Judaism articles from March 1999

Judaism archives from March 1999

Ruth and the Sense of Self: Midrash and Difference.
March 22, 1999... THE DANGER WITH WELL-KNOWN STORIES IS THAT WE read the narrative we have come to expect, instead of what is actually written in the text. So it is with the Book of Ruth: we are all familiar with the story of the widowed stranger who loyally...

Aspects of Vulnerability.
March 22, 1999... THE EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHER ELIZABETH LEONIE Simpson complained in the early 1970s about the escalating absence of clear boundaries between good and bad. [1] But Simpson also acknowledged that the positive side of this condition was that...

"Heal Us, Lord, and We Shall Be Healed": The Role of Hope and Destiny in Jewish Bioethics.
March 22, 1999... HOPE IS A CENTRAL JEWISH CONCEPT. THE ANTHEM OF the modern State of Israel, in fact, is entitled Ha-Tikvah, The Hope. Traditional Jewish expressions of hope apply to what can be attained in this life, a Messianic future, and life after death....

Reading Like a Girl: Gender and Text in Jewish Bioethics.
March 22, 1999... Is there a Jewish Medical Ethics for Women? THE EMERGENCE OF THE TRADITION OF JEWISH MEDICAL ethics into the academic and clinical field of American bioethics has taken a number of forms. The classic texts of halakhic medical reference have...

The Teaching of Writing an Ethical Will.
March 22, 1999... THE CUSTOM OF WRITING AN ETHICAL WILL IS A PROFOUND experience. This habit of writing directions for the religious and secular guidance of children can be traced back to the twelfth century. [1] Until fairly recently it was long-overlooked by...

Rashi and the First Crusade: Commentary, Liturgy, Legend.(11th century rabbi)
March 22, 1999... THE TENTH AND ELEVENTH CENTURIES MARKED THE birth of Franco-German Jewry, the Ashkenazim. These Jews, invited to a rapidly developing part of Europe by Christian civil and religious leaders, soon distinguished themselves in commerce and...

"Listen your way in with your mouth": A Reading of Leviticus.
March 22, 1999... UNLIKE MOST COMMENTARIES, WHICH SEE LEVITICUS "AS a pitifully belated attempt at domesticating the numinous and uncanny essence of the Pentateuch, the early Yahwistic source" (Harold Bloom), or as a system of constitutive commands concerning...

The Strangeness of Leviticus.
March 22, 1999... Religious Doubt and Religious Difference "IS IT TRUE?" THAT IS THE FORM IN WHICH RELIGIOUS doubt has immemorially presented itself to Christians. The occasions of doubt are various. It may be occasioned, as it has been for the past...

Leviticus: Drawing Near the Other.(response articles by Franziska Bark and Bernard Harrison in this issue)
March 22, 1999... YOUR LETTER INVITING ME TO RESPOND TO THE TWO essays on Leviticus (Franziska Bark, "'Listen Your Way in With Your Mouth': A Reading of Leviticus" and Bernard Harrison, "The Strangeness of Leviticus") put me in mind of the Buber-Rosenzweig...

Can You Tell a Jew When You See One? or Thoughts on Meeting Barbra/Barbie at the Museum.
March 22, 1999... If Alexander Du Bois, following in the footsteps of Alexander Hamilton, had come from the West Indies to the United States, stayed with the white group and married and begotten children among them, anyone in after years who bad suggested his...

On Jewish Ethics.(Review)
March 22, 1999... THE JEWISH MORAL VIRTUES BY EUGENE B. BOROWITZ AND Frances Weinman Schwartz (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1999) is an anthology of Jewish ideals and a rather personal view of those virtues by two very gifted interpreters who speak...

Jewish Women's History.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, Volumes 1 & 2. Edited by PAULA E. HYMAN and DEBORAH DASH MOORE. New York: Routledge, 1997. This is an extraordinary work, a labor of love, which initiates a new view of the history of...

Jews and Jesus: Abraham Geiger's Polemics.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus. By SUSANNAH HESCHEL. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1998. In her intellectual biography, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, Susannah Heschel sets out to demonstrate that Geiger's...

Communications.
March 22, 1999... DEAR EDITOR: Amnon Hadary's cri de coeur leading off the rich Winter issue pierced my very core. Nowhere before have I come across so passionate yet so clear an analysis of the differences between the goals and standards of the secular...