Reform Judaism is constantly evolving as we continue to seek a faith that is in harmony with our beliefs and experiences. This volume offers readers a thought-provoking collection of essays by rabbis, cantors, and other scholars who differ, sometimes passionately, over religious practice, experience, and belief. Its goal is to situate Judaism in a contemporary context, and it is uniquely suited for community discussion as well as study groups.

This is the first book to explore the idea that Israel is a theocratic state through the examination of different aspects of Israel's history and Israel today. For example; Judaism and its place in Israel, politics and the political sphere, the media and other aspects that could constitute Israel being a theocracy. Also explored is opposition to Israel and how through this, Israel cannot be a theocratic state.

A collection of articles based upon conferences of the Framework for Contemporary Jewish Thought and Identity at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Jewish and Arab contributors, including authors, educators, MKs and Rabbis, address such subjects as Being an Arab Citizen in a Jewish Democratic State, Teaching Judaism to Secular Jews, Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State, and Integration of State Law and Halakha.

A National Jewish Book Award-winning autobiography that's "an astonishing fusion of learning and psychic intensity; its poignance and lucidity should be an authentic benefit to readers, Jewish and gentile" (The New York Times Book Review). Children have obligations to their parents: the Talmud says "one must honor him in life and one must honor him in death." Beside his father’s grave, a diligent but doubting son begins the mourner’s kaddish and realizes he needs to know more about the prayer issuing from his lips. So begins Leon Wieseltier’s National Jewish Book Award–winning autobiography, Kaddish, the spiritual journal of a man commanded by Jewish law to recite a prayer three times daily for a year and driven, by ardor of inquiry, to explore its origins. Here is one man’s urgent exploration of Jewish liturgy and law, from the 10th-century legend of a wayward ghost to the speculations of medieval scholars on the grief of God to the perplexities of a modern rabbi in the Kovno ghetto. Here too is a mourner’s unmannered response to the questions of fate, freedom, and faith stirred in death’s wake. Lyric, learned, and deeply moving, Wieseltier’s Kaddish is a narrative suffused with love: a son’s embracing the tradition bequeathed to him by his father, a scholar’s savoring they beauty he was taught to uncover, and a writer’s revealing it, proudly, unadorned, to the reader.

This classic survey of the main features of the Jewish historical landscape exposes students to the rich scholarly literature on Jewish history, theology, philosophy, mysticism, and social thought that has been produced in the last century and a half. It shows Judaism as a creative response to ultimate issues of human concern by members of a group that has faced a unique concatenation of political, economic, and geographical circumstances. -- From product description.