Download or read book Orthodox Judaism and the Politics of Religion written by Daniel Mahla and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the first half of the twentieth century, nationalizing processes in Europe and Palestine reshaped observant Jewry into two distinct societies, ultra-Orthodoxy and national-religious Judaism. Tracing the dynamics between the two most influential Orthodox political movements of the period, from their early years through the founding of the State of Israel, Daniel Mahla examines the crucial role that religio-political entrepreneurs played in these developments. He frames the contest between non-Zionist Agudat Yisrael and religious-Zionist Mizrahi as the product of wide-ranging social and cultural struggles within Orthodox Judaism and demonstrates that at the core of their conflict lay deep tensions between rabbinic authority and political activism. While Orthodoxy's encounter with modern Jewish nationalism is often cast as a confrontation between religious and secular forces, this book highlights the significance of intra-religious competition for observant Jewry's transition to the age of the nation state and beyond.

Download or read book Orthodox by Design written by Jeremy Stolow and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010-04-28 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Orthodox by Design, a groundbreaking exploration of religion and media, examines ArtScroll, the world’s largest Orthodox Jewish publishing house, purveyor of handsomely designed editions of sacred texts and a major cultural force in contemporary Jewish public life. In the first in-depth study of the ArtScroll revolution, Jeremy Stolow traces the ubiquity of ArtScroll books in local retail markets, synagogues, libraries, and the lives of ordinary users. Synthesizing field research conducted in three local Jewish scenes where ArtScroll books have had an impact—Toronto, London, and New York—along with close readings of key ArtScroll texts, promotional materials, and the Jewish blogosphere, he shows how the use of these books reflects a broader cultural shift in the authority and public influence of Orthodox Judaism. Playing with the concept of design, Stolow’s study also outlines a fresh theoretical approach to print culture and illuminates how evolving technologies, material forms, and styles of mediated communication contribute to new patterns of religious identification, practice, and power. Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the scholarship category, Jewish Book Council

Download or read book The Politics of Religion and the Religion of Politics written by Ira Sharkansky and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prominent political theorist Ira Sharkansky looks at the intersection of religion and politics, using the case of Israel-where a chief rabbi officiates along with a prime minister-to examine how the two inform each other. Focusing more on similarities than differences, Sharkansky demonstrates that both religion and politics can justify their position on the moral high ground. Both are involved in shaping our values and standard of living; however, neither religion nor politics can claim a monopoly of virtue: Political demagogues have their religious equivalents in self-serving prophets and false messiahs, and politicians and religious leaders both may violate the morality that they preach. Sharkansky examines the place of intellectual certainty, doubt, charisma, and passion in both realms. He argues that Israel, among other Western democracies where politics and religion intersect, supports a successful fusion of the two.

Download or read book Rabbis of our Time written by Marek Čejka and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-16 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term ‘rabbi’ predominantly denotes Jewish men qualified to interpret the Torah and apply halacha, or those entrusted with the religious leadership of a Jewish community. However, the role of the rabbi has been understood differently across the Jewish world. While in Israel they control legally powerful rabbinical courts and major religious political parties, in the Jewish communities of the Diaspora this role is often limited by legal regulations of individual countries. However, the significance of past and present rabbis and their religious and political influence endures across the world. Rabbis of Our Time provides a comprehensive overview of the most influential rabbinical authorities of Judaism in the 20th and 21st Century. Through focussing on the most theologically influential rabbis of the contemporary era and examining their political impact, it opens a broader discussion of the relationship between Judaism and politics. It looks at the various centres of current Judaism and Jewish thinking, especially the State of Israel and the USA, as well as locating rabbis in various time periods. Through interviews and extracts from religious texts and books authored by rabbis, readers will discover more about a range of rabbis, from those before the formation of Israel to the most famous Chief Rabbis of Israel, as well as those who did not reach the highest state religious functions, but influenced the relation between Judaism and Israel by other means. The rabbis selected represent all major contemporary streams of Judaism, from ultra-Orthodox/Haredi to Reform and Liberal currents, and together create a broader picture of the scope of contemporary Jewish thinking in a theological and political context. An extensive and detailed source of information on the varieties of Jewish thinking influencing contemporary Judaism and the modern State of Israel, this book is of interest to students and scholars of Jewish Studies, as well as Religion and Politics.

Download or read book What Shall I Do with this People written by Milton Viorst and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical history of how religious leaders have influenced the practice of Judaism to serve personal conceptions critiques Orthodox Judaism's doctrines concerning marriage and divorce, conversion, and women's rights.

Download or read book Secularism and Religion in Jewish Israeli Politics written by Yaacov Yadgar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-07-28 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Common discourse on Jewish identity in Israel is dominated by the view that Jewish Israelis can, and should, be either religious or secular. Moving away from this conventional framework, this book examines the role of secularism and religion in Jewish society and politics. With a focus on the ‘traditionists’ (masortim) who comprise over a third of the Jewish-Israeli population, the author examines issues of religion, tradition and secularism in Israel, giving a fresh approach to the widening theoretical discussion regarding the thesis of secularisation and modernity and exploring the wider implications of this identity. Yadgar’s conclusions have significant social, cultural and political implications, serving not only as a new contribution to the academic discourse on Jewish-Israeli identity, but as a platform upon which traditionist positions on central issues of Israeli politics can be heard. Offering a detailed investigation into a central and important Jewish-Israeli identity construct, the book is relevant not only to the study of Jewish identity in Israel but also within the wider social-theoretical issues of religion, tradition, modernity and secularization. The book will be of great interest to students of Israeli society and to anyone looking into the issues of Jewish identity, Israeli nationalism and ethnicity, religion and politics in Israel, and the sociology of religion.

Download or read book Rituals of Conflict written by Ira Sharkansky and published by Lynne Rienner Publishers. This book was released on 1996 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kosher food, secular marriage, divorce, burial, abortion and other medical procedures,

Download or read book A Murder in Lemberg written by Michael Stanislawski and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How could a Jew kill a Jew for religious and political reasons? Many people asked this question after an Orthodox Jew assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Itshak Rabin in 1995. But historian Michael Stanislawski couldn't forget it, and he decided to find out everything he could about an obscure and much earlier event that was uncannily similar to Rabin's murder: the 1848 killing--by an Orthodox Jew--of the Reform rabbi of Lemberg (now L'viv, Ukraine). Eventually, Stanislawski concluded that this was the first murder of a Jewish leader by a Jew since antiquity, a prelude to twentieth-century assassinations of Jews by Jews, and a turning point in Jewish history. Based on records unavailable for decades, A Murder in Lemberg is the first book about this fascinating case. On September 6, 1848, Abraham Ber Pilpel entered the kitchen of Rabbi Abraham Kohn and his family and poured arsenic in the soup that was being prepared for their dinner. Within hours, the rabbi and his infant daughter were dead. Was Kohn's murder part of a conservative Jewish backlash to Jewish reform and liberalization in a year of European revolution? Or was he killed simply because he threatened taxes that enriched Lemberg's Orthodox leaders? Vividly recreating the dramatic story of the murder, the trial that followed, and the political and religious fallout of both, Stanislawski tries to answer these questions and others. In the process, he reveals the surprising diversity of Jewish life in mid-nineteenth-century eastern Europe. Far from being uniformly Orthodox, as is often assumed, there was a struggle between Orthodox and Reform Jews that was so intense that it might have led to murder.

Download or read book A Prophetic Peace written by Alick Isaacs and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-06 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Real philosophy for the real world . . . if you’re interested in peace, read it.” —Ebor Challenging deeply held convictions about Judaism, Zionism, war, and peace, Alick Isaacs’s combat experience in the second Lebanon war provoked him to search for a way of reconciling the belligerence of religion with its messages of peace. In his insightful readings of the texts of Biblical prophecy and rabbinic law, Isaacs draws on the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Martin Buber, among others, to propose an ambitious vision of religiously inspired peace. Rejecting the notion of Jewish theology as partial to war and vengeance, this eloquent and moving work points to the ways in which Judaism can be a path to peace. A Prophetic Peace describes an educational project called Talking Peace whose aim is to bring individuals of different views together to share varying understandings of peace.

Download or read book Why Do People Discriminate Against Jews written by Jonathan Fox and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Patterns of discrimination -- Chapter 3: Religious anti-semitism -- Chapter 4: Anti-Zionism and anti-Israel behavior and sentiment -- Chapter 5: Conspiracy theories -- Chapter 6: The British example -- Chapter 7: Conclusions -- Appendix A: Multivariate analyses and technical details.

Download or read book The Invention of Jewish Theocracy written by Alexander Kaye and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-22 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tension between secular politics and religious fundamentalism is a problem shared by many modern states. This is certainly true of the State of Israel, where the religious-secular schism provokes conflict at every level of politics and society. Driving this schism is the idea of the halakhic state, the demand by many religious Jews that Israel should be governed by the law of the Torah as interpreted by Orthodox rabbis. Understanding this idea is a priority for scholars of Israel and for anyone with an interest in its future. The Invention of Jewish Theocracy is the first book in any language to trace the origins of the idea, to track its development, and to explain its crucial importance in Israel's past and present. The book also shows how the history of this idea engages with burning contemporary debates on questions of global human rights, the role of religion in Middle East conflict, and the long-term consequences of European imperialism. The Invention of Jewish Theocracy is an intellectual history, based on newly discovered material from numerous Israeli archives, private correspondence, court records, and lesser-known published works. It explains why the idea of the halakhic state emerged when it did, what happened after it initially failed to take hold, and how it has regained popularity in recent decades, provoking cultural conflict that has severely shaken Israeli society. The book's historical analysis gives rise to two wide-reaching insights. First, it argues that religious politics in Israel can be understood only within the context of the largely secular history of European nationalism and not, as is commonly argued, as an anomalous exception to it. It shows how even religious Jews most opposed to modern political thought nevertheless absorbed the fundamental assumptions of modern European political thought and reread their own religious traditions onto that model. Second, it demonstrates that religious-secular tensions are built into the intellectual foundations of Israel rather than being the outcome of major events like the 1967 War. These insights have significant ramifications for the understanding of the modern state. In particular, the account of the blurring of the categories of "secular" and "religious" illustrated in the book are relevant to all studies of modern history and to scholars of the intersection of religion and human rights

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 The Politics of Torah written by Alan Mittleman and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation Examines the forces that led to the formation of the first international political movement among Orthodox Jews in 1912, setting its history in the context of both the millenial Jewish political tradition and the Jewish struggle with modernity. Details conflicts that shaped the movement and explores the movement's relationship with prior expressions of Jewish political thought and practice. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Download or read book Religion and Politics in Israel written by Charles S. Liebman and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Cosmopolitans and Parochials written by Samuel C. Heilman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1989-10-11 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Far from simply vanishing in the face of modernity, Orthodox Jews in the United States today are surviving and flourishing. Samuel C. Heilman and Steven M. Cohen, both distinguished scholars of Jewish studies, have joined forces in this pathbreaking book to articulate this vibrancy and to characterize the many faces of Orthodox Jewry in contemporary America. Who are these Orthodox Jews? How have they survived, what do they believe and practice and how do they accommodate the tension between traditional Jewish and modern American values? Drawing on a survey of more than one thousand participants, the authors address these questions and many more. Heilman and Cohen reveal that American Jewish Orthodoxy is not a monolith by distinguishing its three broad varieties: the "traditionalists," the "centrists," and the "nominally" orthodox. To illuminate this full spectrum of orthodoxy the authors focus on the "centrists," taking us through the dimensions of their ritual observances, religious beliefs, community life, and their social, political, and sexual attitudes. Both parochial and cosmopolitan, orthodox and liberal, these Jews are characterized by their dualism, by their successful involvement in both the modern Western world and in traditional Jewish culture. In painting this provocative and fascinating portrait of what Jewish Orthodoxy has become in America today, Heilman and Cohen's study also sheds light on the larger picture of the persistence of religion in the modern world.

Download or read book Orthodox by Design written by Jeremy Stolow and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is the first thorough study of the ArtScroll publishing 'phenomenon,' which is a major force in contemporary English-speaking Jewish life. It is deeply and richly informed by interdisciplinary work on semiotics, textuality and mediation. It will be quite useful to those working in areas such as religion and media, contemporary Jewish studies, history of print, sociology of religion, and American religion. And it should fascinate those who are regular if not always uncritical users of ArtScroll publications."_Jonathan Boyarin, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill "With stunning clarity, wit and originality, Jeremy Stolow takes us into the deeply influential but largely unexplored world of ArtScroll, a company that has cornered the market on the publishing of Orthodox religious prayer books, as well as a host of related works from cookbooks to self-help texts. With ethnographic and scholarly skill, and his characteristic attention to both detail and the big picture, Stolow reveals a social universe that is astonishingly complex, political and profitable. This inviting and groundbreaking book is a remarkable contribution to the fields of religion, media studies, and Judaic studies."_Faye Ginsburg, New York University "Destined to become the classical study of print, piety and politics in the digital age, Orthodox by Design will force us to rethink many taken-for-granted assumptions about globalization, secularization and orthodoxy. A comprehensive investigation of global publishing, it offers fresh insight into the politics of translation, the emergence of a Jewish public sphere and the expanding influence of Haredi intellectuals."_Bryan S. Turner, editor of The Routledge International Handbook of Globalization Studies "Orthodox by Design is a singular contribution to Jewish studies and the emergent field of religion and media. Stolow's masterful account of the Artscroll enterprise and its reception shows how materiality and media matter in the formation of religious sensibilities, practices, and everyday life in the contemporary world."_Elizabeth A. Castelli, author of Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making "This carefully crafted, imaginative study of Artscroll offers a theoretically powerful perspective on the limitations of textual approaches of 'book religions.' Its relevance far exceeds the field of Jewish studies. I am thrilled by Stolow's deployment of 'design' as a key theoretical concept that leads beyond usual oppositions of spirit/matter, content/form or message/medium. Located at the intersection of religious studies, media studies and social sciences, Orthodox by Design is an outstanding, path-breaking intervention in broader debates about religion, media and materiality."_Birgit Meyer, author of Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion and the Senses

Download or read book Beyond Sectarianism written by Adam S. Ferziger and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1965 social scientist Charles S. Liebman published a study that boldly declared the vitality of American Jewish Orthodoxy and went on to guide scholarly investigations of the group for the next four decades. As American Orthodoxy continues to grow in geographical, institutional, and political strength, author Adam S. Ferziger argues in Beyond Sectarianism: The Realignment of American Orthodox Judaism that one of Liebman’s principal definitions needs to be updated. While Liebman proposed that the “committed Orthodox” —observant rather than nominally affiliated—could be divided into two main streams: “church,” or Modern Orthodoxy, and “sectarian,” or Haredi Orthodoxy, Ferziger traces a narrowing of the gap between them and ultimately a realignment of American Orthodox Judaism. Ferziger shows that significant elements within Haredi Orthodoxy have abandoned certain strict and seemingly uncontested norms. He begins by offering fresh insight into the division between the American sectarian Orthodox and Modern Orthodox streams that developed in the early twentieth century and highlights New York’s Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun as a pioneering Modern Orthodox synagogue. Ferziger also considers the nuances of American Orthodoxy as reflected in Soviet Jewish activism during the 1960s and early 1970s and educational trips to Poland taken by American Orthodox young adults studying in Israel, and explores the responses of prominent rabbinical authorities to Orthodox feminism and its call for expanded public religious roles for women. Considerable discussion is dedicated to the emergence of outreach to nonobservant Jews as a central priority for Haredi Orthodoxy and how this focus outside its core population reflects fundamental changes. In this context, Ferziger presents evidence for the growing influence of Chabad Hasidism – what he terms the “Chabadization of American Orthodoxy.” Recent studies, including the 2013 Pew Survey of U.S. Jewry, demonstrate that an active and strongly connected American Orthodox Jewish population is poised to grow in the coming decades. Jewish studies scholars and readers interested in history, sociology, and religion will appreciate Ferziger’s reappraisal of this important group.