Print version record.

Caring for an intermarried Jew by converting his partner: Rabbi Uzziel's earliest responsum on Giyur (Salonica, c. 1922) / Zvi Zohar -- Gaining moral guidance from the Jewish tradition: four examples to test David Ellenson's approach and mine / Elliot N. Dorff -- The role of reform in Israeli Orthodoxy / Adam S. Ferziger -- Between "west point standards" and life in the trenches: the Halakhic dilemmas of orthodox outreach workers / Jack Wertheimer -- The Touro Monument controversy: aniconism vs. anti-idolatry in a mid-nineteenth-century American Jewish religious dispute / Jonathan D. Sarna -- Reverse engineering the twentieth-century bar/bat mitzvah / Isa Aron -- "And it not be stilled": the legacy of Debbie Friedman / Deborah E. Lipstadt -- From the Rhine Valley to Jezreel Valley: innovative versions of the mourner's Kaddish in the Kibbutz movement / Dalia Marx -- New waters in an old vessel: a history of Mikveh in modern Judaism / Michael A. Meyer -- German Jewry and Dutch Jewry: two separate paths to modernity / Steven M. Lowenstein -- Zionism, American Jewry, and the "negation of diaspora" / Arnold Eisen -- Traditional exemplars in a time of crisis / Michael Marmur -- Between a rock and a hard place: Rav J.B. Soloveitchik's perspective on gender / Rachel Adler -- The tendency of stories and the ethics of life's endings / William Cutter -- Thoughts on forgiveness in psychoanalysis and judaism / Lewis M. Barth -- Ethnicity, religion, and spirituality in postwar jewish america / Lawrence A. Hoffman -- Complicating a Jewish modernity: the Jewish theological seminary, Columbia University and the rise of a Jewish counterculture in 1968 / Riv-Ellen Prell -- Reform Rabbis, Betty Friedan, and the uses of "tradition" / Carole B. Balin -- On Momento: remaking memory from the outside in / Wendy Zierler -- At the centenary of Agnon's "Ve-hayah he'akov le-mishor": a new reading / Arnold J. Band -- Coda: from tradition to radicalism: jewish women in pre-Holocaust Poland / Paula E. Hyman.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 333-341) and index.

English.

Although the ideas of "tradition" and "modernity" may seem to be directly opposed, David Ellenson, a leading contemporary scholar of modern Jewish thought, understood that these concepts can also enjoy a more fluid relationship. In honor of Ellenson, editors Michael A. Meyer and David N. Myers have gathered contributors for Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity: Rethinking an Old Opposition to examine the permutations and adaptations of these intertwined forms of Jewish expression. Contributions draw from a range of disciplines and scholarly interests and vary in subject from the theological to the liturgical, sociological, and literary. The geographic and historical focus of the volume is on the United States and the State of Israel, both of which have been major sites of inquiry in Ellenson's work. In twenty-one essays, contributors demonstrate that modernity did not simply replace tradition in Judaism, but rather entered into a variety of relationships with it: adopting or adapting certain elements, repossessing rituals that had once been abandoned, or struggling with its continuing influence. In four parts--Law, Ritual, Thought, and Culture--contributors explore a variety of subjects, including the role of reform in Israeli Orthodoxy, traditions of twentieth-century bar/bat mitzvah, end-of-life ethics, tensions between Zionism and American Jewry, and the rise of a 1960s New York Jewish counterculture. An introductory essay also presents an appreciation of Ellenson's scholarly contribution. Bringing together leading Jewish historians, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and liturgists, Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity offers a collective view of a historically and culturally significant issue that will be of interest to Jewish scholars of many disciplines.