Download or read book Judaism Without Tribalism written by Rabbi Rami Shapiro and published by Monkfish Book Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-14 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Judaism Without Tribalism is a blessing, a much-needed challenge, and a deep well of wisdom and sanity." —Natalie Goldberg This book investigates Judaism at its best—and sanest. It strips away outdated and harmful beliefs that have accrued over the centuries and returns to the essential truths that are too-often ignored in favor of tradition, tribal identity, or the claims of the powerful. The result is a vibrant Judaism for the 21st century and beyond—a Judaism that draws deeply from history and scripture yet addresses the unmet needs of the present and the future. It is a Judaism that is open and accessible to everyone. Judaism without tribalism is a call to be a light unto the nations, and a blessing to all the people of the earth. It is a Judaism free from legalism and tribalism—a Judaism that refuses to serve patriarchy and power. Written by one of today's most respected—and most unconventional—Jewish thinkers, Judaism Without Tribalism is a manifesto, an invitation to completeness, and a call for inner and outer spiritual revolution. It is also a deeply practical guide to living authentically, breath by breath and day by day.

Download or read book Nothing Sacred written by Douglas Rushkoff and published by Crown. This book was released on 2003-04-08 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed writer and thinker Douglas Rushkoff, author of Ecstasy Club and Coercion, has written perhaps the most important—and controversial—book on Judaism in a generation. As the religion stands on the brink of becoming irrelevant to the very people who look to it for answers, Nothing Sacred takes aim at its problems and offers startling and clearheaded solutions based on Judaism’s core values and teachings. Disaffected by their synagogues’ emphasis on self-preservation and obsession with intermarriage, most Jews looking for an intelligent inquiry into the nature of spirituality have turned elsewhere, or nowhere. Meanwhile, faced with the chaos of modern life, returnees run back to Judaism with a blind and desperate faith and are quickly absorbed by outreach organizations that—in return for money—offer compelling evidence that God exists, that the Jews are, indeed, the Lord’s “chosen people,” and that those who adhere to this righteous path will never have to ask themselves another difficult question again. Ironically, the texts and practices making up Judaism were designed to avoid just such a scenario. Jewish tradition stresses transparency, open-ended inquiry, assimilation of the foreign, and a commitment to conscious living. Judaism invites inquiry and change. It is an “open source” tradition—one born out of revolution, committed to evolution, and willing to undergo renaissance at a moment’s notice. But, unfortunately, some of the very institutions created to protect the religion and its people are now suffocating them. If the Jewish tradition is actually one of participation in the greater culture, a willingness to wrestle with sacred beliefs, and a refusal to submit blindly to icons that just don’t make sense to us, then the “lapsed” Jews may truly be our most promising members. Why won’t they engage with the synagogue, and how can they be made to feel more welcome? Nothing Sacred is a bold and brilliant book, attempting to do nothing less than tear down our often false preconceptions about Judaism and build in their place a religion made relevant for the future. From the Hardcover edition.

Download or read book Wisdom of the Jewish Sages written by Rami M. Shapiro and published by Harmony/Bell Tower. This book was released on 1995 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Advice for those seeking to deepen and build their relationship with God.

Download or read book The Thirteenth Tribe written by Arthur Koestler and published by . This book was released on 2014-05 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the history of the ancient Khazar Empire, a major but almost forgotten power in Eastern Europe, which in the Dark Ages became converted to Judaism. Khazaria was finally wiped out by the forces of Genghis Khan, but evidence indicates that the Khazars themselves migrated to Poland and formed the cradle of Western Jewry. To the general reader the Khazars, who flourished from the 7th to 11th century, may seem infinitely remote today. Yet they have a close and unexpected bearing on our world, which emerges as Koestler recounts the fascinating history of the ancient Khazar Empire. At about the time that Charlemagne was Emperor in the West. The Khazars' sway extended from the Black Sea to the Caspian, from the Caucasus to the Volga, and they were instrumental in stopping the Muslim onslaught against Byzantium, the eastern jaw of the gigantic pincer movement that in the West swept across northern Africa and into Spain. Thereafter the Khazars found themselves in a precarious position between the two major world powers: the Eastern Roman Empire in Byzantium and the triumphant followers of Mohammed. As Koestler points out, the Khazars were the Third World of their day. They chose a surprising method of resisting both the Western pressure to become Christian and the Eastern to adopt Islam. Rejecting both, they converted to Judaism. Mr Koestler speculates about the ultimate faith of the Khazars and their impact on the racial composition and social heritage of modern Jewry. He produces a large body of meticulously detailed research.

Download or read book Transcendental Judaism written by David L. Lieberman and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2023-06-12 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is it really possible to connect with God? Can we find spirituality in Judaism? The answer to both these questions is yes. Traditionally, Judaism teaches that we connect with God through the performance of the commandments, the mitzvot (from the Aramaic word tzavta meaning connection). But what if we are not mitzvah-observant in the traditional ways? Can we still experience a palpable closeness to God and have a sense that we are all connected as one? To this question, our sages also answer yes. Through the meditative quieting of the mind, we can directly experience that "still small voice." It is the awesome voice of infinite intelligence that created and upholds our world with compassion and justice. When we repeatedly experience it, we enliven its qualities into our lives; we "walk in God's ways." When we do so, we uplift not only ourselves, but the world around us.

Download or read book Jewish Radical Feminism written by Joyce Antler and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist, 2019 PROSE Award in Biography, given by the Association of American Publishers Fifty years after the start of the women’s liberation movement, a book that at last illuminates the profound impact Jewishness and second-wave feminism had on each other Jewish women were undeniably instrumental in shaping the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Yet historians and participants themselves have overlooked their contributions as Jews. This has left many vital questions unasked and unanswered—until now. Delving into archival sources and conducting extensive interviews with these fierce pioneers, Joyce Antler has at last broken the silence about the confluence of feminism and Jewish identity. Antler’s exhilarating new book features dozens of compelling biographical narratives that reveal the struggles and achievements of Jewish radical feminists in Chicago, New York and Boston, as well as those who participated in the later, self-consciously identified Jewish feminist movement that fought gender inequities in Jewish religious and secular life. Disproportionately represented in the movement, Jewish women’s liberationists helped to provide theories and models for radical action that were used throughout the United States and abroad. Their articles and books became classics of the movement and led to new initiatives in academia, politics, and grassroots organizing. Other Jewish-identified feminists brought the women’s movement to the Jewish mainstream and Jewish feminism to the Left. For many of these women, feminism in fact served as a “portal” into Judaism. Recovering this deeply hidden history, Jewish Radical Feminism places Jewish women’s activism at the center of feminist and Jewish narratives. The stories of over forty women’s liberationists and identified Jewish feminists—from Shulamith Firestone and Susan Brownmiller to Rabbis Laura Geller and Rebecca Alpert—illustrate how women’s liberation and Jewish feminism unfolded over the course of the lives of an extraordinary cohort of women, profoundly influencing the social, political, and religious revolutions of our era.

Download or read book Suicide of the West written by Jonah Goldberg and published by Crown Forum. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An urgent argument that America and other democracies are in peril because they have lost the will to defend the values and institutions that sustain freedom and prosperity. Now updated with a new preface! “Epic and debate-shifting.”—David Brooks, New York Times Only once in the last 250,000 years have humans stumbled upon a way to lift ourselves out of the endless cycle of poverty, hunger, and war that defines most of history. If democracy, individualism, and the free market were humankind’s destiny, they should have appeared and taken hold a bit earlier in the evolutionary record. The emergence of freedom and prosperity was nothing short of a miracle. As Americans we are doubly blessed, because the radical ideas that made the miracle possible were written not just into the Constitution but in our hearts, laying the groundwork for our uniquely prosperous society. Those ideas are: • Our rights come from God, not from the government. • The government belongs to us; we do not belong to it. • The individual is sovereign. We are all captains of our own souls, not bound by the circumstances of our birth. • The fruits of our labors belong to us. In the last few decades, these political virtues have been turned into vices. As we are increasingly taught to view our traditions as a system of oppression, exploitation, and privilege, the principles of liberty and the rule of law are under attack from left and right. For the West to survive, we must renew our sense of gratitude for what our civilization has given us and rediscover the ideals and habits of the heart that led us out of the bloody muck of the past—or back to the muck we will go.

Download or read book That Precious Strand of Jewishness That Challenges Authority written by Leon Rosselson and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2017-07-01 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “For my parents and grandparents, Jewish identity, in religion, culture and language, was a given. Not so for me. I’m not religious, not a Zionist, so in what consists my Jewishness? Is a love of chopped liver and a belief that chicken soup cures all ills enough? And does it matter? This is the story of my search for answers. It is an argument with myself, with song lyrics to embellish the argument.” Like so many of those others in Britain of Jewish lineage, songwriter and award-winning folk singer Leon Rosselson is descended from antecedents who fled pogroms in eastern Europe. Pertinently, he questions what being a Jew means—is it adherence to Judaism as a religion, an ethnicity, a citizen of Israel, or someone who eats “chicken soup with knedlach”? He describes clearly and with historical insight how any concept of “Jewishness” can involve all of those things and more. In his own life, he has decided to pick and choose from this tradition and history and build on what he deems to be the progressive, humane, and universalist values of that Jewish background. Rosselson is a strong supporter of Palestinian rights, seeing in the victimization of Palestinians by the state of Israel parallels with historical Jewish persecution. He concludes this short essay by stating: “I share with the growing number of Jews in the diaspora who place solidarity with the oppressed above demands of tribalism and with those in Israel who dare to stand against the powers that be.”

Download or read book Jewish Megatrends written by Rabbi Sidney Schwarz, PhD and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visionary solutions for a community ripe for transformational change—from fourteen leading innovators of Jewish life. "Jewish Megatrends offers a vision for a community that can simultaneously strengthen the institutions that serve those who seek greater Jewish identification and attract younger Jews, many of whom are currently outside the orbit of Jewish communal life. Schwarz and his collaborators provide an exciting path, building on proven examples, that we ignore at our peril." —from the Foreword The American Jewish community is riddled with doubts about the viability of the institutions that well served the Jewish community of the twentieth century. Synagogues, Federations and Jewish membership organizations have yet to figure out how to meet the changing interests and needs of the next generation. In this challenging yet hopeful call for transformational change, visionary leader Rabbi Sidney Schwarz looks at the social norms that are shaping the habits and lifestyles of younger American Jews and why the next generation is so resistant to participate in the institutions of Jewish communal life as they currently exist. He sets out four guiding principles that can drive a renaissance in Jewish life and gives evidence of how, on the margins of the Jewish community, those principles are already generating enthusiasm and engagement from the very millennials that the organized Jewish community has yet to engage. Contributors—leading innovators from different sectors of the Jewish community—each use Rabbi Schwarz's framework as a springboard to set forth their particular vision for the future of their sector of Jewish life and beyond.

Download or read book Imperialism and Jewish Society written by Seth Schwartz and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-09 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative new history of Palestinian Jewish society in antiquity marks the first comprehensive effort to gauge the effects of imperial domination on this people. Probing more than eight centuries of Persian, Greek, and Roman rule, Seth Schwartz reaches some startling conclusions--foremost among them that the Christianization of the Roman Empire generated the most fundamental features of medieval and modern Jewish life. Schwartz begins by arguing that the distinctiveness of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and early Roman periods was the product of generally prevailing imperial tolerance. From around 70 C.E. to the mid-fourth century, with failed revolts and the alluring cultural norms of the High Roman Empire, Judaism all but disintegrated. However, late in the Roman Empire, the Christianized state played a decisive role in ''re-Judaizing'' the Jews. The state gradually excluded them from society while supporting their leaders and recognizing their local communities. It was thus in Late Antiquity that the synagogue-centered community became prevalent among the Jews, that there re-emerged a distinctively Jewish art and literature--laying the foundations for Judaism as we know it today. Through masterful scholarship set in rich detail, this book challenges traditional views rooted in romantic notions about Jewish fortitude. Integrating material relics and literature while setting the Jews in their eastern Mediterranean context, it addresses the complex and varied consequences of imperialism on this vast period of Jewish history more ambitiously than ever before. Imperialism in Jewish Society will be widely read and much debated.

Download or read book Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism written by Sarah Imhoff and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-13 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of how early twentieth-century American Jewish men experienced manhood and presented their masculinity to others. How did American Jewish men experience manhood, and how did they present their masculinity to others? In this distinctive book, Sarah Imhoff shows that the project of shaping American Jewish manhood was not just one of assimilation or exclusion. Jewish manhood was neither a mirror of normative American manhood nor its negative, effeminate opposite. Imhoff demonstrates how early twentieth-century Jews constructed a gentler, less aggressive manhood, drawn partly from the American pioneer spirit and immigration experience, but also from Hollywood and the YMCA, which required intense cultivation of a muscled male physique. She contends that these models helped Jews articulate the value of an acculturated American Judaism. Tapping into a rich historical literature to reveal how Jews looked at masculinity differently than Protestants or other religious groups, Imhoff illuminates the particular experience of American Jewish men. “There is so much literature—and very good scholarship—on Judaism and gender, but the majority of that literature reflects an interest in women. A hearty thank you to Sarah Imhoff for writing the other half of the story and for doing it so elegantly.” —Claire Elise Katz, author of Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism “Invariably lucid and engaging, Sarah Imhoff provides a secure foundation for how religion shaped American masculinity and how masculinity shaped American Judaism in the early twentieth century.” —Judith Gerson, author of By Thanksgiving We Were Americans: German Jewish Refugees and Holocaust Memory

Download or read book Choosing Life after Tragedy written by Anson Hugh Laytner and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2023-09-08 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wave of disease and death in his immediate family led Rabbi Anson Laytner to question much of what he had learned about the meaning of suffering, the value of petitionary prayer, and the role of God in human life. As he struggled to deal with his grief and doubts, he gradually found a way forward. His spiritual healing process took him from intense grief to a renewed appreciation of life—and resulted in this book, a work of creative theology some eighteen years in the making. Choosing Life After Tragedy is written for people who struggle with the subjects of suffering, divine providence, God, and prayer; people who are looking for honest, thoughtful, provocative—and occasionally humorous—theological reflections, but no easy answers. Laytner intersperses his penetrating theological reflections with pertinent episodes from his life because, for him, theology is personal and experience-based. Trained as a liberal rabbi, Laytner riffs on Jewish themes to offer a universal message of hope in the face of suffering and loss, and of mutual support based on humanity’s various teachings of lovingkindness. This book will challenge you; it will sometimes amuse you; but you will not remain unmoved.

Download or read book Toward a Holy Ecology written by Ellen Bernstein and published by Monkfish Book Publishing. This book was released on 2024-02-20 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Song of Songs is among the most accessible of all biblical books. It is also the most deeply ecological text of the canon, yet few people are aware of the Song’s ecological message. The intention of Toward a Holy Ecology: Reading the Song of Songs in the Age of Climate Crisis is to illuminate that message. Today there is such urgency around our many earth crises—so much brokenness—that we need a vision of wholeness and an ecological language that can help inspire, soothe and reinvigorate us, and bring us together regardless of our various affiliations and ideologies. The Song offers both ecological language and a vision. It sets the natural world before us with intensity and beauty, bidding us to savor it with all of our senses so that we may return to the world with the renewed clarity, love and energy necessary to work toward a healthy future for the earth and all her inhabitants. The Song is a particularly powerful book since it never utters the name of the divine, yet is a deeply spiritual work that may reach people who are interested in matters of the sacred, but prefer to steer clear of God language and conventional religious ideas. In both the Jewish and Christian worlds, where many people are disengaging from religion altogether, the Song—with its universal themes of love, justice and the integrity of nature—may help open the door to the possibilities which religion has to offer. Toward a Holy Ecology: Reading the Song of Songs in an Age of Climate Crisis seeks to engage a wide readership including all people who love the earth and its inhabitants, outdoor enthusiasts, spiritual seekers, poets, feminists, and students of the humanities, religion and ecology.

Download or read book The Wandering Who written by Gilad Atzmon and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2011-09-30 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation of Jewish identity politics and Jewish contemporary ideology using both popular culture and scholarly texts. Jewish identity is tied up with some of the most difficult and contentious issues of today. The purpose in this book is to open many of these issues up for discussion. Since Israel defines itself openly as the ‘Jewish State’, we should ask what the notions of ’Judaism’, ‘Jewishness’, ‘Jewish culture’ and ‘Jewish ideology’ stand for. Gilad examines the tribal aspects embedded in Jewish secular discourse, both Zionist and anti Zionist; the ‘holocaust religion’; the meaning of ‘history’ and ‘time’ within the Jewish political discourse; the anti-Gentile ideologies entangled within different forms of secular Jewish political discourse and even within the Jewish left. He questions what it is that leads Diaspora Jews to identify themselves with Israel and affiliate with its politics. The devastating state of our world affairs raises an immediate demand for a conceptual shift in our intellectual and philosophical attitude towards politics, identity politics and history.

Download or read book Judaism Beyond God written by Sherwin Wine and published by . This book was released on 2017-03-31 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judaism Beyond God presents an innovative secular and humanistic alternative for Jewish identity. It provides new answers to old questions about the essence of Jewish identity, the real meaning of Jewish history, the significance of the Jewish personality, and the nature of Jewish ethics. It also describes a radical and creative way to be Jewish - new ways to celebrate Jewish holidays and life cycle events, a welcoming approach to intermarriage and joining the Jewish people, and meaningful paths to strengthen Jewish identity in a secular age.

Download or read book The Price of Whiteness written by Eric L. Goldstein and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-31 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What has it meant to be Jewish in a nation preoccupied with the categories of black and white? The Price of Whiteness documents the uneasy place Jews have held in America's racial culture since the late nineteenth century. The book traces Jews' often tumultuous encounter with race from the 1870s through World War II, when they became vested as part of America's white mainstream and abandoned the practice of describing themselves in racial terms. American Jewish history is often told as a story of quick and successful adaptation, but Goldstein demonstrates how the process of identifying as white Americans was an ambivalent one, filled with hard choices and conflicting emotions for Jewish immigrants and their children. Jews enjoyed a much greater level of social inclusion than African Americans, but their membership in white America was frequently made contingent on their conformity to prevailing racial mores and on the eradication of their perceived racial distinctiveness. While Jews consistently sought acceptance as whites, their tendency to express their own group bonds through the language of "race" led to deep misgivings about what was required of them. Today, despite the great success Jews enjoy in the United States, they still struggle with the constraints of America's black-white dichotomy. The Price of Whiteness concludes that while Jews' status as white has opened many doors for them, it has also placed limits on their ability to assert themselves as a group apart.

Download or read book A Temporary Affair written by David Radin and published by Monkfish Book Publishing. This book was released on 2022-08-02 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Temporary Affair is a collection of talks given at Sunday morning sittings at the Ithaca Zen Center by Yoshin David Radin, abbot and founder of the Ithaca Zen Center for the past 40 years. The talks contained here were given at a time when Yoshin’s health was severely compromised by end stage renal failure. In February 2019, he received a kidney transplant from a member of Ithaca Zen Center, to whom the publication is dedicated. The collection of 31 talks contains the insight of the individual dharma talks themselves, as well as the underlying story of how the dharma teachings helped the author cope, and even thrive, with his continuing loss of kidney function. The talks go right up to the days before he was admitted to the hospital. The comfort and guidance he received from the dharma during the times when he was most ill have been a great inspiration to all who know him, as they will to readers. In his own words, “How extraordinary, how blessed, how wonderful, to have met the teachings that free us from suffering when in difficult places.” Through these talks the reader can clearly see how he put that wisdom to use in his own life situation, and how they can do so as well.