Download or read book Communings of the Spirit The journals of Mordecai M Kaplan 1913 1934 written by Mordecai Menahem Kaplan and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Communings of the Spirit written by Mordecai M. Kaplan and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2002-05 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mordecai M. Kaplan (1881-1983), founder of Reconstructionism, is the preeminent American Jewish thinker and rabbi of our times. His life embodies the American Jewish experience of the first half of the twentieth century. With passionate intensity and uncommon candor, Kaplan compulsively recorded his experience in his journal (some 10,000 pages). This first volume of Communings of the Spirit covers Kaplan's early years as a rabbi, teacher of rabbis, and community leader. Kaplan, who trained rabbis for half a century, gives us an inside picture of life at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the center of Conservative Judaism in America. He records his masterful weekly sermons, which were attended regularly by his students. With unflinching candor, he reveals his successes and failures, uncertainties and self-doubts. Undeterred by attacks on his radical beliefs, he never wavered in the pursuit of a more dynamic Judaism.

Download or read book Communings of the Spirit Volume II written by Mel Scult and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-10 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selections from the diary of Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionism in America, detailing a provocative firsthand account of Jewish life in America and of the mind of a very challenging thinker.

Download or read book Communings of the Spirit Volume III written by Mel Scult and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mordecai M. Kaplan (1881–1983), founder of Reconstructionism and the rabbi who initiated the first Bat Mitzvah, also produced the longest Jewish diary on record. In twenty-seven volumes, written between 1913 and 1978, Kaplan shares not only his reaction to the great events of his time but also his very personal thoughts on religion and Jewish life. In Communings of the Spirit: The Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan Volume III, 1942–1951, readers experience his horror at the persecution of the European Jews, as well as his joy in the founding of the State of Israel. Above all else, Kaplan was concerned with the survival and welfare of the Jewish people. And yet he also believed that the well-being of the Jewish people was tied to the safety and security of all people. In his own words, "Such is the mutuality of human life that none can be saved, unless all are saved." In the first volume of Communings of the Spirit, editor Mel Scult covers Kaplan’s early years as a rabbi, teacher of rabbis, and community leader. In the second volume, readers experience the economic problems of the 1930s and their shattering impact on the Jewish community. The third volume chronicles Kaplan’s spiritual and intellectual journey in the 1940s. With candor and vivid detail, Kaplan explores his evolving beliefs concerning a democratic Judaism; religious naturalism; and the conflicts, uncertainties, and self-doubts he faced in the first half of the twentieth century, including his excommunication by the ultra-Orthodox in 1945 for taking a more progressive approach to the liturgy. In his publications, Kaplan eliminated the time-honored declarations of Jewish chosen-ness as well as the outdated doctrines concerning the resurrection of the dead. He wanted a prayer book that Jews could feel reflected their beliefs and experiences; he believed that people must mean what they say when they pray. Kaplan was a man of contradictions, but because of that, all the more interesting and significant. Scholars of Judaica and rabbinical studies will value this honest look at the preeminent American Jewish thinker and rabbi of our times.

Download or read book Landmark of the Spirit written by Annie Polland and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York City’s magnificent Eldridge Street Synagogue was built in 1887 in response to the great wave of Jewish immigrants who fled persecution in eastern Europe. Finding their way to the Lower East Side, the new arrivals formed a vibrant Jewish community that flourished from the 1850s until the 1940s. Their synagogue served not only as a place of worship but also as a singularly important center in the development of American Judaism. A near ruin in the 1980s that was recently reopened after a massive twenty-year restoration, the Eldridge Street Synagogue has been named a National Historic Landmark. But as Bill Moyers tells us in his foreword, the synagogue is also “a landmark of the spirit, . . . the spirit of a new nation committed to the old idea of liberty.” Annie Polland uses elements of the building’s architecture—the façade, the benches, the grooves worn into the sanctuary floor—as points of departure to discuss themes, people, and trends at various moments in the synagogue’s history, particularly during its heyday from 1887 until the 1930s. Exploring the synagogue’s rich archives, the author shines new light on the religious life of immigrant Jews, introduces various rabbis, cantors and congregants, and analyzes the significance of this special building in the context of the larger American-Jewish experience. For more information, go to: www.EldridgeStreet.org

Download or read book Kabbalah in America written by Brian Ogren and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-06 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kabbalah in America includes chapters from leading experts in a variety of fields and is the first-ever comprehensive treatment of the title subject from colonial times until the present. As the first of its kind, it will set the tone for all future scholarship on the subject.

Download or read book The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M Kaplan written by Mel Scult and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-29 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An important and powerful work that speaks to Mordecai M. Kaplan’s position as perhaps the most significant Jewish thinker of the twentieth century.” (Deborah Dash Moore coeditor of Gender and Jewish History) Mordecai M. Kaplan, founder of the Jewish Reconstructionist movement, is the only rabbi to have been excommunicated by the Orthodox rabbinical establishment in America. Kaplan was indeed a radical, rejecting such fundamental Jewish beliefs as the concept of the chosen people and a supernatural God. Although he valued the Jewish community and was a committed Zionist, his primary concern was the spiritual fulfillment of the individual. Drawing on Kaplan’s 27-volume diary, Mel Scult describes the development of Kaplan’s radical theology in dialogue with the thinkers and writers who mattered to him most, from Spinoza to Emerson and from Ahad Ha-Am and Matthew Arnold to Felix Adler, John Dewey, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. This gracefully argued book, with its sensitive insights into the beliefs of a revolutionary Jewish thinker, makes a powerful contribution to modern Judaism and to contemporary American religious thought. “An interesting, stimulating, and well-done analysis of Kaplan’s life and thought. All students of contemporary Jewish life will benefit from reading this excellent study.” —Jewish Media Review “The book is highly readable―at times almost colloquial in its language and style―and is recommended for anybody with a familiarity with Kaplan but who wants to understand his thought within a broader context.” —AJL Reviews

Download or read book The Jewish Journaling Book written by Janet Ruth Falon and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2013-01-24 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explore your experiences, relationships, and feelings through this guided tour of journal-keeping in Jewish tradition. Journaling has been, and remains, an inherently Jewish activity. From the Kabbalist mystics who recorded their practices of reaching altered states of consciousness, to the more recent journals of those who lived during the Holocaust, to the spiritual precedent for Jewish journal-keeping at holy times of the year, writing, recording, and reflecting have long been a part of Jewish custom. Janet Ruth Falon delves into the practical aspects of keeping a journal as well as how you can use your journal to nurture Jewish values and concerns. Using examples from her own writing, she demonstrates how journaling can unleash your creativity and reveal aspects of yourself that you may not have thought about before. She also includes 52 journaling tools that teach specific techniques to help you create and maintain a vital, living journal, from a Jewish perspective. Inspiring and practical, this guided tour of journaling shows how yours can be used to better understand yourself and the world.

Download or read book God Optional Religion in Twentieth Century America written by Isaac Barnes May and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-13 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is about the relationship between the American religious left and secularization. It explores how three liberal religions -liberal Quakers, Unitarians, and Reconstructionist Jews- attempted to preserve their traditions in the modern world by redefining what it meant to be religious. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, these groups underwent the most massive theological change imaginable, allowing their members to opt not to believe in a personal God. As the God of traditional theism did not seem to fit into a post-Darwinian framework, these traditions took the dramatic step of redefining that concept to make a "God" that did fit, and eventually they went even further by making belief in God a matter of purely personal preference. This book narrates how, over the course of the twentieth century, believing in God and being religious became increasingly disconnected. It documents the continuance of these religious communities even after the theological rationales that originally brought them together disappeared, their communal identities instead becoming focused on humanitarian service and political commitments, which began to replace a shared adherence to theism. The radical religious views of these small liberal denominations became influential among the wider society, and eventually became accepted in American popular culture and law"--

Download or read book Hanukkah in America written by Dianne Ashton and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the ways American Jews have reshaped Hanukkah traditions across the country In New Orleans, Hanukkah means decorating your door with a menorah made of hominy grits. Latkes in Texas are seasoned with cilantro and cayenne pepper. Children in Cincinnati sing Hanukkah songs and eat oranges and ice cream. While each tradition springs from its own unique set of cultural references, what ties them together is that they all celebrate a holiday that is different in America than it is any place else. For the past two hundred years, American Jews have been transforming the ancient holiday of Hanukkah from a simple occasion into something grand. Each year, as they retell its story and enact its customs, they bring their ever-changing perspectives and desires to its celebration. Providing an attractive alternative to the Christian dominated December, rabbis and lay people alike have addressed contemporary hopes by fashioning an authentically Jewish festival that blossomed in their American world. The ways in which Hanukkah was reshaped by American Jews reveals the changing goals and values that emerged among different contingents each December as they confronted the reality of living as a religious minority in the United States. Bringing together clergy and laity, artists and businessmen, teachers, parents, and children, Hanukkah has been a dynamic force for both stability and change in American Jewish life. The holiday’s distinctive transformation from a minor festival to a major occasion that looms large in the American Jewish psyche is a marker of American Jewish life. Drawing on a varied archive of songs, plays, liturgy, sermons, and a range of illustrative material, as well as developing portraits of various communities, congregations, and rabbis, Hanukkah in America reveals how an almost forgotten festival became the most visible of American Jewish holidays.

Download or read book An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thinkers written by Alan T. Levenson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2006 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highlighting well-known Jewish thinkers from a very wide spectrum of opinion, the author addresses a range of issues, including: What makes a thinker Jewish? What makes modern Jewish thought modern? How have secular Jews integrated Jewish traditional thought with agnosticism? What do Orthodox thinkers have to teach non-Orthodox Jews and vice versa? Each chapter includes a short, judiciously chosen selection from the given author, along with questions to guide the reader through the material. Short biographical essays at the end of each chapter offer the reader recommendations for further readings and provide the low-down on which books are worth the reader's while. Introduction to Modern Jewish Thinkers represents a decade of the author's experience teaching students ranging from undergraduate age to their seventies. This is an ideal textbook for undergraduate classes.

Download or read book Silent No More written by Henry L. Feingold and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-03 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholar and author of the celebrated five-volume series, The Jewish People in America, Henry L. Feingold offers a fresh and inspiring look at the Russian/Soviet Jewish emigration phenomenon. Haunted by its sense of failure during the Holocaust, the Soviet Jewry movement set for itself an almost unrealizable goal of finding sanctuary for Jews from a hostile Soviet government. Working together with activists in Israel and Europe, and with a remarkable group of refuseniks that had been denied the right to emigrate, this courageous group mounted a relentless campaign lasting almost three decades. Although Feingold credits Israel with initiating the struggle for Soviet Jewry and fostering it within American Jewry, he maintains that it was the actions of a secure and confident American Jewry that finally delivered the Jews from the Soviet Union. Feingold’s mastery of detail and broadness of scope provide a prodigious and sweeping account of the American Jewish movement. He finds early roots of the effort in the American Jewish involvement with Jewish emigration in late Tsarist Russia. He highlights both the human dimension of the exodus and the complex international ramifications of the movement, especially in the Middle East. "Silent No More" concludes by pondering the role of the movement’s effective public relations campaign, which focused on the human right of freedom of movement in hastening the collapse of the Soviet empire. Feingold’s rigorous scholarship sheds light on an important, yet rarely told episode in history, one that will enliven further examination of the subject. This book will be of interest to scholars of American Jewish history, the cold war, Israeli studies, and American ethnic and immigration history.

Download or read book Reappraisals and New Studies of the Modern Jewish Experience written by Brian Smollett and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-10-30 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reappraisals and New Studies of the Modern Jewish Experience brings together twenty scholars of Modern Jewish history and thought. The essays provide a fresh perspective on several central questions in Jewish intellectual, social, and religious history from the eighteenth century to the present in the contexts of Russia, Western and Central Europe, and the Americas.

Download or read book Clergy Education in America written by Larry Abbott Golemon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clergy have historically been represented as figures of authority, wielding great influence over our society. During certain periods of American history, members of the clergy were nearly ever-present in public life. But men and women of the clergy are not born that way, they are made. And therefore, the matter of their education is a question of fundamental public importance. In Clergy Education in America, Larry Golemon shows not only how our conception of professionalism in religious life has changed over time, but also how the education of religious leaders have influenced American culture. Tracing the history of clergy education in America from the Early Republic through the first decades of the twentieth century, Golemon tracks how the clergy has become increasingly diversified in terms of race, gender, and class in part because of this engagement with public life. At the same time, he demonstrates that as theological education became increasingly intertwined with academia the clergy's sphere of influence shrank significantly, marking a turn away from public life and a decline in their cultural influence. Clergy Education in America offers a sweeping look at an oft-overlooked but critically important aspect of American public life.

Download or read book Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism written by Geoffrey Cantor and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Darwin’s theory of evolution transformed the life sciences and made profound claims about human origins and the human condition, topics often viewed as the prerogative of religion. As a result, evolution has provoked a wide variety of religious responses, ranging from angry rejection to enthusiastic acceptance. While Christian responses to evolution have been studied extensively, little scholarly attention has been paid to Jewish reactions. Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism is the first extended meditation on the Jewish engagement with this crucial and controversial theory. The contributors to Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism—from several academic disciplines and two branches of the rabbinate—present case studies showing how Jewish discussions of evolution have been shaped by the intersections of faith, science, philosophy, and ideology in specific historical contexts. Furthermore, they examine how evolutionary theory has been deployed when characterizing Jews as a race, both by Zionists and by anti-Semites. Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism addresses historical and contemporary, as well as progressive and Orthodox, responses to evolution in America, Europe, and Israel, ultimately extending the history of Darwinism into new religious domains.

Download or read book A Queer Way Out written by Hila Amit and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-05-23 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that queer Israeli emigrants engage in a deliberately unheroic form of resistance to Zionism. The very language of Zionism prizes the concept of immigration to Israel (aliyah, literally ascending) while stigmatizing emigration from Israel (yerida, descending). In A Queer Way Out, Hila Amit explores the as-yet-untold story of queer Israeli emigrants. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Berlin, London, and New York, she examines motivations for departure and feelings of unbelonging to the Israeli national collective. Amit shows that sexual orientation and left-wing political affiliation play significant roles in decisions to leave. Queer Israeli emigrants question national and heterosexual norms such as army service, monogamy, and reproduction. Amit argues that emigration itself is not only a political act, but one that pioneers a deliberately unheroic form of resistance to Zionist ideology. This fascinating study enriches our understandings of migration, political activism, and queer forms of living in Israel and beyond.

Download or read book Gender and the Abjection of Blackness written by Sabine Broeck and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anti-racist critique of gender studies as a field. In Gender and the Abjection of Blackness, Sabine Broeck argues that gender studies as a mostly white field has taken insufficient account of Black contributions, and that more than being an ethnocentric limitation or blind spot, this has represented a structural anti-Blackness in the field. Engaging with the work of Black feminist authors Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman, Broeck critiques a selection of canonical white gender studies texts to make this case. The book discusses this problem at the core of gender theory as a practice which Broeck terms enslavism—the ongoing abjection of Black life which Hartman has called the afterlife of slavery. This has become manifest in the repetitive employment of the “woman as slave” metaphor so central to gender theory, as well as in recent theoretical mutations of these anti-Black politics of analogy. It is the structural separation of Blackness from gender that has functioned over and again as the scaffold enabling white women’s struggles for successful recognition of equality and subjectivity in the human world as we know it. This book challenges white readers to rethink their own untroubled identification with gender theory, and it provides all readers with a white feminist theorist’s sophisticated theoretical and self-critical scholarly account of her own reckoning with and learning in dialogue from Black feminism’s critique. Sabine Broeck is Professor of American Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany. She is the coeditor of several books, including (with Jason R. Ambroise) Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology.