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Credo in a kind of
American jewish Hamlet-like
bagel, too round for action
yet leavened enough by contact
with the near-dead past—you call it
landscape, I call it history—to provide
a layered vantage…
I’m trying to pray; one of the voices of my mind says, “God, please help me do this,”
but another voice intervenes: “How conceive God’s interest would be to help you believe?”
Is this prayer? Might…
This book deals with the problem of religion in contemporary Jewish education. It grew out of my thinking and teaching about Jewish education, which made me realize that religion is always on the…
But any honest observer of the contemporary scene must admit that the fading of traditional Jewish piety has not meant its replacement by more “Christian” forms of religious life, even though some of…
There are contradictions and ambivalences in our celebrating Thanksgiving. We are recent Americans. It wasn’t the Mayflower that brought our people over here. We know too much about what the coming of…
In the book of Ruth we read an extraordinary expression of love between two women, spoken by a daughter-in-law to her mother-in-law. The text has often been read as a reflection of Judaism’s position…
[…] the Madison Left experience, at least in the early and mid-1960s, was never simply an American experience. It was more jumbled, at least more composite—like America itself? In my own not untypical…
The Hebrew Zakhor—“Remember”—announces my elusive theme. Memory is always problematic, usually deceptive, sometimes treacherous. Proust knew this, and the English reader is deprived of the full force…
Over the past ten years, the American Jewish community has undergone a radical inner shift in mood, from buoyant optimism to deep anxiety about its future. […]
The present anxiety can be dated to the…
To be in exile, with a religious or historical sense that one is exiled, is to have already a mission and purpose in life. One’s clear project then is to end the exile and to return to…