Jews In Dialogue

Discover the Power of Dialogue to Heal Religious Division How can members of different faith traditions approach each other with openness and respect? How can they confront the painful conflicts in their history and overcome theological misconceptions? For more than twenty years, Professors Mary C. Boys and Sara S. Lee have explored ways that Catholics and Jews might overcome mistrust and misunderstandings in order to promote commitment to religious pluralism. At its best, interreligious dialogue entails not simply learning about the other from the safety of one’s own faith community, but rather engaging in specific learning activities with members of the other faith—learning in the presence of the other. Drawing upon examples from their own experience, Boys and Lee lay out a framework for engaging the religious other in depth. With vision and insight, they discuss ways of fostering relationships among participants and with key texts, beliefs and practices of the other’s tradition. In this groundbreaking resource, they offer a guide for members of any faith tradition who want to move beyond the rhetoric of interfaith dialogue and into the demanding yet richly rewarding work of developing new understandings of the religious other—and of one’s own tradition.

Jews in Dialogue discusses Jewish post-Holocaust involvement in interreligious and intercultural dialogue in Israel, Europe, and the United States. The essays within offer a multiplicity of approaches and perspectives (historical, sociological, theological, etc.) on how Jews have collaborated and cooperated with non-Jews to respond to the challenges of multicultural contemporaneity. The volume’s first part is about the concept of dialogue itself and its potential for effecting change; the second part documents examples of successful interreligious cooperation. The volume includes an appendix designed to provide context for the material presented in the first part, especially with regard to relations between the State of Israel and the Catholic Church.

Using the vision embedded in Israel's Declaration of Independence as a template, this anthology presents a unique and comprehensive dialogue between North American Jews and Israelis about the present and future of the State of Israel. With each essay published in both Hebrew and English, in one volume, Deepening the Dialogue is the first of its kind, outlining cultural barriers as well as the immediate need to come together in conversation around the vision of a democratic solution for our nation state.

Twenty-seven interdisciplinary essays on aspects of Judaism in the Greco-Roman world, exemplifying a wide range of techniques, by a well-known scholar. Three are previously unpublished, including a reappraisal of the Judaism and Hellenism debate and a study of the Sardis synagogue. The book's overall coherence derives from the author's long-standing interests in the analysis of texts as documents of cultural and religious interaction, and in how Jewish communities were woven into the social fabric of Greek cities in the Hellenistic and Roman East. The four sections are: Greeks and Jews, Josephus, The Jewish Diaspora and Epigraphy, and finally Beyond the Greeks and Romans, essays which extend into Christian literature and on to the nineteenth century reception of the Judaism/Hellenism dichotomy. Scholars and students from a wide variety of backgrounds will benefit. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.

Aaron W. Hughes presents the first major study of dialogue as a Jewish philosophical practice. Examining connections between Jewish philosophy, the literary form in which it is expressed, and the culture in which it is produced, Hughes shows how Jews understood and struggled with their social, religious, and intellectual environments. In this innovative and insightful book, Hughes addresses various themes associated with the literary form of dialogue as well as its philosophical reception: Why did various thinkers choose dialogue? What did it allow them to accomplish? How do the literary features of dialogue construct philosophical argument? As a history of philosophical form, context, and practice, this book will interest scholars and students working at the intersections of religious studies, philosophy, and literature.

Jews in Dialogue offers various perspectives on Jewish post-Holocaust involvement in interreligious and intercultural dialogue. The topics raised in the volume range from halakhic conditions for interfaith dialogue to antiracist Jewish activism in postwar France.

Never before translated into English, this work presents to the reader perhaps the most important source for an intensifying medieval Christian-Jewish debate.

'I love the German character more than anything else in the world, and my breast is an archive of German song' So wrote Heinrich Heine in 1824, adding: 'It is likely that my Muse gave her German dress something of a foreign cut from annoyance with the German character'. Here Heine sums up the ambivalent emotions of Jews who felt at home in German culture and yet, even in the age of emancipation, foundGermany less than welcoming. This anthology illustrates the history of Jews in Germany from the eighteenth century, when it was first proposed to give Jews civil rights, to the 1990's and the problems of living after the Holocaust. The texts include short stories, plays, poems, essays, letters anddiary entries, all chosen for their literary merit as well as the light they shed on the relations between Jews in Germany and Austria and their Gentile fellow-citizens. Ritchie Robertson's lucid introduction provides the necessary historical context and his translations make available in Englishin some cases for the first time - both Jewish writers on various aspects of Jewish experience and responses of Gentile writers to the Jews in their midst. Each is introduced by a short illuminating preface.