Fifty Synagogue Seminars

During the last twelve years, Dr. Baron has led fifty pre-Sabbath-service seminars at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, New York and/or the New London Synagogue. These didactic essays explore the Bible, theology, liturgy, social responsibility, and the arts - from Who wrote the Bible? to Mark Twain's Concerning the Jews. Each chapter examines a problem that had perplexed Baron, and for which he provides a detailed evidence-based review together with sources. He pursues each issue from hundreds or thousands of years ago to the present, including both the Diaspora and Israel. He looks at what countries bordering Palestine had discussed and practiced, and scrutinizes the attitudes of other Abrahamic and Eastern religions and their differing denominations. Finally, he attempts to assess the relevance of each topic for the twenty-first century.

Why does Jephthah’s daughter weep? This new child-oriented reading reveals that a complex mix of emotional, familial, socio-cultural, and sexual consequences of menarche and menstruation lies behind her tears. There’s more blood flowing in this Judges story than you’ve likely imagined!

Analyzing one of the most vital and significant Jewish populations in the United States, Harmony and Dissonance chronicles the intellectual, cultural, and social history of the Jews of Detroit from 1914 to 1967. Sidney Bolkosky has drawn upon resources from religious and secular Jewish institutions in Detroit and supplemented them with information and interpretations from numerous oral testimonies to place this material in the context of the city of Detroit and its unique economic and social history. Thus the book includes discussions of the effects of Detroit events on the Jewish population, from Henry Ford's promise of a five dollar per day wage to the Detroit riots of 1943 and 1967. The author contends that the peculiar history of Detroit plays a determining role in the history of its Jews. Organized chronologically, Harmony and Dissonance examines the historically shifting dynamics among Jewish groups and individuals, addressing such controversial topics as assimilation, intermarriage, religious conflicts, anti-Semitism, and East European versus German Jewish identities. In pursuing the central thesis of the problematic search for Jewish identity, which runs throughout the book and ties the work together, the author has also explored the multifaceted nature of the Jewish population of Detroit, its landsmanshaften, German Jews, "establishment" organizations and their antagonists, cultural forces, and numerous Yiddish groups. This focus on identity is sharpened as the author perceives two events increasingly directing Jewish life and thought--the Holocaust and its aftermath and the founding of the state of Israel. How those events influenced the attitudes and behavior of Detroit's Jews contributes to what one Detroit patriarch called "the Detroit difference."

Conflicting rules of the correct procedures of the Temple cult, whose significance demanded absolute exactitude and uniformity, precluded common public rituals and created the schism