Download or read book Becoming Un orthodox written by Lynn Davidman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lynn Davidman offers an in-depth study of defectors from Orthodox Judaism, showing how they negotiate the difficult passage away from their families and communities and reconstruct their identities in new social contexts.
Download or read book Hidden Heretics written by Ayala Fader and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book concerns a cohort of ultra-orthodox Jews based in the greater New York area who, while retaining membership and close familial and other ties with their strictly observant communities, seek out secular knowledge about the world on the down low (so to speak), both online and via in-person encounters. Ayala Fader conducted her ethnographic research in these rarified social circles for years, developing relationships of trust with the mostly young married men and women who have taken to clandestine methods to find alternative social spaces in which to question what it means to be ethical and what a life of self-fulfillment looks like. Fader's book reveals the stresses and strains that such "double-lifers" experience, including the difficulty these life choices inject into relationships with wives, husbands, and one's children. Not all of these "double-lifers" become atheists. Fader's interlocutors can be placed on a broad spectrum ranging from religiously observant but open-minded at one end to atheism on the other. The rabbinical leadership of these ultra-orthodox communities are well aware of this phenomenon and of how unfiltered internet access makes such alternative forms of seeking an ever-present temptation. (Some ultra-orthodox rabbis have been sounding the alarm for years, claiming that the internet represents more of a threat to community survival today than the Holocaust did in the last century.) Fader's book examines the institutional responses of ultra-orthodox communities to the double-lifers. These include what is typically referred to as a Torah-based type of "religious therapy" conducted by trained members of these communities who as therapists and "life coaches" blend elements of modern psychiatry with ultra-orthodoxy and "treat" troubling, potentially life-altering doubt and skepticism as symptoms of underlying emotional pathology"--
Download or read book People Love Dead Jews Reports from a Haunted Present written by Dara Horn and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Wall Street Journal, Chicago Public Library, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living. Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture—and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks—Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the "righteous Gentile" Varian Fry. Throughout, she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present. Horn draws upon her travels, her research, and also her own family life—trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious ten-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children’s school, the profound perspective offered by traditional religious practice and study—to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an antisemitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget," is on the rise. As Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past—making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity.
Download or read book What Does a Jew Look Like written by Keith Kahn-Harris and published by . This book was released on 2022-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book American Shtetl written by Nomi M. Stolzenberg and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling account of how a group of Hasidic Jews established its own local government on American soil Settled in the mid-1970s by a small contingent of Hasidic families, Kiryas Joel is an American town with few parallels in Jewish history—but many precedents among religious communities in the United States. This book tells the story of how this group of pious, Yiddish-speaking Jews has grown to become a thriving insular enclave and a powerful local government in upstate New York. While rejecting the norms of mainstream American society, Kiryas Joel has been stunningly successful in creating a world apart by using the very instruments of secular political and legal power that it disavows. Nomi Stolzenberg and David Myers paint a richly textured portrait of daily life in Kiryas Joel, exploring the community's guiding religious, social, and economic norms. They delve into the roots of Satmar Hasidism and its charismatic founder, Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum, following his journey from nineteenth-century Hungary to post–World War II Brooklyn, where he dreamed of founding an ideal Jewish town modeled on the shtetls of eastern Europe. Stolzenberg and Myers chart the rise of Kiryas Joel as an official municipality with its own elected local government. They show how constant legal and political battles defined and even bolstered the community, whose very success has coincided with the rise of political conservatism and multiculturalism in American society over the past forty years. Timely and accessible, American Shtetl unravels the strands of cultural and legal conflict that gave rise to one of the most vibrant religious communities in America, and reveals a way of life shaped by both self-segregation and unwitting assimilation.
Download or read book The Non orthodox Jew s Guide to Orthodox Jews written by David Baum and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Non-Orthodox Jews Guide to Orthodox Jews offers an all-encompassing view of Orthodox Jews beliefs and actions and explains the issues that non-Orthodox Jews often find puzzling or exasperating. Readers will encounter surprisingly refreshing discussions of topics such as happiness, good and evil, personal integrity, suffering, heaven and hell, prophecy, prayer, charity, economics, feminism, love and sexuality, marriage, evolution, morality, political correctness, assimilation, intermarriage and Zionism. They will also discover that Orthodox Jews are modern, twenty-first-century men and women who embrace the benefits of modern society while affirming and perpetuating an all-important chain that stretches back more than three millennia.
Download or read book Jews are Like That written by James Waterman Wise and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Soul of Judaism written by Bruce D Haynes and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A glimpse into the diverse stories of Black Jews in the United States What makes a Jew? This book traces the history of Jews of African descent in America and the counter-narratives they have put forward as they stake their claims to Jewishness. The Soul of Judaism offers the first exploration of the full diversity of Black Jews, including bi-racial Jews of both matrilineal and patrilineal descent; adoptees; black converts to Judaism; and Black Hebrews and Israelites, who trace their Jewish roots to Africa and challenge the dominant western paradigm of Jews as white and of European descent. Blending historical analysis and oral history, Haynes showcases the lives of Black Jews within the Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstruction and Reform movements, as well as the religious approaches that push the boundaries of the common forms of Judaism we know today. He illuminates how in the quest to claim whiteness, American Jews of European descent gained the freedom to express their identity fluidly while African Americans have continued to be seen as a fixed racial group. This book demonstrates that racial ascription has been shaping Jewish selfhood for centuries. Pushing us to reassess the boundaries between race and ethnicity, it offers insight into how Black Jewish individuals strive to assert their dual identities and find acceptance within their respective communities. Putting to rest the simplistic notion that Jews are white and that Black Jews are therefore a contradiction, the volume argues that we can no longer pigeonhole Black Hebrews and Israelites as exotic, militant, and nationalistic sects outside the boundaries of mainstream Jewish thought and community life. The volume spurs us to consider the significance of the growing population of self-identified Black Jews and its implications for the future of American Jewry.
Download or read book Mitzvah Girls written by Ayala Fader and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-20 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mitzvah Girls is the first book about bringing up Hasidic Jewish girls in North America, providing an in-depth look into a closed community. Ayala Fader examines language, gender, and the body from infancy to adulthood, showing how Hasidic girls in Brooklyn become women responsible for rearing the next generation of nonliberal Jewish believers. To uncover how girls learn the practices of Hasidic Judaism, Fader looks beyond the synagogue to everyday talk in the context of homes, classrooms, and city streets. Hasidic women complicate stereotypes of nonliberal religious women by collapsing distinctions between the religious and the secular. In this innovative book, Fader demonstrates that contemporary Hasidic femininity requires women and girls to engage with the secular world around them, protecting Hasidic men and boys who study the Torah. Even as Hasidic religious observance has become more stringent, Hasidic girls have unexpectedly become more fluent in secular modernity. They are fluent Yiddish speakers but switch to English as they grow older; they are increasingly modest but also fashionable; they read fiction and play games like those of mainstream American children but theirs have Orthodox Jewish messages; and they attend private Hasidic schools that freely adapt from North American public and parochial models. Investigating how Hasidic women and girls conceptualize the religious, the secular, and the modern, Mitzvah Girls offers exciting new insights into cultural production and change in nonliberal religious communities.
Download or read book We Look Like the Enemy written by Rachel Shabi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rachel Shabi was born in Israel to Jewish Iraqi parents. When she was a child her family emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1974. Their leaving reversed the spiritual trek of the Jewish Diaspora, around the world whose members wistfully repeat at the Passover tables, "Next year in Jerusalem." Years later, in fact, Shabi went back to visit and to live for an extended period, but her attitude toward her former homeland is conflicted by the longstanding discrimination suffered by Arab Jews in Israel. Shortly after its creation, Israel accepted close to one million Jews from Arab lands-from Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey. Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jews now make up around 50% of Israel's population. Yet Ashkenazi Jews have traditionally disparaged the Mizrahi as "backward" and have systematically limited their opportunities in the classroom and the workplace. "There is a class split," writes Shabi, "that runs on ethnic lines." She traces the history of how the Jewish Disapora lived alongside Muslims and Christians for centuries, and how the dream of Jewish solidarity within Israel in the mid-20th century was fractured by ethnic discrimination as pernicious as racism in the United States, Great Britain, and other parts of the world. Shabi combines scholarly research with intimate oral history to shed light on ethnic injustice, and her personal story and passion make We Look Like the Enemy a stunning, unforgettable book.
Download or read book A Fortress in Brooklyn written by Nathaniel Deutsch and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The epic story of Hasidic Williamsburg, from the decline of New York to the gentrification of Brooklyn "A rich chronicle of the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburg. . . . This expert account enlightens."—Publishers Weekly “One of the most creative and iconoclastic works to have been written about Jews in the United States.”—Eliyahu Stern, Yale University The Hasidic community in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn is famously one of the most separatist, intensely religious, and politically savvy groups of people in the entire United States. Less known is how the community survived in one of the toughest parts of New York City during an era of steep decline, only to later resist and also participate in the unprecedented gentrification of the neighborhood. Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper unravel the fascinating history of how a group of determined Holocaust survivors encountered, shaped, and sometimes fiercely opposed the urban processes that transformed their gritty neighborhood, from white flight and the construction of public housing to rising crime, divestment of city services, and, ultimately, extreme gentrification. By showing how Williamsburg’s Hasidim rejected assimilation while still undergoing distinctive forms of Americanization and racialization, Deutsch and Casper present both a provocative counter-history of American Jewry and a novel look at how race, real estate, and religion intersected in the creation of a quintessential, and yet deeply misunderstood, New York neighborhood.
Download or read book Why Jews Do That written by Avram Mlotek and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Fun Take on "Judaism for Dummies" that Will Answer All Questions Wondered by the Goyim and Jewish People Alike! When the subject of religion comes up, people often get very shy and are worried about offending. Now, if there was only a book that covered all the nooks and crannies of a religion, written in an easily digestible way... Well, now there is! Written by Rabbi Avram Mlotek, Why Jews Do That is a terrific look into the Jewish religion, answering all the tough questions you've been afraid to ask. But this isn't just for the Jews among us. Just because you're Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or the like, doesn't mean you cannot enjoy an inside look to find out if Jews believe in Jesus, what kosher really is, and how we keep our yarmulkes secured to our heads. So have no fear, as Jews are here to help! Some of the tough questions answered by Rabbi Mlotek include: What's with Jews and candles? Do Jews have confession like Catholics? Why are Jews obsessed with food? Is sex kosher? What about marijuana? And much more! Why Jews Do That is your one-stop shop for answers to all the questions you wanted to know, but were too shy to ask. So whether you're a devout follower, a casual observer, someone marrying into the faith, or just interested in buffing up your Bible knowledge, Rabbi Mlotek will guide you through the challah, mitzvahs, and shiksas that make Jewish life so...lively.
Download or read book Letters to Josep written by Levy Daniella and published by . This book was released on 2016-03-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of letters from a religious Jew in Israel to a Christian friend in Barcelona on life as an Orthodox Jew. Equal parts lighthearted and insightful, it's a thorough and entertaining introduction to the basic concepts of Judaism.
Download or read book Unorthodox written by Deborah Feldman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the author's upbringing in a Hasidic community in Brooklyn, describing the strict rules that governed her life, arranged marriage at the age of seventeen, and the birth of her son, which led to her plan to leave and forge her own path in life.
Download or read book All Who Go Do Not Return written by Shulem Deen and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A moving and revealing exploration of ultra-Orthodox Judaism and one man's loss of faith Shulem Deen was raised to believe that questions are dangerous. As a member of the Skverers, one of the most insular Hasidic sects in the US, he knows little about the outside world—only that it is to be shunned. His marriage at eighteen is arranged and several children soon follow. Deen's first transgression—turning on the radio—is small, but his curiosity leads him to the library, and later the Internet. Soon he begins a feverish inquiry into the tenets of his religious beliefs, until, several years later, his faith unravels entirely. Now a heretic, he fears being discovered and ostracized from the only world he knows. His relationship with his family at stake, he is forced into a life of deception, and begins a long struggle to hold on to those he loves most: his five children. In All Who Go Do Not Return, Deen bravely traces his harrowing loss of faith, while offering an illuminating look at a highly secretive world.
Download or read book How to Fight Anti Semitism written by Bari Weiss and published by Crown. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD • The prescient founder of The Free Press delivers an urgent wake-up call to all Americans exposing the alarming rise of anti-Semitism in this country—and explains what we can do to defeat it. “A praiseworthy and concise brief against modern-day anti-Semitism.”—The New York Times On October 27, 2018, eleven Jews were gunned down as they prayed at their synagogue in Pittsburgh. It was the deadliest attack on Jews in American history. For most Americans, the massacre at Tree of Life, the synagogue where Bari Weiss became a bat mitzvah, came as a shock. But anti-Semitism is the oldest hatred, commonplace across the Middle East and on the rise for years in Europe. So that terrible morning in Pittsburgh, as well as the continued surge of hate crimes against Jews in cities and towns across the country, raise a question Americans cannot avoid: Could it happen here? This book is Weiss’s answer. Like many, Weiss long believed this country could escape the rising tide of anti-Semitism. With its promise of free speech and religion, its insistence that all people are created equal, its tolerance for difference, and its emphasis on shared ideals rather than bloodlines, America has been, even with all its flaws, a new Jerusalem for the Jewish people. But now the luckiest Jews in history are beginning to face a three-headed dragon known all too well to Jews of other times and places: the physical fear of violent assault, the moral fear of ideological vilification, and the political fear of resurgent fascism and populism. No longer the exclusive province of the far right, the far left, and assorted religious bigots, anti-Semitism now finds a home in identity politics as well as the reaction against identity politics, in the renewal of America First isolationism and the rise of one-world socialism, and in the spread of Islamist ideas into unlikely places. A hatred that was, until recently, reliably taboo is migrating toward the mainstream, amplified by social media and a culture of conspiracy that threatens us all. Weiss is one of our most provocative writers, and her cri de coeur makes a powerful case for renewing Jewish and American values in this uncertain moment. Not just for the sake of America’s Jews, but for the sake of America.
Download or read book Roads Taken written by Hasia R. Diner and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the late 1700s and the 1920s, nearly one-third of the world’s Jews emigrated to new lands. Crossing borders and often oceans, they followed paths paved by intrepid peddlers who preceded them. This book is the first to tell the remarkable story of the Jewish men who put packs on their backs and traveled forth, house to house, farm to farm, mining camp to mining camp, to sell their goods to peoples across the world. Persistent and resourceful, these peddlers propelled a mass migration of Jewish families out of central and eastern Europe, north Africa, and the Ottoman Empire to destinations as far-flung as the United States, Great Britain, South Africa, and Latin America. Hasia Diner tells the story of millions of discontented young Jewish men who sought opportunity abroad, leaving parents, wives, and sweethearts behind. Wherever they went, they learned unfamiliar languages and customs, endured loneliness, battled the elements, and proffered goods from the metropolis to people of the hinterlands. In the Irish Midlands, the Adirondacks of New York, the mining camps of New South Wales, and so many other places, these traveling men brought change—to themselves and the families who later followed, to the women whose homes and communities they entered, and ultimately to the geography of Jewish history.
