Jewish Renaissance
The Jewish Renaissance Agenda: Emerging Challenges
Alisa Rubin Kurshan
The Jewish Renaissance agenda in the year 2000 has evolved and matured from the early years of the continuity movement. What began as a reaction – some believed an overreaction – to the alarming intermarriage statistics of the 1990 National Jewish Population Study is now a flourishing initiative that seeks to answer the [...]
Rebuilding Jewish Communities
Arnold Eisen
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was surely correct when he complained, some forty years ago, that Jewish leaders had focused their attention on “the problem of the Jewish people, the group, the community, its institutions,” at the expense of concern for the individual Jew and his or her “intimate problems… the search for meaning.” Organized [...]
From the Outside In: Renaissance and Adult Jewish Learning
Carolyn Keller
“Three years ago, I began a journey. I began to draw more and seek more from Judaism, …my journey was filled with important questions and challenges. Two struck me: What made my home a Jewish home? What distinguished the sacred from the profane in my Jewish life? I felt I had no good answers, [...]
Social Justice and Renaissance
Leonard Fein
The line that made the rounds this summer had an American Jewish tourist in Israel ask-ing his guide how to say tikkun olam in Hebrew. The underlying point, of course, is that tikkun olam has become – take your pick: a mantra, a commitment, a cliché, a shtick – of American Judaism. Now and [...]
Jews and Books
Alvin Rosenfeld
For the past two years, I’ve had the privilege of serving as a judge for the Koret Jewish Book Awards in the area of fiction. According to some, we are living in an age that soon may see the “death of the book,” but word about the coming demise evidently has not reached Jewish [...]
