Jews can live their own life as Jews and yet be part of a different country.
Category Archive: February 13
In the early nineteenth century, with Enlightenment optimism soured by years of war and revolution, critics were skeptical of America’s naive faith that it had reinvented politics.
The Jewish story is the story of wandering. It is the story of extraordinary heterogeneous complication.
People who are comfortable with very clear boundaries and group definitions don’t like the instability and ambiguity of people who say they are more advanced Christians, or they don’t have to do what the bishop says.
The notion that religion can actually be something… attached to progressivism seems so bizarre. But all you have to say is that Abolition wouldn’t have happened without it. The way in which African Americans managed to achieve a degree of self-determination was through the church.
In the Einstein way, I can’t believe in a universe that doesn’t have some sort of prime mover, identical with all of created nature. I have a whole lot of a harder time with supposing the fine print of the Torah was a direct revelation.
I am enormously susceptible to religious environments – the music, the liturgy and the prayers.
The Gospel of Judas really has been a surprise in many ways. For one thing, there’s no other text that suggests that Judas Iscariot was an intimate, trusted disciple, one to whom Jesus revealed the secrets of the kingdom, and that conversely, the other disciples were misunderstanding what he meant by the gospel.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the stereotype of the ugly American – voracious, preachy, mercenary, and bombastically chauvinist – was firmly in place in Europe.
It’s not right to think about all of Jewish-German history as shrouded by the smoke of the crematorium.