Judaism articles from March 1994

Judaism archives from March 1994

Hebraism and Hellenism reconsidered.
March 22, 1994... "ARAYNGEFALEN VIA A YOVEN IN A SUKEH!" This widespread Yiddish saying--"Fallen like a Greek into a sukkah!"--shows how far apart, at least in the popular Jewish mind of yesteryear, are Greek and Jewish cultures. The Latin Church Father...

The concept of the chosen people: an interpretation.
March 22, 1994... 43. Midrash Deuteronomy Rabba 2:4. For the collected rabbinic views in English translation, cf. Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, Vol. 2, pp. 225-242. 44. For example, cf. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed III:48. 45. Judah Ha-Levi,...

Rationales for the omission of eschatology in the Bible.
March 22, 1994... HAVING GAINED A SHORT RESPITE FROM PERSECUtiOn after the expulsion from Spain, Don Isaac Abravanel, after many arduous and turbulent years in the service of the Portuguese and Spanish sovereigns, settled in Monopoli, a small Italian town on the...

Malamud as modern Midrash. (Jewish author Bernard Malamud)
March 22, 1994... DESCRIBING HIS APPROACH TO WRITING SHORT fiction, Bernard Malamud once suggested that one needs "to say everything that must be said and to say it quickly, fleetingly, as though two people had met for a moment in a restaurant . . . and one had...

Shylock and the struggle for closure.
March 22, 1994... 1. "Go presently inquire, and so will I/Where money is": Theoretical and Historical Considerations IN HIS SEMINAL WORK ON SHAKESPEAREAREAN FESTIVE comedy, C. L. Barber introduces a theory of comic form which attempts to account for the role of...

Everyman's intellectual: remembering Irving Howe. (writer)
March 22, 1994... WHILE MOST PEOPLE KNEW IRVING HOWE AS A critic, academic, and writer, I was privileged to know him as a collaborator and friend. Meeting with Irving on a regular basis over a period of several years, I grew to know and appreciate his personal...

The sins of the census.
March 22, 1994... WHY DID THE ISRAELITES HAVE TO MAKE atonement for the divinely ordained census? Why was counting the people considered a sin? Or did the sin attributed to the enumeration attach to something else? The first census mentioned in the Bible is...

Revisiting my father's synagogue.
March 22, 1994... THOUGH I HAVE NO PERSONAL MEMORIES OF Hanover, I am acutely aware of my origins. I was born there on November 3, 1935, less than two months after Hitler's Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of their citizenship and of whatever illusions they...

The vanished world of Egyptian Jewry.
March 22, 1994... I WAS BORN IN CAIRO IN 1920 INTO A MIDDLE-class Jewish family. My father, too, was born in Cairo, and my mother, born in Turkey, was brought to Cairo as a teenager. Both of my parents were of Sephardic origin. However, my father had acquired...

The Bereshit song.
March 22, 1994... THE CREATION OF THE WORLD IS MADE TANtalizingly simple in the opening chapter of Genesis. When one considers the true complexity of it all, as so many branches of science are now revealing with every passing day in countless laboratories...