Word: diaspora
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Missionary zeal once beat strong in Judaism; the Pharisees, said Jesus, would "compass sea and land to make one proselyte" (Matthew 23:15). This proselytizing urge vanished in the Diaspora, but the time may have come to compass land and sea again. So thinks Robert Gordis, professor of Bible at Manhattan's Jewish Theological Seminary and of religion at Columbia University...
...over Israel last week students in government-run secular schools were reacting with anger or, curiosity or boredom to a new course of teaching that would have shocked their Zionist forebears on the one hand and their Diaspora ancestors on the other. Orthodox Jews would have been horrified at the thought of a child growing up in Israel without knowing the words of a single prayer or the uses of candles on the Sabbath. And the zealous, Socialist-minded Zionists of a generation ago would never have exposed their children to religious rites, which they viewed as symbols...
...Goldmann rose to plead with Ben-Gurion for some kind of formal working partnership between the Jews of Israel and Jews in other countries before it is too late and both die spiritually. Failure of this partnership would be calamitous for Israel and catastrophic for the Jews of the Diaspora. "Israel must counteract by its existence the silent process of assimilation. What made Eastern Jewry so powerful and creative was not its theoretical adherence to Jewish religion and Jewish culture but the fact that it had implemented the Talmud in its daily life. Such reality of ideas...
...close to the folk stream of East European Jewish life as blintzes and borsch. In countless stories (The Old Country, Adventures of Mattel) he humorously chronicled the bittersweet life of the late 19th-century eastern ghettos-pious, self-contained, but poised on the brink of a new Diaspora to Western Europe and America. Born Solomon Rabinowitz, and raised in the little village of Voronko, Russia, the hero of The Great Fair is a "pretty boy with fat red cheeks," who can convulse his playmates by mimicking the rabbi's manner of taking snuff, or bring a glint of pride...
...Diaspora is refreshing after nothing. There is a point here, a trace of something that does not stink, a sort of negative odor that puts it above Spades." There are people who love a country, and they find it stricken, and there is a girl whose love is wider than a country. It is good that the authoress loves the country of which she writes, but there is a vapid, too-plaintive air that distracts the sympathy of the reader. "If you were born in Israel, you were a sabra, tough and tan on the outside, sweating...