Virtually Jewish

SUMMARY

The authors created a Web-based tutorial for novice-to-intermediate users of the World Wide Web using primarily Jewish content in order to encourage potential Jewish users of the World Wide Web. The lessons contain information on Jewish-themed Web sites and progressively complex information about how to use the Web. Tips and practice exercises are included.     

Jewish Identity and the Secular Achievements of American Jewish Men and Women

Three questions are addressed concerning the relationship of Jewish identity to secular achievements. Are the secular achievements of American Jews related at all to the strength of their Jewish identity? Which has a stronger relationship to secular achievement, a religious or an ethnic Jewish identity? Do communal aspects or private, personal aspects of Jewish identity have the stronger relationship to secular achievements? Using the 2000–2001 National Jewish Population Survey, we find that educational attainment, labor force participation, and occupational achievements are related to several expressions of Jewish identity, even after controlling for the traditional sources of variation (age, gender, education, family status). Jewish identity, as expressed in terms of religion, ethnicity, communal commitment, and private attitudes and practices, is related to contemporary Jewish secular achievement, albeit differently for men and women.     

Jewish discourse and the Shtetl

The Shtetl, the small town of Eastern Europe, especially in Poland and Russia, where Jews were the majority in the population and set the tone of life, has not received proper historiographical treatment. The major problem is that the shtetl has been idealized, much like in the play Fiddler on the Roof, to represent people's nostalgia, not reality. Shtetl society was also taken by Zionists and others as representative of an objectionable Jewish role model, the contrary of what Zionist sought to achieve. It is commonly thought that by the time of the Shoah, when the Nazis indeed destroyed it, the shtetl was already moribund. In fact, through the early twentieth century, shtetl population remained steady; in some cases it even grew. This survey of existing literature, whose quantity is less than what might be expected, is a prelude to a comprehensive study on shtetl society, in particular during the twentieth century, which this author is now concluding. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Education in the Jewish State

This essay argues that schooling in Israel is tied too closely to ideology. This results in an indoctrinary orientation that contributes to divisiveness and imperils Israeli democracy. After reviewing and critiquing the roots of this orientation, I advance an alternative that understands education as an agent of the good rather than ideology. Israeli schooling requires a vision of goodness broad enough to encompass competing conceptions of Jewish life espoused by the majority as well as non-Jewish orientations affirmed by various minorities. Such a vision can be grounded, I contend, in a democratic Jewish theology that emphasizes God as teacher rather than tyrant.     

Invention and convention: Jewish and Christian critique of the Jewish fixed calendar

The institution of the Jewish fixed calendar has provoked muchcontroversial discussion not only among Jewish, but also Christian scholars. The significant contributions to the subject by two of the great sixteenth-century polymaths, the Jew Azariah de' Rossi and the Christian Sebastian Münster, pinpoint the delicate nature of calendrical investigation. Münster's frequent use of one particular piyyut (a religious poem) to undermine the basis of the Jewish fixed calendar is intended to defend the contradictory calendrical data in the Gospels. De' Rossi implicitly attacks Muenster for his recourse to this unhistorical text. Yet de' Rossi himself is intent on proving that the Jewish fixed calendar is a late post-talmudic convention, an iconoclastic approach which was not welcome in certain rabbinic circles. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

犹太哲学:一种命定的宗教哲学--评《现代犹太哲学》

如果有人说西方哲学里有一种“基督教哲学” ,那么没人会感到惊讶 ,但是 ,如果说有一种“犹太哲学” ,那么许多人即使不感到惊讶 ,也会觉得很陌生。当《现代犹太哲学》 (傅有德等著 ,人民出版社 ,1 999,1 2 )一书摆在笔者面前时 ,我多少就有这种感觉。犹太民族贡献给西方世界乃至全人类的最伟大财富是以《圣经·旧约》为核心的一神教信仰。作为一种文明看 ,这种一神教信仰与古希腊文明的不同就在于 ,前者强调的是在践行神圣律法这种活生生的信仰实践中去领会上帝存在的真实性 ,去追寻和接受生活与世界的真实意义 ,而后者则要求在思想中 ,在…     

论犹太律法的主要特征

犹太律法是犹太民族的法律制度,它对犹太民族产生深远影响,犹太民族曾有律法民族之称,它的发展深受犹太民族的宗教、历史等的影响。在这些因素的影响下,犹太律法呈现出发展上的连续性、内容上的宗教性、信守上的民族性以及属人法性等特征。其中,连续性特征常常被人所误读,属人性特征是犹太律法中最为人所知的特征,而宗教性是犹太律法的显著特征,民族性特征使犹太律法呈现民族特色。正因如此,犹太律法不仅成为犹太文化重要内容,而且也是世界法系的重要组成部分。     

Biology and the Jewish question after the revolution: one Soviet approach to the productivization of Jewish labor

In the 1920s a group of health professionals and biologists in the Soviet Union embraced the nascent eugenics movement in order to justify the promotion of physical labor among Jews. Eugenics offered a scientific approach to solving the “Jewish question” through the productivization of Soviet Jewry. Drawing upon the work of Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, this group linked the settlement of Jews on the land to the belief that the physiognomy of Jews engaged in physical labor would be genetically passed on to their offspring. The goal was to overcome the perceived debilitating psychological and physical traits of shtetl Jewry by mobilizing Soviet Jewry for the building of socialism. By the late 1920s, however, eugenics fell victim to the Kremlin’s materialist conception of human society that emphasized social engineering and voluntarism and excluded biological influences on the transformation of Soviet society.     

Race and the construction of Jewish identity in French and American Jewish fiction of the 1920s

In both the United States and France, Jewish-fiction writers of the 1920s often invoked the idea of Jewish racial unity as a non-rational, uncontrollable force separating Jews from mainstream society irrespective of their desire for integration. This genre of fiction reveals an ambivalent attitude towards race-thinking. The notion that there are intractable physical differences between groups threatened the Jews status as fully privileged co-citizens. Yet a racialized self-understanding provided them with a way to articulate the intangible bonds of community, which their official status as a purely religious group normally held them back from expressing openly. The common trope of the failed Jewish-Gentile romance best expresses the dual desire of French and American Jews for acceptance and distinctiveness. A sense of racial identity often leads protagonists to reject a non-Jewish lover or spouse and draw strength from a renewed sense of connection with the Jewish people. More often than not, however, these figures are left with feelings of ambivalence and regret, as they realize that their universalist dream of uniting with someone from a different racial background is not possible in the real world, where their Jewish particularism inevitably dooms such relationships to failure.I would like to thank Hasia Diner, Laura Lee Downs and Bonnie S. Anderson for reading and commenting on previous versions of this article.