as petition. In the first three benedictions we praise God, as if He were a King before whom we are presenting our...

When conversion is not on the agenda: developing direct support strategies for mixed couples.(Critical Issues)
June 22, 2006... KERUV IS A HEBREW WORD THAT MEANS "TO DRAW near." It is often used to describe the process of "outreach," that is to say, to draw Jewish people who are not necessarily synagogue members closer to Jewish life, or as "inreach," which necessitates...

Judaic Studies.(Poem)
June 22, 2006... University of Nebraska-Lincoln The department doesn't even fill a floor but one room at the university, fluorescents dark behind a frosted door which answers woodenly to every knock. No secretary waiting there to call me puppele,...

Women rabbis: a novel idea (1).
June 22, 2006... WOMEN HAVE BEEN ORDAINED AS RABBIS IN THE United States since 1972. At first, women rabbis were considered a novel idea. Today, they are widely found in Jewish institutional life. (2) Through their congregational- and organizational-centered...

Saint of Silence?(The Battle for Rome: The Germans, the Allies, the Partisans, and the Pope, September 1943-June 1944)(Book review)
June 22, 2006... The Battle for Rome: The Germans, the Allies, the Partisans, and the Pope, September 1943-June 1944, By ROBERT KATZ, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. In 1942, the British ambassador to the Holy See, D'Arcy Osborne, wrote in his diary,...

The 'Forgotten Refugees' remembered in film.(The Forgotten Refugees)(Movie review)
June 22, 2006... "The Forgotten Refugees," a film; executive producer, Ralph Avi Goldwasser; produced and directed by Michael Grynszpan; co-produced and directed by Tommy Schwarcz; written by J.J. Salman; released by Isra TV and The David Project Center for...

Communications.(Letter to the editor)
June 22, 2006... DEAR EDITOR: Ron H. Feldman's essay on the Sabbath vs. the new moon (Winter/Spring 2005) was fascinating in the extreme. There is one point, however, with which I must take issue. That point is the "unnatural problem" connected to Rabbi...

Errata.(Correction notice)
June 22, 2006... In the Summer/Fall 2005 issue, we neglected to identify Howard Stecker, author of "Responding to the Temperament of Twenty-First Century Jews." He is senior rabbi of Temple Israel of Great Neck, N.Y.