Word: jewish
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Orthodox Rabbi Harvey Falk of Brooklyn believes that much interreligious tension need never have existed at all. His current book, Jesus the Pharisee: A New Look at the Jewishness of Jesus, just issued by a Roman Catholic publisher (Paulist Press; 175 pages; $8.95), contends that Jews and Christians alike fail to grasp Jesus' ties to the competing Jewish factions of his time. Christians, says Falk, have misunderstood some of the teachings of Jesus, while Jews have been needlessly hostile toward "Yeshua ha Notzri" (Jesus of Nazareth). Falk's book offers a provocative and controversial theory on Christian origins...
Falk examines two factions of the Pharisees, a group of pious Jews who believed in the resurrection of the dead, rewards and punishments for this life in the next and rabbinic authority to interpret Jewish law. These two parties, the School of Hillel and the School of Shammai, clashed shortly before Jesus' birth. Jewish tradition records that the rigid Shammaites held religious control throughout Jesus' life and during the founding decades of the Christian Church. But by A.D. 70 the more flexible Hillel school had become pre-eminent and the predecessor of today's traditional Judaism. In Falk's theory...
Falk holds that a central issue between the schools was Jewish-Gentile relations. The School of Shammai taught that non-Jews had no hope of eternal life. One of the faction's first acts upon gaining power in the Sanhedrin, the supreme council of the Jews, was to pass a series of sweeping measures that limited contacts with Gentiles. The School of Hillel, however, taught that righteous Gentiles merited a share in the world to come if they observed the seven so-called Noahide commandments, basic moral directives addressed to Adam and Noah in the Bible and binding all humanity...
...R.S.C. has been equally innovative with Breaking the Silence, a quasi-biographical work that centers on Playwright Stephen Poliakoff s grandfather, a Russian Jewish aristocrat who refuses to accept the changes that Lenin's Soviet revolution have brought. Forced to live in near squalor on a railway carriage while assigned as a roving inspector, he stubbornly devotes all his energies to developing a talking motion picture. Although he is an untrained amateur, there are glints of genius in him. The play deftly balances his private quest against vast social change, and culminates in an agonizing exile from a homeland that...
...realize it is fashionable to blame the Soviets for just about everything, but I was surprised to see your chart depicting immigration to the U.S. ascribe anti-Jewish pogroms to the U.S.S.R. in the 1880s. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was not established until after 1917. Although czarist Russian officials encouraged anti-Semitism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the last pogroms were conducted by anti-Bolshevik groups in the Ukraine and White Russia prior to full consolidation of Communist control. William Bollinger Los Angeles...