judaism

Will the courts stop religion-themed gay “cure” programs?

Parting Ways is Butler’s attempt to construct a Jewish narrative that coheres with her philosophical and political sensibilities as well as her allegiance to her Jewish heritage and lineage. As a Jew for whom religious practice and the Jewish textual tradition do not constitute her Jewish core, hers is a secular narrative of Jewishness outside the orbit of Zionism. Butler’s concern for Israel is that she believes its present construction is “Jewishly” indefensible (in the terms she develops in her book) and the muscularity with which Zionism is proffered squashes any alternative narrative of diasporic Jewish identity.

“Jewish self-hatred” is an epithet that Jews fling at other Jews—for not being religious enough, or for daring to criticize Israel. As Paul Reitter puts it in his book, On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred, the term is an “an instrument of censure,” a “smear.” Reitter’s title is slightly misleading—the book doesn’t explain why some Jews hate themselves. Instead he explains the origin of the term. Reitter argues that many historians have wrongly assumed that the term has always been censorious, but careful study reveals that Jewish self-hatred was first put forward for a salutary, even messianic purpose.

Will Romney want to talk about LDS Temples being modeled on Solomon’s?

It its efforts to support the Palestinian cause, the Kairos USA statement cherrypicks from the Bible and winds up in some old and discomfiting territory.

Peter Singer: if your religious beliefs don’t permit it, don’t do it.

40,000 Hasidim vs. Internet.

Steve Jobs invented stuff, and that stuff changed the world.

It’s usually clear to Bart Ehrman who loves him and who hates him. Evangelical Christians have been raking Ehrman over the coals for years for his rejection of biblical inerrancy—and atheists and humanists have embraced his writing as ammunition in the fight against the evils of organized religion. In his new book, Did Jesus Exist?, Ehrman debunks the work of so-called “mythicists”—writers who have argued that a man named Jesus who taught about the coming Kingdom of God never really existed, and that the religions created around him are nothing but fantasy.

In Yiddish, Jews reacted to the stories wafting out of Holy Week churches with a mixture of fear and derision. The Christian savior was regularly referred to by playful nicknames like Yoizel, Getzel, and most creatively Yoshke Pandre. The layers of meaning in this last name are astonishing: Using the diminutive suffix “–ke,” Yoshke translates as “Little Joe.”