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This category contains 16 posts

Prayers from the Heart

Dinah Berland, ed. and adaptor, Hours of Devotion: Fanny Neuda’s Book of Prayers for Jewish Women. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. $24.00
Reviewed by Elisheva Carlebach

Exploring the Alliance

A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews, Christian Zionists, and One Man’s Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance
by Zev Chafets. HarperCollins, 2007 240 pp $24.95
Reviewed by Michael Kress
Jewish attitudes toward Evangelicals tend to range from the paranoid (“They’re out to make America a Christian theocracy!”) to the condescending (“They’re backwater, low-IQ, gun-toting simpletons!”). [...]

Emma Lazarus: Poet of Exile

Alicia Ostriker
Emma Lazarus by Esther Schor,
Nextbook, Schocken, 2006. 350 pp, $21.95
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
The words of Emma Lazarus, famously engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty [...]

Transforming Synagogues: Two New Guides

Jack Bloom
ReThinking Synagogues: A New Vocabulary for Congregational Life Lawrence A. Hoffman, Jewish Lights Publishing, 2006, 240 pp, $19.99
The Spirituality of Welcoming: How to Transform Your Congregation into a Sacred Community Ron Wolfson, Jewish Lights Publishing, 2006, 224 pp, $19.99
Synagogue 2000 (S2K) — now (S3K) — is one of the most exciting synagogue ventures of [...]

Visionary Leadership

Jen Glaser
Nathan Laufer, The Genesis of Leadership: What the Bible Teaches Us about Vision, Values and Leading Change Jewish Lights Publishing, 2006, 288 pp, 24.99
In a moment of personal reflection and disclosure in the second section of The Genesis of Leadership, Rabbi Nathan Laufer speaks to the Janus-like vision of good leaders. Visionary leaders develop [...]

The Mighty and the Almighty

Marc Gopin
Madeleine Albright, The Mighty and the Almighty, HarperCollins, 2006, $26, 352 pages
Madeleine Albright’s book The Mighty and the Almighty is path-breaking; for the first time, one of the major political actors on the world stage and in American foreign policy is seriously engaging and interweaving the issues of religion, politics, diplomacy, war, and peace. [...]

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UPCOMING NEXT MONTH: American Jewish Loyalties

  • Michael Kimmage on the Fifties
  • Noam Pianko on Mordechai Kaplan
  • Arie Dubnov on Hannah Arendt
  • Steven Nadler on Baruch Spinoza
  • Eli Lederhendler on lines that can't be crossed
  • Roberta Seid and Hadar Susskind weigh in on Israel
  • Amy Eilberg on embracing difference
  • Shaul Magid on dogmas in American Judaism
  • Shlomo Fischer on Israel’s army
  • And an array of short personal reflections on convictions outside the pale