Jewish Community Leaders Research Articles

The Israelite Community Council of Sidon 1914–1948: Between the Yishuv and Grand Liban

Abstract The history of the Jews of Lebanon is often overlooked—they are considered victims of the Arab–Israeli conflict, or within the context of the wider Levantine Jewish community. Sidon, a port city of biblical origins, is a distinct case study through which to examine the interplay between Zionism and Lebanese nationalism because of Sidon’s historical background, geographic proximity to Palestine, and subordinate position to the Beiruti Jewish community. I show how the Israelite Community Council operated within a contested national-ethnic sphere, where it effectively straddled the Zionism promoted by members of the Yishuv and the emerging Lebanese nationalism of the newly established Grand Liban. Initially seeing itself as part of the Land of Israel/Eretz Israel, the Jewish community of Sidon asserted itself within the multiconfessional Lebanese state. Sitting at the crossroads of competing ethnonational currents, Sidon’s Jewish community leaders espoused a fluid, local-territorial-based identity, one that was at ease both with Jewish and Lebanese nationalism. We expand our understanding of this now dispersed community through an examination of the evolution of national borders, intercommunal relationships, and engagement with the Yishuv.

Global Transit, Imperial Performativity, and Survival: European Jewish Refugees in the Philippines Under US Tutelage and Japanese Occupation, 1937–1946

Abstract By late 1941, some 1,300 Jews had escaped from National Socialist-controlled Europe to the Philippines. This essay problematizes the existing historiography on this rescue by going beyond examinations of its mechanisms and the politics of memory. Instead, it introduces a rereading of the refugees’ struggles by focusing on their continued being-in-transit and mandated imperial performativity, which allows for analysing transnational spaces shaped by their seemingly mundane everyday practices, from walking to cooking. During the early years, American, Filipino, and Jewish community leaders expected the performance of imperial norms and policed interactions between the refugees and native Filipinos. Some of the refugees succeeded. Some even managed to open shops. Others failed or rebelled and soon found themselves in peril. The late 1941 invasion by Japanese forces subjected Philippine society to new racial hierarchies. Jewish refugees, suspected of collaborating with the enemy, had to engage in different imperial performances in order to survive. By late 1946, many Jewish survivors had managed to leave, mostly to the United States, where they encountered new challenging power asymmetries of a different kind.

Moroccan Jewish shoemaking under European colonialism (1912-39)

This article presents the micro-history of Jewish shoemakers in urban and rural Morocco under the French Protectorate. Whereas in pre-1912 Morocco Jewish shoemakers were an active element within the spaces of the sūq , in post-1912 Morocco the traditional arrangements which enabled this integration were challenged by both the indigenous societies (the Muslim and Jewish populations) and the French local government. The struggle of the Jewish shoemakers to preserve their livelihood in the notoriously difficult times of European colonialism after 1912 involved a constant dialogue with (1) Jewish community leaders and Jewish entrepreneurs, (2) Muslim craftsmen and customers, (3) the French Protectorate government. This widespread discourse fluctuated between conflict and harmony, expressing the relative power of the Jewish shoemakers, which was a product of economic, cultural and political realities.

Counting on Whiteness: Religion, race, ethnicity, and the politics of Jewish demography

AbstractAmerican Jews have long been an anomaly for scholars concerned with understanding how they fit into extant social scientific or historical categories. Sometimes they seem best described as an ethnic group, other times as a religious one. This ambiguity has also vexed Jewish communal leaders whose desire to comprehend their communities has largely been underwritten by their intention to protect it. This intersection of sociological methods and schema and Jewish communal concerns has resulted in decisive omissions regarding how best to account for the racial and ethnic diversity of American Jews. An analysis of survey instruments used in 175 American Jewish population studies and community portraits conducted since 1970 reveals a focus on questions of religious practice and an avoidance of those about race and ethnicity, resulting in a “religio‐racial formation” of American Jews as White. This approach to studying American Jewish life has marginalized or excluded non‐White Jews while ensuring ongoing Jewish communal access to Whiteness without having to claim it explicitly.

Religious leaders’ trust in mental health professionals

ABSTRACT Religious leaders are often the first recourse for people facing mental health challenges. Efforts have been made to understand faith leaders’ mental health literacy, but little is known about the extent to which faith leaders trust mental health professionals, which likely influences their referral practices. To address this gap, this paper examines faith leaders’ perceptions of mental health professionals using data from interviews with leaders of Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and Sikh communities in Texas and the mid-Atlantic region conducted between 2017 and 2019 (n = 67). Analysis shows that when asked about the extent to which they would trust their members to the care of mental health professionals, faith leaders adopt one of four orientations (1) Unqualified trust; (2) Conditional trust; (3) Distrust and (4) Dismissal. The paper elaborates on each of these four orientations and leaders’ rationales for them, followed by implications for faith leaders and mental health professionals.

Religion Data from Australia's 2016 Census: The Case of Judaism with Broader Implications for Comparisons with Earlier Census Results

AbstractThe number of people reporting “Judaism” in Australia's 2016 Census was 6.5 percent lower than the previous census in 2011. Following a long period of growth, this Jewish population contraction represented an unprecedented turnaround in Jewish demographic fortunes, of concern to Jewish community leaders and service providers alike. However, a detailed examination of multiple data sources indicates this conclusion is incorrect. Rather, the size of Australia's Jewish population remained relatively stable over this period and the apparent contraction can be attributed to changes in the census’ religion question and highly publicized concerns about data privacy in the run‐up to the troubled 2016 Census, culminating in attempted sabotage of the online instrument. These findings may have wider implications for the comparison of 2016 Census data on religion with earlier census data relating to other groups including “No religion.”

Jewish Ethics and Leadership: Four Perspectives

Abstract These reflections on the ethics of Jewish communal leadership unite a scholarly examination with three personal narratives from the field. Anchoring the discussion is an argument for leadership grounded in four core virtues: anavah (humility), kavod (respect), yosher (integrity), and spiritual orientation. Three Jewish communal leaders highlight ethical quandaries and imperatives they confront in their work. One calls for the cultivation of moral courage. The others explore the tension between personal identity and public representation and the ethical imperative for the Jewish community to confront gender bias and racism.

Reflections on David A. Teutsch's Oeuvre

It is an honor to be here today to celebrate my colleague and friend David Teutsch. I have been asked to begin this opening session by talking “briefly” about David's work, in particular his contributions to the field of Jewish ethics. On its face, that is an impossible assignment, for there is truly no way to do justice to the merits and impact of David's work briefly. And yet, I know that if David were to have his way we would skip right over this tribute and go straight to learning from our speakers. So, in an effort to find a Maimonidean middle path that accommodates both David's modesty and the wishes of the organizers of this conference, I will offer just a few comments about the work that has informed and inspired so many of us before I begin my remarks on Jewish leadership.David's contributions to the field of Jewish ethics are truly extraordinary. The three-volume Guide to Jewish Practice, of which David is the main author and overall editor, is a monumental achievement, unprecedented in its scope outside the Orthodox world. I know of no other attempt by any contemporary Jewish ethicist to present a comprehensive guide to religious and ethical practice. This alone would justify David's position as one of the most important Jewish religious thinkers of our time. But David's achievement is not only in the breadth of the subjects he has addressed but in the way he has done so. His work draws extensively on classical Jewish views but is written very self-consciously for Jews living in a pluralistic, post-halakhic world. Recognizing that our values are shaped by Western culture and democratic institutions, as well as classical Jewish sources and practices, the Guide to Jewish Practice invites its readers to deepen their understanding of traditional perspectives and to creatively build upon that tradition. That creativity and pluralism is evident throughout these volumes, where David's text is supplemented by the comments of dozens of other rabbis and scholars at the bottom of each page.David's work is also distinguished by his consistent attention to methods of Jewish decision-making, what we in the field would call “meta-ethics.” He has worked within a framework known as values-based decision-making, and one of his main contributions to the field has been his exploration of precisely how facts, values, beliefs, and historical context all have their place in reaching a well-constructed Jewish moral position. David has challenged everyone in the field to put their cards on the table, as it were, explaining just how they have arrived at the moral positions they have. In this way, David's work always offers us more than just a thoughtful and creative approach to a Jewish moral issue; it challenges us to think more deeply and justify our moral positions more carefully than we might otherwise.In addition to his contributions to Jewish ethics and practice, of course, David has been a leader in creating Reconstructionist liturgy, especially as editor of the Kol Haneshamah prayer books. Here again David has led the way in revitalizing classical Jewish prayers in an idiom that resonates with contemporary Jews—egalitarian, spiritual, and poetic. He has also, of course, devoted enormous energy to the work of synagogue revitalization and leadership development, work that has benefited Jewish communities across the country. His book Making a Difference: A Guide to Jewish Leadership and Not-for-Profit Management contains a wealth of practical wisdom that reflects the expertise he acquired through his doctoral work at Wharton as well as a lifetime of experience as a rabbi and as president of RRC. It should be required reading for all Jewish communal leaders and those who aspire to such positions.I could go on, but I think the message is clear: David's work—in ethics, in liturgy, in communal organization and leadership—has been groundbreaking and inspirational, not only within Reconstructionist circles but throughout the non-Orthodox world. His contributions in each of these domains has reflected his unique combination of deep learning and equally deep human experience and practical wisdom. Speaking for myself, but I know also for thousands of others, I have learned a great deal from every conversation with David and each encounter with his work. It is, indeed, a privilege to be here today to honor him—as teacher and colleague and friend—and to do so by engaging with some of the issues that have mattered most to him throughout his distinguished career. Yishar kokhakha, David—may you continue to go from strength to strength.

Jewish Ethics and Leadership

Abstract These reflections on the ethics of Jewish communal leadership unite a scholarly examination with three personal narratives from the field. Anchoring the discussion is an argument for leadership grounded in four core virtues: anavah (humility), kavod (respect), yosher (integrity), and spiritual orientation. Three Jewish communal leaders highlight ethical quandaries and imperatives they confront in their work. One calls for the cultivation of moral courage. The others explore the tension between personal identity and public representation and the ethical imperative for the Jewish community to confront gender bias and racism.

Revisiting the Qur’anic aḥbār in Historical Context

The precise identity of the Qur'anic aḥbār, some kind of Jewish communal leaders, has long been debated. This study presents a fresh examination of this term in its Qur'anic context, alongside its cognates in pre-Qur'anic Jewish texts, and engages seriously with both traditional and academic scholarship of the Qur'an.

Colonial Justice and the Jews of Venetian Crete. By Rena N. Lauer (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) 292 pp. $69.95

<i>Colonial Justice and the Jews of Venetian Crete</i>. By Rena N. Lauer (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) 292 pp. $69.95

“Elhanan, Son of Shemariah”: The Old Series and the Cairo Geniza

The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2020) Copyright © 2020 Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. T H E J E W I S H Q U A R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 110, No. 4 (Fall 2020) 593–598 “Elhanan, Son of Shemariah”: The Old Series and the Cairo Geniza EVE KRAKOWSKI THE CAIRO GE N IZ A’S S C HOLA RLY origin story is well known. The most familiar version stars Solomon Schechter. In 1896 he discovered a page from the long-­ lost Hebrew version of Ben Sira, set sail for Cairo, emptied the repository from whence the page had come—­ a chamber in the Ben Ezra synagogue in which Jews had deposited their worn-­ out manuscripts for nearly a millennium—­ and removed its contents to Cambridge University , where they swiftly revolutionized the history of Judaism. Of course, this is not ­ really the ­ whole story. To begin with, the chamber Schechter visited was not actually the Ben Ezra’s medieval geniza but a recent reconstruction, built ­ after the synagogue had been demolished in the late 1880s and its manuscripts removed (many of them to be sold off by dealers, which is how the Ben Sira fragment had made it to Cambridge in the first place). Schechter’s famous pile of “disjecta membra” ­ were the remnants, reduced and extensively damaged during this transition, that had been returned to the new synagogue building sometime ­ after it went up in 1892—­ and that may have been mixed in with other fragments first deposited elsewhere.1 Moreover, Schechter was hardly the only scholar to seek the chamber out, only the most successful. Stefan Reif’s A Jewish Archive in Old Cairo, Peter Cole and Adina Hoffman’s Sacred Trash, and several impor­ tant recent studies by Rebecca Jefferson have collectively brought the above facts to light, along with a phenomenally engaging cast of characters who preceded, collaborated with, and fought against Schechter in tracking down and deciphering Geniza manuscripts.2 1. “Disjecta membra”: Solomon Schechter, “A Hoard of Hebrew Manuscripts,” The Times, August 3, 1897. 2. Stefan Reif, A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo: The History of Cambridge University’s Genizah Collection (Richmond, UK, 2000); Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (New York, 2011); Rebecca Jefferson , “‘What Cannot Often Be Obtainable’: The Revd Greville John Chester 594 JQR 110.4 (2020) Yet scrolling through the earliest volumes of the Jewish Quarterly Review in preparation for this forum, it was still startling to see a short “Note” by Adolf Neubauer in the October 1893 issue (three years before Schechter laid eyes on his famous fragment of Ben Sira!) titled “Elhanan, Son of Shemariah ben Elhanan.”3 Elḥanan b. Shemarya is thoroughly familiar to all Geniza scholars as a Jewish communal leader in Fustat who appears repeatedly in the early eleventh-­ century Geniza rec­ ord. As for Neubauer, he was a librarian and eventually a reader in rabbinics at Oxford, vividly remembered in Sacred Trash as the Geniza’s main “discoverer” manqué.4 Between 1889 and 1892 he helped Oxford’s Bodleian Library purchase from the Anglican priest and collector Greville Chester numerous lots of Hebrew manuscripts taken from the Ben Ezra synagogue, then in the midst of reconstruction.5 As ­ these clues might suggest, Neubauer’s note turned out to be Geniza-­ centric. In fact it is, so far as I can tell, the first scholarly edition of a Geniza fragment: two sheets that Chester had sold the Bodleian the previous winter (during the 1891–92 season), bearing a partial copy of a letter sent by Sherira b. Ḥananya (gaon of the Iraqi yeshiva of Pumbedita in the late tenth ­ century) to his loyalist Avraham b. Sahlān in Egypt, which praises both Elḥanan and his ­ father Shemarya.6 It is easy to understand why this text had caught Neubauer’s eye. He had recently published a collection of medieval Jewish chronicles, in which Shemarya featured prominently as one of the protagonists of the and the Bodleian Genizah Collection,” Journal of the History of Collections 31.2 (2019): 271–89...

Misogyny and the Continuity Crisis: Is Social Science Research Responsible?

Misogyny and the Continuity Crisis:Is Social Science Research Responsible? Leonard Saxe (bio) This response to Berman, Rosenblatt, and Stahl's indictment of social science and its role in promoting misogyny in the US Jewish community is being written in the midst of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. Covid-19 has already resulted in more than 180,000 deaths worldwide, and most of us are self-isolating to mitigate propagation of the virus.1 Members of the Jewish community have not been spared the consequences of the pandemic, as it has disrupted not only our health, but also our personal, professional, and religious lives. For many, Passover was spent separated from loved ones, as the apex of the pandemic upended the family gatherings that normally pass on the formative story of Judaism to the next generation. I situate my comments within the Covid-19 crisis because the underlying theme of the authors' critique is that the demographic study of Jewish continuity—essentially the study of families—is inherently misogynistic. Their thesis is that social scientists created "a continuity crisis paradigm" that acts to subjugate women's agency. By extension, the construct, adopted by Jewish communal leaders, helps to explain why exploitation and sexual harassment has been tolerated in the Jewish community. Berman, Rosenblatt, and Stahl's provocative argument conflates a number of issues. One is the focus of the scholarship of Jewish life on families and, in particular, marriage. A second is the application of sociodemographic methods to the study of Jewish life. A third concerns the inferences and policy conclusions drawn from that research. The linkage between these elements is complex, far more so than the authors suggest. In particular, their assessment rests on a narrow perspective on the production of social scientific knowledge. As a postpositivist, who nevertheless values empirical research, my comments focus on a set of alternative explanations for the phenomena described by the authors. Although I reject the authors' argument that a particular way of studying Jewish continuity promotes misogyny, I concur with their [End Page 221] contention that individual behavior—in this case, sexual harassment—needs to be understood in a larger context. Attributing responsibility solely to individuals is a "fundamental attribution error"2 and deflects attention from collective responsibility. If we are to redress gender-based harassment, we must understand the underlying attitudes and policies that promote or tolerate such behavior. As social scientists, we have an obligation to explore how and whether our discipline contributes to an inequitable environment, Berman, Rosenblatt, and Stahl take issue with quantitative sociodemographic studies in particular and their role in promoting the perception of a continuity crisis. To place this work in context, the discussion below considers aspects of the authors' argument separately. In part, I assess the role of research in shaping discourse in the Jewish community. I suggest improvements in research design, analysis, and interpretation so that the diversity of the Jewish experience can be better understood. IS MARRIAGE AND FAMILY RESEARCH INHERENTLY PROBLEMATIC? Given Judaism's focus on childbearing and child-rearing, it is difficult to accept the premise that the social scientific study of marriage and family is not a legitimate focus of research on the Jewish community.3 To note the obvious, family issues frame Judaism's most sacred text. From the origin story of Adam and Eve, to the story of Abraham, Sarah and their progeny, to the journey of the tribes of Israel who fled from Egypt, the Biblical narrative features sibling rivalry, spousal jealousy, deceit, and a host of human failings. Intimate relationships are at the foreground of Jewish history and culture. Demography is also part of the Jewish story. Censuses of the Jewish people occurred even as they wandered in the desert. Described in the kind of detail that would be worthy of a dissertator's methodology section, the census is a kind of stratified sample (by family) of the tribes. A longstanding focus of commentary has concerned who and what might have been missed in the accounting, but notably other debates have focused on the censuses' accuracy.4 Even today, when the Torah portion [End Page 222] (B'midbar) describing the census is recited, we also read...

American Christians and the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry: A Call to Conscience by Fred A. Lazin

Reviewed by: American Christians and the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry: A Call to Conscience by Fred A. Lazin Marjorie N. Feld (bio) American Christians and the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry: A Call to Conscience. By Fred A. Lazin. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019. x + 251 pp. For many affiliated American Jews of my generation, the cause of Soviet Jewry left a significant mark on our youth. At my bat mitzvah, I was "twinned" with a girl in the Soviet Union who, I was told, could not practice her religion publicly. Three years later, in 1987, I joined 250,000 others at my first demonstration in Washington, DC: The March to Free Soviet Jewry. My own hazy memories of these events match the dominant historiographical outlines of the movement and its white, Ashkenazic Jewish leadership. In his new book American Christians and the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry, Fred A. Lazin offers a competing or, perhaps, complementary, portrait: a history of the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry (the "Task Force"), a group dedicated to Soviet Jewry and headed by Sister Ann Gillen of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus. Lazin's study illuminates the politics of interreligious cooperation and activism while revising our understanding of the Soviet Jewry movement. Lazin sets the stage for the 1972 founding of the Task Force by beginning with the "constructive consequences" of Vatican II, in particular the 1965 Nostra Aetate document that drastically altered relationships between Catholics and Jews. In the years following, nuns began to address broader social problems outside of the Catholic Church, just as American Jewish leaders sought support from Christians for the cause of Soviet Jewry. First sponsored by the National Catholic Council for Interracial Justice (NCCIJ) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Task Force gradually fell under AJC leadership with the goal "that it would serve as the national organization through which concerned Christians may act on behalf of the Soviet Jewish community" (38). Grounded in prodigious archival research, this book chronicles, in intricate detail, the multifaceted work undertaken by Sister Gillen across the United States and in the Soviet Union, at United Nations conferences, and at the World Conferences for Soviet Jewry. Under the careful and strict supervision of the AJC, and using the language of human and civil rights, Sister Gillen drew from her own Christian networks in assembling conferences, vigils, meetings, and demonstrations for Soviet Jewry. She contributed to a campaign that mobilized millions of people, Jewish and Christian, world leaders and laypeople alike, and offered a unifying cause for American Jews in the final years of the Cold War. Lazin writes that some Jewish communal leaders spoke of "spiritual genocide" and resisted efforts to broaden the campaign to work for other [End Page 641] (Christian) groups denied religious expression in the Soviet Union (70). He suggests that Israeli leaders led or reinforced this resistance because of their own nation's investment in Soviet Jewry's freedom to emigrate. Indeed, in the very first sentence of the book, Lazin notes that "Israeli leaders immediately faced an existential threat to the new Jewish State's existence—a population insufficient to ensure both the survival of the State and its Jewish majority" (1). The Task Force, he writes, knowingly or unknowingly served this purpose as it drew Christian allies to the cause of Soviet Jewry and of the free emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel. Even Sister Gillen, he tells us, "may or may not have been aware of the role of the [Israeli] Liaison Bureau"—a "clandestine operation focused on Soviet Jewry in the office of the Israeli prime minister"—in the work of the Task Force's campaigns (65, 64). Perhaps tied to the directives of Israeli leadership and to new geopolitical contexts, the tension over advocating for other religious groups in the Soviet Union intensified in the late 1970s. In response, Sister Gillen, joined by AJC leaders, set up a National Interreligious Task Force on Human Rights, which "shifted the focus of advocacy to one of universal human rights" (145). In these years, Sister Gillen allied with Catholics and evangelical Protestants to draw attention to...

Queer Healing: AIDS, Gay Synagogues, Lesbian Feminists, and the Origins of the Jewish Healing Movement

Queer Healing:AIDS, Gay Synagogues, Lesbian Feminists, and the Origins of the Jewish Healing Movement Gregg Drinkwater (bio) In September 1987, Paul Cowan, the celebrated Village Voice writer, memoirist, and activist, was diagnosed with leukemia.1 He died in September 1988, days after turning forty-eight.2 After his death, Cowan's wife, Rachel, then a rabbinical student at the New York campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the Reform movement's seminary, gathered with friends and colleagues around her dining room table. They lamented that there were few Jewish spiritual care resources available for those facing serious illness and their families.3 At the time, there were well-known Christian models of spiritual healing services and other non-Jewish, spiritually-based healing rituals. But the relevant Jewish communal resources were limited to Jewish hospital chaplains, a few Jewish hospices, rabbinic visits for seriously ill congregants, and the traditional practices of bikur holim (visiting the sick) and communal prayers for the ill.4 Rachel Cowan and this group of Jewish feminists who had been gathering at her home recognized a widespread hunger for Jewish communal resources devoted to spiritual and physical healing, especially outside of medical contexts. Cowan and her circle identified this spiritual need at the very moment that gay and lesbian Jewish communal leaders in California were themselves developing new rituals and language to support spiritual healing in a community ravaged by the AIDS crisis.5 Unbeknownst to [End Page 605] Cowan and her friends, in Los Angeles in October 1987, Debbie Fried-man and Rabbi Drorah Setel, two feminist innovators deeply connected to Judaism's Reform Movement (and then romantic partners), revised one of the core Jewish prayers for ill people—the Mi Shebeirach ("The One Who Blesses") prayer for healing. At the time, the prayer was rarely used in Reform communities. These two women, both then immersed in the AIDS crisis and the gay and lesbian Jewish community, re-wrote the traditional Mi Shebeirach as an egalitarian, empowering, and spiritually contemplative song for use in communal settings. And just five months before Paul Cowan's death, Yoel Kahn, a young gay rabbi working at Congregation Sha'ar Zahav—a gay and lesbian synagogue nearly 3,000 miles away in San Francisco then being decimated by AIDS—had created a model Jewish healing service.6 Indeed, Jewish healing services based on Kahn's model, and this new Mi Shebeirach prayer for healing, both coming out of lesbian and gay contexts, would transform not only the nature of personal prayer, but also the very visibility of illness, spiritual healing, and the body in liberal Jewish communities. Within overlapping feminist and gay and lesbian Jewish communities on either side of the country, mourning, loss, and gay communal solidarity set the stage for the elaboration of new forms of Jewish healing rituals. Gay, lesbian, and feminist Jews in California met the AIDS crisis with new forms of prayer and ritual, while in New York, the newly ordained rabbis Rachel Cowan and Nancy Flam, along with Rabbi Susan Freeman, the feminist activist and journalist Ellen Hermanson, and the novelist Nessa Rapoport continued their conversations around Cowan's dining room table.7 These women envisioned new Jewish spiritual support resources for the ill; along with trainings for clergy, social workers, and medical professionals. They also imagined advocating for research into health and spiritual healing and developing new liturgy and rituals centered on the spiritual needs of the ill, their loved ones, and their caregivers in a Jewish context. Out of these conversations, the framework for what would later become the National Center for Jewish Healing (NCJH) emerged. By the mid-1990s, dozens of newspapers and magazines profiled the national Jewish healing movement that Cowan, Flam, Freeman, Hermanson, and Rapoport had sparked.8 This high-profile media coverage and word of mouth helped move the healing movement into the [End Page 606] mainstream of Jewish life.9 By 1995, the NCJH had trained hundreds of rabbis and other Jewish leaders on their innovative rituals, liturgy, and program ideas.10 These included the new Mi Shebeirach song and a complete healing service modified by Nancy Flam and others but based on...

The Pandemic, Antisemitism, and the Lachrymose Conception of Jewish History

The Pandemic, Antisemitism, and the Lachrymose Conception of Jewish History Magda Teter (bio) On April 18, 2020 a protest against lockdowns enacted to stop the spread of COVID-19 took place at the Ohio Statehouse. 1 The protestors waved Trump banners and yellow Tea Party "Don't Tread on Me" flags, and they held signs reading "Open Ohio" or "Open My County." Among protesters were some with antisemitic signs. Some spotted signs depicting a blue rat with a star of David and a caption "The Real Plague." Soon, conspiracies around George Soros, the Hungarian-born Jewish American philanthropist and a Holocaust survivor, began to circulate in far-right circles. 2 This has come on the heels of the upsurge of antisemitic attacks that have intensified in the US since 2016, leading to responses in op-eds, blog posts, and reports that almost invariably make sweeping statements about Jewish history and antisemitism. "COVID-19, like any crisis in history since the inception of the Jewish people, will ignite a wave of antisemitism," wrote Michael Laitman on the online platform JewishBoston.com. 3 NPR reported: "American Jews are finding themselves in a historically familiar position: Scapegoated for a plague." 4 "All of this can feel medieval," wrote Aviya Kushner in The Forward. 5 Many of the articles refer to the premodern era, with the Black Death, which peaked in western Europe in 1348–49, and the persecution of Jews that followed repeatedly becoming a focal point of their examples. Aviya Kushner homed in on the word "burning." Brian [End Page 20] Schrauger, in The Jerusalem Post, discussed Jews being "slaughtered," "murdered," "bludgeoned to death, herded into houses to be burned alive en masse, stripped naked and marched to a collective massacre," before asking "Could COVID-19 ignite an outbreak of antisemitism?" 6 Dan Freedman, in Moment Magazine, sought to explain "why Jews were blamed for the Black Death"; doing so, he too repeated the language of persecution by highlighting "episodes of violence," "slaughter," "burning," "torture," and more. 7 Although Freedman did not answer the question asked, the answer seems implicit in the vocabulary he employed. Even before the COVID-19 crisis, recent acts of antisemitic violence, including shootings and stabbings, have prompted widespread responses. In their discussions of the issue, members of the news media and Jewish community leaders alike commonly cite the string of anti-Jewish attacks that have occurred in recent years in the United States—in Pittsburgh, Poway, and Brooklyn. Commentators analyzing the December 2019 Hanukkah attack in Monsey, New York commonly referred back to these and other recent cases of anti-Jewish violence to emphasize the rise of antisemitic violence. 8 A headline to Deborah Lipstadt's piece published in The Atlantic following the Monsey attack declared: "Jews Are Going Underground." 9 The intention of these media articles has been to combat antisemitism by pleading that we learn lessons from the past. Yet, the act of recounting horrifying violence underscores the dangerously narrow context of news about Jews and the limited common vocabulary deployed in such reports about past and contemporary events alike—a vocabulary that has been marked, not without good reasons, by the language of persecution. But the relentless repetition of the language of violence does nothing to explain the cause of such anti-Jewish violence. It only suggests to the public that Jews have always been hated by others, with no alternative offered. Showing that kind of persistent hatred does not answer the "why" and thus does not provide readers with tools to combat this hatred. In fact, it may do the opposite; it may encourage hatred and violence as evidenced by the fact that some of the perpetrators of anti-Jewish attacks today have been known to have Googled questions like, for example, "Why Did Hitler Hate Jews?" 10 The current popular writing about American Jews in the era of the pandemic (and Trump) feels eerily like Leidensgeschichte (the history of suffering), but without the Gelehrtengeschichte (the history of learning) that was equally a hallmark of much nineteenth-century Jewish historiography. [End Page 21] The narrow vocabulary used in public media is not just descriptive. It has a longer and darker history that is...

Farene dui: The separation of the Jewish and Christian universitates in fifteenth-century Apulia

This study aims to make a contribution to the understanding of municipal belonging and Jewish–Christian relations in Renaissance Italy through the analysis of charters granted by the Aragonese kings of Naples to the cities and the Jewish communities of Apulia. During the fifteenth century the Jewish and Christian communities of the Kingdom of Naples were neither administratively nor jurisdictionally independent from one another. It was through political action that the Jewish communities attempted and succeeded in loosening the ties with the municipal communities, accentuating the gap between two religiously distinct groups. This study suggests that the administrative and jurisdictional separation of the Jewish community from the Christian universitas was not sought by municipal governments: it constituted, rather, the ultimate political goal of the Jewish communal leaders.

"Girded for the Superhuman Task": American Jews and the Trope of the Zionist Pioneer, 1925–1956

"Girded for the Superhuman Task":American Jews and the Trope of the Zionist Pioneer, 1925–19561 Mark A. Raider (bio) The America-Israel nexus has long intrigued scholars of the American Jewish experience, modern Jewish history, and American religion. Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Rabb dub Israel "the X-factor in American Jewish existence" and suggest it shapes Jewish life in "fundamental ways … not often fully fathomed, either by American or Israeli Jews."2 Viewed historically, Naomi W. Cohen observes, the trajectory of this phenomenon has been nothing short of meteoric. While Zionism was largely an "in-house affair" up until the Balfour Declaration of 1917, it thereafter emerged in the public square as "an Allied war aim" enmeshed with US domestic politics and foreign policy.3 "The course of Zionism and especially of American Zionism," Cohen concludes, "from then until the establishment of Israel some thirty years later, was significantly shaped by American opinion."4 Jonathan D. Sarna emphasizes the centrality of "Zion of the American Jewish imagination," especially in the first half of the twentieth century, as a reflection of the "yearnings and dreams" of American Jews even as it helped them "to counter the malicious [End Page 303] slurs of their enemies."5 Michael Brown enhances our understanding of the America-Israel "connection" by examining the parade of Zionist luminaries who spent extended time in the United States and played a crucial role cultivating American Jewry's relationship to "the apparently infertile soil of the Yishuv" (pre-state Israeli society).6 Vladimir Jabotinsky, Golda Meir, David Ben-Gurion, and other Palestine emissaries, as he demonstrates, worked assiduously to fashion ties between political Zionism's fledgling institutions and a loose but developing nationwide coalition of American Jewish communal leaders, voluntary organizations, and synagogue movements. Such a transnational web of activity, Michael Berkowitz points out, was consonant with the Western Jewish milieu of the early twentieth century including the American Jewish environment where the Zionist project was "styled increasingly as a rescue mission and object of philanthropy."7 The present study seeks to complement the foregoing discussion by investigating the theme of Zionist heroism, specifically the cultural myth of the haluz (Zionist pioneer) and its dynamic impact on American Jewry's relationship to Zionism and the Yishuv (and later Israel).8 Taking a page from scholars of folklore and semiotics who consider "textual shifts as signs of cultural shifts," American Jewry's romantic perception of haluziyut (Zionist pioneering), it will be argued, offers a useful lens for assessing the evolving cultural-political and transnational matrix of Zionism in the American setting.9 The contours of this [End Page 304] phenomenon came into focus in the decades that spanned the 1920s through the 1950s, a period in modern Jewish history framed by, on the one hand, US restrictions on eastern European Jewish immigration, the Fourth Aliyah (the wave of middle-class Polish Jewish immigration to the Yishuv), and Jewish land acquisition and colonization in Palestine's Jezreel Valley, and, on the other, the rise of the State of Israel and what historian Arthur Goren describes as American Jewry's "golden decade" (1945–1955), during which Zionism and Israel became integral to the "communal consensus."10 Folklore scholar Dan Ben-Amos explains that while forms of popular cultural expression may be "classified" into discrete categories such as "history, tradition, dance, music, games, and tales," they nevertheless possess "symbolic significance reaching far beyond the explicit content of the particular text, melody, or artifact."11 "Legend," Ben-Amos asserts, "often signifies a chronological truth; myth symbolizes a religious truth; and parable implies a moral truth … All these forms are but different phases in the same process."12 In a similar vein, art historian Carol Zemel notes the "cultural space of a minority population" can be "fluid and irregular," defying "a fixed geography," and should be considered "interactively, as cultural life in relationship to—and with—a neighbor, a contiguous but different society."13 The salience of such insights for modern Jewish history is not to be underestimated.14 Indeed, they can be productively applied to unpacking the image of the Jewish hero in the West and, by extension, the trope of the...

Eat, Sing, Love: How Interfaith Families Model Interfaith Engagement

Eat, Sing, Love: How Interfaith Families Model Interfaith Engagement Susan Katz Miller I lift my eyes up, unto the mountains, from where, from where can my help be found? (Psalm 121) Dancing a grapevine step, while singing Psalm 121 set to a minor melody, I was conscious of a pleasant harmonic buzz created by engaging more than one of my senses simultaneously. The circle connected dozens of members of the Interfaith Families Project of Greater Washington DC (IFFP), a community of Jews and Christians celebrating both Judaism and Christianity together. When we reached the line “My help comes from the one, maker of heaven and earth” I looked into the eyes of the random person across from me in the circle, and thought about that person as my source of help. I felt deeply moved by the intensity of this direct gaze, and the pleasure of moving in sync with a chain of people who embodied interfaith life. In that moment, claiming an exclusive label or theology for myself as a Jew or Christian felt entirely beside the point. A growing number of Americans are rebelling against the traditional narrative of lifelong allegiance to a specific religious denomination, movement, community, dogma, or creed. Free to move about the country, free to love across boundaries, they are forming interfaith families, and participating in multiple religious practices as “lived religion.” Rather than attempting to resolve the cognitive dissonance of “competing” religious truth claims, they are content to immerse themselves in the rich sensory experiences of the entire extended family: the sounds, smells, tastes, and imagery. Resisting the false binaries of religion versus culture, belief versus cynicism, intellectual versus corporeal, these families may access spirituality, and even transcendence, through performance of ancestral and contemporary rituals. And increasingly, they resist internalizing the idea that they are transgressors, gate‐crashers, or dabblers. At the same time, they may resist the idea that their hybridity is a disrespectful form of cultural appropriation, because they are growing up in families with historical connections to more than one religious culture. They take pleasure and pride from eating, singing, dancing, and loving in the new liminal spaces they are creating together. Today, at least one quarter of married people in the U.S. say they have a spouse with a different religious (or nonreligious) identity, according to the Pew Research Center. And one in every five people in the U.S. now grows up in an interfaith family. While traditional religious institutions have often warned against forming such families, Pew finds that “Nearly three‐quarters of those raised by parents from different religious backgrounds say their parents disagreed little, if at all, about religion.” In this essay, I explore what I believe is one of the secrets to that harmony: an emphasis on embodiment rather than exposition and explication. In much of the literature on interfaith families, religious institutions (and those scholars they fund) have tended to studiously ignore multiple religious practitioners, at best, and discourage their existence at worst. In part as a result, and because the study of religious complexity in families with multiple religious heritage is relatively new, the terminology remains fluid and contested. In the Jewish world, academics and community leaders still refer to “intermarriage” or possibly “interfaith marriage,” while referring to multiple religious practitioners as “partly Jewish.” The term multiple religious belonging (MRB) came out of Catholic academic theology, with the writings of Catherine Cornille and Peter Phan, and continuing through the work of Paul Knitter. The Protestant world has begun to take an interest more recently, often adopting the terms multiple religious practitioners (MRPs) or multiple religious participation as more appropriate since belonging may be moderated by institutional gatekeepers. In recent years, sociologists, anthropologists, and scholars of religion have explored the reclaiming or creation of other terms including complex religious identity, religious syncretism, bricolage, and hybridity. And in his essential new book When One Religion Isn't Enough: The Lives of Spiritually Fluid People, Christian minister and Buddhist practitioner Duane Bidwell uses the terms religious multiplicity, or spiritual fluidity. Meanwhile, in many societies it is entirely normal and unremarkable to practice more than one religion—as in the intertwined practice of Buddhism and...

"Rosy, White, and Clean Pages of History": Jojo Eskenazi's "Moiz Plays" and the Politics of Contemporary Jewish Theatre in Turkey

"Rosy, White, and Clean Pages of History":Jojo Eskenazi's "Moiz Plays" and the Politics of Contemporary Jewish Theatre in Turkey İlker Hepkaner (bio) Introduction Approximately 18,000 Jews currently live in Turkey, comprising one of the largest Jewish populations living within a Muslim majority society.1 In this community, there are multiple amateur theatre groups, either housed in clubs open only to Jewish community members based in İstanbul or staging their plays under the auspices of the Jewish Community of Turkey (Türkiye Musevi Cemaati)2 and the Chief Rabbinate. Despite its popularity among members of the community, contemporary Jewish theatre in Turkey has received little attention from scholars working on theatre in Turkey or on Jewish identity in theatre in national and transnational contexts. Among the Jewish theatre groups' activities, Jojo Eskenazi's comedic "Moiz plays" stand out for their consistent performance schedule and the support they receive from Turkey's Jewish community leaders and members, particularly for their political messages and community-building function.3 These plays are centered around İstanbullu Manifaturacı Moiz (Moiz the Draper from Istanbul), played by Eskenazi himself, and Moiz's wife Kleret, played by Fani Bonofiyel. Analysis of the texts, recorded performances, playbills, and introductory remarks by the organizers before performances of these plays unravels their wider functionality within the Jewish community and the theatre scene in Turkey.4 Moiz plays staged in the last twenty years crystallize [End Page 323] how Jews of Turkey engage with international Jewish, Turkish-national, and communal identity discourses; partake in the contemporary efforts of preserving Judeo-Spanish through bilingual performances; and contribute to transnational connections among Jews of Turkey in Turkey and Israel.5 When Moiz plays are analyzed in relation to the cultural context in Turkey and not as isolated cultural products only by/about/for the Jewish community in Turkey, the contemporary Jewish amateur theatre proves to be an important part of Turkey's theatre scene, a scene which needs reframing outside mainstream institutions and practices—that is, only consisting of performances in the Turkish language or staged by state institutions. Focusing on Jews' transition from an Ottoman millet (confession-based community) to a modern Turkish minority or their emigration to Europe, the Americas, and Israel, contemporary studies have investigated Jews' self-positioning within the modern Turkish context from a state-minority relations perspective. Jews' cultural production in Turkey has been analyzed only as those of a minority, almost completely isolated from the majority cultural context, not in relation to and as part of the context that is dominated by the Sunni-Turkish majority's cultural conventions.6 Discussing the political repercussions of studying "Arab-Jews," Shohat argues that segregating Middle Eastern Jewish cultures from their local contexts has served Eurocentric and Zionist interpretations of history, especially in the light of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East. By selectively reading Judeo-Muslim histories through a "pogromatic" discourse which only focuses on contentions and not on collaboration between Jews and Muslims, the Euro-Israeli historiography has subsumed the Jewish histories in the Muslim lands to a "universal" Jewish experience defined by the European Jews' history.7 Such discourse rejects "an Arab and Muslim context for Jewish institutions, identities, and histories."8 Instead of these deliberate distortions, Shohat argues for investigating Jewish history and culture in the Middle East in relation to their Muslim majority contexts. Such an approach based on relationality resists glorifying Judeo-Muslim history, which whitewashes Jewish-Muslim relations and is often used for nationalistic interpretations of history.9 Not dismembering Jewish culture and history from its Muslim contexts reveals this community's own positionality in Turkish culture, which needs to be analyzed apart from Eurocentric imaginations or nationalistic impulses projected onto it. [End Page 324] In this light, contemporary Jewish theatre should be considered as part of Türkiye Tiyatrosu (Theatre of Turkey) a theatre scene which includes more than plays and performances staged only for the Turkish-speaking majority. There are multiple examples of "Theatre of Turkey" which are multilingual and multiethnic yet engaged with the mainstream Turkish theatre scene. In the late 2000s, the Istanbul cultural scene witnessed the blooming of theatre companies and performances outside the...