Download or read book Beyond Jewish Identity written by Jon A. Levisohn and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2019-12-31 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is something deeply problematic about the ways that Jews, particularly in America, talk about “Jewish identity” as a desired outcome of Jewish education. For many, the idea that the purpose of Jewish education is to strengthen Jewish identity is so obvious that it hardly seems worth disputing—and the only important question is which kinds of Jewish education do that work more effectively or more efficiently. But what does it mean to “strengthen Jewish identity”? Why do Jewish educators, policy-makers and philanthropists talk that way? What do they assume, about Jewish education or about Jewish identity, when they use formulations like “strengthen Jewish identity”? And what are the costs of doing so? This volume, the first collection to examine critically the relationship between Jewish education and Jewish identity, makes two important interventions. First, it offers a critical assessment of the relationship between education and identity, arguing that the reification of identity has hampered much educational creativity in the pursuit of this goal, and that the nearly ubiquitous employment of the term obscures significant questions about what Jewish education is and ought to be. Second, this volume offers thoughtful responses that are not merely synonymous replacements for “identity,” suggesting new possibilities for how to think about the purposes and desired outcomes of Jewish education, potentially contributing to any number of new conversations about the relationship between Jewish education and Jewish life.
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 Beyond the Synagogue written by Rachel B. Gross and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book New Jewish Identities written by Zvi Y. Gitelman and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique collection of essays that deal with the intriguing and complex problems connected to the question of Jewish identity in the contemporary world. Concerning the problem of identity formation, this book addresses very important issues: What is the content or meaning of Jewish identity? What has replaced religion in defining the content of Jewishness? How do people in different age groups construct their Jewish identity? In most cases, the authors have combined a variety of research methods: they drew samples or relied on the sample surveys of others; used personal interviews with respondents who are especially knowledgeable about their own Jewish communities, or based their research on participant observation of particular communities or communal institutions.
Download or read book Beyond Stereotypes written by Bruce Zuckerman and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades after the Civil War, sports slowly gained a prominent position within American culture. This development provided Jews with opportunities to participate in one of the few American cultures not closed off to them. Jewish athleticism challenged anti-Semitic depictions of Jews' supposed physical inferiority and an Americanization narrative emerged that connected Jewish athleticism with full acceptance and integration into American society. This acceptance was not without struggle, but Jews succeeded and participated in the American sporting culture as athletes, coaches, owners, and fans. The contributions to this volume paint a broad picture of Jewish participation in sports, with essays written by respected historians who examine the impact of sport on Judaism. Despite the continued belief that Jewish religious or cultural identity remains somehow distinct from the American idea of the "athlete," the volume demonstrates that American Jews have made a tremendous contribution to American sports, and that sports have helped construct American Jewish culture and identity.
Download or read book Israel s Jewish Identity Crisis written by Yaacov Yadgar and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-30 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative and provocative study tackling the main assumptions surrounding Israel's claim to Jewish identity.
Download or read book Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages written by David C. Kraemer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-11-21 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the history of Jewish eating and Jewish identity, from the Bible to the present. The lessons of this book rest squarely on the much-quoted insight: 'you are what you eat.' But this book goes beyond that simple truism to recognise that you are not only what you eat, but also how, when, where and with whom you eat. This book begins at the beginning – with the Torah – and then follows the history of Jewish eating until the modern age and even into our own day. Along the way, it travels from Jewish homes in the Holy Land and Babylonia (Iraq) to France and Spain and Italy, then to Germany and Poland and finally to the United States of America. It looks at significant developments in Jewish eating in all ages: in the ancient Near East and Persia, in the Classical age, throughout the Middle Ages and into Modernity. It pays careful attention to Jewish eating laws (halakha) in each time and place, but it does not stop there: it also looks for Jews who bend and break the law, who eat like Romans or Christians regardless of the law and who develop their own hybrid customs according to their own 'laws', whatever Jewish tradition might tell them. In this colourful history of Jewish eating, we get more than a taste of how expressive and crucial eating choices have always been.
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 368 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.
Download or read book Israel Has a Jewish Problem written by Joyce Dalsheim and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-17 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long-standing debate about whether the State of Israel can be both Jewish and democratic raises important questions about the rights of Palestinian Arabs. In Israel Has a Jewish Problem, Joyce Dalsheim argues that this debate obscures another issue: Can the Jewish state protect the right to be Jewish, whatever form that “being” might take? Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, she investigates that question by looking at ways in which Jewish citizens of Israel struggle to be Jewish within the confines of a Jewish state. She focuses on everyday experiences, on public interpretations of the possibilities of being Jewish in the context of state policy, and on media representations of conflicts between Jewish citizens over social, religious, and political issues. Despite Israel's claim that every religious community “is free, by law and in practice, to exercise its faith, observe its holidays ... and administer its internal affairs,” Israel is foundationally a Jewish state. It privileges Orthodox regulation of who will be considered a Jew, of marriage and family law, and of conversion. This arrangement, and the constant tensions it has produced over the years, is often understood as a compromise between secular and religious political factions. But this religious-secular framing conceals broader patterns inherent in nationalist projects more generally. Using insights from Franz Kafka's writing as a theoretical lens through which the ethnographic data can be viewed, Dalsheim interrogates the relationship between nationalism and religion, asking what kinds of liberation have been achieved by Jews in the Jewish State. Ultimately the book argues, in a Kafkaesque reversal of the liberatory promise of national sovereignty, that national self-determination involves collective self-elimination.
Download or read book Rethinking Jewish Philosophy written by Aaron W. Hughes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-04 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rather than assume that the terms "philosophy" and "Judaism" simply belong together, Aaron W. Hughes explores the juxtaposition and the creative tension that ensues from their cohabitation. He examines the historical, cultural, intellectual, and religious filiations between Judaism and philosophy.
Download or read book How I Stopped Being a Jew written by Shlomo Sand and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shlomo Sand was born in 1946, in a displaced person’s camp in Austria, to Jewish parents; the family later migrated to Palestine. As a young man, Sand came to question his Jewish identity, even that of a “secular Jew.” With this meditative and thoughtful mixture of essay and personal recollection, he articulates the problems at the center of modern Jewish identity. How I Stopped Being a Jew discusses the negative effects of the Israeli exploitation of the “chosen people” myth and its “holocaust industry.” Sand criticizes the fact that, in the current context, what “Jewish” means is, above all, not being Arab and reflects on the possibility of a secular, non-exclusive Israeli identity, beyond the legends of Zionism.
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 Roads to the Palace written by Michael Rosenak and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 1995 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Begins a series in which scholars from the main denominations and humanist thinkers identify major questions and issues concerning the education of individuals and communities and the discourse between cultures and faiths from theological and non-materialist perspectives. Rosenak (Jewish education, Hebrew U.-Jerusalem) discusses the texts and methods used for passing on Jewish religious and social values. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Jews and Jewish Identities in Latin America written by Yaron Harel and published by Jewish Latin American Studies. This book was released on 2019-02-08 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an excellent tool both for scholars and students interested in the wide range of Jewish expressions found in Latin America, which are hardly known in other regions.
Download or read book Shylock s Children written by Derek Penslar and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-07 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shylock's children tells the story of Jewish perceptions of this economic difference and of its effects on modern Jewish identity in Europe.
Download or read book Beyond the Ghetto Gates written by Michelle Cameron and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When French troops occupy the Italian port city of Ancona, freeing the city’s Jews from their repressive ghetto, it unleashes a whirlwind of progressivism and brutal backlash as two very different cultures collide. Mirelle, a young Jewish maiden, must choose between her duty—an arranged marriage to a wealthy Jewish merchant—and her love for a dashing French Catholic soldier. Meanwhile, Francesca, a devout Catholic, must decide if she will honor her marriage vows to an abusive and murderous husband when he enmeshes their family in the theft of a miracle portrait of the Madonna. Set during the turbulent days of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Italian campaign (1796–97), Beyond the Ghetto Gates is both a cautionary tale for our present moment, with its rising tide of anti-Semitism, and a story of hope—a reminder of a time in history when men and women of conflicting faiths were able to reconcile their prejudices in the face of a rapidly changing world.
Download or read book Beyond Tribal Loyalties written by Avigail Abarbanel and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of 25 personal stories of Jewish peace activists from Australia, Canada, Israel, the UK and the United States. They focus on the complex and intensely personal journey that Jewish activists go through to free themselves from the hold of Zionist ideology and its requirement to support all Israeli policies.
