Judaism articles from March 1998

Judaism archives from March 1998

Israel and the Diaspora at 50.(For Israel's Jubilee Year)
March 22, 1998... By common consensus, the two most extraordinary events of twentieth-century Jewish history were the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust and the construction of the state of Israel.(1) They bracket the 1940s, and they define Jewish...

Class photo. (poem)
March 22, 1998... In the class picture my son brought home from kindergarten are all the clues that we will find once it's too late: already, the girl at the top left turns her face toward unnamed airports, the boy below leans forward and waits for the race to...

Who knows one? (poem)
March 22, 1998... Who knows one? I know one. One is what he's left with when he undresses himself of office gossip and strangers' faces remembered from buses and stares from his window at hills yellow with flowers, and the sky. Who knows two? I know two. Two...

Political Judaism and the post-Zionist era.(For Israel's Jubilee Year)
March 22, 1998... The year 1996 saw the 100th anniversary of the publication of Herzl's The Jewish State, and 1997 the 100th anniversary of the first Zionist Congress at Basel, Switzerland. It is not surprising that a lot of energy, within Israel and outside it,...

This is history: reading the Passover Haggadah. (poem)
March 22, 1998... The words embroider the event The text insures that these moments now will not be only pictures in the mind recalled in silence. The Seder insures They are spoken aloud. This is history. Even the fragile, fragmentary moments made indelible....

Roots in the air. (Jews' sense of community)(For Israel's Jubilee Year)
March 22, 1998... A book by Leonard Fein, Where Are We? (1988), defines Jewish identity in relation to self and Israel for 300 pages and comes to the conclusion that "one is Jewish because one is Jewish, and because being Jewish is a way of connecting with the...

In the shadow of history: second generation writers and artists and the shaping of Holocaust memory in Israel and America.(For Israel's Jubilee Year)
March 22, 1998... We now stand half a century after the holocaust, as Israel marks its fiftieth anniversary, yet the issues raised by that cataclysmic event are no clearer now than they were in 1948 when the state was established; indeed, many of the attempts to...

Pesah, Yom Ha-Atzma'ut, Shavu'ot 1949. (discussion of Helen Vogel Yanow's life)(For Israel's Jubilee Year)
March 22, 1998... In Memoriam, Helen Vogel Yanow, Z"L, 1921-1998 My mother died on February 15. In going through her papers, I found a collection of letters that she (and in part, my father) had written from Jerusalem in 1949 to their parents back in the US. One...

Revelation, textual criticism, and divine writ. (evaluation of the Pentateuch)
March 22, 1998... Forty days after the giving of the Torah, when the children of Israel danced around the golden calf proclaiming, "This is your God, Israel who brought you out of Egypt" (Exodus 32:8), revelation was suspended. Seven hundred years later, when...

Tsimtsum. (poem)
March 22, 1998... Infinity is once and future, all in all and everywhere. And since You, Lord, are infinite, infinity itself, it seems, then why did You create us, life and death, the whole wide wondrous universe? What did You need? You had it all. Did You dream...

The Jewish community in Denmark: history and present status.(From all their habitations)
March 22, 1998... The Little Mermaid, Hans Christian Andersen, Tivoli, thatched-roofed cottages with storks nesting on the chimneys, "Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen." These are some of the stereotyped images associated with Denmark, images frequently encouraged...

Rethinking memory: too much/too little. (Jewish tradition of passing on tradition Jewish beliefs to children)(Teaching Jewish studies)
March 22, 1998... "We must not forget!" How often we have heard this cry, and each time we have heard it we have no doubt silently repeated it in our hearts. In the face of the growing tide of anti-Semitism once again sweeping Europe, both drawing strength from...

Aaron's dirge. (poem)
March 22, 1998... And Nadav and Avihu, the sons of Aaron . . . offered strange fire before the Lord, which he commanded them not. And there went out a fire from the Lord, and devoured them. Leviticus 10:1-2 I sing for my sons, the joys of my life devoured by...

The theology of conservative Judaism.(Current Theological Writing)
March 22, 1998... An enormous two-volume history of the conservative movement in American Judaism, Tradition Renewed, edited by Jack Wertheimer and celebrating more than a hundred years of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, has recently appeared. It...

Vanishing Diaspora.
March 22, 1998... By BERNARD WASSERSTEIN. Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1996. Reviewed by IRWIN M. WALL On September 30, 1997 the Cardinal of Paris, himself of Jewish origins, and other bishops and prelates of the Catholic church in France gathered at...