The Empire of Our Religion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shari Rabin
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Reform Judaism ◽  
American Continent ◽  
American Imperialism ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
American Judaism ◽  
Pastoral Ideal

Amidst unfettered mobility, Jewish leaders like Isaac Mayer Wise and Isaac Leeser attempted not only an institutional overhaul of American Judaism, but also an ideological one. Jewish leaders engaged in popular geography and new forms of theological reflection, drawing on Jewish thought and the ideologies of American imperialism. They both critiqued the settings of American Jewish life, even advocating for agricultural colonies, but also developed a Jewish pastoral ideal. In this mode, they developed novel understandings of Jewish identity, Jewish institutions, and religious change. The internalized “Jewish heart” and the powerful “empire of our religion” both became widespread metaphors for explaining how and why Judaism would flourish anywhere. They were used by a broad swath of Jewish leaders, as was the concept of “progress,” although those allied with Wise’s Reform Judaism and with Leeser’s traditionalism soon developed competing understandings of how religious change should happen and of whether Judaism should be fully mobile or merely portable. In spite of these divides, they helped establish an underlying confidence that Judaism could and should prevail throughout the American continent through institutional development and individual identities.

Jewish Theology and World Religions

2012 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Know How ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Past ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Critical Issues ◽  
Religious Other

Two of the most pervasive aspects of modern Jewish life are interaction with people of other faiths and exposure to their beliefs to a degree unknown in the past. Jewish thinking regarding other religions has not succeeded in keeping pace with the contemporary realities that regularly confront most Jews, nor has it adequately assimilated the ways in which other religions have changed their teachings about Jews and Judaism. Many Jews who grapple with Jewish tradition in the contemporary world want to know how Judaism sees today's non-Jewish other in order to affirm itself. Re-examining Jewish tradition, they seek guidance in understanding their interfaith relationships in the light of a Jewish religious mission. This book advances this conversation, exploring critical issues that Jews and Jewish thought face when relating to Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. It also analyses the philosophical issues raised by pluralism, non-exclusive approaches to religious truth, and appreciating the religious other. The chapters show why formulating a Jewish theology of world religions is a priority for Jewish thinkers and educators concerned with reinvigorating Judaism's contribution to the contemporary world, and how it coheres with maintaining Jewish identity and continuity.

Conclusion

2012 ◽  
pp. 360-370
Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young People ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Effect Change ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Traditional Approaches ◽  
Desire To Change

This concluding chapter examines changes to the role of yeshiva in Jewish society as well as several developments to yeshiva history after the nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, the changes and conflicts that had struck the Jewish world had affected the yeshiva too. Contemporary discussion of the yeshiva was frequently in the context of the Haskalah and noted its power to effect change. There is no clear answer as to what it was that persuaded young people to abandon traditional Jewish life, but the wholesale attribution of this to the Haskalah is not self-evident. It seems much more likely that the threat to traditional ways came from indifference to Jewish identity rather than from any desire to change that identity. Indifference is naturally hard to identify, and it was easier for conservatives to battle against a concrete enemy, equally eager to do battle, than to engage with an attitude that was so contemptuous of traditional approaches that it did not even bother to argue with them.

scholarly journals “Zwischen allen Stühlen”: Reflections on Judaism in Germany in Victor Klemperer’s Post-Holocaust Diaries

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 168
Author(s):  
Sepp
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
Jewish Origin ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Soviet Occupation Zone

This article focuses as a case study on Victor Klemperer’s diaristic representation of German-Jewish identity and culture after 1945 in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the GDR. The contribution shows how Klemperer’s professional and social situation remained very uncomfortable even in East Germany. For the diarist, the communist code ‘antifascist/fascist’, just like the code ‘German/un-German’ before it, was tantamount to concealing Jewish origin. His post-Holocaust journals provide an immediate insider’s view of Jewish life in Germany after the Holocaust from the perspective of a victim of active persecution. Against this backdrop, the contribution examines how the author’s original German nationalism gradually makes way, caught between contradictory impulses of assimilation and decreed Jewish identity, for a much more complex understanding of his own cultural identity. Klemperer’s diaries highlight a number of tensions that ultimately reflect on the disjunction between living and writing: The divide between a single and changing self lies at the heart of his diaries after 1945, which depict an astute, complex psychogram of the assimilated German-Jewish bourgeoisie that survived the Holocaust and tried to continue living in communist Germany.

Willy Loman and Postwar Jewish Insecurity

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-76
Author(s):  
Mark Hodin
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
American West ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Land Of Israel ◽  
Death Of A Salesman

Abstract Willy Loman’s cryptic Jewish identity, recognizable but absent, has long been considered an act of ethnic betrayal, evidence of Arthur Miller’s inauthenticity as a Jewish writer. However, as scholars recently have explored the undercurrent of anxiety running beneath the surface of postwar Jewish life, Willy’s feelings of rootlessness, and his worries over American success, seem now particularly “Jewish.” Arguing that Willy Loman represents a postwar Jewish-American identity crisis, not a suppressed Jewish essence, the article analyzes the reception of Death of a Salesman (1949) in the Jewish press, from the pulpit, and within the synagogue community. Throughout, Willy’s preoccupation with acceptance and his eventual self-destruction resonate uncomfortably with the nightmare of European catastrophe that American Jews were then processing. In this context, the article claims that Biff’s attempt to counter his father’s world of selling by laboring in Texas, an action usually interpreted through myths of the American West, may have been read by Jewish Salesman audiences through a discourse of postwar Zionism they knew well: namely, the resettlement of Holocaust refugees in the land of Israel.

American Judaism and Race

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jodi Eichler-Levine
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
American Jews ◽  
American Judaism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Race And Religion

Thinking about American Jews, race, and religion entails confronting the instability of those terms. This chapter examines the history of Jews and race in the United States through three lenses. First, it looks at the history of how Eastern European Jews have been “raced” in America, and in particular how they became “white.” Second, it considers Jewish interactions with other groups, such as blacks, Native Americans, and Asians, and how Jewish identity has been co-constituted with and against that of other groups. Third, the chapter looks at internal Jewish diversity and the challenges presented by Euro-centric models of Jewishness. The chapter concludes by considering Jews, race, and religion in the age of Ferguson.

A New American Jewish World

1998 ◽  
pp. 294-297
Author(s):  
Sefton D. Temkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Reform Judaism ◽  
American Jewish

This chapter shows how the battles over the Pittsburgh Platform were being fought over a terrain which other factors were already transforming. Large-scale migration from Eastern Europe had begun. The number of Jews in the United States, estimated at 250,000 in 1880, reached the million mark in 1900, the year of Wise’s death. The acculturated community, speaking English albeit with a German accent, largely middle class, reformed in religion, was outnumbered by one that spoke Yiddish, belonged to the proletariat, and was untouched by Reform Judaism. The processes which Wise saw at work when he arrived in 1846 had to begin over again; but although many of the factors were similar, the answers were not necessarily the same. Incidentally, the presence of a second and larger Jewish community enhanced the importance of New York in American Jewish life and diminished the significance of Cincinnati and other Midwest communities where Wise had held sway.

Rashi’s Commentary

2019 ◽  
pp. 33-78
Author(s):  
Eric Lawee
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Southern France ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Enormous Number

The Commentary’s medieval reception unfolded in diverse centers of Jewish life and across a strikingly large number of spheres: exegetical, educational, polemical, and more. The chapter investigates the fortunes of the Commentary through the period of its early printing in the three key centers for its reception history: Ashkenaz (the Franco-German sphere), Sefarad (Spain), and southern France. The chapter concludes with an account of Rashi’s status as the paramount Torah commentator as it is brightly underscored in data from the first half century of Hebrew printing. In the four centuries prior to print, the Commentary had circulated in hundreds of copies—an enormous number for a Hebrew work in the chirographic age, the focus of the overview here. With printing, the number of editions exploded, reaching some three thousand in three decades. The record of early printings points to the Commentary’s status as a foundational text transcending time and place and embodying a collective Jewish identity.

Jewish Life in an Age of Reaction

1998 ◽  
pp. 5-18
Author(s):  
Sefton D. Temkin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Reform Judaism ◽  
Intellectual Milieu ◽  
Pros And Cons ◽  
The Way

This chapter describes the intellectual milieu within which Isaac Mayer Wise grew up. Growing up, he stood apart from the intellectual circles whose aspirations evoked the fears of authority. Yet the chapter shows a pamphlet he had picked up in Prague — one which had a profound effect on a young man brought up in the stuffy atmosphere of Metternich’s Austria. He later claimed that this pamphlet made him a naturalized American in Bohemia. Indeed, the influence on Wise of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment can be judged from the way it remained with him. Repeatedly he extolled the power of reason and the rule of progress. One can be sure that during the years of his study in Prague, Wise heard the pros and cons both of Reform Judaism in general and of a modern institution for the training of rabbis canvassed with ardour.

The Challenge of a Jewish State

2015 ◽  
pp. 135-180
Author(s):  
David H. Weinberg
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
The Creation ◽  
First Time ◽  
State Of Israel

This chapter investigates the first of three external challenges which defined Jewish life in western Europe in the late 1940s and 1950s. This was the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. For the first time in modern history, Jews could choose whether or not to live in the diaspora. There were hundreds of survivors in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands who were convinced that they had no future in Europe and migrated to Palestine as soon as they could. Those who chose not to were now forced to think more seriously about their decision to remain in western Europe. Zionist stalwarts, in particular, were challenged to reassess their role now that the Jewish state was a reality. What resulted was a transformation in collective and personal behaviour and attitudes that largely strengthened collective Jewish identity and commitment.

Socialist Realism and the Holocaust: Jewish Life and Death in Anatoly Rybakov's Heavy Sand

PMLA ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 111 (2) ◽  
pp. 240-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Rosenshield
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The One ◽  
Second World

Anatoly Rybakov's Heavy Sand (; 1978), the first widely read work of Russian fiction since the 1930s to deal extensively with Jewish life during the Soviet period, is a bold—and problematic—attempt to overcome the negative stereotype of the Jew in Russian culture and to create a memorial to the Soviet Jews murdered by the Nazis. However, governmental and self-imposed censorship, socialist realism, and the narrator's conflicted Russian-Jewish identity vitiate this rehabilitative project. Rybakov's use of socialist realism to heroize the Jews and to present their destruction as part of a larger plot to exterminate the Slavs distorts and de-Judaizes the Soviet Jewish catastrophe of the Second World War. Heavy Sand is replete with tensions and contradictions. On the one hand, the author celebrates Jewish family life and writes of a memorial to murdered Jews that includes a potentially subversive Hebrew inscription; on the other, he denies the significance of Jewish identity and provides a Russian translation of the Hebrew inscription that accords with Soviet policy and ideology. In the end, Heavy Sand conceals more than it reveals about Jewish life and death in the Soviet Union; it represents an aesthetics of—and a testimony to—not remembering but forgetting.

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