Judaism articles from September 1997

Judaism archives from September 1997

Awe and the religious life.
September 22, 1997... What's It All About? A.J. Heschel, in his discussion of awe and faith in God in Search of Man, suggests that we have overemphasized the cognitive/doxastic in our thinking about religion. We have given pride of place to religious belief; we...

Exodus. (poem)
September 22, 1997... Millennia mount up and are we born older, each of us? Layering the narratives and styles, do we age? Here is the taut muscle of memory, it jerks and flexes in our sleep. Awakened, we are the empty theater, the barren-bellied stage. Echoes...

Open orthodoxy! A modern Orthodox rabbi's creed.
September 22, 1997... Halakhic Principles As a modern orthodox rabbi, I profess an unequivocal commitment to the truth, validity and eternal applicability of the Halakhic system.(1) No less than my brethren of the Orthodox Right, I believe in Torah mi-Sinai, the...

Observations on Jewish philosophy and feminist thought.
September 22, 1997... In a recent volume, Jewish philosophers and Jewish Philosophy, Michael L. Morgan has brought together essays of Emil Fackenheim spanning five decades that are devoted to assessing the history, the present practice, and the future of Jewish...

The failure of a Jewish program of public satire in the squares of Medina.
September 22, 1997... Jewish tradition has placed great emphasis and pride in the Jewish people collectively taking on the "yoke of the kingdom of heaven" and the "yoke of the commandments," meaning that the Jew submits entirely and without question to the will of God...

On Maurice Samuel's twenty-fifth Yahrzeit. (death anniversary of Jewish author)
September 22, 1997... During a recent visit to Israel, my wife Mindell and I entered the Old City of Jerusalem through the Zion Gate. A short walk brought us to Rechov Ha-Yehudim (Jewish Quarter Road). At the beginning of a row of businesses on our left - the entrance...

Rabbi Ganzfried's two million Kitzurs. (Shlomo Ganzfried's book 'Kitzur Shulkhan Arukh)
September 22, 1997... The week my grandfather died my grief-stricken mother, perched on her low shiva bench in our living room, urged my father to make certain that her parent's tombstone included the line: grandson of the author of the Kitzur Shulkhan Arukh. I was...

Holocaust questions.
September 22, 1997... Among my rejections of popular beliefs concerning the Shoah, I count the following two: I reject the idea that every survivor must have a sense of moral guilt. The assumption is that the only way you could survive was by resorting to some act...

The tragedy of Gillian Rose. (Jewish social critic)
September 22, 1997... On December 9, 1995, The Jewish Philosopher and social critic Gillian Rose died of ovarian cancer at forty-eight, after a long and painful illness of more than two years duration. She had published many books, including a memoir of her dying...

Morocco's last Jews.
September 22, 1997... Within ten years all the jews will have left, and only a memory will remain of their 2,800-year history in Morocco. The first Jews arrived in North Africa with the Phoenicians around the time of the founding of Carthage (813 B.C.E.) and were...

The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian.
September 22, 1997... Reviewed by BEREL LANG The publication in 1961 of Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews(1) immediately established it as foundational in the writing of Holocaust history. Other comprehensive histories and many specialized studies...

The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust.
September 22, 1997... Reviewed by MICHAL PELED GINSBURG In this collection of essays, the distinguished literary critic Geoffrey Hartman discusses a whole array of issues related to remembering and representing the Holocaust. Hartman points out that the crucial...

The Jewish Wars: Reflections by One of the Belligerents.
September 22, 1997... Reviewed by EMIL L. FACKENHEIM Some twenty years ago the critic Alfred Kazin wrote that "year by year these terrible events [of the Holocaust] press themselves more tightly on our minds," while at the same time he asks, "where is faith? How...

Jacob's Voices: Reflections of a Wandering American Jew.
September 22, 1997... Reviewed by RAFAEL MEDOFF In a reversal of the classic story of Jewish immigrants assimilating in the American melting pot, Jerold Auerbach's engaging autobiographical memoir charts the journey of an American Jewish intellectual who returns to...