Festival Of Freedom

"Festival of Freedom, the sixth volume in the series MeOtzar HoRav, consists of ten essays on Passover and the Haggadah drawn from the treasure trove left by the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, widely known as "the Rav." For Rabbi Soloveitchik, the Passover Seder is not simply a formal ritual or ceremonial catechism. Rather, the Seder night is "endowed with a unique and fascinating quality, exalted in its holiness and shining with a dazzling beauty." It possesses profound experiential and intellectual dimensions, both of them woven into the fabric of halakhic performance. Its central mitzvah, sippur yetzi'at Mitzrayim, recounting the exodus, is extraordinarily multifaceted, entailing study and teaching, storytelling and symbolic performance, thanksgiving and praise." --Book Jacket.

Told in simple and direct prose, the story of the Jewish people's great fight for freedom is made accessible to even the youngest reader. Full-color illustrations.

With the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, many African Americans began calling for "a day of publick thanksgiving" to commemorate this important step toward freedom. During the ensuing century, black leaders built on this foundation and constructed a distinctive and vibrant tradition through their celebrations of the end of slavery in New York State, the British West Indies, and eventually the United States as a whole. In this revealing study, Mitch Kachun explores the multiple functions and contested meanings surrounding African American emancipation celebrations from the abolition of the slave trade to the fiftieth anniversary of U.S. emancipation. Excluded from July Fourth and other American nationalist rituals for most of this period, black activists used these festivals of freedom to encourage community building and race uplift. Kachun demonstrates that, even as these annual rituals helped define African Americans as a people by fostering a sense of shared history, heritage, and identity, they were also sites of ambiguity and conflict. Freedom celebrations served as occasions for debate over black representations in the public sphere, struggles for group leadership, and contests over collective memory and its meaning. Based on extensive research in African American newspapers and oration texts, this book retraces a vital if often overlooked tradition in African American political culture and addresses important issues about black participation in the public sphere. By illuminating the origins of black Americans' public commemorations, it also helps explain why there have been increasing calls in recent years to make the "Juneteenth" observance of emancipation an American -- not just an African American -- day of commemoration.

Enlivened by personal stories, Passover illuminates and celebrates how ancient Jewish traditions are kept alive in the modern world in this work of nonfiction for middle readers.

This joyous retelling of the Jewish people's fight for freedom includes vibrant, full-color illustrations and instructions for a traditional holiday Seder to bring the true meaning of Passover to life.

Talking About Freedom explores the history and significance of this freedom festival in Canada. Discover the main features of Emancipation Day celebrations, learn about the people of African ancestry's struggle for freedom, and the victories achieved in the push for equality into the 21st century.

In this book, Lochman presents an ethic illuminated by the Ten Commandments. In wrestling to discover the meaning of human life, both individual and social, his deepest concern has been with freedom under the law. Lochman points out that no human society, however well equipped technologically, can exist without a moral basis, without convictions that are more than mere opportunism, pragmatism, and calculated self-interest. This moral basis is provided by the Ten Commandments, the Magna Charta of freedom. Lochman discusses current problem areas of personal, sexual, and social ethics: worship of false gods, anxiety, the work ethic and the cult of success, murder, terrorism, suicide, abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, war, the new morality, and new understandings of shared life in marriage.