Animal in the Synagogue

Does Judaism Condone Violence? Holiness and Ethics in the Jewish Tradition

Teaching Tarleton

This Article examines intersection of law, religion, and culture in evolution of polygamy in Jewish tradition. It traces development of Jewish thought on polygamy over time by assembling and analyzing relevant discussions, arguments, decisions, and biblical interpretations from time of Hebrew Bible passages, when plural marriage was an accepted part of Jewish society, to early Middle Ages when practice was formally and conclusively rejected. In doing so, Article attempts to untangle various influences--both practical and doctrinal, internal and external--on evolution of marriage law in Jewish communities. These findings highlight mutable nature of marriage norms within a religious community, adaptability of religious doctrine to practical needs of community, and potentially progressive force of religious morality in advancing women's rights. INTRODUCTION: POLYGAMY AND RELIGION IN PUBLIC DISCOURSE Judaism's relationship with polygamy has always been fraught with tension and perhaps can best be summed up by fact that word for co-wife in Hebrew is tzarah, literally trouble. As many know, practice of polygamy was once considered part and parcel of Jewish culture, at least in theory, but nowadays that is no longer case. The story of Jewish polygamy has no clear-cut ending; there was no one defining moment or document that shifted Jewish societies in Western Europe away from polygamy and into monogamy. But over time, these norms did shift for reasons we examine in this Article. For past several years, issue of marriage and of marital forms in particular has been a prominent feature on both national (1) and international stage. (2) Efforts to lift prohibitions on same-sex marriage in this country and abroad have inspired people on all sides of political spectrum to speak about virtues of monogamy's core institution and to express views on who should be included within it. (3) While public discourse over marriage in United States and around world has focused primarily on gay marriage, issue of legalizing plural marriage has been gaining considerable attention in recent years. (4) In United States, TV shows such as TLC's Sister Wives, HBO's Big Love and Showtime's Polyamory: Married and Dating have brought concept of plural marriage into nation's collective living room. Polyamory, practice of having more than one intimate relationship at a time with knowledge and consent of everyone involved, has even been called the next civil rights movement. (5) The discussion of polygamy presents valuable angles for reconsidering contemporary marriage debate. First, plural marriage raises novel questions beyond those presented by gay marriage because it turns not on idea of who can be in a marriage, but rather on very institution of marriage itself as consisting of a two-and-only-two part unit. Second, plural marriage, unlike gay marriage, represents an alternative bundling of marital principles that may be described as traditional within a broad range of cultures and religious communities. (6) In this context, an examination of what a religious tradition has had to say about marriage over time can inform our understanding of what religion is capable of saying about topic today. This Article will focus on history of polygamy in Jewish tradition and will examine why, after millennia of experimentation, a religion walked away from a practice it had once legitimized. We will follow this history through various streams of Jewish law and tradition, and watch as debate slowly shifts from a question of legality to morality, from could to should. We will focus on three historical realities over time that make sense of this evolution: First, all of Jewish law is, at its core, an act of holding multiple values in a dialectic tension. …

Naomi Sokoloff is an Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization and Chair of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Washington. She is the author of Imagining the Child in Modern Jewish Fiction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) and has co-edited two books: Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (JTSA, 1992) and Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature (Wayne State University Press, 1994).

Reviewed by: A Permanent Beginning: R. Nachman of Braslav and Jewish Literary Modernity by Yitzhak Lewis Alexandra Mandelbaum Kupeev Yitzhak Lewis. A Permanent Beginning: R. Nachman of Braslav and Jewish Literary Modernity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. 242 pp. Many studies have been conducted on Rebbe Naḥman of Bratslav (1772–1810), and the stories he told. The book before us is significant for clarifying an important perspective on R. Naḥman, which has not yet been explored in scholarship and research: R. Naḥman as part of modern Hebrew literature. In this book, Yitzhak Lewis discusses modern Hebrew literature in detail, including its various definitions and characterizations, as well as the notion of modernity in general, which at times implies a historical awareness of renewal and at other times indicates a rupture from the Old World. Yet the most important task of the book is to establish the correct place of R. Naḥman in his time, a crucial task that recognizes that a person does not only interpret his reality but is also an inherent part of it. Although R. Naḥman was critical of the cultural processes taking place in eastern Europe in his time, Lewis shows that R. Naḥman played an integral role in these changes as well, in his own way. Departure is a recurring theme throughout the book. Modernity as a movement of departure is both an ideological and aesthetic decision, according to the author. Like many others, R. Naḥman participated actively in shaping the rift of modernity as an act of departure. It is important to consider that modern Hebrew literature was influenced not only by Enlightenment ideas from the West, but also by local national movements. While it is difficult to argue that R. Naḥman was well versed in all of these, this was the prevailing mindset of his time. According to Lewis, it is incorrect to regard R. Naḥman’s thought as a “tradition.” In fact, R. Naḥman himself took a central part in modernity, even when observing it from the outside. Lewis argues that R. Naḥman created a theology of “in between,” or alternatively, a theology of “the edge.” He stresses that R. Naḥman is not an “example” of modernity or revival, and treads carefully between the desire to position R. Naḥman in a modern framework and the danger of framing him anachronistically or romantically. What I find the most interesting aspect of A Permanent Beginning is how Lewis accurately describes the crisis of modernity not only specifically as a content issue but also as a crisis of language. It is the means of representation that change, and the person remains in the existential condition of being detached. This crisis is not only an ideological crisis; it is primarily an aesthetic crisis. It is thus impossible to address the question of R. Naḥman and modernity without referring to modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. This is why a dichotomy between Hebrew and Yiddish may overlook the ways in which both the revival of Hebrew and the Yiddishist movement are important players in the board game of modernity. Lewis is careful not to place R. Naḥman at the beginning of Hebrew literature (as some scholars do) but he also does not rush into declaring R. Naḥman a Yiddish author. Even in the matter of language, R. Naḥman remains stranded. It is interesting to consider R. Naḥman’s request that a book of sipurei maʿasiyot (fairy tales) be printed in both Hebrew and Yiddish. This request was not motivated by one decision or the other, but rather stemmed from the complex and rich nature of his situation between the two worlds. [End Page 222] Here, I believe it would have been appropriate to extend this discussion on R. Naḥman’s stories to two additional topics: visions and dreams (they are included in Zvi Mark’s book All the Stories of R. Nachman of Breslav), and a consideration of his teachings. The latter appear in different contexts, such as the important discussion regarding the word beḥinah that Rebbe Naḥman of Bratslav often uses in...

Exile and the City F. Scott Fitzgerald's “The Lost Decade”

This research paper focuses on lacquer art and its role in Vietnamese history, as well as in the modern world. It explains the harsh labor conditions and time-intensive process that go into creating a piece of lacquer art, and attempts to explain why, in spite of its difficulty, it is still made today. Lacquer art has traveled through many Asian countries, and yet this paper focuses on one specific type: Vietnamese traditional lacquer art. As an art technique unique to the culture and history of Vietnam, it is distinctive and not just taken from other countries. Though the process of creating a piece is intense and restless, even leaving marks upon the artist’s skin, the resulting product is truly unmeasurable. Vietnamese lacquer art has been the country’s traditional art form for over 2,000 years, with it serving as relics in pagodas and spiritual items for Buddhism, worship paintings, communal houses, etc. Its labor, history, and the application of this traditional technique combined with artistic creations of older and younger artists has formed it into what it is today. Though this art form is not usually known in modern society, in the art world and among older generations, this art form is extremely valuable due to its materials, labor, and the history that it holds, which is why there are so many collectors from around the world collecting these pieces.

Our hypothesis in this article is that Julia Álvarez chooses several anomalous syntactical structures in English in the short stories My English and A Genetics of Justice to point out certain facts or certain feelings that are important in her life. In this sense we can say that there is a relationship between the use of words or structures and the author’s ideology. This article is within the framework of Systemic Functional Grammar for two main reasons: a) the importance of context for the analysis of the main syntactical processes of thematization and postponement in English and b) because it studies language in relation to society and analyses the main reasons for choosing between some linguistic forms or others, fact that is always determined for the function that those linguistic forms have in society. The main purpose of this article is to show that presenting ideas using certain syntactical structures in English (existential sentences, extraposition, pseudo-cleft sentences, passive, cleft sentences, reversed pseudo cleft and left dislocation) is not at random because those structures have specific communicative implications, as we will see when we analyse the examples in the two short stories we have chosen.

The study of language had always stood at the forefront of every Jewish movement of revitalization and cultural renewal. It served as bridesmaid as each new spiritual period began, accompanying it along up to its full ascendancy. —Reuven Fahn (1937), 31 The Hebrew Language—A "Lost Tongue" One hundred and fifty years of arduous attempts to revive Hebrew as a modern literary language preceded its revival as a spoken language. Yet, from its incipience to the end of the nineteenth century, modern Hebrew literature could barely gain itself a narrow circle of devoted readers. One of the more acute expressions of the distress of Hebrew authors in the last third of the century was voiced by Yehudah Leib Gordon (1830-92), the greatest of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) poets.1 In 1871 Gordon published the poem "For Whom Do I Labor?" out of a sense that, lacking an audience, he was perhaps the last of the Hebrew poets: [End Page 171] For Whom Do I Labor? Whilst poesy's muse upon me comes stealing Whilst heart conceives and with right hand composing Poems composing and in a language forgotten Where triumph, what bliss, may ever prevail And for whom do I spend my best years in travail Depriving my person of quiet and gain? My parents—adhering to their Lord and nation Commerce, Commandments, their life's occupation Reason revolts them, good taste never found "Deathly is poetry, and rhetoricheathen! "To lodge near a poet is strictly forbidden!" Thus do they taunt us, viciously hound.2 Gordon avers that his best years have been devoted to composing poetry in a "language forgotten"—a language in demand by no one. His lament is that the traditional Jewish society of his day treats writing poetry in Hebrew as an act of apostasy and attacks and isolates those engaged in it. This lament may strike the modern reader as odd. Scholarship on the origins of Hebrew, like research on the traditional Jewish educational system, rejects as superficial the characterization of Hebrew as a "dead language." Yet if Hebrew was not dead, why were there no readers for modern Hebrew texts? The conventional view can accommodate this difficulty: traditional education indeed prepared potential readers in the Hebrew language, but the community also imposed strict social sanctions on those who read the new Hebrew literature.3 Indeed, many researchers dwell on the preservation mechanisms that sustained the Hebrew language over the generations and kept it in continual use.4 Benjamin Harshav's "Essay on the Revival of the Hebrew Language" is a case in point.Harshav expounds on "the life of 'dead' Hebrew" and claims that explication of Hebrew texts, a central activity in religious life, served to sustain "awareness of the meanings of words and of the parallels between various texts in the Hebrew library."5 In his opinion, such "Education emphasized the understanding of texts" (his emphasis), both in the heder and in the yeshivah. Language comprehension was reinforced by the methods of study employed within the education system, which included reading and translating the Torah in the heder, quoting texts and interpreting them as part of Talmudic studies, and the dialogic method of study employed in the yeshivahs. Hebrew, furthermore, was the language used in religious literature, in responsa, in rabbinic decisions, and in community documents. All these, along with the Hebrew component of Yiddish, show, [End Page 172] in Harshav's opinion, that "unlike Latin, which the common folk did not know and whose primary students were monks, all Jews were required to study texts in the Holy Tongue. ... Even if in the lower classes of society the level of study was not advanced, in fact every male knew—or was supposed to know—how to read. Hebrew texts served also for daily prayer, blessings and so forth. Hebrew was understood well...

Reviewed by: The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud: Essays on Cultural Roots and the Problem of Religious Identity Yves Laberge The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud: Essays on Cultural Roots and the Problem of Religious Identity. Edited by Arnold D. Richards. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2010. Pp. viii +196. Paper $45.00. ISBN 978-0786444243. Scholarship on Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) is rich and abundant, but countless dimensions still have to be studied. This impressive collection presents fourteen essays on Jewish identity, based on Freud’s writings on art, culture, history, myth, religions, and the unconscious. Most chapters quote from Freud’s essays, articles, and correspondence, with a clear preference for what would become his last book, Moses and Monotheism (1939), which is cited in almost every chapter. Like many studies on Freud’s works and ideas, this overlooked book is fascinating because it explores various facets within and outside psychoanalysis. Of course, this book is not the first to focus on Freud’s religious and cultural roots: the salient writings of Martin Bergmann on Freud’s Jewish identity are also mentioned (Salberg 6). Topics are varied: the influence of classical Greek culture on the young Freud, modernism, antisemitism in Austria, the early critique of psychoanalysis in Austrian media, Freud’s introduction to “The Moses of Michelangelo,” the links between Freud and Lévinas, Freud’s exile in London (from June 5, 1938), and finally suicidality in Freud’s life and work (171). In a chapter dedicated to “Freud’s Theory of Jewishness,” Eliza Slavet argues that the main question in Moses and Monotheism was “how and why individuals have been regularly convinced that they are Jewish and that they should practice Jewish traditions even as the ‘Jewish tradition’ does not itself satisfy any ‘material needs’” (98). The contributors’ approaches are often interdisciplinary, because Freud’s thoughts were in essence linked with an impressive number of domains. For example, Freud was aware that his own descriptive work on the psychoanalytic process during the cure was somewhat like writing a literary work in terms of narratives: according to Jill Salberg, “As early as the Studies in Hysteria, Freud writes that many of his case histories read like short stories, suggesting his awareness of the literary, associative, narrative quality of how people experience and speak about their lives” (5). Other chapters refer to Freud’s works on art, history, religion, and of course psychoanalysis. In terms of group identity, many contributors seem to agree that “Freud was a typical Viennese Jew” (e.g. 22, 35). However, it is obvious that the Viennese social context with its Christian dominant culture and Jewish minority culture influenced Freud’s worldview, subjectivity, theories, and writings (Salberg 5). By developing theories through cases and examples inspired by his everyday life and his patients’ experiences, he testified as well about his society and his own intimate, inner life. In other words, “Freud offered his memories and dreams as data for his own theories” (Salberg 5). [End Page 201] The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud is an important book because it links science to culture and religion, even though Freud was not a “believer.” For readers unfamiliar with Freud’s method or with psychoanalysis in general these essays are a treat, and can be read without any prerequisites since there is very little discussion related to the unconscious and Freudian theory. On the other hand, students will find here some interesting discussions about German and Austrian culture and collective identity in the first half of the twentieth century. Even for those who are resistant to psychoanalysis, these essays will be instructive because they aptly illustrate the importance and the solid ground of Freud’s thinking outside the domain for which he was famous. Yves Laberge Université de Haute-Bretagne Copyright © 2012 German Studies Association

Two centuries after their emancipation by the French Revolution, the integration of French Jewry appears to have been successfully achieved. But one question is raised: what has been its cost in terms of fidelity toward Jewish tradition? Following two distinct directions, the author analyses first the emancipatory logic of French politics toward its minorities. She examines the content and the effects of the two main conditions imposed on the Jews for their acceptance as French citizens: the renouncement of their collective and national identity as members of a Jewish “nation” and the confessionalization of their religious belonging, transforming them into a religious minority. The second direction is orientated towards the Jewish tradition, or, more precisely, traditions, as long as it includes the profane as well as the religious traditions. What is meant, then, by the very term “tradition”, according to tradition itself and according to the use made through the reference to tradition among certain contemporary Jewish circles? In a third section, the author endeavours to articulate these two perspectives. She tries to show how the requirements of both universes, culturally, ideologically, intellectually and politically so alien to each other, have become accommodated into a very specific phenomenon called “franco-judaïsm”. She also shows the distance separating this modality of Jewishness from the one expressed by the Jewish East-European immigrants settled in France by the turn of the century. She finally demonstrates how Jewish tradition, after undergoing a complicated inner process of recomposition, has succeeded in integrating itself into the cultural landscape of French Jewry and how it is on its way to becoming a commodity, thrown onto the free market of modern cultural consumerism.

This study discuss contemporary feminist genres and innovative techniques PoyK and social issues, traditional and modern culture of women in the short story. Analysis of descriptive data through library data, relevant research journal articles, online newspapers, short story Fanny J. Poyk Woman from Notes, Kompas, December 3, 2017; Belis is Dowry Kompas January 10, 2016; and One Day in Metromini Republika November 12, 2017. Analysis of data on the search for Poyk feminism and social, traditional and modern cultural issues concerning women.The results this research show that the feminist genre in Poyk's imagery in his short story is radical feminism. Feminist movement that rejects parthiarchy. Mince out of the house and earn a living independently. Women have not been sold properly in households and the public sphere. From a cultural point of view there has been a throwback in the culture of marriage in NTT in deciding the wedding dowies 'Belis' have taken place in these modern times. Things that need to be paid attention to economies that demand others can live frugally and practically. Poyk’s short story through characterization reflects the phenomenon of women who have gender inequality in terms of marginalization, subordination, stereotype, violence, and double burden.

The history of the short story is as old as human civilization. The parable, fable and folk tale are its different forms and all of them, share their origin and pattern with poetry. After the maturity of the novel as a genuine genre, the descendent craft of the short story writing sprang up from a variety of soil late in the nintenth century, previously, the short story was assigned an inferior statues, mostly recognized as a little piece of literature that an author/writer tossed of between major productions. At present, the prolific writers in this field have considered the modern short story as a complex form, making in depth but lacks in length.With the advent of literary art, the yearning for tales has acquired new dimensions. The range and scope of the stories has become extensive, wide and universal. Now the writer of short stories endeavours to explore various manifestations of life which primarily include inter-personal relationship,man’s association with nature,the learning experiences of life and other social issues. The human relationship continues to be the nucleus of any literary work. In a country like India,anyone, who wishes to be a writer,has to shoulder moral responsibility. The author through his work provides an outlet to his innermost unexpressed feelings and frees his mind from these emotions. Sometimes he brings to the notice of his readers his observations of social and cultural setup,thus performing the role of a social reformer. As a genuine artist the author needs to shoulder the responsibility to interpret life in all its shades and colours for the common man. The prominent Indian practitioner’s off short story as a literary form included K S Venkataramani, K Nagarajan, Raja Rao, Rabindranath Tagore, Mulk Raj Anand, Ruskin Bond, R K Narayan, etc.

Research Article| March 01 2012 Arnold Bennett’s Hotels Randi Saloman Randi Saloman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2012) 58 (1): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2012-2008 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Randi Saloman; Arnold Bennett’s Hotels. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 March 2012; 58 (1): 1–25. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2012-2008 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Essays You do not currently have access to this content.

Imperialism in the Modern World