The Jews as a Chosen People

The Jews as a Chosen People PDF Author: S. Leyla Gurkan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134037074
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
The concept of the Jews as a chosen people is a key element of the Jewish faith and identity. This book explores the idea of chosenness from the ancient world, through modernity and into the Post-Holocaust era. Analysing a vast corpus of biblical, ancient, rabbinic and modern Jewish literature, the author seeks to give a better understanding of this central doctrine of the Jewish religion. She shows that although the idea of chosenness has been central to Judaism and Jewish self-definition, it has not been carried to the present day in the same form. Instead it has gone through constant change, depending on who is employing it, against what sort of background, and for what purpose. Surveying the different and sometimes conflicting interpretations of the doctrine of chosenness that appear in Ancient, Modern, and Post-Holocaust periods, the dominant themes of ‘Holiness’, ‘Mission’, and ‘Survival’ are identified in each respective period. The theological, philosophical, and sociological dimensions of the question of Jewish chosenness are thus examined in their historical context, as responses to the challenges of Christianity, Modernity, and the Holocaust in particular. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Jewish Studies, the Holocaust, religion and theology.

The Jews as a Chosen People

The Jews as a Chosen People PDF Author: S. Leyla Gurkan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134037074
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Get Book Here

Book Description
The concept of the Jews as a chosen people is a key element of the Jewish faith and identity. This book explores the idea of chosenness from the ancient world, through modernity and into the Post-Holocaust era. Analysing a vast corpus of biblical, ancient, rabbinic and modern Jewish literature, the author seeks to give a better understanding of this central doctrine of the Jewish religion. She shows that although the idea of chosenness has been central to Judaism and Jewish self-definition, it has not been carried to the present day in the same form. Instead it has gone through constant change, depending on who is employing it, against what sort of background, and for what purpose. Surveying the different and sometimes conflicting interpretations of the doctrine of chosenness that appear in Ancient, Modern, and Post-Holocaust periods, the dominant themes of ‘Holiness’, ‘Mission’, and ‘Survival’ are identified in each respective period. The theological, philosophical, and sociological dimensions of the question of Jewish chosenness are thus examined in their historical context, as responses to the challenges of Christianity, Modernity, and the Holocaust in particular. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Jewish Studies, the Holocaust, religion and theology.

The Chosen People in America

The Chosen People in America PDF Author: Arnold M. Eisen
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253114128
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
An exploration of how American Jewish thinkers grapple with the notion of being the isolated “Chosen People” in a nation that is a melting pot. What does it mean to be a Jew in America? What opportunities and what threats does the great melting pot represent for a group that has traditionally defined itself as “a people that must dwell alone?” Although for centuries the notion of “The Chosen People” sustained Jewish identity, America, by offering Jewish immigrants an unprecedented degree of participation in the larger society, threatened to erode their Jewish identity and sense of separateness. Arnold M. Eisen charts the attempts of American Jewish thinkers to adapt the notion of chosenness to an American context. Through an examination of sermons, essays, debates, prayer-book revisions, and theological literature, Eisen traces the ways in which American rabbis and theologians—Reconstructionist, Conservative, and Orthodox thinkers—effected a compromise between exclusivity and participation that allowed Jews to adapt to American life while simultaneously enhancing Jewish tradition and identity. “This is a book of extraordinary quality and importance. In tracing the encounter of Jews (the chosen people) and America (the chosen nation) . . . Eisen has given the American Jewish community a new understanding of itself.” —American Jewish Archives “One of the most significant books on American Jewish thought written in recent years.” —Choice

Hollywood's Chosen People

Hollywood's Chosen People PDF Author: Daniel Bernardi
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814338070
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
As studio bosses, directors, and actors, Jews have been heavily involved in film history and vitally involved in all aspects of film production. Yet Jewish characters have been represented onscreen in stereotypical and disturbing ways, while Jews have also helped to produce some of the most troubling stereotypes of people of color in Hollywood film history. In Hollywood's Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema, leading scholars consider the complex relationship between Jews and the film industry, as Jews have helped to construct Hollywood's vision of the American dream and American collective identity and have in turn been shaped by those representations. Editors Daniel Bernardi, Murray Pomerance, and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson introduce the volume with an overview of the history of Jews in American popular culture and the American film industry. Multidisciplinary contributors go on to discuss topics such as early Jewish films and directors, institutionalized anti-Semitism, Jewish identity and gossip culture, and issues of Jewish performance on film. Contributors draw on a diverse sampling of films, from representations of the Holocaust on film to screen comedy; filmmakers and writers, including David Mamet, George Cukor, Sidney Lumet, Edward Sloman, and Steven Spielberg; and stars, like Barbra Streisand, Adam Sandler, and Ben Stiller. The Jewish experience in American cinema reveals much about the degree to which Jews have been integrated into and contribute to the making of American popular film culture. Scholars of Jewish studies, film studies, American history, and American culture as well as anyone interested in film history will find this volume fascinating reading.

Evangelizing the Chosen People

Evangelizing the Chosen People PDF Author: Yaakov Ariel
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807860530
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
With this book, Yaakov Ariel offers the first comprehensive history of Protestant evangelization of Jews in America to the present day. Based on unprecedented research in missionary archives as well as Jewish writings, the book analyzes the theology and activities of both the missions and the converts and describes the reactions of the Jewish community, which in turn helped to shape the evangelical activity directed toward it. Ariel delineates three successive waves of evangelism, the first directed toward poor Jewish immigrants, the second toward American-born Jews trying to assimilate, and the third toward Jewish baby boomers influenced by the counterculture of the Vietnam War era. After World War II, the missionary impulse became almost exclusively the realm of conservative evangelicals, as the more liberal segments of American Christianity took the path of interfaith dialogue. As Ariel shows, these missionary efforts have profoundly influenced Christian-Jewish relations. Jews have seen the missionary movement as a continuation of attempts to delegitimize Judaism and to do away with Jews through assimilation or annihilation. But to conservative evangelical Christians, who support the State of Israel, evangelizing Jews is a manifestation of goodwill toward them.

The Chosen People

The Chosen People PDF Author: Richard Lynn
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781593680367
Category : Jews
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
"Einstein... Shylock... Rothschild... Trotsky... Jesus. The scientist and philosopher... the greedy money-lender and middle man... the impoverished immigrant... the elite of politics and high finance... the prophet... the revolutionary. All of these have been faces of the Jewish people over the centuries. They have inspired admiration, envy, suspicion, and hatred and overflowed with world-changing personages. The historian Yuri Slezkine claimed that the 20th century was nothing less than the 'Jewish century,' so indispensable were they in the creation of the modern world"--Cover, p. [4].

The Chosen People

The Chosen People PDF Author: John Allegro
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
ISBN: 098932804X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The Chosen People tells the history of the Jews from the conquest of Jersualem by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon in 587 B.C.E. to the Second Jewish Revolt of C.E. 132. John Allegro bases his account on traditional texts — books of the Old Testament, Josephus, Philo Judaeus, Dio Cassius, and others — and sets out the complicated parade of plots, counter-plots, betrayals, and insurrections in a brisk and highly readable sequence. His main theme is how the conception of the Jewish nation as a divinely chosen race was planted as a political ambition among the exiled Jews. Bringing together old customs and stories, the idea was fired by the longing of the Babylonian Jews for their traditional homeland. Many of them grew prosperous outside Palestine, and their wealthy communities manipulated the wish for identity in the idea of an exclusive Judaism embodied as a political state and fighting for autonomy against local and imperial neighbors — more dream than fact. The author writes that “When the ‘new Judaism' came to be hammered out after the return from captivity, it was around these ancient customs and a historicized mythology that it was fashioned.” The religion was devised not, as popularly presented, by gift of the desert god Yahweh who had manifested himself in opposition to the Canaanite fertility god Baal but by reinterpreting the Sumerian idea of a life-giving god over many generations. For there was no fundamental opposition — the god-names originally meant the same. This second edition features a new introduction by James M. Donovan.

The Chosen Few

The Chosen Few PDF Author: Maristella Botticini
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691144877
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein show that, contrary to previous explanations, this transformation was driven not by anti-Jewish persecution and legal restrictions, but rather by changes within Judaism itself after 70 CE--most importantly, the rise of a new norm that required every Jewish male to read and study the Torah and to send his sons to school. Over the next six centuries, those Jews who found the norms of Judaism too costly to obey converted to other religions, making world Jewry shrink. Later, when urbanization and commercial expansion in the newly established Muslim Caliphates increased the demand for occupations in which literacy was an advantage, the Jews found themselves literate in a world of almost universal illiteracy. From then forward, almost all Jews entered crafts and trade, and many of them began moving in search of business opportunities, creating a worldwide Diaspora in the process.

Messiah in the Passover

Messiah in the Passover PDF Author: Darrell L. Bock
Publisher: Kregel Publications
ISBN: 082544537X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
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God's Kindness Has Overwhelmed Us

God's Kindness Has Overwhelmed Us PDF Author: Jerome I. Gellman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781618111708
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Jerome Gellman presents a new theology of the Jews as the Chosen People, addressing self-serving ethnocentric supremacy, cultural isolation, and defamation of religions other than Judaism. This book is traditional in taking chosenness and the truth of Judaism seriously, and in eschewing a theology of multiple covenants. At the same time, it is critical, rejecting previous concepts of chosenness, and innovative, offering for the twenty-first century a fresh way of seeing the Jews' place in the world. On this foundation, Gellman suggests a new approach to inter-religious understanding from a Jewish point of view, and examines the impact of his proposal on traditional Jewish liturgy.

Did Jew Know?

Did Jew Know? PDF Author: Emily Stone
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 1452129576
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
An addictively readable mix of practical information, fun facts and figures, and amusing trivia about Jewish life. This witty handbook serves up a hearty stew of all things Jew. Did Jew Know is filled with fun, surprising, and informative facts about all aspects of Jewish life. Need to know about all those second-tier holidays no one ever celebrates? We’ve got you covered. Curious about kosher laws and Kabbalah? Have no fear. Join us for a history of the Jewish people from Saul to Seinfeld, a rundown of bubbe-approved nosh, and details about the Jewish invention of . . . everything. Packed with infographics, quizzes, and charts, this handy primer is perfect for cocktail conversation, sharing facts around the Seder table, or celebrating the unlikely triumphs of the Chosen People.