Union College Research Articles

미국장로회선교사 윌리엄 뉴튼 블레어(邦緯良)의 한국선교와 숭실대학

윌리엄 뉴튼 블레어(William Newton Blair, 방위량(邦緯良), 1876-1970)는 1901년 9월 내한하여 1949년 대구선교부에서 은퇴하기까지 48년 동안 한국에서 사역했던 미국 북장로회 선교사이다. 그는 1907년 “평양대부흥회” 당시 부흥회의 설교자이며 인도자였고, 1909년부터 일어난 “백만인 구령운동”과 1919~1935년의 “기독교 진흥운동”에서도 주도적인 역할을 담당하였다. 그는 한국교회의 개척사업과 기독교 교육사업에 지대한 공헌을 하였으니 장로회 평양선교부를 중심으로 한 서북지역의 5개군을 관할하며 순회전도사역을 하면서 57개의 교회를 개척하였고, 1901년부터 숭실학당(Soongsil Academy)과 평양신학교, 교회의 주일학교에서 교육사업에 헌신하였다. 1930년대 후기 일제의 신사참배 강요에 따른 탄압과 박해를 받는 가운데에도 블레어는 결연히 신사참배를 거부하다가 1942년 일제에 의해 강제로 출국 당해 미국으로 송환되었다.BR 그는 1902년부터 숭실학당에서 체육과 음악을 가르쳤고, 1908년과 1920년에는 미국에서 모금활동을 전개하여 숭실대학(Soongsil Union College)과 평양신학교의 건물을 신축하였으며, 1930년대에는 숭실대학의 교수로 재직하면서 후학을 양성하였고, 숭실대학이 신사참배를 거부하고 자진 폐교할 때에는 재단이사장으로 학교 운영과 폐교절차를 진행하는 등 숭실대학의 교육, 행정에 직접 참여한 경영자이기도 하였다. 그는 5권의 저작과 30여 편의 논문을 저술하였고, 대부분 영어로 기술한 저술 중에 2권의 한글 번역본이 출간되었지만, 아직 블레어의 한국선교사역에 관한 전문적인 연구저작은 나오지 않았다. 본 논문은 국내외의 관련 논저를 수집 조사하여 모두 5장의 편폭으로 48년간 한국에서 진행된 블레어의 선교사역과 숭실대학에서의 교육사역에 대해 전반적으로 고찰해 보았다.

The Southern Social Network

The Southern Social Network Catherine Clinton (bio) Hola and welcome: I am so grateful for this opportunity to address you as the eighty-second president of our Southern Historical Association (SHA), as the nomination came at an ebb tide in my personal and professional life. This honor has buoyed me during the transition from teaching southern studies abroad back to my patria chica and an endowed chair at the University of Texas at San Antonio.1 I had always fantasized the most popular presidential address might include a few pleasantries before announcing, “The bar is now open.” But my right hand in this and so many matters, our invaluable SHA secretary-treasurer, Stephen Berry, had already contemplated modifying tradition by welcoming glasses aflow and table seating during our presidential session. This is our first annual meeting on the beach since 1972—when the SHA met at Hollywood-by-the-Sea, Florida. That presidential address, “The Making of a Feminist,” was a departure: Mary Elizabeth Massey was the first woman president of the organization since 1953, and the word feminist appeared for the first time in the annual program.2 Mine will strike an equally different chord, emphasizing our annual meeting as part of a southern social network, with autobiographical and historical observations interwoven along the way.3 [End Page 7] My path to this podium has been a long and winding road: as I have often joked with friends, my academic career might provide a cautionary tale, that you could “publish and perish.” What I rarely could do was hold my tongue; I began my career as a Cassandra and continue a scold. Cassandra was allegedly seduced by Apollo with the gift of prophecy, but when she refused him her body, he cast a spell: no one would believe any of her warnings. She became a kind of exile as a madwoman. Cassandra has always been to me the patron saint of those fighting sexual harassment, an issue I will return to later. My first formal teaching post was at the University of Benghazi in 1974, and you could only go up from there: Complaining about sexism? Try teaching in a fundamentalist Islamic republic. After my doctoral stint of four years at Princeton University (1975-1979), I secured a tenure-track job in upstate New York at Union College, where I spent four years before landing at Harvard University as an assistant professor in the Department of History in 1983. I was married by then and settled near Cambridge, and my chair explained to me that the history department was “like a monastic order”—just in case I had not yet figured out my unsuitability for permanent faculty status. A 1998 Boston Globe exposé of the Harvard history department explained that the last time someone was promoted to tenure through the ranks in American history, Dwight D. Eisenhower was president.4 By 1989, two books published and another manuscript in progress, one child and two miscarriages later, I sought refuge from dwindling prospects with a temporary post at Brandeis University. After my second child was born in 1989, I was called back to another department at Harvard. Following the death of Nathan I. Huggins, a friend and champion, the Afro-American studies department (my alma mater, as I had majored in Af-Am as an undergraduate) was in limbo. My temporary appointment provided a jill-of-all-trades, while Barbara Johnson and Werner Sollors put shoulders to the wheel to salvage the struggling enterprise, bringing on board Henry Louis Gates Jr. to reinvent the program. The department, born of revolution and revived from life support, was transformed into an academic powerhouse, and its renaissance over the past twenty-five years has been historic. [End Page 8] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The author during her year (2001–2002) at The Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina. Courtesy of the author. But in 1991, with two young sons, I moved to Connecticut for my husband’s work, commuting to Harvard and then, for a semester, to Brown University. Finally, I decided to abandon teaching to write full-time, which included joining the Screen Writers’ Guild and acquiring...

Sulzerism, Sulzermania, and the Shaping of the American Cantorate

Sulzerism, Sulzermania, and the Shaping of the American Cantorate Jonathan L. Friedmann (bio) "The name of Salomon Sulzer has, to modern cantors, an almost mythical sound."1 When musicologist Eric Werner wrote these words for the 1954 reissue of Viennese cantor-composer Salomon Sulzer's Schir Zion,2 the name, much more than the music, was a source of reverence for American cantors. New York's Hebrew Union College (HUC) School of Sacred Music, which Werner helped spearhead into existence, was just six years old.3 It was the first American academy to train professional cantors, and the idea of cantors leading Reform services—as opposed to a choir director or soloist—was still new in many parts of the country. Werner saw Sulzer (1804–1890) as the cantorial ideal, equally adept at vocal performance, Hebraic texts, and Western art music. For the first time in the history of European synagogue song, Sulzer transformed entire services from a functional oral tradition to a decorum-conscious art form.4 His voice was celebrated beyond the Jewish community. His dignified persona was widely praised. Yet, as Werner asks parenthetically in the same preface, "Is his mythical stature perhaps a mere reverential oblivion? It might seem so."5 The reprinting of Sulzer's music in 1954 coincided with the cantor's 150th birthday. It was a hopeful tribute. The material had for decades been inaccessible to American synagogues. Existing editions were enormously expensive, and Jews of Eastern European background stereotyped Sulzer's music as "not Jewish enough," while Classical Reform congregations [End Page 287] found it "too Jewish." In another essay that year, Werner drove home his point: "Most cantors profess to revere his great work and are eager to pay lip-service to him."6 This was not a new phenomenon. In the introduction to an 1885 hymnbook for Cincinnati's Mound Street Temple, published during Sulzer's lifetime, compiler M. Goldstein laments that the music of the "unrivalled master" had been "thrown aside."7 Superficial tributes to Sulzer had a long history. The Society of American Cantors gathered in 1904 to discuss short-lived plans for a New York-based school for cantorial training. The meeting began with an exhortation: "Brethren, if you have your cause and the cause of Judaism at heart, you cannot more befittingly commemorate this centennial birthday of the great master than by establishing a school for cantors where young men of musical ability shall be trained in every branch that is requisite for a modern cantor."8 The Jewish Ministers Cantors Association of America marked the fiftieth anniversary of Sulzer's death (1940) with a commemorative concert in New York.9 The cover of a 1989 issue of the Reform Jewish magazine Keeping Posted features a portrait of Sulzer, but devotes just one dry paragraph to him. As late as 1994—forty years after Werner's tribute and one hundred and ninety years after Sulzer's birth—Cantor William Sharlin noted the "considerable irony" that only a few congregational tunes snatched from Sulzer's choral works remain in synagogue practice, while the grand works that made him "the father of the modern cantorate" are almost never heard.10 Sulzer's legendary status can be viewed as a carry-over from nineteenth-century "Sulzermania," when cantors from Central Europe and, later, Eastern Europe trekked to Vienna to study with Sulzer, and notable musicians and critics heard his services at the Stadttempel synagogue. International luminaries penned flattering accounts of his artistry, including [End Page 288] English travelogue writer Frances Milton Trollope,11 Austrian composer and pianist Franz Liszt,12 and American Sephardic lawyer and diplomat Benjamin Franklin Peixotto.13 Hagiographic depictions of Sulzer's prowess and piety spread in Jewish circles, as did exaggerated accounts of his friendship with Franz Schubert and other leading musicians.14 He was purportedly honored with the Russian Golden Medal; the Grand Duke of Baden Golden Medal; knighthood in the Order of Franz Joseph; and Morenu diplomas from the Jewish communities of Lviv, Szegedin, and Vienna, among other awards.15 Jews and non-Jews attended his ceremonious burial in 1890, and newspapers around the world printed laudatory obituaries and appreciations. The exuberance surrounding...

Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Sources of Wonder by Michael Marmur

Reviewed by: Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Sources of Wonder by Michael Marmur Stuart D. Robertson Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Sources of Wonder By Michael Marmur. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. xiii + 279 pp. Michael Marmur's book is (apparently) an extension of the author's 1984 PhD dissertation at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Heschel's Rhetoric of Citation: The Use of Sources in God in Search of Man. The present book has as its basic purpose "to demonstrate how Heschel's political, intellectual, and spiritual commitments were imbedded in his reading of Jewish tradition." The author is Provost at the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion. Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Sources of Wonder is structured in nine chapters, with extensive endnotes and two indices for sources and subjects. The [End Page 143] categories developed in these chapters include Heschel's use of the Bible, rabbinic sources, Maimonides, Kabbalah, the Hasidim, his "affinity with strangers," his Aspaklaria (Hebrew, "the compendium of Jewish thought," but in this book the author defines it as Heschel's "perspective and prism through which he viewed the world"), and finally, his call to action. Marmur calls attention to the criticism of various biblical scholars that though Heschel drew on the Bible more than on other sources, he was not a biblical scholar in the mold of recent biblical scholarship. "On occasion Heschel offered decontextualized readings of the Bible that came directly from rabbinic literature." His was a "hermeneutics of surprise." "The Bible is the most sublime literary distillation of the surprise, wonder, amazement, and awe that are the primal human responses to the mystery of existence." This hermeneutic was not Heschel's unique contribution, of course, as the author notes in calling attention to his citation of "key works of the Jewish esoterical tradition, including the sixteenth century kabbalistic work, Pardes Rimmonim, of Moses b. Jacob Cordovero of Safed." Though the early rabbinic PARDES scheme of interpretation included the peshat, the plain meaning of the text, it also included mystical reflection on the Bible (sod). Neither the early understanding of peshat nor a mystical interpretation was at all like the modern scholarly approach to the Bible. Since Heschel made no pretense of being a biblical scholar in the modern sense, and admitted to his nurturing from rabbinic sources, to criticize him for this lack is inappropriate. And Marmur is not among these critics that do so. Chapter 7, "An Affinity of Strangers," displays how Heschel was similar to important Jewish thinkers of the past in his openness to non-Jewish spiritual figures. Heschel proposed there had been a link between Menahem Morgenstern (d. 1859), the Polish Kotzer Rebbe, and the Danish Lutheran philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard (d. 1855). He remembers that Heschel wrote a book on Abravanel (d. 1508), the Portuguese polymath, who was at home in Christian theology and Islamic philosophy. These are only two examples of affinity with strangers of Jewish luminaries, in whose train Heschel found a place. This is not to suggest that there were not fundamental differences between the Jewish and Christian figures but that "despite profound differences in perspective and substance . . . parochialism [was] untenable." Heschel participated with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Civil Rights march on Selma. He was a friend of Reinhold Niebuhr, the influential Christian voice of conscience, and many others. These affinities were based on a common cause that reflected the Jewish ideal of tecun olam, to heal the world. [End Page 144] Marmur appropriately reminds the reader that Heschel's driving inner forces made necessary something larger than great thoughts. His work became a call to action. As his life drew near its end, Heschel "expressed opinions on a wide array of social issues and current affairs." But he not only spoke out, but also participated in the causes about which he spoke. Why? First, because for him to withdraw from the world was "futile and unworthy." Second, because to remain a bystander was immoral. Third, because he followed the example of the biblical prophets. Though he was steeped in the rabbinic heritage, and was widely read beyond Jewish sources, he drew on the Bible...

The Syntax of Volitives in Biblical Hebrew and Amarna Canaanite Prose by Hélène Dallaire

Reviewed by: The Syntax of Volitives in Biblical Hebrew and Amarna Canaanite Prose by Hélène Dallaire Andrew D. Gross hélène dallaire, The Syntax of Volitives in Biblical Hebrew and Amarna Canaanite Prose (Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic 9; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014). Pp. xi + 250. $49.50. Dallaire’s monograph, a revised and updated version of her Hebrew Union College doctoral dissertation (2002), systematically explores how Biblical Hebrew prose expresses volition, that is to say, wishes, desires, requests, and commands. Furthermore, to place the development of this means of expression in a diachronic context, she similarly examines the expression of volitives in the language of the fourteenth-century b.c.e. Amarna letters. In her introductory chapter, D. explains the monograph’s methodology and corpus and then sets about defining certain core linguistic concepts, including modality and volitives. This chapter also covers some basic concepts in sociolinguistics, as D.’s analysis also considers how languages encode social differences between speaker and audience (e.g., a person of greater stature speaking to one of lesser stature). Finally, it includes a brief overview of how volitives are expressed morphologically in Akkadian, Classical Arabic, and Classical Ethiopic. In chap. 2, the largest part of the book, D. covers Biblical Hebrew prose, considering in turn the verbal forms usually associated with volitive moods (imperative, jussive, and cohortative) as well as nonvolitive verbal forms that are sometimes used to express volitives (yiqtol, qatal, and the infinitive absolute). After a survey of recent views on Biblical Hebrew’s overall system of expressing volitives, D. turns to the Biblical Hebrew imperative, which is the longest section of the chapter. Her analysis covers both diachronic questions, such as the origins of the long imperative form and the particle nāʾ, and synchronic ones. Among this latter group, she pays special attention to sequences of verbs in which an imperative is followed by other verbal forms, both volitive and nonvolitive. She then continues with a similar method of analysis for the other above-mentioned verbal forms. Some of the conclusions she reaches are the following: (1) The long imperative, the cohortative, and the particle nāʾ derive from the energic form yaqtulan(na), with the -na having separated off at some point to become an independent particle. (2) The regular imperative is the least marked form and therefore can be used in the broadest number of situations. Clauses using the long imperative or the particle nāʾ, on the other hand, are marked for politeness or respect. (3) Commands expressed by imperatives generally concern actions within an immediate or short-term time frame, while those expressed by the infinitive absolute convey injunctions to be performed within a long-term framework. This use of the infinitive absolute is unsurprisingly more common in legal and instructional material, and because these commands come from an authority figure (e.g., God or Moses), they never use the particle nāʾ. In chap. 3, D. tackles the system of volitives in El Amarna Canaanite. The chapter, which is briefer than the one on Biblical Hebrew, begins with some introductory remarks on the language of the Amarna letters and on its verbal system in particular. Then D. analyzes the various forms used in Amarna Akkadian to express volitives: the imperative, the West Semitic jussive (yqtl-Ø), the Akkadian precative (liprus), and the yaqtula. As in the previous chapter, she also considers instances of nonvolitive forms expressing the volitive, as well as how sequences of verbs express volitive ideas. A short concluding chapter summarizes D.’s main observations and fleshes them out a bit with evidence from other Northwest Semitic languages. [End Page 117] Dallaire takes particular interest in the role that the Canaanite yaqtula conjugation plays in the expression of volitives in Biblical Hebrew. She notes several cases in which a nonjussive Hebrew yiqtol is used as a volitive and argues that this use derives from the earlier yaqtula conjugation. After the loss of short, final vowels erased any morphological distinction between the indicative yaqtulu and the volitive yaqtula, these forms merged in Biblical Hebrew. According to D., the prefix conjugation retained both the indicative and volitive uses (pp. 125–29). She further notes...

Undergraduate Research and Training in Ion-Beam Analysis of Environmental Materials

We have an active undergraduate research program at the Union College Ion-Beam Analysis Laboratory (UCIBAL) focused on the study of environmental materials. Accelerator-based ion-beam analysis (IBA) is a powerful tool for the study of environmental pollution because it can provide information on a broad range of elements with high sensitivity and low detection limits, is non-destructive, and requires little or no sample preparation. It also provides excellent training for the next generation of environmental scientists. Beams of protons and alpha particles with energies of a few MeV from the 1.1-MV tandem Pelletron accelerator (NEC Model 3SDH) in the UCIBAL are used to characterize environmental samples using IBA techniques such as proton-induced X-ray emission, Rutherford back-scattering, and proton-induced gamma-ray emission. Recent projects include the characterization of atmospheric aerosols in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, the study of heavy metal pollutants in river sediment, measurements of Pb diffusion in sulfide minerals to help constrain the determination of the age of iron meteorites, and the search for heavy metals and toxins in artificial turf.

Can a rabbi marry someone of another religion? Debates of the American Reform movement whether intermarried rabbis can lead Reform congregations

Traditionally, rabbis were expected to marry women who were devoted to Judaism. The convention was a logical one. As a symbolic exemplar of Judaism, everything a rabbi does should reflect his commitment to the Jewish religion. Instead, over the course of the modern period, non-Orthodox denominations have deviated from many traditional positions. This has included the Reform movement’s allowance that rabbis can determine whether they will officiate at interfaith marriage ceremonies. However, while many Reform rabbis have conducted such ceremonies, they were nevertheless expected to have married within the faith themselves. Recently, some rabbis have begun advocating for Reform rabbis to marry gentiles who have not converted to Judaism. The Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, the academic institution serving the Reform movement of North America, which has campuses in the United States and Israel, went through a process of discussion, debate, evaluation, and decision making. At the end of this process, the decision was made to retain the policy of prohibiting intermarried students from matriculating or graduating. This article outlines the development as well as the resolution of the current controversy.

David Nirenberg, Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Pp. 352. $45. ISBN: 978-0-226-16893-7.

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsDavid Nirenberg, Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Pp. 352. $45. ISBN: 978-0-226-16893-7.Reuven FirestoneReuven FirestoneHebrew Union College and the University of Southern California Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 91, Number 4October 2016 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/687903 Views: 120Total views on this site Copyright 2016 by the Medieval Academy of America. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Seasonal and Local Solar Time Variation of the Meridional Wind at 95 km from Observations of the 11.072-GHz Ozone Line and the 557.7-nm Oxygen Line

AbstractGround-based spectrometers have been deployed to measure the concentration, velocity, and temperature of ozone in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT), using low-cost satellite television electronics to observe the 11.072-GHz line of ozone. The ozone line was observed at an altitude near 95 km at 38°N, 71°W using three spectrometers located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Haystack Observatory (Westford, Massachusetts), Chelmsford High School (Chelmsford, Massachusetts), and Union College (Schenectady, New York), each pointed south at 8° elevation. Observations from 2009 through 2014 were used to derive the nightly averaged seasonal variation of the 95-km altitude meridional wind velocity, as well as the seasonally averaged variation of the meridional wind with local solar time. The results indicate a seasonal trend in which the winds at 95 km are directed southward at about 10 m s−1 in the summer of the Northern Hemisphere and northward at about 10 m s−1 in the winter. Nighttime data from −5 to +5 local solar time show a gradual transition of the meridional wind velocity from about −20 to 20 m s−1. These variations correlate well with nighttime wind measurements using 557.7-nm optical airglow observations from the Millstone Hill high-resolution Fábry–Perot interferometer (FPI) in Westford.

Introduction to Ethics of Forgiveness and Revenge

The papers collected in this volume were first presented at a workshop entitled Ethics of Forgiveness and Revenge, which was held May 22-23, 2014 at Union College in Schenectady, New York. The papers cover a range of topics, including the rightness and wrongness of vengeance and forgiveness, who has the standing to avenge or forgive, the relationship between retributive punishment and revenge, and the role apology plays in determining correct punishment. The papers in this volume are not only philosophically interesting, but are also relevant to our everyday lives, since how we respond to moral wrongs is just as important as how we conduct the rest of our moral lives.

Disciplinary thinking, computational doing

This paper describes a 10-year multi-pronged project to introduce students campus-wide to computing, increase enrollments in the computer science department, and change the demographics of students in the introductory computer science courses. The Union College Computer Science (CS) department has changed curricula at the introductory and intermediate levels, and worked with two dozen faculty from 15 disciplines who incorporated computing into their courses. The percentage of women in the introductory CS course has increased from 10% to an average of 37% when measured over a multi-year period.

Physiology and Structure of Motion Sensitive Neurons in the Dragonfly Visual System

Aeshnid dragonflies are among the largest North American insects and also among the fastest and most accurate predators. During prey pursuit, they quickly respond to deviations in their flying‐prey trajectory and alter their flight paths to intercept their quarry. Remarkably, a deviation in the prey's path results in a dragonfly turn in only 30 ms, much faster than the visual latencies in most animals. Visual neurons, called target‐selective descending neurons (TSDNs) are hypothesized to mediate the dragonfly's fast response to flying prey. Once stimulated, these neurons send signals down the nerve cord to the wing‐motor circuitry controlling flight, allowing for a flight path correction. In laboratory experiments with restrained dragonflies, TSDN activity is relatively weaker and slower than expected from the behavior. We are testing the idea that this neural “lethargy” is due to the lack of neuromodulators such as octopamine in the restrained dragonfly's brain. We are investigating this hypothesis by comparing TSDN visual responses before and after injection of the octopamine mimic, chlordimeform. Our results show dramatic increases in TSDN spike activity after chlordimeform injection, suggesting that TSDN activity is augmented in the behaving animal by the neuromodulator, octopamine.Further, utilizing intracellular recording techniques, we aim to identify the individual neurons which mediate responses to specific types of stimuli, such as approaching objects. Once a cell is identified, we will inject a dye through the recording microelectrode, which will travel within the cell in question up into the brain. This will allow us to obtain a structural representation of the neuron, which can then be linked back to its specific function in the visual processing cascade.Support or Funding InformationFunded in part by a Student Research Grant from Union College.Special thanks to Prof. Robert Olberg, Biology Department, Union College

A Century of Hebraica at the Library of Congress

A Century of Hebraica at the Library of Congress Brad Sabin Hill (bio) Words Like Sapphires: 100 Years of Hebraica at the Library of Congress, 1912– 2012. Exhibition curated by Peggy K. Pearlstein, with the assistance of Ann Brener. The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. October 25, 2012–March 16, 2013. http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/words-like-sapphires/pages/default.aspx Perspectives on the Hebraic Book: The Myron M. Weinstein Memorial Lectures at the Library of Congress. Edited by Peggy K. Pearlstein. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 2012. Pp. 240. The Washington Haggadah, Copied and Illustrated by Joel ben Simeon. Introductions by David Stern and Katrin Kogman-Appel. Translation by David Stern. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press and the Library of Congress, 2011. Pp. 248. T heH ebraicS ectionof the Library of Congress in Washington comprises the youngest of the world’s great Hebrew collections. That it should rate so highly is nothing short of remarkable. After all, the old European libraries had been gathering Hebrew books for centuries before the decision in 1800 to establish a congressional library in the new American capital. When the Bibliothèque de France was still the [End Page 101]Bibliothèque du Roi, it already held Hebrew manuscripts from the libraries of Catherine de Medici and Cardinal Richelieu. The state libraries of Munich and Berlin similarly incorporated Hebrew books from royal, ducal, or patrician collections from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. University and state libraries in Hamburg, Leipzig, Leiden, and Basel held collections assembled by Christian Hebraists of earlier centuries. The Vatican and Milan’s Biblioteca Ambrosiana had much Hebraica by the early seventeenth century, the royal library in Turin and the Medici library in Florence had large collections by the mid-eighteenth, and a collection assembled before the century’s end by an abbot in Parma soon made its Palatina one of Europe’s richest repositories of Hebrew. 1 In 1829 Oxford’s Bodleian Library acquired an extraordinary collection of books and manuscripts assembled by the bibliophile rabbi David Oppenheim of Prague—an acquisition that was pivotal for the development of Hebraica libraries in the English-speaking world. 2In London, the British Museum’s Hebraica from aristocratic and royal collections was supplemented in the middle of the century by the purchase of exceptional Jewish libraries from Hamburg and Padua and a hoard of manuscripts gathered by the antiquarian Shapira in Jerusalem. 3The English [End Page 102]libraries’ acquisition of Jewish collections was imitated on the continent. Important private libraries went to state institutions in St. Petersburg, Amsterdam, and (in 1905) Budapest, and in like fashion the municipal and university library of Frankfurt grew into a major resource for Judaica. 4With the addition of the immense private Chasanowich collection from Russia, the public library founded by B’nai B’rith in Jerusalem in 1892 became the core of the Jewish National and University Library, now the National Library of Israel. 5By 1900, the Old World and Palestine were replete with national Hebrew collections. At the outset the Library of Congress possessed not a single Hebrew book. Thomas Jefferson’s books, acquired for the nation in 1815, included Spinoza’s Opera posthumawith its Hebrew grammar (Amsterdam, 1677) and an even older Hebrew-Latin Mishnah, Baba kamma . . . de legibus ebraeorum(Leyden, 1637), and a few volumes of Judaica, but the congressional library possessed nothing remotely like the holdings of institutions across the sea. 6Nor, for that matter, did any other American institution of the day. It wasn’t until late in the century that institutional Judaica libraries were launched in America, first at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and then at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. 7In 1893 a valuable Hebrew collection built in [End Page 103]Italy went to Columbia University. 8Four years later the New York Public Library opened its Jewish Division, which served as a reading room for generations of Hebrew scholars, students, and laymen. 9Yet the Library of Congress, which by the early twentieth century had Chinese, Japanese, and Russian collections, still had no Hebrew books to speak of...

Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity: Rethinking an Old Opposition. Essays in Honor of David Ellenson ed. by Michael A. Meyer, David N. Myers (review)

Reviewed by: Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity: Rethinking an Old Opposition. Essays in Honor of David Ellenson ed. by Michael A. Meyer, David N. Myers Robert M. Seltzer (bio) Michael A. Meyer and David N. Myers, editors, Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity: Rethinking an Old Opposition. Essays in Honor of David Ellenson. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014. xiv + 360 pp. Reviewing a Festschrift presents a special problem: contributions by colleagues, friends, and/or former students of the person being honored can cover a wide range of topics only tangentially connected to each other. Should the reviewer dwell on the achievements of the honoree or look for elements that the collected essays might have in common? This was not a problem in reviewing Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity, a collection of articles of high quality, interest, and value. All of the authors of essays in this volume pay homage to David Ellenson. Raised in a modern Orthodox family in Newport News, VA., he received his BA from the College of William and Mary, his MA in Jewish Studies at the University of Virginia, his PhD from Columbia University, and rabbinic ordination from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion where, after several years as a faculty member, he served as president from 2002 to 2014. In his college days influences on him included sociologists of religion Max Weber, Peter Berger, and Jacob Katz. His first book was Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer and the Creation of Modern Jewish Orthodoxy (1990). His many studies on Judaism in Israel and America are in the dense nine pages of Ellenson’s bibliography appended to the volume. A personal note: his oeuvre includes “Zion in the Mind of the American Rabbinate during the 1940s,” which appeared in the collection The Americanization of the Jews, that I edited with Norman S. Cohen (1995). The essays in Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity are arranged under four sub-headings: Law, Ritual, Thought, and Culture. Together they constitute a mosaic of topics connected to American Jewish religious life in the last half century, such as post-denominationalism, the impact of the counterculture, new conceptions of ethnicity, changing styles of worship, the growing importance of feminism, and the State of Israel. To be sure, there are pieces that do not fit tidily into this mold, such as Jonathan Sarna’s essay on a mid-nineteenth-century controversy over whether it was appropriate to erect a statue of the New Orleans Jewish philanthropist Judah Touro in view of traditional anti-iconic Jewish teachings. Zvi Zohar examines a responsum from early twentieth-century Salonica on converting the non-Jewish partner of an intermarriage (a forerunning of widespread occurrence in contemporary American Judaism). Michael Marmur discusses the early writings of Abraham Joshua [End Page 161] Heschel before he arrived in Cincinnati to teach at the Hebrew Union College and went on to the Jewish Theological Seminary. Rachel Adler critiques Rav J. B. Soloveichik’s equivocations on feminism. As noted, however, most of the pieces deal with more recent developments. Arnold Eisen critiques the venerable Zionist trope of shelilat hagalut expressed in a talk by A. B. Yehoshua. Adam S. Ferziger discusses how the presence of Reform Judaism has sharpened the self-image of Orthodoxy in Israel whereas, conversely, Jack Wertheimer notes how the complexity of American Judaism has affected “Orthodox Outreach Workers.” Notably missing from the collection is concern for Jewish theology, perhaps a result of the list of contributors but also of the paucity of major new theologies of Judaism. Premodern/modern is a critical distinction in the history of science, technology, economics, ideologies, philosophy, art–and in Judaism. As Arnold J. Band notes in his essay on S.Y. Agnon, the relation between what we think of as tradition and modernity is dialectical. Affecting each other, they repeatedly reshaped Judaism as a whole. A central feature of the modern is repeated change. In the Festschrift this appears in Steven M. Lowenstein’s depiction of the separate paths taken by modernizing German and Dutch Jewry. This theme is driven home in Wendy Zierler’s discussion of the avant-garde film Momento, which illustrates how the pre-modern past is repeatedly rewritten. Similar...

Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of David B. Ruderman. Richard I. Cohen, Natalie B. Dohrmann, Adam Shear, and Elchanan Reiner, eds. Pittsburgh: Hebrew Union College Press / University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014. xxvi + 378 pp. $50.

Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of David B. Ruderman. Richard I. Cohen, Natalie B. Dohrmann, Adam Shear, and Elchanan Reiner, eds. Pittsburgh: Hebrew Union College Press / University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014. xxvi + 378 pp. $50.

On Sutak’s <em>Cinema Judaica: The War Years, 1939–1949</em>

On Sutak’s Cinema Judaica: The War Years, 1939–1949 Stephen J. Whitfield (bio) Cinema Judaica: The War Years, 1939–1949. By Ken Sutak. New York: Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion Museum/CCAR Press, 2012. 106pp., ISBN 978-1-884300-25-7 (ebook). US $9.99. Perhaps no decade in modern Jewish history—perhaps no decade since the destruction of the Second Temple—has been so packed with significance as the ten years that began in 1939. The horrifically unimaginable was followed by the thrillingly unpredicted. No catastrophe like the Holocaust can be said to have been redeemed. But the birth of a Jewish state, however much historians of the Yishuv can trace the achievement of sovereignty to forces independent of the shock of the Final Solution, cannot in retrospect be removed from the same cataclysmic decade as the torment of the refugee crisis, the plight of Diasporic Jewry beleaguered by anti-Semitism hardly limited to the distinctive terror of the Third Reich, the impact of totalitarianism, and the momentum of decolonization and nationalism. How did such extraordinary historical experiences register in the past century’s supreme medium of mass communication? One answer is reflected in movie poster exhibits that were mounted in the spring of 2007 and then again in the spring of 2008 at the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion Museum in New York City. This seductive, lovingly designed, and informative volume stems from those exhibits, which Ken Sutak very ably produced. Cinema [End Page 192] Judaica constitutes an impressive feat of archeology, of an era that begins with a feature film like Warner Bros.’ Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Anatole Litvak, USA, 1939), starring Edward G. Robinson, and ends with a quartet of obscure movies set during Israel’s fight for independence. The phrase that serves as the title of this book, Sutak writes, may have originated in Los Angeles, “to promote revival screenings of Jewish-themed films” (99), and to attract audiences to concerts where the film scores by Jewish composers were performed. The author gives no exact dates, however. Nor is his own definition of a “Jewish-themed” movie unduly rigid. The Stranger (Orson Welles, USA, 1946), for example, includes documentary footage of concentration camps. But none of the major characters (portrayed by Orson Welles, who also directed the film, Loretta Young, and the ubiquitous Edward G. Robinson) is Jewish; and the Nazis were not too finicky about whom they chose to imprison and torture in the camps. What makes The Stranger Jewish is therefore dubious. Cinema Judaica even includes a Disney cartoon, Education for Death (Clyde Geronimi, USA, 1943). Or take The House I Live In (Mervyn LeRoy, USA, 1945). Perhaps no nine-minute short in the history of Hollywood has enjoyed more acclaim. This movie won a special Academy Award for “Tolerance Short Subject,” as well as a Golden Globe Award for “Best Film for Promoting International Good Will.” These prizes, in the immediate aftermath of the Final Solution, signaled a shift in the zeitgeist. But the kid Frank Sinatra protects from young bigots in the film is bullied because of his different “religion”; it is not explicitly mentioned as Judaism. During a decade when prejudice was widely believed to be indivisible, as though anti-Semitism and racism were interchangeable, and when universalistic values were often considered the best refuge for an embattled people, it was prudent not to be too specific. The House I Live In was scripted by Albert Maltz, and Lewis Allan (the pseudonym used by Abel Meerepol) is co-credited with writing the title song. Two years after RKO’s short subject was released, Maltz would be subpoenaed to testify as a member of the Hollywood 10 before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Eight years after Sinatra introduced this musical plea for pluralism, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg would be electrocuted; and Meerepol would adopt their orphaned sons. Despite the marvelous evocation of the decade that the visual artifacts in Cinema Judaica achieve, it misses something crucial, which is the politics of many of the filmmakers themselves. The struggle against anti-Semitism was largely a leftist struggle, just as the New Deal had enhanced [End...

Hebrew Union College Annual

Hebrew Union College Annual

Torture, Terror, Digitality: A Conversation with Tony Cokes

Post-conceptual artist Tony Cokes's Evil series (2001-present) interrogates the ideological underpinnings of the on Terror. Through the critical reframing of appropriated texts and images, Cokes infuses a new legibility into material that has remained largely hidden in plain sight. Refunctioning streams of poorly read/ forgotten information, Cokes creates an architecture of wreading (1) for the digital age. Cokes is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and lives in Providence, Rhode Island. His works have been exhibited at such venues as the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Guggenheim Museum in New York; Centre Georges Pompidou and La Cinematheque Francaise in Paris; Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona; the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) in Los Angeles; Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe; and Documenta X in Kassel, Germany. He has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council for the Arts, Creative Capital, and the Getty Research Institute. What follows is taken from a series of exchanges, via email and in person, begun in February 2015--when Cokes presented his work in the context of Distracted Wreading [From Structural Film to Digital Poetics], an exhibition at Union College in Schenectady, New York. JENELLE TROXELL: I'd like to discuss your Evil series and how it relates more generally to your extended body of work. Could you say a few words about the series in terms of how you conceived of it and some of its overarching themes? TONY COKES: The Evil series came about in the period after the events of September 11, 2001. Besides feeling inundated by seeing more American flags than I recalled from any earlier period in my life, I was struck by the return of the concept of evil to contemporary political discourse. The repeated use of the term (often in juxtaposition with its alleged opposite) seemed to be puzzling, yet highly rhetorically effective during the years of the George W. Bush presidency. Phenomena like the ongoing War on Terror, the USA PATRIOT Act, and the Department of Homeland Security's color alert system really frightened and angered me and required a response. I began collecting articles, mostly journalistic, some theoretical, to map these things as they happened. I was particularly interested in these texts as or hidden in plain sight. I was also aware that other artists were working with similar materials (multiple projects based on keyword searches of Bush's speeches, for example), and I wanted to align with those practices as a small act of solidarity and resistance. My premise is that a different reading protocol and context might produce new conditions of possibility and legibility for these already widely, yet poorly, read events/histories/articles. JT: From where does the title derive? TC: The title came to me through an encounter with the interview On Evil: An Interview With Alain Badiou conducted by Christopher Cox and Molly Whalen, which appeared in Cabinet magazine in Winter 2001-02. Excerpts from the interview became text elements in Evil/Shrink (2003), the first completed work in the series. That first video, which featured footage taken of Manhattan before and after 9/11, was composed of two excerpts from a large, still incomplete multichannel installation project called Shrink. That project was to feature three simultaneous yet different views of the same area of the New York City skyline accompanied by a variety of theoretical, artistic, and journalistic texts. All the video was set to the same soundtrack: a set of songs from the 1998 album Shrink, produced by the Bavarian experimental rock band the Notwist. JT: Do you see this project as an elaboration of some of your earlier concerns? TC: I think my work has always had an interest in reframing/ disrupting already existing cultural artifacts (visual, textual, or sonic) to produce different possibilities for reading and meaning. …

Anyone out there from Union College Hospital set 277 of 1985?

Anyone out there from Union College Hospital set 277 of 1985?

The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver and the Foundation of Israel by Ofer Shiff (review)

THE DOWNFALL OF ABBA HILLEL SILVER AND THE FOUNDATION OF ISRAEL Ofer Shiff. Modern Jewish History. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014. 289 pp.The career of American Reform rabbi and Zionist leader Abba Hillel Silver (1893-1963) reached its zenith when ascended to the role of senior mediator between the U.S. and Israel in the wake of the Suez Crisis. Not long afterwards, suffered a reversal of fortune when found himself marginalized by leadership of the nascent Israeli state. This study is not the first analysis of Silver's career but it sets itself apart from earlier scholarship by virtue of Ofer Shiff's masterful and seamless weaving of Silver's own words into the fabric of a key argument: that despite the aforementioned setback, Silver never conflated his political defeat with a rejection of his ideological views. Shiff, professor of Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University, and former director of the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, has crafted an exceptional biography of a man who played a critical role in the early relationship between the foundation of Israel and the largest constituent of diasporic Jewry.Born in Lithuania, Silver immigrated to the United States as a child in 1902 and his family settled on New York's Lower East Side. He received his rabbinical training at Cincinnati's Hebrew Union College and his doctorate from the University of Cincinnati. Shiff's account begins however, closer to the end of Silver's career with his unexpected 1949 resignation from all official positions within the Zionist movement and return to his rabbinical post at Cleveland's largest reform synagogue, Tifereth Israel. Shiff contends that Silver's decision came, not in a fit of pique, but with a recognition that his view of Jewish statehood ran counter to the goals of Israel's statist-oriented leadership under David Ben-Gurion. Silver viewed the foundation of the State of Israel as a noble way station on the journey toward what saw as the universal and spiritual purpose of the faith, not as an end in itself. In Silver's vision, this true purpose was to manifest in the creation of successful relationships between the Jewish Diaspora and non-Jewish host societies. Ultimately, he regarded the post-independence period as one destined to liberate Jewry from the defensive mentality of a people forced incessantly to fight for its very existence. Despite his commitment to such an approach, however, Silver ran headlong into the very existential angst for Israel and the Jewish people that strove to prevent. …