Modern Jews Research Articles

Stressors in the work-family system and negative affect: a comparison between ethnic communities and genders

ABSTRACT The current study examined associations between stressors in the work-family system and negative affect among three ethnic communities in Israeli society. The total sample included 817 participants (65% women) consisting of 269 modern Jews, 147 ultra-Orthodox Jews and 269 Israeli Arabs. Participants completed measures of objective load in the family and work, role conflict, and negative affect. Work-family role conflict emerged as a significant mediator between objective load (experienced at work) and negative affect. Similarities and differences were found across ethnic communities and genders. The association between experiencing role conflict and negative affect is stronger among members of the modern Jewish community than among traditional ones (ultra-Orthodox Jews and Arabs). The research findings present a multifaceted picture regarding the relationship between stressors and their adverse impact on mental well-being across various ethnic communities. While some consistent patterns emerged, indicating a uniform impact of certain stressors, other findings suggest that the association between stress experienced within the family-work system and mental distress is heavily dependent on culture. Professionals are advised to develop culturally sensitive intervention programs that consider specific ethnic community cultural values at workplaces to alleviate tension in the work-family system.

Sociology against Zionism? The Thought of French Jewish Sociologist René Worms on Jews and Judaism at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century

Abstract: Among French Jewish intellectuals who rejected Zionism in the early twentieth century was René Worms, a sociologist who used sociological theories as well as "francojudaïsme," the French-Jewish model of assimilation, to oppose it. In 1920–21, during debates organized by the Société de sociologie de Paris on the future of Palestine and Zionism, Worms used various theories to counter Jewish nationalism. Influenced by biology and race science, he began by denying the existence of a Jewish race, emphasizing the racial heterogeneity of modern Jews. His understanding of the evolution of modern religions toward universalism, influenced by Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim, also discredited Zionism. Finally, his sociology of nationality, interwoven with Ernest Renan's conception of the nation, precluded any national claim to Judaism. This article examines the arguments Worms made and compare them to those of other speakers in debates between sociologists in Paris.

New Science in Old Yiddish: Jewish Vernacular Science and Translation in Early Modern Europe

Abstract: This essay explores the phenomenon of the translation of scientific works from European languages into Yiddish from the early sixteenth century through the late eighteenth century. By following the trajectory of texts and ideas from the non-Jewish realm to the Ashkenazi Jewish vernacular, it draws attention to the ways in which cultural and scientific innovations reached Jewish readers of various classes, spaces, and genders well beyond the narrow elite of rabbinically or university-trained Jews. The essay challenges the notion that there existed in early modern Europe a neat division of labor between Hebrew, the language of the learned elite, and Yiddish, the language of the Jewish masses. It also contributes to recent scholarship calling into question the prominence of the Jewish Enlightenment (the Haskalah) as a harbinger of Ashkenazi interest in non-Jewish knowledge in general, and science in particular. Mapping the hitherto overlooked interactions between Yiddish readers and writers and early modern scientific thought, this essay opens avenues into new research on the complex relationships between the interrelated corpora of early modern Jews and Christians, physicians and rabbis, scholars and laypeople.

Post-Holocaust Culture and Jewish Identity

Post-Holocaust Culture and Jewish Identity Phyllis Lassner (bio) and Victoria Aarons (bio) Titled “Cultural Expressions of Jewish Identities and the Holocaust,” this special issue of The Journal of Jewish Identities explores new directions in scholarly inquiry that emerge when the fields of Holocaust representation and Jewish identities are set in interwoven, critical relationships and in dialogue with each other. Although the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish identities has been an ongoing focus of scholarly investigation and debate, this collection of essays highlights the reflexive, mutually mediated, and interdependent relationship between the two subjects. Despite the manifold differences among evolving Jewish religious and secular denominations and identities, this collection argues that the Holocaust, its collective and historical memory, commemoration, and legacies, has for many Jews, provided a new, questioning, and even disorienting sense of what it means to be Jewish as individuals and as part of a collective identity. Identity, as we will see, is a fluid and in many ways unstable construct informed by geo-political, social, and cultural factors, as well as by the demands and contingencies of individual dispositions and defining interior structures. The Holocaust to a significant extent reshaped and continues to influence Jewish identity. In these essays’ reflexive constructions, we show that traditionally defined, revisionary, and even alienated or ambivalent Jewish identities, provide new perspectives and insights into how the Holocaust, its memory, and legacy might be considered. These complex interrelationships are the subject of the wide range of art and writing that responds to the burgeoning terrors of the pre-Holocaust period, its horrific apocalypse, survival, memory, and commemoration. The scholarly studies in this collection include fragments by those who perished, such as Polish novelist Bruno Schulz, and those who survived, including French writers Lili Berger, Rayzl Zshikhlinski, and Dora Teitelboim. Evolving permutations of Holocaust memory are evinced in the panoply of responses by succeeding generations of artists, filmmakers, and writers. The scholars included in this special issue demonstrate a variety of theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary approaches to the discussion of Jewish identities in relation to the Holocaust. The essays show a rich diversity of genres, writers, artists, and geographies, including France, the United [End Page xi] States, Mexico, Britain, Israel, Hungary, Australia, Poland, and Nigeria, all in an effort to explore different voices and different ways in which identity is understood, constructed, and expressed in response to the events of the Holocaust and their continuing aftermath. The essays address the work of eyewitnesses to the atrocities, as well as second- and third-generation writers, the children and grandchildren of those who experienced the events firsthand and have taken up the memory and legacy of the past. The essays also engage those writers who write from a more distanced perspective in an attempt to wrestle with the defining events of the Holocaust. For example, Nathan Abrams’s research reveals how the acute ambivalence of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick prevented the completion of his film adaptation of Louis Begley’s fictionalized Holocaust memoir. Axel Stähler concludes that Jewish American writers Michael Chabon and Simone Zelitch situate their Jewish identities in reimaginations of the fate of modern Jews. Rebecca Margolis and David Slucki analyze second- and third-generation Australian Jewish writers, focusing on work produced since the turn of the twenty-first century that together “constitute a canon of Australian Jewish writing.” The authors demonstrate that even when there is no personal connection to the Holocaust, artists working in a range of media and aesthetics have felt impelled to respond to the myriad ways in which the destruction of Jews, their communities, and culture have inspired a reexamination of their Jewish identity. In focusing on the interrelated connections among the Holocaust and Jewish identities, these essays examine representations of destroyed, disguised, concealed, and differently expressed Jewish cultures. In turn, our studies show that these individual and collective tragedies and legacies are inflected with dynamic psychological and social influences on developing definitions and protean forms of identity and of the expression of identities. To demonstrate this intricate critical interrelationship, our contributors offer various scholarly approaches that consider fluid and diverse definitions of Jewish identity, including multiple and hybrid denominations, beliefs, observances, and traditions, as well as...

Conversos, Moriscos, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Spain: Some Reflections on Jewish Exceptionalism

Sacrilegious attitudes toward the Eucharistic host are one of the most commonplace accusations leveled against Jews in premodern Europe. Usually treated in Jewish historiography as an expression of anti-Judaism or antisemitism, they are considered a hallmark of Jewish powerlessness and persecution. In medieval and early modern Spain, however, Jews and conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants) were not the only proclaimed enemies of the Eucharist. Reports about avoidance, rejection, criticism, and even ridicule and profanation of the consecrated host were similarly leveled against Muslims and moriscos (Muslim converts to Christianity). This essay seeks to assess the parallels and connections between the two groups through a comparative examination of accusations of sacrilegious behavior towards the host. The first part of the essay analyzes religious art, legal compendia, and inquisitorial trials records from the tribunals of Toledo and Cuenca in order to show some evident homologies between the two groups. The second part of the essay focuses on the analysis of the works of Jaime Bleda and Pedro Aznar y Cardona, two apologists of the expulsion of the moriscos, and draws direct connections between Jewish and morisco sacrilege. By exploring the similarities and differences between accusations against conversos and moriscos, this essay aims to offer a broader reflection on Jewish exceptionalism.

The “Jew,” the Nation and Assimilation: The Old Testament and the Fashioning of the “Other” in German and Dutch Protestant Thought

AbstractThis article discusses a reorientation of supersessionist postures in German and Dutch Protestant reflection on emerging nation states in the nineteenth-century. Historically, Christian thought often othered “the Jew” as the “nascent Christian.” Since the seventeenth-century, Protestant theologians also entertained the possibility of theological othering on the basis of the legalism of the Mosaic covenant, of which ancient biblical Israel and its cultural liturgies were regarded as a token. In the context of the modern nation, German and Dutch Protestant thought entertained this typological othering of biblical nationhood to construct the modern Jew as “Gentile” to the modern nation. As “Gentile,” “the Jew” remains the embodiment of the ultimate other, yet as “nascent Christian,” modern Jews begin to face an unrelenting demand to assimilate. This conundrum contributed to a fundamental tension in the imaginary of the nation, namely between patterns of othering and structures of belonging, echoing far beyond antisemitism, and especially in patterns of othering that are inherent to racism and Islamophobia.

Replies to Commentators on “The Biology of Evil”

Abstract In this article, I reply to commentators Leonard Feldblyum, Robert Holub, and David Owen on my article “The Biology of Evil.” While I concede that Nietzsche often invoked standard degenerationist rhetoric about breeding, I argue that Nietzsche, unlike other degenerationists, never offered any concrete plans for such breeding and was not interested in raising the capacities of average citizens, but rather was concerned with the exceptional few. I argue that these “strokes of luck” do not readily lend themselves to planned breeding programs. I concede that Nietzsche did not favor societies that allowed for the integration of foreign elements, but rather some alternation between regimented hierarchical societies and motley societies. However, against Holub's and Feldblyum's contention that Nietzsche was interested in the alleged Jewish problem of his day, I expand on my claim that, for Nietzsche, the current malaise is more a product of the workings of the ancient than the modern Jews. And against Owen and Holub, I defend the claim that degeneration theory was fundamentally Manichean and that Nietzsche resisted this Manichean tendency.

Rabbis of the (Scientific) Revolution: Revealing the Hidden Corpus of Early Modern Translations Produced by Jewish Religious Thinkers

Abstract This essay discusses the corpus of translations of non-Jewish texts into Jewish languages, which emerged during the early modern period. Particular attention is given to Hebrew translations produced by members of the Jewish religious elite during the long eighteenth century, which have hitherto been viewed as original Jewish works. The article argues that translation was perfectly suited to the combination of attraction and anxiety with which many early modern Jews, particularly members of the Jewish religious elite, observed the cultural developments of their time. These authors acknowledged (what they viewed as) their own cultural inferiority, but feared the potential hazards of direct exposure to non-Jewish texts and ideas. Jewish translators thus became cultural gatekeepers rather than passive recipients of non-Jewish culture. They mistranslated both deliberately and accidentally, added and omitted, gave new meanings to texts and ideas, and harnessed their sources to meet their own agendas. The works of these translators reveal a form of cultural transfer that relied on the mindful adaptation and reformulation of new ideas by discreet, almost inadvertent innovators.

The End of Strangers and the End of Intermediation

The End of Strangers and the End of Intermediation Eva Illouz Being a stranger is the universal condition of modernity. Simmel, like many of his fellow sociologists and Germans at the end of the twentieth century, was riveted by the question of what the new era of trains, light, cities, and money had in store for humanity; but following his anti-positivism and Weberian tendency to look for ideal types, he grasped this change through the emblematic figure of the stranger. Why was the stranger such a key figure of modernity? One reason may lie in Simmel's biography. Although both Simmel's parents had converted to Christianity, he was not able to secure a stable position at the university, largely because he was perceived by others as a Jew. He was, so to speak, forced to be a stranger. Being an outsider from within was the familiar experience of assimilated, modern Jews, a position that turned them into the observers and analysts of the structures that simultaneously accepted them and excluded them. The second reason that the stranger has much to do with modernity is connected to the enormous fluxes of immigration at the end of the nineteenth century. Simmel could not have been unaware that by 1908, the publication date of the collection of essays in which "The Stranger" appears, the largest part of the 2.5 million Eastern European Jews who would immigrate from 1880 until 1924 to the United States had started a new life on the continent. To be sure, many or most of them lived in insalubrious conditions and poor neighborhoods, but they found a country in which they could live, trade, and exercise their religion without the threat of pogroms (which is not to say that antisemitism did not exist in the U.S.). A third reason that the stranger is the key figure of modernity has to do with the enormous development of cities at the end of the nineteenth century. The metropolis—about which Simmel wrote a memorable essay—became a social matrix whose greatness and danger was its capacity to transform people into indifferent strangers to one another, strangers who were no longer [End Page 297] integrated into a psychic economy of hatred, fear, and mistrust. The indifferent stranger has proved to be the main social character of modernity. Simmel thus implicitly opposed two forms of strangeness: one that was unassimilable to Christianity; and a new form of strangeness enabled by the burgeoning secular (or quasi-secular) cities and nation-states, in which the hard boundaries of groups were starting to dissolve. The nation-state not only tolerated but encouraged the perpetual creation of strangers, as millions of peasants throughout Europe left the countryside and migrated to urban centers and as fluxes of population within Europe reshaped the human landscape of cities. This is why the stranger was a figure of intermediation between the state and other states, as well as between social groups constituting a society. Such a modern stranger is the synthesis of nearness and distance. The stranger does not belong to the dominant religion, does not speak the local language, may dress differently, or may eat differently; yet he becomes part of the local social fabric through abstract and impersonal modern intermediaries such as money and the city. For Simmel, the trader is indeed the paradigmatic stranger because he is the node for the circulation of money and of commodities that were destined, until the end of the nineteenth century, mostly for city dwellers. At the end of the century, the notion of the "trader" and the "stranger" might have been a code word for Jews. As described by Simmel, the stranger had all the outer appearances and inner characteristics of the Jew. The Simmelian stranger is an "indifferent stranger," a stranger that was no longer threatening a thick cultural tissue of churches, communities, and tightly bound groups. This is because the modern nation-state was unknowingly promoting three key properties of modernity: abstractness, freedom, and cities—the three key themes of Simmel's sociology. Abstraction of forms of life (bureaucracy, for example), freedom (enabled by the free circulation of goods and money, for example), and...

Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries by David Sorkin

Reviewed by: Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries by David Sorkin Simon Rabinovitch David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 528; 17 b/w illus., 11 maps. $35.00 cloth. "Jewish emancipation" has a bit of a bad rap. The phrase has come to be associated with, at best, highly contingent political rights in Europe and the futility of Jewish "assimilation," and at worst, failure in the form of the Holocaust. The [End Page 113] success of individual Jews in joining the professions, in economic advancement, and in cultural contributions in places where emancipation was most far-reaching has also been seen as contributing to the birth of modern antisemitism and the antisemites' fear of Jews' infiltration from within European society. But what was, or is, "Jewish emancipation?" Despite the word's connotations today of freedom from bondage by grand declaration, the term "emancipation" as applied to Jews follows the meaning applied to other persecuted religious groups, such as Catholics in England before 1829, and refers to the rather haphazard and variable process of Jews gaining legal rights and joining the body politic. As David Sorkin argues in Jewish Emancipation: A History of Across Five Centuries, when viewed as a long-term process affecting all modern Jews, emancipation is "the principal event of modern Jewish history" (354); to understand modern Jewish history, we therefore need to zoom out and understand the process of how states and Jews struggled to define Jewish rights, individually and as a group. We also need to understand that how states changed the way they governed the political rights of Jews fit into more general processes of modern state formation—as Sorkin convincingly argues, Jewish emancipation cannot be separated from the development of modern citizenship, and modern citizenship cannot be separated from the process in which Europe decorporated its laws and society. When states first created the concept of citizenship, they did not simply shake off the old corporate privileges—religion provided the hierarchy around which modern citizenship was built. While Sorkin identifies regions with politically similar states (he divides Europe into western, central, and eastern parts, and also discusses the Ottoman Empire and the Atlantic world), his main point is that emancipation is hyper-local; in no two places does the process of Jews gaining political rights unfold the same way. Sorkin argues that much of the groundwork for civil equality, and how the process of emancipation would unravel in a given place, was built when societies were still governed by group privileges and disabilities. In city-states where Jews made up one of several merchant colonies, the privileges Jews gained on par with others translated into civil equality as states adopted modern notions of citizenship. Sorkin begins with an overview of how, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a number of European commercial hubs—Ancona, Venice, Livorno, Bordeaux, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and London—gave Jews, or sometimes New Christians who reverted back to Judaism, considerable group privileges. Historians have long focused on Amsterdam's role as an early harbinger of Jewish modernity, but Sorkin suggests that what made Amsterdam, along with London and Bordeaux, remarkable, is that in the transition from corporate legal rights to citizenship, the Jews' corporate parity transformed into equal citizenship. Jews gained similar corporate privileges on par with Christian burghers in cities and towns in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, especially those owned by members of the Polish nobility, but the partitioning of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century put the fate of Jewish rights in the hands of Prussia, Austria, and Russia. In contrast to western and eastern Europe, the Holy Roman Empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries granted far-reaching individual rights to a tiny Jewish elite, while resisting the extension of corporate privilege and seeking to limit the presence and visibility of Jews. It is Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II (r. 1765–1790) who would provide a model of contingent emancipation: with each legislative act increasing their privileges, Jews were expected to reciprocate through integration in dress, language, and military service. Joseph II's model of a finely managed, localized, and progressively radical process of integrating...

Teaching Modern Jewish Ethics Through Role-Play

AbstractThis article considers the use of role-playing pedagogy in an undergraduate Jewish Ethics course, focusing on a course activity in which students represented diverse modern Jewish thinkers and debated how Jews should understand particular moral virtues. As an example, this article describes a class in which students represented seven modern Jews with diverse perspectives on altruistic love, kindness, and compassion and engaged in character with questions regarding gender, violence, and who is included in the commandment to love one's fellow, among other issues. This article explores how such role-playing engaged students and challenged them to think critically about the views of others, the construction of virtue, the diversity of modern Jewish ethical traditions, and their own approaches to ethics.

Defining Hellenistic Jews in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Case of Jacob Bernays and Jacob Freudenthal

Hellenic language and culture occupy a deeply ambivalent place in the mapping of Jewish history. If the entanglement of the Jewish and the Greek became especially conflicted for modern Jews in philhellenic Europe, nowhere was it more vexed than in the German-speaking lands of the long nineteenth century. Amidst the modern redefinition of what it meant to be Jewish as well as doubts about the genuine Jewishness of Hellenistic Judaism, how did scholars identify Jewish authorship behind ambiguous, fragmented, and interpolated texts – all the more with much of the Hebraic allegedly deprived by the Hellenic? This article not only argues for the contingency of diagnostic features deployed to define the Jewish amidst the Greek but also maintains the embeddedness of those features in nineteenth-century Germany. It scrutinizes the criteria deployed to establish Jewish texts and authors of the Hellenistic period: the claims and qualities assumedly suggestive of Judaism. First, the inquiry investigates which characteristics German Jewish scholars expected to see in Greek-speaking Jewish writers of antiquity, interrogating their procedures and their verdicts. Second, it examines how these expectations of antiquity corresponded to those scholars’ own modern world. The analysis centers on Jacob Bernays (1824–1881) and Jacob Freudenthal (1839–1907), two savants who helped establish the modern study of Hellenistic Judaism. Each overturned centuries of learned consensus by establishing an ancient author – Pseudo-Phocylides and Eupolemus, respectively – as Jewish, rather than Christian or pagan. This article ultimately reveals the subtle entanglements as well as the mutually conditioning forces not only of antiquity and modernity but also of the personal and academic, manifest both in the philological analysis of ancient texts and in the larger historiography of antique Judaism in the Graecophone world.

Rereading Durkheim in light of Jewish law: how a traditional rabbinic thought-model shapes his scholarship

When studying the work of Émile Durkheim, scholars must consider how his intellectual development in a traditional Jewish environment contributed to and informed his ideas. This article details how Durkheim’s upbringing endowed him with a traditional rabbinic thought-model. The author analyzes five of Durkheim’s major works to argue that the system of classification, language, and style of argument Durkheim used to define concepts in his scholarship mirror streams of rabbinic thought. The article builds off the sociology of knowledge to illuminate how Durkheim employed his codified knowledge of biblical texts and modern Jews to bolster his arguments, and reveals the subtler ways he demonstrates his tacit knowledge of the texts and argument styles. The article ends with an exploration of how conceptual frameworks from the sociology of knowledge may be applied to other leading sociological thinkers—how the modes of thinking instilled during formative years may orient scholarship and the benefits and limitations of this approach.

Faith in Beauty and Progress: Temple Beth El

ABSTRACT In the 1920s Harrisburg's acculturated Reform and Conservative Jews found in City Beautiful aesthetics and ideals the architecture and ideology appropriate for expressing publicly their cultural identity as thoroughly modern Americans and Jews. Temple Beth El and Temple Ohev Sholom, both built on Front Street in uptown Harrisburg, stand as the ultimate material outcome and testimony to the synergistic interweaving of early twentieth century American and Jewish progressivism. A book commemorating Temple Beth El's 1928 dedication, produced by J. Horace McFarland's Mount Pleasant Press in 1930, documents in word and image connections between the founding of the congregation, the building of its temple, and the sensibilities and goals of the City Beautiful movement.

Fossilized Jews and Witnessing Dinosaurs at the Creation Museum: Public Remembering and Forgetting at a Young Earth Creationist “Memory Place”

The Creation Museum (Petersburg, KY) embraces dinosaurs and their bones as witnesses to the historicity of the biblical creation narrative. While many have critiqued the institution’s presentation of the past, approaching this space as a memory place reveals previously unrecognized implications that its historical claims entail. In particular, expanding the place of dinosaurs within the Young Earth creationist memory of the past has compelled a parallel diminution in the representation of ancient and modern Jews in exhibits and related literature. In other words, having incorporated paleontology into its theological worldview, the Creation Museum is compelled to present Jews as quixotic fossils with no particular function in the divine plan for history. As the museum’s profile as a memory place for American evangelicals grows, this could undercut the theological foundations that have encouraged robust relations between that group and Jews over the past half-century.

Fossilized Jews and Witnessing Dinosaurs at the Creation Museum: Public Remembering and Forgetting at a Young Earth Creationist “Memory Place”

The Creation Museum (Petersburg, KY) embraces dinosaurs and their bones as witnesses to the historicity of the biblical creation narrative. While many have critiqued the institution’s presentation of the past, approaching this space as a memory place reveals previously unrecognized implications that its historical claims entail. In particular, expanding the place of dinosaurs within the Young Earth creationist memory of the past has compelled a parallel diminution in the representation of ancient and modern Jews in exhibits and related literature. In other words, having incorporated paleontology into its theological worldview, the Creation Museum is compelled to present Jews as quixotic fossils with no particular function in the divine plan for history. As the museum’s profile as a memory place for American evangelicals grows, this could undercut the theological foundations that have encouraged robust relations between that group and Jews over the past half-century.

In Memoriam: Rabbi Dr. Neil Gillman

Rabbi Dr. Neil Gillman died last November 23, having been ill for several years after treatment for cancer. Born in Quebec City, Canada, Gillman studied philosophy at McGill University in Montreal and then attended rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he would spend his entire career, first as the dean of its Rabbinical School and later as a Professor of Jewish Philosophy. While raised in a traditional Jewish home, his path to the rabbinate and a career teaching Jewish theology was inspired by an encounter with Will Herberg, the noted Jewish social thinker and existentialist theologian, while at McGill. After completing his rabbinical studies, he continued working and teaching at JTS and completed a doctorate in Religious Studies at Columbia University, where he wrote his dissertation on Gabriel Marcel's religious epistemology, a subject that became his central philosophical concern.His early interest in religious existentialism and its emphasis on confrontation with personal belief and meaning became one of Gillman's core commitments as a theologian and as a teacher. Gillman insisted that modern Jews should clarify their own theological commitments in a personal way in order to connect to the teachings and practices of the Jewish tradition. The typical final assignment in almost any Neil Gillman class was the writing of a personal theological statement, a task to which he provided a guide in the final chapter of Sacred Fragments, the most significant statement of his theological approach. Under his influence the personal theological statement became and remains a standard part of the application to the Rabbinical School at JTS. The personal theological statement gave a generation of rabbis, cantors, educators, and lay students the opportunity to discuss their qualms and questions about classical Jewish theology, explore new possibilities, and renew their faith from the “sacred fragments” of traditional images of God.As a thought leader for Conservative Judaism, Gillman's theological work owed a debt to two of his teachers at JTS, Mordecai Kaplan and Abraham Joshua Heschel. Gillman followed Kaplan's theological naturalism because he did not think we could fully retrieve the pre-modern conception of God as a supernatural personal being. At the same time, he understood that for many, himself included, Kaplan's naturalistic theology did not capture the emotive or spiritual power of lived religious experience, both in traditional Jewish ritual and in the everyday world. Heschel's poetic writing and teaching taught him to appreciate the way that the images and metaphors for God in the tradition allowed us to experience the divine within the world, to “see God,” as Gillman often put in explaining his debt to Heschel.To strike a balance between these two aspects of his theology, Gillman drew on Paul Tillich's notion of religious language as a mythic, in the sense of a socio-linguistic pattern of thinking that expresses and shapes the commitments of a community. The concept of myth allowed him to weave the personal imagery for God of classical Jewish texts in his theology without the baggage of supernatural metaphysical commitments. He applied this approach the theological issue of resurrection of the dead, which he explored in his 1997 book, The Death of Death. Again driven by existentialist themes, Gillman noted that American Jews' discomfort with resurrection theology mirrored their difficulty discussing death itself. His own understanding of resurrection as a mythic concept sought to highlight the religious significance of the human body and return to an affirmation of divine power over life and death. As with all his teachings, he found ways to challenge a generation of American Jews and their spiritual leaders to grapple with, to use Tillich's phrase, matters of ultimate concern. His teachings live on in hundreds of students who learned with him and have responded to his invitation to find their own ways for speaking to God and about God.

In Praise of Vulgarity: On Yiddish in Isaac Bashevis Singer's “Di makhsheyfeh”

This article is an attempt to understand Isaac Bashevis Singer's blatant preoccupation in his stories with offensive and outrageous characters and actions that can simply be defined as vulgar. It is best exemplified in stories that depict a recurring theme in his fiction: the expulsion of the female outcast from and by her patriarchal community. Even though the vulgar characteristics of these female outcasts were construed by several Yiddish-speaking intellectuals as an assault both on Jewish women and on Yiddish language and culture, Singer's stories utilize their vulgar style and crude content as a direct attack on the Jewish Maskilim and their twentieth-century successors. This essay discusses his short story "Di makhsheyfeh" ("The Witch") from a feminist perspective, specifically in accordance with Julia Kristeva's theorization of the abject, in order to address Bella Zilberstein (the witch) as an allegorical affirmation of the same vulgar qualities that were projected upon Yiddish since the formation of the Haskalah movement in the eighteenth century. In identifying Yiddish as an abject source of shame on behalf of modernized Jews, Singer deliberately creates an "ugly" story about an "ugly" character. "Di makhsheyfeh" and its outright vulgarity will therefore be discussed both as a critique of the self-destructing delusion of modern Jews in their assimilatory ambitions, and as a celebration of Yiddish folklore characteristics, a passionate embrace of its irrational and "disgraceful" virtues.

Two perspectives on the high priest Joseph Caiaphas: challenges for religious educators presenting Jesus’ Passion

Along with Pontius Pilate, the high priest Joseph Caiaphas takes centre stage when the most dramatic events of the Christian story unfold—the arrest, interrogations and execution of Jesus of Nazareth. Despite his central role in the unfolding drama, the gospel authors present Caiaphas as a shadowy figure and offer little context which might assist readers to judge his character, motivations and intentions. As a result, most Christians remain unaware and uninformed about Joseph Caiaphas. Christian tradition has presented Caiaphas as vengeful, jealous, self-serving and misguided. These characteristics of the key Jewish leader have profound implications for the way modern Christians understand Jesus within his Jewish culture. Contemporary understanding of the relationship between Jesus and Caiaphas also has implications for the course of relationships between modern Jews and Christians. This paper outlines the gospel and historical evidence for Joseph Caiaphas and suggests ways that religious educators might proceed when presenting the story of Jesus’ Passion.

Disraeli, the East and Religion: Tancred in Context

Abstract Recently there has been much interest in Benjamin Disraeli’s writings, and particularly the importance to him of empire, race and Jewishness. His favourite among his own novels, Tancred (1847), set in the Near East, is now often said to advocate Asian imperialism and Jewish superiority and to mark a key stage in his ‘self-fashioning’ as a political leader. This article suggests that the problem with these interpretations, and with the older argument that Disraeli revelled in a lack of principle (which also draws on Tancred) is that they fail to put novel and author in the context of the time. By the 1840s, Disraeli’s books were not obsessed with his own identity; instead he used them to engage with important live issues. The Near Eastern themes which Tancred tackled included serious international questions and equally intense arguments about domestic Christianity, which were themselves heavily influenced by new perspectives on the East. The book discussed how the Church of England, weakened by sectarianism and materialism, could regain the leadership of national opinion. It attacked the liberal sectarian policy pursued by the Peel government in Syria and Lebanon, and European political, religious and economic intervention in the Ottoman Empire more broadly. Commentators have misunderstood what Disraeli meant by ‘empire’, and his (critical) remarks on modern Jews. They continue to present him as exotic, and have read Tancred accordingly, as a personal manifesto for unusual and one-sided causes. Once placed in the context of the time in which it was written, the book’s great theme is revealed as the opposite: the need to abandon partisanship for synthesis in Western and Eastern politics and religion, if a chaotic world is to be brought to order.