The Jewish Action Reader

Jewish Action, the Orthodox Union's quarterly, is one of the English-speaking world's most prominent journals of Jewish thought. This collection presents many of its best essays.

Contemporary Jewish art is a growing field that includes traditional as well as new creative practices, yet criticism of it is almost exclusively reliant on the Second Commandment’s prohibition of graven images. Arguing that this disregards the corpus of Jewish thought and a century of criticism and interpretation, Ben Schachter advocates instead a new approach focused on action and process. Departing from the traditional interpretation of the Second Commandment, Schachter addresses abstraction, conceptual art, performance art, and other styles that do not rely on imagery for meaning. He examines Jewish art through the concept of melachot—work-like “creative activities” as defined by the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides. Showing the similarity between art and melachot in the active processes of contemporary Jewish artists such as Ruth Weisberg, Allan Wexler, Archie Rand, and Nechama Golan, he explores the relationship between these artists’ methods and Judaism’s demanding attention to procedure. A compellingly written challenge to traditionalism, Image, Action, and Idea in Contemporary Jewish Art makes a well-argued case for artistic production, interpretation, and criticism that revels in the dual foundation of Judaism and art history.

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies—an engaging firsthand portrait of American Judaism today American Judaism has been buffeted by massive social upheavals in recent decades. Like other religions in the United States, it has witnessed a decline in the number of participants over the past forty years, and many who remain active struggle to reconcile their hallowed traditions with new perspectives—from feminism and the LGBTQ movement to "do-it-yourself religion" and personally defined spirituality. Taking a fresh look at American Judaism today, Jack Wertheimer, a leading authority on the subject, sets out to discover how Jews of various orientations practice their religion in this radically altered landscape. Which observances still resonate, and which ones have been given new meaning? What options are available for seekers or those dissatisfied with conventional forms of Judaism? And how are synagogues responding? Offering new and often-surprising answers to these questions, Wertheimer reveals an American Jewish landscape that combines rash disruption and creative reinvention, religious illiteracy and dynamic experimentation.

Reading Shakespeare in Jewish Theological Frameworks: Shylock Beyond the Holocaust uses Jewish theology to mount a courageous new reading of a four-hundred-year-old play, The Merchant of Venice. While victimhood and antisemitism have been the understandable focus of the Merchant critical history for decades, Lion urges scholars, performers, and readers to see beyond the racism in Shakespeare's plays by recovering Shakespearean themes of potentiality and human flourishing as they emerge within the Jewish tradition itself. Lion joins the race conversation in Shakespeare studies today by drawing on the intellectual history and oppression of the Jewish people, borrowing from thinkers Franz Rosenzweig and Abraham Joshua Heschel as well as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and rabbis from the Talmud to today. This volume interweaves post-confessional, Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, and mystical ideas with Shakespeare's poetry and opens conversations of prophecy, love, spirituality, care, and community. It concludes with brief critical sketches of Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, and Macbeth to demonstrate that Shakespeare when interpreted through Jewish theological frameworks can point to post-credal solutions and transformed societal paradigms of repair that encourage action and the shaping of a finer world.

Nine months after Danny disappeared, his closest friends, Ellie, Rae, and Deenie, deal with their loss very differently but will have to share secrets about the night he disappeared to uncover the truth. Chapters alternate between past and present.

This collection of essays, largely written by members of the Oxford theological community, was presented to John Ashton on his 65th birthday in 1996. The essays deal with Elijah in Mark, a Q passion narrative, the Gospel thief saying, John's Beloved Disciple, the temple incident (Jn 2.13-25) and history and theology. Outside of the Gospels, they discuss God's wrath in Romans 1, Philippians 1.1-11, Hebrews 4.13, Peter and Paul behind Revelation, and hermeneutical method. Specialists from outside the New Testament field contribute studies of the patristic doctrine of Scripture, the Syriac Diatessaron, William Tyndale, the theology of the resurrection and the Byzantine understanding of John. John Ashton was, before his retirement, Lecturer in New Testament and Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford.

The memoir of an eleven year old girl awakening to physical maturity, religious consciousness and an intense curiosity about the mysteries of hasidic spirituality and Kabbalah. It is a rare window into the world of a hasidic girl in pre-World War I Eastern Europe.