The only comprehensive and up-to-date look at Reform Judaism, this book analyzes the forces currently challenging the Reform movement, now the largest Jewish denomination in the United States. To distinguish itself from Orthodox and Conservative Judaism, the Reform movement tries to be an egalitarian, open, and innovative version of the faith true to the spirit of the tradition but nonetheless fully compatible with modern secular life. Promoting itself in this way, Reform Judaism has been tremen...
Zion in the Desert (SUNY series in Israeli Studies)
by William F. S. Miles
Sun Yatsen (1866-1925) occupies a unique position in modern Chinese history: he is equally venerated as the founding father of the nation by both the mainland Communist government and its Nationalist rival in Taiwan. The first president of the Republic of China in 1911-12, the peasant-born yet Western-trained Dr Sun was also a dedicated political theorist, constantly in search of the ideal political and constitutional blueprint to underpin his incomplete revolution. A decade before the public em...
This volume analyzes historical and recent developments in female religious leadership and the larger issues shaping the scholarly debate at the intersection of gender and religious studies. Jewish activism and scholarship have been crucial in linking theology and gender issues since the early twentieth century. Academic and vocational leadership and training have had significant, concrete impact on religious communal practices and formation across the US and Europe. At the same time, these mode...
n this volume, Rabbi Steven Fisdel explores, Jewish meditation practices as the experiential side of Kabbalah and therefore as one of the primary sources for the development of the mystic thought and belief in Judaism. This work focuses on a variety of mystic traditions within Kabbalah that relate directly to meditative practice. It incorporates several different schools of thought and represents various periods in the development of Kabbalah. Among the traditions included for elucidation are th...
Jewish art has always been with us, but so has a broader canvas of Jewish imaginings: in thought, in emotion, in text, and in ritual practice. Imagining the Jewish God was there in the beginning, as it were, engraved and embedded in the ways Jews lived and responded to their God. This book attempts to give voice to these diverse imaginings of the Jewish God, and offers these collected essays and poems as a living text meant to provoke a substantive and nourishing dialogue. A responsive, living c...
A Reader of Early Liberal Judaism
by Israel Abrahams, Claude Montefiore, Lily Montagu, and Israel I. Mattuck
Based on a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, this volume for the first time interprets the biography and philosophy of the German Jewish thinker Samuel Holdheim (1806-1860), shedding new light on a neglected phenomenon of nineteenth century Jewish intellectual history - the radical Reform Movement that started in Germany and culminated in the American Jewish Reform ideology. Leading scholars of modern Jewish history and thought from Germany, France, Belgium and the United States presen...
Music and Religious Change among Progressive Jews in London
by Ruth Illman
This book analyses religion and change in relation to music within the context of contemporary progressive Judaism. It argues that music plays a central role as a driving force for religious change, comprising several elements seen as central to contemporary religiosity in general: participation, embodiment, experience, emotions and creativity. Focusing on the progressive Anglo-Jewish milieu today, the study investigates how responses to these processes of change are negotiated individually and...