Word: judaisms
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Last week Kitty Dukakis interrupted her hectic campaign schedule to travel back to Boston for Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism's yearly calendar. There she joined 1,000 worshipers to participate in the age-old evening prayers of repentance in the modern sanctuary at Temple Israel, her Reform synagogue. Then, without making any public comment, she went home to quietly observe the traditional sundown-to-sundown fast...
...woman who could soon become the first Jewish First Lady naturally stirs pride within her religious community. But she also personifies American Judaism's most vexing and divisive issue: intermarriage. When Kitty wed Michael Dukakis (who is Greek Orthodox) in a 1963 civil ceremony, she was part of a growing trend. During the past three decades, says Brooklyn College sociologist Egon Mayer, the incidence of intermarriage among Jewish young adults has nearly tripled. A study for the American Jewish Committee puts the rate at around 30%; in Denver and Phoenix it runs...
Northern New England, however, is alive with young Jews, mostly urban emigres, doing interesting things with their lives and their religion. "The pop American Jewishness, the Woody Allen thing, had no underpinnings," explains Ron Wild, a Montpelier resident from Atlanta who heads the annual Conference on Judaism in Rural New England. "It was easy to reject. A lot of people walked away from that." Many college-age Jews in the late '60s and '70s left the cities for the arresting landscapes of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont in the back-to-the-land movement -- a diaspora from the Diaspora, says...
...stress on Jewish studies among modern New Testament scholars has produced a striking vision of Jesus as a rabbinical genius whose teachings were very much in keeping with the liberal Jewish scholarship of his day. "He represented a humanistic trend in Judaism that was then developing out of the liberal wing of the School of Hillel," argues Israeli Historian David Flusser of the Jerusalem School for the Study of the Synoptic Gospels, a group of 15 Jewish and Christian scholars. What Jesus sought, says Flusser, was a Judaism purified of resentments and hatred. "He wanted a feeling of love...
...scholars see no compelling intellectual reason to reject large portions of the Gospels, and find new inspiration in the lessons of Jewish studies and archaeology. For them, no single image of Jesus will do. These thinkers see Jesus as both apocalyptic prophet and reforming sage, as purifier of Judaism and builder of a new order. Advocates range from hard-line Fundamentalists and moderate Evangelicals, who all along have deemed the Gospels historically trustworthy, to moderate liberals who use higher criticism but have become skeptical about skepticism...