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December 2002  

 


 

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December 2002 Highlights

New Boundaries of Jewish Studies

 Mitch Hart
What Would Be Lost?
How does one, writing as both a Jew and a scholar, engage
in dispassionate scholarship, practice the "hermeneutics of
suspicion, and also "teach Judaism to the next generation".

 Jonathan Schorsch
Losing What Would Be? A Response to Mitchell Hart
Jewish Studies embraces so many different modes that there is room enough for vastly contrasting approaches. those scholars who care about Jewish identity and continuity cannot be dismissed as pawns of religious nationalist ideology, nor can they be seen as the only ones "importing" their personal stance.

 Derek Penslar
Teaching Israeli History: The Unbearable
Heaviness of Jewish Power

A University course in Israeli history offers a respite from today's overheated political environment...One can empathize with a subject without identifying with it...

 

 Steve Zipperstein
Separate Tables: Jewish Studies at the Edge
Like all else in the university world, the field of Jewish Studies exists to create analytical problems, to unsettle accepted knowledge, to cause unease, to disturb sleep.

 

 

From the Sh'ma Archive January 1991
 Chaim Seidler-Feller
Between assimilation and identification
One could say that Jewish Studies created an alternative mode of expressing one's identity as a Jew

 

 Koret Foundation Sh'ma Book Reviews

Steven T. Rosenthal's Irreconciliable Differences? The Waning of the American Jewish Love Affair with Israel offers a depressing overview of this dysfunctional relationship. - Review by Gil Troy

 Koret Foundation Sh'ma Book Reviews

 NiSh'ma

 

Life on the Fringes: A Feminist Journey Toward Traditional Rabbinic Ordination by Haviva Ner-David

Life on the FringesNew from Jewish Family & Life!, the parent organization of Sh'ma: Life on the Fringes, a moving memoir and halakhic commentary by a young Jewish feminist who is poised to become the first female Orthodox rabbi. The author, Haviva Ner-David, explores contemporary approaches to Jewish law and life, women's involvement in ritual and study, the challenges of parenting, gender and our Jewish journeys, and more ...

Click on the cover to order.


Living Words: Best High Holiday Sermons of 5760/1999
Living Words: The Best High Holiday Sermons of 5760 is a collection of sermons filled with words of wisdom, pleas for justice, tales of journeys and text-analyses that will inspire and enrich your soul as you ponder new teachings for the High Holidays. Selected by a panel of compassionate and thoughtful judges, these sermons are diverse and challenging, seeking to engage those individuals striving for both knowledge and spiritual growth.

For Sale: A New Source Book on the Jewish Ethics of Addressing Terrorism

This publication is designed to help individuals and families use Jewish sources and resources to address the aftermath of the terrorist attack in NY and Washington. The book asks: How do we do fight terrorism and preserve our society's moral fiber? How do we maintain our personal, communal and religious ethics and sense of morality in the face of a needed war on terrorism? What are the boundaries for addressing terrorism? What is the ethical framework we employ? :

Jewish Ethics and Fighting Terrorism will include three distinct sections:
1. Helping families and educators with strategies to address this difficult terrain with their children.
2. Several High Holiday Sermons that offer words of wisdom, inspiration, comfort, and insight into how an American Jewish community responds to terrorism.
3. An expanded special issue of Sh'ma that addressed these questions with essays from  Rabbi Saul Berman, Director of Edah, a voice of Modern Orthodoxy
Dr. Marc Gopin, author of Between Eden and Armageddon: The Future of World Religions, Violence and Peacemaking and Holy War, Holy Peace
Dr. Reuven Firestone, Professor of Medieval Judaism and Islam at HUC-JIR in LA and author of Jihad: THe Origin of Holy War in Islam.
Dr. Dov Zakheim, Undersecretary of Defence, Controller
Dr. Vanessa Ochs, Professor of Religion, University of Virginia
Rabbi Arnold Resnicoff, National Director of Inter-religious Affairs at the American Jewish Committee, former Chief Rabbi of the American Armed Services
Dr. Dawn Rose, former director of the Ethics Center at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical School and Rabbi of Temple of Universal Judaism in NYC.
Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, President of Jewish Life Network

Available February, 2002. $25.00 includes postage and handling. To order, contact stephenc@JFLmedia.com.



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Quote of
the Month

"In the eyes of some traditional academicians, this relationship between social researchers and the Jewish community may seem distorted, if not, at times, corrupt. The act of seeking influence, access and notice seems at variance with a 'pure' process of seeking truth and presenting it in a way that is insightful, sophisticated and aesthetically pleasing." Steven M. Cohen "Two Worlds of Jewish Social Research"