Female Rabbis, Pastors, and Ministers (Studia Judaica, #95)
How do female rabbis, ministers, and women in other religious leadership roles transform their religious traditions, the very role of religion modern society, and the way women understand themselves? This volume convenes leading scholars and practitioners from various countries and traditions to discuss these questions at the intersection of gender studies, theology, and religious studies. Historical and current developments within Judaism form the starting point for a debate touching on ques...
Teach Yourself Judaism (Teach Yourself (McGraw-Hill))
by C.M. Hoffman and Jonathan Gorsky
Abraham Geiger's Liberal Judaism: Personal Meaning and Religious Authority (Jewish Literature and Culture)
by Ken Koltun-Fromm
Creating American Reform Judaism (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization)
by Sefton D. Temkin
Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1900), founder of the major institutions of Reform Judaism in America, was a man of his time-a pioneer in a pioneer's world. When he came to America from his childhood Bohemia in 1846, he found fewer than 50,000 Jews and only two ordained rabbis. With his sense of mission and tireless energy, he set himself to tailoring the vehicle of Reform Judaism to meet the needs of the growing Jewish community. Wise strove for unity among American Jews, and for a college to train rab...
Why Is America Different?
Does the American Jewish experience represent a singular communal circumstance, or does it repeat, with obvious and unavoidable variation, the older European pattern of Jewish existence? In 2004, on the occasion of the 350th anniversary of the establishment of the American Jewish community, this question seemed well worth revisiting. To explore it more fully, the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University brought together a distinguished group of expert scholars on the main areas...
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-99), the "Great Agnostic," was the greatest freethought orator in the history of the United States. No public speaker before or since has enjoyed the reputation accorded him. After the Civil War, Ingersoll embarked upon a career as a lecturer, touring the United States to make his thoughts on religion, women's rights, and humanism known to all. Some Mistakes of Moses, one of the most popular of these lectures, is a critical examination of the Pentateuch (the first five...
Liberal Judaism the First Hundred Years
by Lawrence Rigal and Rosita Rosenberg
For many contemporary Jews, Israel no longer serves as the Promised Land, the center of the Jewish universe and the place of final destination. In New Jews, Caryn Aviv and David Shneer provocatively argue that there is a new generation of Jews who don't consider themselves to be eternally wandering, forever outsiders within their communities and seeking to one day find their homeland. Instead, these New Jews are at home, whether it be in Buenos Aires, San Francisco or Berlin, and are rooted with...
Elijah the Prophet is one of the most popular and beloved figures in all of Jewish literature. Both as a biblical prophet and a folklore hero, Elijah has fascinated Jews all over the world for centuries. He has served in many different roles, offering guidance on how to live Like a mensch, bringing hope, reconciling family members, rewarding goodness while punishing wickedness, rescuing Jewish communities and worthy individuals, seeing that justice prevails, and signaling the coming of the Messi...
"Guidance, Not Governance" (Monographs of the Hebrew Union College, #37)
by Joan S Friedman
When Congregation Bene Israel hired him to come to Cincinnati in 1854, Rabbi Max Lilienthal (1814-82) seized the opportunity to work with his friend Isaac M. Wise. Together, Lilienthal and Wise forged the institutional foundations for the American Reform movement: the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and Hebrew Union College. In Max Lilienthal: The Making of the American Rabbinate, author Bruce L. Ruben investigates the central role Lilienthal played in creating new institutions and leader...
Survival Through Integration (paperback) (Jewish Identities in a Changing World, #4)
by Ofer Shiff
The book focuses on the most prominent exponents of the universalistic ideology of American Reform Judaism in the 1930s and 1940s. Those who attempted to maintain unquestioning fealty to the principles of universalistic Reform, even in view of the disheartening realities of the Holocaust, are the heroes of the plot that unfolds here. The way they struggled for their beliefs should be viewed as a point of departure for a more general discussion of the challenge posed by the Holocaust to the moder...
Does modernity trample on tradition, or can it in fact be a vehicle for the sacred?How can one determine whether an interpretation is legitimate, anachronistic or corrupted?Does sexual obsession have a textual origin, and is it woman's destiny to be veiled?In Eve's Attire confronts these questions and more to suggest another interpretation of religious traditions surrounding the female body and the erotic.As current fundamentalist religious discourse expresses a growing fixation on modesty, wome...
The Essentials of Liberal Judaism (Routledge Revivals)
by Israel I. Mattuck
First published in 1947 The Essentials of Liberal Judaism explores the fundamental ideas of liberal Judaism. Rabbi Israel Mattuck explains that liberal Judaism is concerned not only with the question, where shall we find the teachings of Judaism, but also with the question, how shall we find them? He discusses important themes like conception of God in Judaism; grounds for the belief in God; problem of evil; guidance of God in human history; sin, repentance and atonement; Judaism and the social...