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 From 21 to 30 of 64 articles By Matthew LaGrone
In tractate Shabbat, several pagans interested in conversion to Judaism present questions to Rabbis Hillel and Shammai: Shammai refused to convert them because of their ignorance of Judaism, whereas Hillel “accepted each of them lovingly, and through his patient and wise instruction he was able to bring them into Judaism.” Conversion and the tensions surrounding it is one of the most contemporary and sensitive debates in Jewish life. The author offers a historical and reflective account of how different ages have dealt with these tensions in hopes that we could gain some insight for our times. By Julian Voloj
Cuba is celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its revolution. Along the streets of Havana, there are banners with inscriptions such as La Libertad No Se Puede Bloquear (“Freedom can’t be blockaded”), and many buildings are decorated with brand-new portraits of the revolution’s heroes, including, most notably, Fidel Castro, who has now stepped down as Lider Máximo, and Ernesto Guevara, the legendary Argentine doctor commonly known by his nickname, “Che.” How is life for Jews in Cuba today? Un milagro, “a miracle,” is how Jaime Gans Grin sees it as well, “all this is a miracle.” You probably can’t find a more accurate description for the rebirth of Jewish life in Cuba.
After she had survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp and married her husband there, Berlin native Margot Friedländer emigrated to America. A return to Germany was out of the question. After her husband’s death in 1997, however, Margot Friedländer started talking about her experiences during the Holocaust. In the meantime, her dramatic story of hope and betrayal, moral courage in the midst of terror, and the unconditional will to survive has turned into an interesting documentary film and an enthralling book, which in 2009 will be awarded the Einhard Prize, presented every two years to the author of an outstanding biography.
By Julian Voloj
By Julian Voloj
Purim is the festival that commemorates the deliverance of the Jewish people from imminent danger in the Persian Diaspora. Of all the Jewish holidays, Purim is the most boisterous, and its focus on dressing up in colorful masks and costumes and holding public parades leads some to characterize it as the Jewish Mardi Gras. At the moment, Attila Seres, a Hungarian Jew, is using a “virtual Mardi Gras” to bring about the rescue of Budapest’s Jewish Quarter.
By Julian Voloj
“Second Life, for me it’s an opportunity to meet other Jews, talk to people, make new friendships,” Fischer explains. On Saturday evenings, when he’s in Second Life after the Sabbath ends and he accesses his virtual Western Wall, he always meets new people. “Most of them are totally enthusiastic about the SL Kotel and think it’s cool that a Chabadnik is in Second Life.”
By Hector Schmuckler
It is the author’s hypothesis that what is at risk in the commercialized, globalized, multi-cultural, post-modern, or however you wish to call it, world, is memory—the collective memory that is always at the nucleus, at the center of that which characterizes Judaism. The question that will be reiterated again and again ad infinitum, as long as there is such a thing called Judaism, asks: what is this memory?
Fifth speech in the series: “Growing Up in the Ghetto, Growing Up in the World” - The Third International Conference of Intellectuals, Rosario, Argentina. By Julian Voloj
While the film Dirty Dancing is thought of almost everywhere in the world merely as a romantic dance movie, it has quite a different connotation for American Jews. “The film is an affectionate homage to the Catskills and the area’s Jewish resorts. Therefore the film is part of American Jewish culture,” says Elizabeth Edelstein, Director of Education at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.
By Diana Sperling
The Jew understands his ties to the land in terms that are not natural, but legal. We inhabit the earth that belongs, as the Biblical text says, to the Lord; in other words possession is, in any event, contractual, circumstantial and subject to laws. We are not offspring of the land, but of the letter.
Fourth speech in the series: “Growing Up in the Ghetto, Growing Up in the World” - The Third International Conference of Intellectuals, Rosario, Argentina.
…This essay stands as a start, and not as the last word, on the place and form of European Jewry in the twenty-first century.… I think that European Jewry can usefully fill the space that lies psycho-politically between the two great blocs of Jewry, the U.S.A. and Israel.
By Clive A. Lawton
Essay originally published in "Turning the Kaleidoscope – Perspectives on European Jewry". The author departs from the interpretation of Rashi concerning the destinies of Beruriah and Rabbi Meir (Avodah zarah, 18b), and the journey focuses on that exegesist’s modus operandi in his interpretative method. She invites us to discover the bearing the precedent of the Beruriah case has had on women’s organic access to the scholarly world of our people. By sharing some paradigmatic portraits of this exceptional woman, she supports a question concerning the original intention behind the parshan: Could it have been to draw attention to conflicting aspects of Rabbi Meir’s behavior towards his wife? Or would it have been to sanction Beruriah on account of the complexity of her persona? Perhaps we still had a few centuries and sufferings to go for attention to shift away from Beruriah’s supposed guilt and onto Rabbi Meir’s responsibility.
“In any event”—she tells us—“it is not clear to me which side of the moon is the dark one, and this perush’s richness lies, perhaps, in awakening us enough to be capable of assimilating its change of light.”
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