Building a Public Judaism

Building a Public Judaism PDF Author: Saskia Coenen Snyder
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674070577
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
Nineteenth-century Europe saw an unprecedented rise in the number of synagogues. Building a Public Judaism considers what their architecture and the circumstances surrounding their construction reveal about the social progress of modern European Jews. Looking at synagogues in four important centers of Jewish life—London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Berlin—Saskia Coenen Snyder argues that the process of claiming a Jewish space in European cities was a marker of acculturation but not of full acceptance. Whether modest or spectacular, these new edifices most often revealed the limits of European Jewish integration. Debates over building initiatives provide Coenen Snyder with a vehicle for gauging how Jews approached questions of self-representation in predominantly Christian societies and how public manifestations of their identity were received. Synagogues fused the fundamentals of religion with the prevailing cultural codes in particular locales and served as aesthetic barometers for European Jewry’s degree of modernization. Coenen Snyder finds that the dialogues surrounding synagogue construction varied significantly according to city. While the larger story is one of increasing self-agency in the public life of European Jews, it also highlights this agency’s limitations, precisely in those places where Jews were thought to be most acculturated, namely in France and Germany. Building a Public Judaism grants the peculiarities of place greater authority than they have been given in shaping the European Jewish experience. At the same time, its place-specific description of tensions over religious tolerance continues to echo in debates about the public presence of religious minorities in contemporary Europe.

Building a Public Judaism

Building a Public Judaism PDF Author: Saskia Coenen Snyder
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674067495
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Book Description
Coenen Snyder considers what the architecture and construction of nineteenth-century European synagogues reveal about the social progress of modern European Jews. The process of claiming a Jewish space was a marker of acculturation but not full acceptance, she argues. The new edifices, even if spectacular, revealed the limits of Jewish integration.

Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon

Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon PDF Author: Justin Daniel Cammy
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 744

Book Description
Wisse is a leading scholar of Yiddish and Jewish literary studies and a fearless public intellectual on issues relating to Jewish society and culture. In this celebratory volume, her colleagues pay tribute with a collection of critical essays whose subjects break new ground in Yiddish, Hebrew, Israeli, American, European, and Holocaust literature.

More Than Just Hummus

More Than Just Hummus PDF Author: Matt Adler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781735154602
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
Journey from the comfort of your home to the most misunderstood place in the world: Israel. Unlike most travelogues, however, your guide is a gay Jew who uses his Arabic to shed light on life in the less-seen parts of this magnificent country. Join him as he shares his gay identity with a questioning teenager, hitchhikes on golf carts in a rural Druze village, and celebrates Shabbat -- all in Arabic. You'll find Matt visiting Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Druze communities, using his compassion and sense of humor to delve into the intricacies of one of the most diverse places on the planet.

Playlist Judaism

Playlist Judaism PDF Author: Kerry M. Olitzky
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1566996031
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 126

Book Description
"Every Jewish institution," writes Kerry Olitzky, "is undergoing significant change and is in danger of becoming irrelevant to the majority of North American Jews. All these institutions will have to reimagine themselves if they are to survive and grow. And the most numerous of these institutes is also the most vulnerable: the synagogue." The synagogue as we know it developed in response to a variety of needs, often in an attempt to create new communities for education and assembly as populations moved from urban centers to the suburbs. These needs have changed, and the synagogue is no longer the center of social and professional life. Change is necessary, but what a synagogue that serves the new needs of American Jewish religious life look like? In Playlist Judaism, Kerry Olitzky offers provocative proposals to help synagogues face today s challenges, from turning the synagogue inside out so that it is reaching out to the community around it, to recognizing intermarriage as an opportunity for synagogues, and encouraging synagogues not to forget the Boomers. It is an engaging look at what creative thinking has to offer congregations today. In his foreword, Ron Wolfson says that the book will provide "leadership teams with a plethora of practical proposals to chart an exciting and engaging future for their congregations."

Congregating and Consecrating at Central Synagogue

Congregating and Consecrating at Central Synagogue PDF Author: Elizabeth Blackmar
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780971728516
Category : Jews
Languages : en
Pages : 79

Book Description
Two related essays describing the history the development of a religious fellowship and the public ceremonies that contributed to and highlighted many moments of that history in this Reform New York congregation. A significant portion of the research was done in Central Synagogue's Archives. Many historic photographs (B&W) are included.

A Jewish Public Theology

A Jewish Public Theology PDF Author: Abraham Unger
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498535887
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 126

Book Description
A Jewish Public Theology draws from Jewish law and political science to address the most searing current policy issues. It goes beyond the current orthodoxies of left, right, and populist ideologies to examine how an ancient tradition speaks to the disruptions of our global epoch.

Building After Auschwitz

Building After Auschwitz PDF Author: Gavriel David Rosenfeld
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300169140
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The first major study to examine the rise to prominence of Jewish architects since 1945 and the connection of their work to the legacy of the Holocaust Since the end of World War II, Jewish architects have risen to unprecedented international prominence. Whether as modernists, postmodernists, or deconstructivists, architects such as Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Louis I. Kahn, Daniel Libeskind, Richard Meier, Moshe Safdie, Robert A.M. Stern, and Stanley Tigerman have made pivotal contributions to postwar architecture. They have also decisively shaped Jewish architectural history, as many of their designs are influenced by Jewish themes, ideas, and imagery. Building After Auschwitz is the first major study to examine the origins of this "new Jewish architecture." Historian Gavriel D. Rosenfeld describes this cultural development as the result of important shifts in Jewish memory and identity since the Holocaust, and cites the rise of postmodernism, multiculturalism, and Holocaust consciousness as a catalyst. In showing how Jewish architects responded to the Nazi genocide in their work, Rosenfeld's study sheds new light on the evolution of Holocaust memory.

Trouble-making Judaism

Trouble-making Judaism PDF Author: Elli Tikvah Sarah
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780954848293
Category : Feminism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Book Description


Building a Diaspora

Building a Diaspora PDF Author: Eliezer Ben-Rafael
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047418530
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
The crumbling of the USSR has set Russian-speaking Jews free to emigrate. From the threat of antisemitism to economic disaster, their “good reasons” to do so were numerous and within one and a half decade most of them moved out and scattered throughout the world. This book is about the million that settled in Israel, the half million now in the US and the 200.000 who settled in Germany. This book presents the comparative work of an international team of researchers which delves into the building of communities, the formulation of collective identities and the articulation of public discourse by people who, after eighty years of Marxism-Leninism and compulsory removal from Jewish culture, are now reconstructing their ethnicity. In every place, they face contrasting challenges and as a whole, constitute an ideal case for the study of the making of contemporary transnational diasporas.