The Talmud And The Internet

"Not long after my grandmother died, my computer crashed and I lost the journal I had kept of her dying." So begins this powerful, personal consideration of modern technology and ancient religious impulses by the celebrated young novelist, essayist, and culture editor of the Forward. Jonathan Rosen blends religious history, memoir, and literary reflection as he compares the fortunate life of his American-born grandmother to the life of his European-born grandmother who was murdered by Nazis. The Talmud and the Internet explores the contradictions of Rosen's inheritance and toggles between personal paradoxes and those of the larger world. Along the way, he chronicles the remarkable parallels between a page of Talmud and the home page of a Web site. In the loose, associative logic and the vastness of each, he discovers not merely the disruption of a broken world but a kind of disjointed harmony. In the same way that the Talmud helped Jews survive after the destruction of the Temple by making Jewish culture portable and personal, the all-inclusive Internet serves a world that is both more uprooted and more connected than ever before. In this profound, ultimately hopeful meditation, Rosen charts the territory between doubt and belief, tragedy and prosperity, the world of the living and the world of the dead.

Review: "This encyclopedia offers an authoritative and comprehensive survey of the important writers and works that form the literature about the Holocaust and its consequences. The collection is alphabetically arranged and consists of high-quality biocritical essays on 309 writers who are first-, second-, and third-generation survivors or important thinkers and spokespersons on the Holocaust. An essential literary reference work, this publication is an important addition to the genre and a solid value for public and academic libraries."--"The Top 20 Reference Titles of the Year," American Libraries, May 2004

The story of the Talmud is the story of the Jewish people—a thrilling insight into Jewish culture and a devastating account of the history of anti-Semitism.

Annotation. An exploration of how globalization affects the evolving roles of religion in the Americas.

The Lord has not left us defenseless. In the last days two groups of 144,000 will rise up to battle against the Antichrist and the False Prophet and to witness Yahweh's salvation to the world at a time when the world will be ripe in judgment, destruction and horror. There is nothing new about the NWO. It is the same type of government Lucifer tried to run as a high ranking cherub before he rebelled against the Most High God before he lost his rank, kingdom, and even home planet. Author Sherry Shriner reveals the terrifying reality of aliens in our midst in Aliens on the Internet. She exposes Lucifer's alleged tactics of using the Internet, chip implantations, abductions, and how to fight back by deactivating implants and stopping abductions. She also reveals how churches have been used to bring about Lucifer's rise to power, and how America has become the home base of operations for Lucifer and his aliens. Today the governments, militaries, churches, and religious television networks of the world work in cahoots with Satan behind the scenes to help bring the world under his control. The saints are under attack.

Judaic Technologies of the Word argues that Judaism does not exist in an abstract space of reflection. Rather, it exists both in artifacts of the material world - such as texts - and in the bodies, brains, hearts, and minds of individual people. More than this, Judaic bodies and texts, both oral and written, connect and feed back on one another. Judaic Technologies of the Word examines how technologies of literacy interact with bodies and minds over time. The emergence of literacy is now understood to be a decisive factor in religious history, and is central to the transformations that took place in the ancient Near East in the first millennium BCE. This study employs insights from the cognitive sciences to pursue a deep history of Judaism, one in which the distinctions between biology and culture begin to disappear.

This lively book focuses on how different Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities engage with new media. Rather than simply reject or accept new media, religious communities negotiate complex relationships with these technologies in light of their history and beliefs. Heidi Campbell suggests a method for studying these processes she calls the "religious-social shaping of technology" and students are asked to consider four key areas: religious tradition and history; contemporary community values and priorities; negotiation and innovating technology in light of the community; communal discourses applied to justify use. A wealth of examples such as the Christian e-vangelism movement, Modern Islamic discourses about computers and the rise of the Jewish kosher cell phone, demonstrate the dominant strategies which emerge for religious media users, as well as the unique motivations that guide specific groups.