Contemporary Jews Research Articles

Kaplan’s Approach to Prayer Appreciated and Challenged

Kaplan’s Approach to Prayer Appreciated and Challenged Eric Caplan Introduction Mordecai M. Kaplan (1881–1983), the ideological founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, is an important figure in the development of American Jewish liturgy. Kaplan and his closest followers—Eugene Kohn and Ira Eisenstein among others—coedited the New Haggadah (1941), the Sabbath Prayer Book (1945), the High Holiday Prayer Book (1948), the Festival Prayer Book (1958), and the Daily Prayer Book (1963). Prior to the publication of these works, Kaplan oversaw the publication of two collections of readings to be used to enrich prayer services. How can we account for Mordecai Kaplan’s obvious interest in liturgy? The most common way of responding to this question is to point to Kaplan’s famous desire for intellectual honesty in prayer. Kaplan believed that “In religion, as in everything else, we must not say what we do not mean.”1 Having concluded that it is no longer possible to believe, among other things, that the Bible was revealed, that God will send a personal messiah, and that the dead will be physically resurrected in the future, he could no longer pray the traditional liturgy and believed that many contemporary Jews were in a similar position. This explained, he thought, why so many stayed away from the synagogue. Kaplan’s liturgical efforts were definitely motivated by his desire to put into congregants’ hands a text that reflected modern belief and thereby made prayer more possible for them. But the desire for intellectual honesty only partially explains Kaplan’s liturgical efforts. It does not explain, for example, why over half of Kaplan’s prayer books were devoted to supplementary readings, the majority of which do not serve as a counter voice to prayers that Kaplan found theologically troubling. It also does not provide any insight into why Kaplan was so concerned, in the first place, that Jews continue to pray. After all, he could have responded to the empty pews of his time by seeing the death of communal prayer as simply another stage in the natural evolution of Jewish practice. Sacrifices, too, were once an essential component of Jewish ritual life but ceased after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70CE. Not every component of Jewish tradition that dies needs to be revived. Mordecai Kaplan, however, could not stand idly by while Jews abandoned traditional prayer because he believed that prayer was essential to the realization of religion’s primary purpose: motivating people to strive for a more just world order. And it is this belief in the importance of prayer that provides the most comprehensive explanation for Kaplan’s liturgical creativity. For Mordecai Kaplan, “The problem of serious‐minded religionists is not: how can we get people to become religious? But, How can we get religion to make people better?”2 Kaplan wanted religion to serve both as a catalyst for individual moral growth and for inspiring collective progress in the “struggle against poverty, disease, ignorance, oppression and war.”3 He recognized that achieving progress in these areas was not easy and believed that to persevere in the task an individual needed to have strong faith that the world and its people could indeed be perfected. Fostering that faith is an essential function of religion. It requires the cultivation in people of two complementary states of mind: appreciation of the world’s blessings—for if the world already has good within it there is reason to believe that this good can be expanded—and the conviction that there exists a Force in the universe (God) that supports the human quest to achieve a better world and thus makes this goal attainable. As Kaplan explains, Every experience of success in overcoming the misery of cowardice, envy, hate and greed is an experience of God. Faith in God is faith in the possibility of such achievements, without which we inevitably sink into moral defeatism. That is why religious belief, in the sense of faith in the Power that makes for salvation, is indispensable to modern man no less than it was to his forefathers, as reinforcement for ethical living.4 The purpose of prayer For Kaplan, engaging in prayer is of great help...

On the complexities of modern Jewish identity: contemporary Jews against Israel

The contention of the present essay is that many Jews who oppose the existence of the state of Israel express a problematic form of Jewish identity, which may reach the point of a new pattern of Judeophobia – certainly, a puzzling intellectual phenomenon. Excluded from this category are Jews who criticize certain Israeli policies; this is the accepted democratic and liberal norm. Meant are Jews who either demand structural changes that deny the Jewish character of Israel, or even support the so-called 'abolishment' of the Jewish state. Even if their number is small, the visibility and influence of such Jews are quite large. Although most of them indignantly reject the allegation of Judeophobic attitudes, they frequently find themselves on a common platform (at times literally so) with declared and active non-Jewish Jew-haters, who are never shy to use their Jewish companions for their own argumentation.

‘Lifting the Veil’: The Challenges Posed by 2 Corinthians 3

Second Corinthians 3 is a challenging text for Jewish-Christian relations. On the one hand, Paul sets forth there materials cherished by Christians, such as a beautiful description of the effect of the outpouring of God’s Spirit. On the other hand, he offers several derogatory remarks about the Mosaic covenant and his Jewish contemporaries who did not accept the gospel. This article argues that 2 Corinthians 3 is largely the product of Paul’s defensiveness. While it sets forth his positive teachings, the article also flags problematic materials. It concludes with remarks about how to appropriate this text today.

On EditingFrom the Well of Living WatersandDrash: Northwest Mosaic

On Editing from The Well of Living Waters and Drash: Northwest Mosaic Wendy Marcus (bio) and Lenore Weiss (bio) Lenore: From the Well of Living Waters, an anthology of Jewish Bay Area poets began like many projects—with a conversation. In the summer of 2010, I met with Rabbi Burt Jacobson, founding rabbi of Kehilla Community Synagogue, for my annual spiritual check-up. At the conclusion of our talk and knowing my interests, Rabbi Burt suggested that I consider editing an anthology of Kehilla poets and friends. It sounded like a grand idea. I asked Kehilla staff to post a call for submissions in the synagogue's online newsletter, Kol Kehilla. I also reached out to congregants and poets whom I knew from the perimeter of our community. The response was immediate. Poems flowed to me from all directions. In August [End Page 86] 2010 we held a "Poetry and Music Cabaret" as a fundraiser. Poets read at the synagogue in Piedmont, California, joined by Lior Tsarfaty, a talented Israeli musician who offered Hebrew music and Arabic prayers. The evening was extraordinary, a gathering of Jewish American poets who embraced shared traditions and ancestors, including the pain of the Holocaust, and deeply felt concerns about the debacle of Palestine and Israel for all people who call this long and narrow place of approximately 290 miles, their home. We listened to the strength of each other's voices assembled in one place. It was a holy experience, similar to one I had the previous year at a benefit event I helped to organize, "Poetry for Gaza," where leading Arab and Jewish writers stood together. United in our hearts and in the healing name of the word, we arrived at the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California in Oakland to raise money for the children of Gaza. The audience heard that register and responded generously. While I frequently attend poetry readings throughout the Bay Area, I hadn't been aware of a missing quality of voice until I had the opportunity to edit From the Well of Living Waters. I believe now it was a need to hear my Jewish contemporaries speak together from one platform. While not all of the poets write explicitly Jewish-identified poetry, all of them, including myself, write and explore poetry from that core. I wanted the anthology to help us understand how that Jewish core has alloyed or broken us apart. As Jews of the 21st century, we inhabit a different world from that of our ancestors. The Holocaust, a horrible defining event for at least one generation of Jews, has been off-set by other challenges. As American Jews, how do we respond to the politics of Israel, born in the pain of the Holocaust? How do we rescue and nurture our values in today's world? Wendy: My impetus for founding Drash: Northwest Mosaic, initially, was personal and a lot about my frustration at not getting my often-Jewish-themed short stories into general literary magazines. It seemed that the few Jewish literary magazines available to me were either too feminist/lesbian, too academic, too edgy (as in young and raunchy) or too snobbish (East Coast cliques)—this is going to piss off people, oh well. Not knowing a thing about publishing, I enlisted some earnest and equally hopelessly naïve poets and writers here at Temple Beth Am, where I am the music director, and we set about making a literary journal to reflect the time and place in which we lived: the slower, softer, definitely more moist, Jewish Northwest. ("C'mon kids, this is gonna be fun!") Oy, huge learning curve. I have learned how many books to order, how many books not to order, how to write grants, how to set up and run readings (and keep long-winded, full-of-themselves literary types from boring people to death). We are going into the building stage of Volume V, due out end of May, and I've just finished sending out hundreds of rejection and acceptance notices (and getting both gracious and impossibly snotty responses). In my quest for a respectful selection process, I make a point of sending out...

Towards the global shtetl: golem texts in the new millennium

This article explores the post-1990s formation of a global paradigm of popular Jewish culture by European, Israeli and American authors. The author argues that golem texts show both how Jews themselves function as a metaphor for globalisation, an image with frequent anti-Semitic connotations, and for the ways in which contemporary Jewishness is currently being positively reconfigured in terms of post-modern playfulness. In the films and literary texts by directors and authors such as Amos Gitai, Marge Piercy, Ellen Galford and Michael Chabon, this article shows the golem symbolises contemporary Jewish self-constructions beyond the national and racialised delineations of the past.

The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people

Contemporary Jews comprise an aggregate of ethno-religious communities whose worldwide members identify with each other through various shared religious, historical and cultural traditions. Historical evidence suggests common origins in the Middle East, followed by migrations leading to the establishment of communities of Jews in Europe, Africa and Asia, in what is termed the Jewish Diaspora. This complex demographic history imposes special challenges in attempting to address the genetic structure of the Jewish people. Although many genetic studies have shed light on Jewish origins and on diseases prevalent among Jewish communities, including studies focusing on uniparentally and biparentally inherited markers, genome-wide patterns of variation across the vast geographic span of Jewish Diaspora communities and their respective neighbours have yet to be addressed. Here we use high-density bead arrays to genotype individuals from 14 Jewish Diaspora communities and compare these patterns of genome-wide diversity with those from 69 Old World non-Jewish populations, of which 25 have not previously been reported. These samples were carefully chosen to provide comprehensive comparisons between Jewish and non-Jewish populations in the Diaspora, as well as with non-Jewish populations from the Middle East and north Africa. Principal component and structure-like analyses identify previously unrecognized genetic substructure within the Middle East. Most Jewish samples form a remarkably tight subcluster that overlies Druze and Cypriot samples but not samples from other Levantine populations or paired Diaspora host populations. In contrast, Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel) and Indian Jews (Bene Israel and Cochini) cluster with neighbouring autochthonous populations in Ethiopia and western India, respectively, despite a clear paternal link between the Bene Israel and the Levant. These results cast light on the variegated genetic architecture of the Middle East, and trace the origins of most Jewish Diaspora communities to the Levant.

Making Myths: Jews in Early Christian Identity Formation (review)

Reviewed by: Making Myths: Jews in Early Christian Identity Formation Miriam Ben Zeev Leonard V. Rutgers Making Myths: Jews in Early Christian Identity Formation Leuven: Peeters, 2009 Pp. 151. This fascinating and innovative work by Leonard Rutgers focuses on the role of the Jews in early Christian identity formation. In order to distinguish themselves from their historical background, Christians had to redefine the theological and socio-political position of the Jews. For this purpose, a series of myths was created, designed to dislodge the Jews theologically in such a way as also to affect their societal position. The first case study takes us to Antioch in the fourth century C.E. Here the local church authorities systematically appropriated the Jewish literary tradition about the Maccabees, then developed the liturgical means to turn these traditions into a cult—the veneration of the bones of the martyrs—and finally appropriated [End Page 332] the synagogue that was associated with their memory, turning it into a church that soon became the center of the cult. Scriptural exegesis was a double-edged sword that could be used both to induce violence and to validate its results ideologically once such violence had taken place, a truly ingenious way of having Jewish heroes further a Christian cause. The next case concerns Constantinople in the year 553. Justinian's Novella 146 heavily intervened in the internal affairs of the Jewish community. Jews were allowed (or rather advised) to read their holy Scriptures in the Greek translation of the Septuagint, to do away with the Mishnah, not to believe in certain doctrines, and stop adhering to a "literal interpretation" of the Hebrew Bible. Rutgers puts forward a new interpretation of this law, arguing that it was promulgated in order to eliminate the Jews' knowledge of Hebrew and consequently their access to the Hebrew Bible: otherwise it remained difficult for Christians to win the exegetical war they had been waging against Jewish contemporaries. With the Mishnah gone, Jewish commentators eliminated, Scriptures read in Greek, and severe penalties instituted, Christians would no longer fear that what went on in the synagogues was beyond their control. Rutgers highlights an additional important point. The Jews mentioned in Justinian's law are not real-life Jews, but rather "hermeneutic Jews" like those we find in the writings of the early Church: people whose life was characterized by means of inferences drawn from scriptural exegesis. Novella 146, therefore, is important in that it attests the extension of the notion of "hermeneutic Jews" from patristic to Roman legal literature, which in turn translated these views into actual policies. The third case study focuses on the background of the synagogue destructions advocated in legal material and carried on physically in different part of the empire in the fifth and sixth centuries. The starting point of this phenomenon is identified by Rutgers with a semantic shift occurring in the ways Christian theologians viewed "the synagogue." While in previous Jewish and non-Jewish sources the term synagogue meant a specific building and/or community, Christian writings, from the second century C.E. onwards, took it to mean, generally, the entire people of Israel. By this expansion, the term came to have a stereotypical and atemporal meaning, whose negative character is exemplified by Augustine's equation of the Jewish synagogue with the Latin congregatio, a gathering of cattle, as opposed to ecclesia, convocatio, a gathering of people—the church. The generalization of the term allowed church leaders to make an additional move: to infuse it with a whole repertoire of generic and often hermeneutically constructed prejudices against the Jews. These negative views show up in all parts of the Roman Empire in commentaries on books of the Hebrew Bible, in sermons, and in letters. The consequences for the Jews were lethal, transforming early Christian communities from passive listeners into active rabble-rousers. The abstracted negative notions of "the synagogue" collided with the ongoing reality of the actual buildings, and thinking was translated into practice. In addition to theologically displacing Judaism, Christians had also to physically replace the Jews. Social psychology confirms: when self-confidence is low, physical proximity in inter-group settings often leads to aggressive boundary maintenance. This...

Introduction to the Special Issue on Jewish Secularism

This special issue provides an opportunity to consider from the perspective of social science the situation of contemporary Jews outside of the framework of religion. In its essence Jewish secularism asks and answers the questions ‘‘Who are the Jews?’’ and ‘‘What are the Jews?’’ without reference to the claims of historic or normative Judaism—the precepts of the Halachah and the authority of the rabbinate. The vast majority of Jews today would refute the early medieval Jewish thinker R. Saadiah Gaon’s theocratic assertion, that the Jewish people was a nation ‘‘... only by virtue of its Torah.’’ In the twenty-first century that phrase does not resonate in either theory or in practice; in the current jargon ‘‘it doesn’t compute.’’ Of course, historically the Jews were a unique collectivity—a people comprising a combination of religion and nation and recognized as such both by themselves and gentiles. This dual system of Jewish identity broke down after the French revolution under the challenge of emancipation in Europe and nationalism in both Europe and the Islamic world. Following emancipation in Western Europe, Jews were convinced to become Frenchman, Germans and Englishmen of the Hebrew or Mosaic persuasion and to slough off their national and ethnic loyalties and particularities. But importantly, in the process most Jews also rejected traditional rabbinical authority in favor of individual autonomy and free thinking. In the period 1870–1914 in the multi-national empires of Central and Eastern Europe, the mass of Jews copied other oppressed minorities and, whether Zionists or Bundists, asserted their identity as a nationality based on the secular principle of a common Hebrew or Yiddish language and volkisch kultur. So by the 1920s across large swathes of Europe—whether under the Soviet constitution, in the successor states under the Minority Treaties of Versailles or even in the newly recognized ‘‘National Home for the Jewish People’’ in Mandatory Palestine—the Jews were

Jesus in the Context of Judaism: Quest, Con-Quest, or Conquest?: Editor's Introduction

Though many articles, reviews, and books are not of one opinion on the life and time of Jesus, there is a general understanding in the dogma of the Church and in the Quests of the Academy that the incarnate Christ of Christian belief lived and died a faithful Jew, and what this says to contemporary Jews and Christians is the focus of this special issue of Shofar .

"Gäste, die bleiben": Vladimir Solov′ev, die Juden und die Deutschen , and: Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov (review)

Reviewed by: "Gäste, die bleiben": Vladimir Solov′ev, die Juden und die Deutschen, and: Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov Catherine Evtuhov Dmitrij Belkin, "Gäste, die bleiben": Vladimir Solov′ev, die Juden und die Deutschen ["Guests Who Stay": Vladimir Solov′ev, the Jews, and the Germans]. 424 pp. Hamburg: EVA Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2008. ISBN 3865726240. €38.00. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov. 320 pp., illus. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. ISBN-13 978-0801447297, $55.00 (cloth); 978-0801474798, $21.95 (paper). The literature on Vladimir Solov′ev has experienced a quiet explosion over the past 20 years, beginning with the "revival of forgotten names" (vozvrashchenie zabytykh imen) of the perestroika years and continuing with a plethora of new publications and studies. Among the most noteworthy have been, in the early years, A. F. Losev and A. V. Gulyga's green two-volume late Soviet edition of selected writings (1988), followed by the wonderful Moscow re-edition of S. M. Luk′ianov's biography, complete with a third volume reconstructed from the author's notes. Manon de Courten wrote a significant study of Solov′ev's social philosophy and view of history, and a substantial edited volume, Solov′ev as Reconciler and Polemicist, included a variety of articles reevaluating Solov′ev and proposing a "deconstruction and normalization" of Solov′ev's thought. The Solov′ev Society based at Nijmegen—the soil that partially nourished the above two books—has provided a fertile milieu for discussion of Solov′ev; in addition, at least four major studies have been published in Poland and a Solov′ev Society founded in Granada, Spain.1 Many of these writers and researchers have doubtless been [End Page 193] inspired by what Randall Poole called, in a recent review, "the greatness of Vladimir Solov′ev."2 The two books under review here make a significant and original contribution to this burgeoning scholarship. It is perhaps an indication of the growing maturity of the field that they do so in entirely different ways. It makes sense, then, to examine each work separately, before drawing any more general conclusions. Dmitrij Belkin's "Guests Who Stay" originated partly as a dissertation at the University of Tübingen, and partly as a series of articles on various aspects of the "Jewish question" in relation to Solov′ev. The author tells us explicitly at the outset that he intends neither to provide a new biography of Solov′ev nor to undertake a full analysis of his ideas; nor, indeed, to investigate the reception of these ideas. Rather, he is interested in Solov′ev's status vis-à-vis the concept "guest": Belkin shows us Solov′ev's remarkable presence in the writings and musings of both contemporary and subsequent Jewish and German intellectuals, whether as a "host" or as a visitor. How, in other words, did Solov′ev appear in the context of two cultures that were not his own? Belkin's book is virtually perfect in its dialectical structure. Part 1, "Host: The ‘Jewish Question' in Solov′ev's Russia," combs through the writings of Solov′ev's Jewish contemporaries in search of Solov′ev's traces. Part 2, "Guest: V. S. Solov′ev's Reception in Germany" (this was the dissertation) performs an equally meticulous investigation of contemporary German sources. A third part, "Teacher and Physician: Philosophy as Pedagogy and Medicine," moves into the interwar years, evoking the world of émigré and German intellectuals and the assimilation of Solov′ev in the middle of the 20th century, including the extraordinarily influential books and seminars of Alexandre Kojève. The dialectical structure holds within each part as well. Belkin's study of Solov′ev and the Jewish question examines, first, the "imaginary Jew," or the image of Jews in 19th-century Russian thought prior to Solov′ev. Here Belkin follows his own schema of Russian philosophy (a not entirely original one) which he sees as beginning with Chaadaev and, curiously, concluding with Solov′ev himself—thus excluding the philosophers of the Silver Age and emigration. Not surprisingly, neither Slavophiles nor conservatives had a good deal to say, in quantitative terms...

The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature (review)

The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature (review)

Augustinus en de Joden: een inleidend overzicht

The article explores how Augustine of Hippo (354-430) deals with the Jews and Judaism. First it investigates the occurrence and meaning of the word �Iudaeus� in Augustine�s works. It turns out that Augustine, unlike many a predecessor, does not make a sharp distinction between �Hebrew�, �Israelite�, and �Jew�. Mainly on the basis of The City of God the role of the Jews in history is discussed. According to Augustine, all true believers (even those living before the time of Jesus) are �Christ believers� and are considered to belong to Christ�s body, the Church. The diaspora of the Jews is evaluated both negatively and positively: negatively as a consequence of �their putting Christ to death�; positively since through the dispersion of the Jews their Scriptures have been dispersed as well and so provide �testimony to the truth taught by the Church�. The so-called �mark of Cain� can not be interpreted as a predominantly positive sign: it provides protection indeed, but this divine protection is, once again, �for the benefit of the Church�. Contrary to some current opinion, it is stressed that Augustine knew contemporary Jews in Roman North Africa quite well.

<i>New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora</i> (review)

Jews: End of the Jewish Diaspora, by Caryn Aviv and David Shneer. York: York University Press, 2005. 214pp. $18.95. Buses whisked a group of Jewish college students from Ben Gurion airport to the room where the first Prime Minster of signed the Declaration of Independence in 1948. Welcome Home, the trip leader called out to the disoriented and exhausted participants in a Birthright program. As one of the counselors on this trip several years ago, I looked around to see how the students would respond. Even as a Jew who felt very strongly connected to Israel, I wondered whether the language of reflected my own understanding of the Diaspora-Israel relationship. I expected that the young adults wearing baseball caps and sweatshirts with college logos would find this message of homecoming even more bewildering less than two hours into their first trip to the country. I was reminded of this experience while reading David Shneer and Caryn Aviv's provocative study, Jews: End of the Jewish Diaspora. authors' argument that the State of no longer represents the central address for a new generation of contextualized my own response in the Hall of Independence as part of a larger trend. Contemporary Jews, Shneer and Aviv argue, feel increasingly at home and fully settled all over the world from San Francisco to Moscow. This phenomenon is transforming the role that plays in the construction of personal and communal Jewish identity among this population, whom they label the New Jews. No longer burdened with a sense of inferiority, outside the homeland have created locally nourished expressions of Jewish life and de-centered networks that render the dichotomy between and of questionable descriptive value. Subtitling the book The End of the Jewish Diaspora reflects the authors'conviction that the cultural, religious, and geographic hierarchies encoded within the concepts of Israel andDiaspora belie the experiences of the New Jews. Aviv and Shneer support their bold claims by providing ethnographic reports of thriving Jewish centers. These case studies illuminate overlooked corners of the Jewish world. We tour Crown Heights with the Hasidic Discovery Center, pray with a group of American tourists in neo-Hasidic synagogues in Safed, and visit with the first female rabbi of Russia. One particularly fascinating chapter, Castro, Chelsea, and Tel Aviv, explores how queer create different expressions of Jewish and queer identities in America and Israel. At the same time, queer also maintain global communities that transcend geography. Focusing on this rarely studied community provides an effective lens for clarifying the importance of considering local milieu in the formation of identity, the prevalence of multiple transnational Jewish networks each built around shared interests and concerns, and the give-and-take nature of the dialogue between Israelis and living elsewhere in the world. Other chapters, however, suggest that there remains a significant gap between the authors' ideal typology of New Jews as fully settled in their respective communities and the realities they encountered in their research. For instance, Let My People Stay, the first chapter in the book, sets out to replace perceptions of the Russian Jewish experience as moribund with images of a secure and thriving community which parallels patterns of North American Jewry. Yet the long discussion of the prevalence of antisemitism in Russia, particularly the disturbing popularity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, left me with more, rather than fewer, questions about the long-term viability of Russian Jewish life. …

Las repercusiones de la Guerra Civil española en Palestina: sionistas y comunistas, judíos y árabes

The spanish civil war had aroused a wide reaction in the jewish Yishuv in Palestine. Although right-wing groups showed notable sympathy for Spain's nationalist rebels, public opinion in general was manifestly sympathetic to the republican cause. At the same time, despite various expressions of solidarity with the Republic, almost every grouping the Yishuv , including the various gradations of the zionist left, opposed sending youths from Palestine to join the volunteers of the International Brigades. Those were the days of the rebellion of the Palestinian National Movement and the usual arguments of zionist leaders were that «the Yishuv is fighting for its life no less than Spanish Republic». Torn between their commitment to the international struggle against the fascism and the fight of the working classes on the one hand and their commitment to establish a jewish state in Palestine on the other hand, left-wing zionists gave priority to the jewish national project. Even the communists were not that enthusiastic about sending their militants to fight to Spain. Based on the analysis of the contemporary jewish press, this article portrays the various reactions in Palestine to the civil war.

Towards a New Understanding of Jewish Language in the Twenty‐First Century

AbstractThis article outlines some debates and issues in the field of Jewish linguistics and offers a research agenda for comparative analysis of Jewish languages. This agenda builds on previous research, especially on Yiddish and Judezmo (Judeo‐Spanish), but also incorporates data on the language of contemporary Jews (especially Jewish English), as well as theories and methods from variationist sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Based on a new understanding of Jewish language as a distinctively Jewish repertoire rather than a separate system, this research agenda aims to provide a more nuanced and unified understanding of the phenomenon of Jewish language.

Inventing Jewish Ritual (review)

Inventing Jewish Ritual, by Vanessa Ochs. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2007. 276 pp. $25.00. Commentators of contemporary Jewish life often fall into two categories. Some anxiously describe the Jewish world as dying, teetering on the brink of an assimilation crisis. These Jews see the world as a glass more than half-empty. More optimistic observers see reasons to celebrate and imagine the Jewish world as a glass half-full. In Vanessa Ochs' new book, Inventing Jewish Ritual, that proverbial glass is not just half-full, it's joyously overflowing. The title of this book is somewhat of a misnomer and actually doesn't do it justice. Inventing Jewish Ritual is not just a thought-provoking and accessibly written analysis of the ways in which Jews from every denominational stripe (and beyond) are coming up with new rituals. Vanessa Ochs has also written richly ethnographic accounts of how people imagine new possibilities for living creative and inspired Jewish lives. By providing case studies, sample texts, snippets of email exchanges, fieldnotes, and websites, Ochs offers fascinating descriptions of how contemporary Jews borrow freely from diverse cultural currents, sometimes in extraordinary and surprising ways. The ethnography makes plain her primary argument: that Jews are constantly re-interpreting and expanding what counts as authentically Jewish (whether objects, stories, or practices). In other words, Inventing Jewish Ritual charts how Jews are making American Judaism a more meaningful, relevant, interesting, and compelling place to callhome. Ochs begins her analysis with a personal discussion of how she herself came to ritual innovation, albeit slowly and over a few decades. Initially hesitant and tentative, her first efforts to create new Jewish rituals emerged out her own desire to ritually acknowledge moments in her life and community using tools and concepts from Judaism. Ochs came of age with Jewish feminism, a movement that she credits, along with American democratic do-it-yourself impulses and the havurah movement, as primarily responsible for this extraordinary flowering of new Jewish rituals, practices, and material objects circulating amongst American Jews for the past generation. But the creativity she witnesses is both eclectic and decidedly not denominational. Innovation seems to be emerging from all corners of Jewish life - from Haredi attempts to regulate internet usage through chevrusa- style monitoring of websites to Heeb magazine to new ritualists - people (usually women) who eschew traditional rabbinic training and provide customized lifecycle rituals, often for people estranged and alienated from traditional forms of Jewish communal worship and organizational life. What's also astonishing, but perhaps not surprising, is how quickly new (and seemingly radical) innovative rituals become incorporated into so many people's lives, and take on the patina of tradition. Thanks to the veritable explosion of blogs, listserves, and websites where Jews can post and circulate new rituals and their explanations, the time-frame for adoption has become compressed. In several cases, these new rituals quickly acquire historical narratives, legends, and origin myths that accompany their practice. The most familiar case is the story and now widespread practice of putting an orange on the seder plate at Passover. Here, the various circulating legends provide insight into how new rituals can prompt multiple, and sometimes competing, narrative versions of their origins. Most people mistakenly attribute the orange-seder plate ritual to a fictitious, tense exchange between Susannah Heschel and an irate congregant, who angrily retorted that allowing women up on the bimah is like putting an orange on the seder plate! In fact, the real story is much more radical. …

Maimonides' Confrontation with Mysticism (review)

Reviewed by: Maimonides' Confrontation with Mysticism Aryeh Botwinick Maimonides' Confrontation with Mysticism. By Menachem Kellner. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006. Pp. 364. Hardcover. $49.50. Menachem Kellner's interesting and important book, Maimonides' Confrontation with Mysticism, tries to situate Maimonides in his immediate Jewish environment, which Kellner characterizes as proto-kabbalistic. The dominant strains in the religious beliefs and practices of Maimonides' Jewish contemporaries were essentialist and realist. They invested Halakhah, holiness, the Hebrew language, and Jewish identity itself with palpably divine elements and connections that tore them out of a naturalistic context and reconfigured them on an almost literal level as being saturated with Divinity. Kellner argues that Maimonides' major writings—encompassing both the Mishneh Torah and The Guide of the Perplexed—were undertaken to dispel this faulty understanding of Judaism and to substitute for it a much more nominalistic and naturalistic account of the development and content of Judaism. According to Kellner (here following in the footsteps of Moshe Idel), the irony of Maimonides' project was that his rejection of proto-kabbalism served as a spur to "the younger generation of Maimonides' contemporaries" to create "the historical forms of kabbalism," which in one form or another continue to infiltrate and define the beliefs and practices of ordinary Jews down to the present day. The central texts of the proto-kabbalah were the Sefer Yetsirah and the works that are grouped together under the rubric of the Heikhalot literature. In terms of more immediate predecessors, Judah Halevi's Sefer HaKuzari, with its realist vocabulary for singling out the special character of the Hebrew language and the Jewish people and their relationship to God, also reflects this sort of sensibility. Since religious orthodoxy had not yet been defined at the time that Maimonides was writing—its emergence had to await the hardening of ideological boundaries that were coextensive with the rise of modernity—the vast talmudic lore dealing with demons and angels could be lifted out wholesale as a religious substratum supporting the Jewish religious way of life. A popular mystical outlook rendering God intellectually accessible and emotionally close at hand constitutes the path of least resistance for masses of believers who cherish religion as a refuge from the exercise of a critical and utilitarian intelligence, mapping-out the only route to human salvation. For Kellner, the crucial motivating factor driving Maimonides to do battle against the proto-kabbalism of his day as well as the decisive methodological tool enabling him to do so was his nominalism. He says that "Maimonides combines philosophical nominalism with religious nominalism" (p. 13). Maimonides not only wants to "depopulate the heavens" so that "there is God and nature and nothing else"; he transposes nominalistic modes of understanding from the broad metaphysical domain of denying reality to universals to how he construes the structure of Jewish religion in its more limited, technical regions. Halakhah, for example, does not inventory a preexisting Divine reality. It works rather to construct a particular social reality defined by its legal parameters and norms. Halakhah is much more appropriately [End Page 415] seen as a set of human responses to particular readings of texts both biblical and rabbinic in origin, rather than as a set of divine givens irrevocably fixing the reality of the Jewish community. Kellner's book is extremely valuable in the way that it roots both Maimonides' legal code and his philosophy in the thought-world and social and religious practices of his own time, and dramatizes the ways in which some of his most characteristic formulations function as critical responses to what prevailed in his own culture and environment. In doing this, Kellner has, with very telling effect, transposed to Jewish textual materials the historical methodology that Quentin Skinner and J.G.A. Pocock have applied with successful results to the texts of Western political theory. However, I believe that there is another way of telling Idel's and Kellner's story that places the emergence of Kabbalah soon after the circulation of Maimonides' key texts in a different light. In this version, Kabbalah doesn't spell the renewed triumph of popular realist religiosity over elitist, more rational, more abstract religion. From the perspective...

The New Iconography of Christ and the Changes in Depiction of the Jews in High and Late Middle Ages

Major changes in the Christian piety of High Middle Ages are not reflected only in the humanizing tendencies in the representation of the Saviour Jesus Christ, rendered as Man of Sorrows or Ecce Homo, but directly or indirectly influenced a wide range of new iconographic subjects. One of the specific issues within the context of great number of changes that actually shook the whole Europe certainly is the relation to the mother religion – Judaism and its living representatives – contemporary Jews. The article sets out the inversely proportioned relation between the two topics: with the humanization of Jesus Christ rises the estrangement from the Jews.

It'S In My Genes: Biological Discourse and Essentialist Views of Identity among Contemporary American Jews

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, an era when immigrant groups were seen as divisible into races with distinct physical and mental traits, American Jews thought of themselves as a race. In the post-Holocaust era, however, racial language was eschewed, and American Jews instead adapted terms such as “community” and “ethnicity.” Our research on unsynagogued Jews and adult children of Jewish intermarriage, however, revealed that many contemporary Jews actually continue to employ an essentialist understanding of Jewishness that emphasizes the biological, genetic basis of their identities. Their reliance on ascribed characteristics as central to their identities in an era when the idea of a Jewish race has been debunked, and when most scholars eschew racial categorizations, is surprising and constitutes the analytic focus of this article.

Meetings of Past and Present: The Installations of Multimedia Artists Hana Iverson and Melissa Shiff

Recent site-specific installations incorporating video and digital media by artists Hana Iverson and Melissa Shiff provocatively engage women's roles in relation to Jewish history and traditions, cultural and religious. Utilizing many of the strategies that emerged in installation and performance art during the early 1960s and mid-1970s, these artists create works that are also broadly reflective of the displacements experienced by contemporary Jews. In View from the Balcony (2000), Iverson performs a kind of hybrid spiritual-secular healing ritual in and on the traditional sacred space of the Eldridge Street Synagogue on New York's Lower East Side. The work—a multi-media project about memory—responds to the wounds suffered during the historical displacements experienced by immigrant Jews, as they are embodied by one of that community's most important surviving communal buildings. In Postmodern Jewish Wedding (2006), a video based on the performance Melissa Shiff created around her own wedding in Toronto in 2003, the artist reinvents ritual; in ARK (2006), a video sculpture commissioned by the Jewish Museum in Prague, she creates a new form of display for the archive in a narrative work through which objects recount their own history and resonate both in a local Jewish communal context and in a wider Czech national and political one. Iverson's and Shiff's works have in common the idea of rescuing and restoring the empowering and positive aspects of women's difference as expressed in traditional Jewish ritual. In addition, their interests in the relationship of place to cultural memory, and their engagement with new media to evoke the past in light of the present suggest common cause in the aesthetic re-visioning of contemporary Jewish life.