Jewish Studies Commons^™

The American Jewish Family, David C. Dollahite, Trevan G. Hatch, Loren D. Marks

Faculty Publications

The authors are family scholars who study the nexus of religion and family relationships ( Dollahite and Marks, 2020 ; Marks, Hatch, and Dollahite, 2018 ). We have conducted inhome, in- depth interviews (about two hours each) with 30 Jewish couples and families across several states. In this chapter we share many fi rst- person quotations about ritual and practice in Jewish families from three major branches of Judaism: Conservative, Orthodox, and Reform. A unique aspect of these quotes is that a number are from observant Jewish children, youth, and young adults, a group that has been largely overlooked in …

Sanctuary In Time: Shabbat As The Soul Of Modern Jewry And The Essence Of “Doing” Judaism, Trevan G. Hatch, Loren D. Marks

Faculty Publications

According to the Hebrew Scriptures, Shabbat was established from the foundations of the world. It was the climax of God’s creation (Gen 1:1– 2:3; Ex 20:11). God “hallowed” the seventh day “because on it, [He] rested from all the work that he had done in creation” (Gen 2:3, NRSV). Shabbat is also associated with the Exodus from Egypt (see Deut 5:12– 15; cf. Ex 23:9– 12). God commanded Israel to observe Shabbat as a remembrance that they “were slaves in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there” (Deut 5:15, NRSV). After the Exodus, …

Jud Ms 26 Israel Bernstein Writings, Emily Margaret Newell

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Provenance: These papers were donated by Beth B. Schneider, on April 15, 2021.

Ownership and Literary Rights: The Israel Bernstein Writings Collection are the physical property of the University of Southern Maine Library. Literary rights, including copyright, belong to the creator or her legal heirs and assigns. For further information, consult the Special Collections Librarian.

Cite as: The Israel Bernstein Writings Collection, The Judaica Collection, Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine, Special Collections, University of Southern Maine Library.

Restrictions on access: This collection is open for research.

The Canonization Of The Books Of The Jewish, Catholic, And Protestant Scriptures, Kaleb J. Jung

Classical Conversations

The three Canons of Judaism, Catholic Christianity, and Protestant Christianity all claim more authority or consistency than what they have. Judaism puts too much authority on an unknown group in 200 CE that was not regarded until 400 years later in the Mishnah. Catholicism emphasizes the divinity of scriptures that the early church fathers almost universally disbelieved. Protestantism held that the Canon put forward by Calvin was entirely equal in its truth and that it should not be changed even in the face of changing beliefs or new discoveries. However, just because a Canon has been altered or closed in …

Hagar And Potiphar’S Wife: A Representation Of Egypt In Judaism And Islam, Nardine Attia

Capstone and Graduation Projects

As a nation and land, modern Egypt has gradually been depicted as a female. Considering Egypt’s prominence in Judaism and Islam, from a close reading of Jewish and Islamic texts pertaining to two Egyptian women—Hagar and Potiphar’s wife— various similarities could be noted between these female figures and Egypt as portrayed in the two Abrahamic religions. While Potiphar’s wife seems to be more representative of Egypt in Judaism and Islam, the different portrayal of both women across religious texts provides each with a space to reflect different aspects defining Egypt in each religion.

Anti-Semitism In France: How The Post-Holocaust Era Informs French Attitudes Today, Alyssa Chesek

Student Research Poster Presentations 2021

Following the end of the Holocaust, approximately 160,000 native Jews and 20,000 displaced Jews arrived in France. France, which operated under the Vichy government during World War II, was a Nazi puppet regime complicit in the persecution of its Jewish population. When Vichy fell in 1944, the recently instated Provisional Government of the French Republic became responsible for Jewish restitution and reintegration services. However, the new government refused to recognize a Jewish problem; this denial resulted in inadequate services and protections for the Jewish population. Without providing Jews with proper legal protections, the French government created an environment which may …

The Impact Of Religious Ritual Initiation On Males, David Mcmillan

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

The following paper is focused on revealing the influence that religious ritual initiations/rites of passages have on males from the religions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. In the first section of the paper, I explain why it is important that the influence that religious ritual initiations have on males be studied. The second section covers the literature that was used to obtain my research results. The third section explains how the methodologies of content analysis and semiotics were incorporated into my research. In the fourth section, I reveal that practices such as self-control and discipline are common traits in how …

Playing At The Crossroads Of Religion And Law: Historical Milieu, Context And Curriculum Hooks In Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This chapter presents the use of Lost & Found – a purpose-built tabletop to mobile game series – to teach medieval religious legal systems. The series aims to broaden the discourse around religious legal systems and to counter popular depiction of these systems which often promote prejudice and misnomers. A central element is the importance of contextualizing religion in period and locale. The Lost & Found series uses period accurate depictions of material culture to set the stage for play around relevant topics – specifically how the law promoted collaboration and sustainable governance practices in Fustat (Old Cairo) in twelfth-century …

Italian Jews: A Surprising And Understudied Influence In The Enlightenment, Lura Martinez

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

The experience of Italian Jews during the Enlightenment is deserving of much more attention. Not only did Italian Jews such as Moshe Ḥayyim Luzzatto, a man born in a ghetto, later embrace a form of secularism, but his works and others written by his peers made an impact on the Italian Enlightenment and seemingly contributed to the practice of toleration that appeared in sporadic installments throughout Europe. While the Jewish experience in Europe hails from a long tradition of persecution, with sporadic and incomplete periods of toleration at various points in its history, it is clear that through a promotion …

Nazi-Confiscated Art: Eliminating Legal Barriers To Returning Stolen Treasures, Stephanie J. Beach

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

World War II ended over three-quarters of a century ago, but there still remain prisoners of war. Before and during the war, the Nazis confiscated approximately 650,000 works of art—an “art theft” orchestrated by Adolf Hitler to rid society of Jewish art and artists and to collect worthy works to build his own art capital. Seventy-five years later, looted Holocaust-era artworks are still either undiscovered or in the possession of museums across the globe without proper ownership attribution or payment to Holocaust survivors or their heirs. There are modern remedies, such as the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust Era Assets, …

The Resurrection Of Jewish Religion At The Turn Of The 20th And 21st Centuries: The Case Of Ukraine, Viktor Yelenskyi

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

The article deals with the complexities of Judaism’s revival in Ukraine, where Jews have enriched the Jewish civilization with Hasidism, gifted the Jewish world with a whole plethora of outstanding Jewish figures and a remarkable cultural heritage both tangible and intangible, and where their religion underwent a monstrous destruction during the Holocaust and the Soviet anti-religious persecutions. Today's Judaism in Ukraine is a complex mixture of at least six decisive components. That is, (i) more than 20 centuries of the Judaism’s history in Ukrainian lands; (ii) the "great religious comeback," which unfolded in the world in the late 1970s; (iii) …

Words And Diagrams About Rosenzweig's Star, Martin Zwick

Complex Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article explores aspects of Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption from the perspective of systems theory. Mosès, Pollock, and others have noted the systematic character of the Star. While “systematic” does not mean “systems theoretic,” the philosophical theology of the Star encompasses ideas that are salient in systems theory. The Magen David star to which the title refers, and which deeply structures Rosenzweig’s thought, fits the classic definition of “system” – a set of elements (God, World, Human) and relations between the elements (Creation, Revelation, Redemption). The Yes and No of the elements and their reversals illustrate the bridging of …

Is It So Bad To Be Yourself?, Andrew S. Russell

Graduate Theses

Homosexuality has been a topic of recent controversial religious discourse, not only in America, but also world-wide. This begs the question: when did homosexuality become such a divisive issue in religious circles? The purpose of this thesis is to examine how ancient western cultures perceived homosexuality and treated homosexuals. Starting with the pagan civilizations of Greece and Rome, and then looking at how homosexuality was perceived in the ancient Judaic world and into the early Christian community, it seems that homosexuality only gradually became stigmatized as early Christians sought to distinguish themselves as unique in the ancient world.

Mimicry As Movement Analysis, Rosa Abrahams

Faculty Publications

The analysis of movement to music often stems from examinations of video-recorded events. This allows the analyst an opportunity to re-watch, pause, and slow down the movements of their participants, and to produce descriptive notation that appears alongside a score (e.g., Roeder and Tenzer 2012). Unlike prescriptive forms of dance notation (e.g., Laban 1928), such transcriptions of movement often illuminate metrical connections between music and movement. However, when video-recording is not permissible, other methods of movement analysis must be developed. This paper pilots a new technique for rigorous analysis of the interaction between movement and music, which may be used …

Spiritual Exploration: Gender, Human Frailty And Interfaith Realities, Elizabeth Iobst

Charles Rice Post-Graduate Research Fellowship

This collection of essays details personal experiences, religious beliefs, gender roles and interviews conducted during a research fellowship in England and Israel.

The Legal Significance Of Custom In The Halakhic Jurisprudence Of Rabbi Yechiel Mikhel Epstein’S Arukh Hashulchan, Shlomo C. Pill, Michael J. Broyde

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Residential Location Choices Of Chabad Households: An Analysis Of Decision Making With Non-Price Constraints, Chasity A. Mcfadden

Honors Theses

Where an individual chooses to live informs many of their economic decisions and may be the single largest economic decision one makes in their lives. Through understanding the way that people choose their residential locations, we are able to better understand the opportunities available to them. Within the Chabad community, there is a large focus on emissary work, which calls Chabad Jews to move outside of large Jewish communities in order to help secular Jews become more religious. There are also certain religious amenities that are necessary to live a Chabad life, such as a local synagogue. So the question …

Jesus And The Mosaic Law: Agapic Love As The Foundation And Objective Of Law, Robert F. Cochran ,Jr.

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Equity In American And Jewish Law, Itzchak E. Kornfeld , Ph.D.

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

New Perspectives On Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, The Nazi Pogrom In Global Comparison, Wolf Gruner, Steven J. Ross

Purdue University Press Book Previews

On November 9 and 10, 1938, Nazi leadership unleashed an unprecedented orchestrated wave of violence against Jews in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland, supposedly in response to the assassination of a Nazi diplomat by a young Polish Jew, but in reality to force the remaining Jews out of the country. During the pogrom, Stormtroopers, Hitler Youth, and ordinary Germans murdered more than a hundred Jews (many more committed suicide) and ransacked and destroyed thousands of Jewish institutions, synagogues, shops, and homes. Thirty thousand Jews were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps.

Volume 17 of the Casden Annual Review includes …

Temporal And Topological: Two Ways Of Living Israel/Palestine, Rocco Giansante

Journal of Religion & Film

Elia Suleiman and Amos Gitai are two Israeli filmmakers, Palestinian and Jewish respectively. Gitai’s first film, House (1980), was censored by Israeli Television—the producers of the film—due to its sympathetic portrayal of Palestinians. Elia Suleiman’s debut film, Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996), was criticized at the Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia for a sequence showing an Israeli flag and Suleiman himself was accused of being a Zionist collaborator. By comparing the ways in which these two films deal with the political and social implications of the Israel-Palestine conflict, this article highlights two distinct methods of relating to facts on the …

Finding Edith: Surviving The Holocaust In Plain Sight, Edith Mayer Cord

Purdue University Press Book Previews

Finding Edith: Surviving the Holocaust in Plain Sight is the coming-of-age story of a young Jewish girl chased in Europe during World War II. Like a great adventure story, the book describes the childhood and adolescence of a Viennese girl growing up against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the rise of Nazism, World War II, and the religious persecution of Jews throughout Europe. Edith was hunted in Western Europe and Vichy France, where she was hidden in plain sight, constantly afraid of discovery and denunciation. Forced to keep every thought to herself, Edith developed an intense inner life. After …

Abe, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Abe (2019) directed by Fernando Grostein Andrade.

Latteri On Weiss, 'Sefer Yesirah And Its Contexts: Other Jewish Voices', Natalie Latteri

Theology & Religious Studies

Book Review by Natalie Latteri on Tzahi Weiss' Sefer Yesirah and Its Contexts: Other Jewish Voices. This review was originally published in the Journal of Medieval Worlds, Vol. 1, Number 1, pp. 117-120.

A Newcomer's Guide To Kabbalah, Ernest M. Oleksy

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

Kabbalah is a mystical and highly spiritual form of Judaism. Popularized by its endorsement by high-profile celebrities like Madonna, the average layperson knows enough about Kabbalah to recognize it as a vaguely familiar term, but not much else. This article strives to serve as an entry-point for both an intellectual and a popular audience to help familiarize readers with core components of Kabbalah and to help to begin fostering an appreciation for this very sophisticated faith. Matters of history, philosophy, science, doctrine, and more pertaining to Kabbalah will be discussed in this article

Re-Playing Maimonides’ Codes: Designing Games To Teach Religious Legal Systems, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Lost & Found is a game series, created at the Initiative for

Religion, Culture, and Policy at the Rochester Institute of

Technology MAGIC Center.1 The series teaches medieval

religious legal systems. This article uses the first two games

of the series as a case study to explore a particular set of

processes to conceive, design, and develop games for learning.

It includes the background leading to the author's work

in games and teaching religion, and the specific context for

the Lost & Found series. It discusses the rationale behind

working to teach religious legal systems more broadly, then

discuss the …

Is Judaism Democratic? Reflections From Theory And Practice Throughout The Ages, Leonard J. Greenspoon

Purdue University Press Book Previews

As government by the people, democracy has always had its proponents as well as opponents. What forms of government have Jewish leaders, both with and without actual political power, favored? Not surprisingly, many options have been offered theoretically and in practice. Perhaps more surprisingly, democracy has been at the heart of most systems of governance. Biblical Israel was largely a monarchy, but many writers of the Bible were critical of the excesses that almost always arise when human kings take charge: the general populace loses its freedom. In rabbinic Judaism, the majority ruled, and many principles that support modern democratic …

To Dust You Shall Return: A Theological Argument For The Human Compost Movement, Sydney N. Ederer

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This research paper analyzes Catholic, Daoist, and Jewish beliefs on death, the body, the soul, afterlife, and after death rituals in order to build a connection between these beliefs and human composting practices. It uses these three religious traditions to find support for and recognize potential opposition against the human compost movement. These conclusions are in turn used to make a claim for human composting. Thorough research and a careful analysis of religious beliefs and traditions surrounding death and the body provides theological support for human composting as a recommended method for body disposal after death. Therefore, this research is …

The Lost & Found Game Series: Teaching Medieval Religious Law In Context, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context. The Lost & Found project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy. The first game in the series is a strategy game called Lost & Found …

Teaching Is Not Instruction: A Jewish Perspective On Teaching Religion In The Light Of Krister Stendahl’S Three Rules Of Religious Understanding, Dow Marmur

Consensus

No abstract provided.