The Everything Jewish Wedding Book

The Everything Jewish Wedding Book
Author: Rabbi Hyim Shafner
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2008-11-17
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1440501661

From reciting the Kiddush (sanctification prayer) to building the chuppah (wedding canopy), the details of a Jewish wedding can be overwhelming! This wedding guide helps newlyweds understand tradition and plan a wedding they’ll cherish forever. Written by a rabbi who has performed many weddings, this informative guide will help people navigate: the Judaic concept of marriage; engagement etiquette; the proper way to introduce the families; how to confer with a rabbi and the ritual director; the business of incorporating family heirlooms; and more! Whether the wedding is joining two Jewish people or an interfaith couple, this book is a must-have survival guide for any chatan (groom) or kallah (bride).

Choosing a Jewish Life, Revised and Updated

Choosing a Jewish Life, Revised and Updated
Author: Anita Diamant
Publisher: Schocken
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2007-08-07
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0805212191

"As a rabbi and a convert, I appreciate this book deeply for its sensitivity to the complex feelings of those who are exploring paths to becoming Jewish, and for the deep love of Judaism it conveys. I will give it to every interfaith couple, and recommend that they give it to their parents. It is wonderful! " --Rachel Cowan, co-author of Mixed Blessings In the same knowledgeable, reassuring, and respectful style that has made her one of the most admired writers of guides to Jewish practices and rituals, Anita Diamant provides advice and information that can transform the act of conversion into an extraordinary journey of self-discovery and spiritual growth. Married to a convert herself, Diamant anticipates all the questions, doubts, and concerns, provides a comprehensive explanation of the rules and rituals of conversion, and offers practical guidance toward creating a Jewish identity. Here you will learn how to choose a rabbi, a synagogue, a denomination, a Hebrew name; how to handle the difficulty of putting aside Christmas; what happens at the mikvah (the ritual bath) or at a hatafat dam brit (circumcision ritual for those already circumcised); how to find your footing in a new spiritual family that is not always well prepared to receive you; and how not to lose your bonds to your family of origin. Sensitive, sympathetic, and insightful, Choosing a Jewish Life provides everything necessary to make conversion a joyful and spiritually meaningful experience.

The Synagogues of Kentucky

The Synagogues of Kentucky
Author: Lee Shai Weissbach
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 212
Release:
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780813131092

White southerners recognized that the perpetuation of segregation required whites of all ages to uphold a strict social order -- especially the young members of the next generation. White children rested at the core of the system of segregation between 1890 and 1939 because their participation was crucial to ensuring the future of white supremacy. Their socialization in the segregated South offers an examination of white supremacy from the inside, showcasing the culture's efforts to preserve itself by teaching its beliefs to the next generation. In Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South, author Kristina DuRocher reveals how white adults in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continually reinforced race and gender roles to maintain white supremacy. DuRocher examines the practices, mores, and traditions that trained white children to fear, dehumanize, and disdain their black neighbors. Raising Racists combines an analysis of the remembered experiences of a racist society, how that society influenced children, and, most important, how racial violence and brutality shaped growing up in the early-twentieth-century South.

Synagogues

Synagogues
Author: Samuel Gruber
Publisher: Friedman-Fairfax
Total Pages: 128
Release: 1999
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

A must for both architecture and Judaic studies buffs, this gorgeous volume offers a glorious armchair tour of synagogues of the world. For almost two thousand years, the synagogue has been the focal point of Jewish life and identity. This sumptuously illustrated volume traces the history of the synagogue as an institution and follows the development of synagogue art and architecture throughout the ages and across continents. Synagogues: -- features an incredible diversity of synagogues, from sixteenth-century Italian scuolas to twentieth-century works by architects such as Philip Johnson and Frank Lloyd Wright -- pictures synagogues from all over the world: from Cochin, India, to Venice, Italy; from London, England, to Jerusalem, Israel

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity
Author: Abraham Joshua Heschel
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 468
Release: 1997-05-16
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780374524951

Gathers essays by the Jewish scholar, activist, and theologian about Judaism, Jewish heritage, social justice, ecumenism, faith, and prayer.

To Be a Jew

To Be a Jew
Author: Hayim H. Donin
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2019-08-13
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1541618149

The inimitable, classic guide to the ageless heritage of Judaism, from Rabbi Hayim H. Donin, an incomparable teacher and interpreter of Jewish laws and practice. Embraced over many decades by hundreds of thousands of readers, To Be a Jew offers a clear and comprehensive introduction to traditional Jewish laws and customs as they apply to daily life in the contemporary world. In simple and powerful language, Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin presents the fundamentals of Judaism, including the laws and observances for the Sabbath, the dietary laws, family life, prayer at home and in the synagogue, the major and minor holidays, and the guiding principles and observances of life, such as birth, naming, circumcision, adoption and conversion, Bar-mitzvah, marriage, divorce, death, and mourning. Ideal for reference, reflection, and inspiration, To Be a Jew will by greatly valued by anyone who feels that knowing, understanding, and observing the laws and traditions of Judaism in daily life is the essence of what it means to be a Jew.

American Jewish Orthodoxy in Historical Perspective

American Jewish Orthodoxy in Historical Perspective
Author: Jeffrey S. Gurock
Publisher: KTAV Publishing House, Inc.
Total Pages: 492
Release: 1996
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780881255676

American freedom, opportunity and voluntarism has created challenges to the traditional faith and practice of all religious denominations. Jeffrey S. Gurock's pathbreaking work on the history of Jewish Orthodoxy in America has identified and explored the many ways that one religious group responded to those challenges. His model and influential studies of the American Orthodox rabbinate and synagogue have shown that attitudes favoring religious reconciliation and accommodation to the American environment were not less important than Orthodoxy's staunch resistance to that same environment. His seminal work has challenged scholars to understand that Orthodoxy is composed of a spectrum of approaches and has demonstrated that merely labelling a person or institution as "Orthodox" is only the first step towards understanding a particular stance on the most contentious of issues. American Jewish Orthodoxy in Historical Perspective brings together fifteen of Professor Gurock's most important essays with a new introduction that places his work in historiographical perspective. Beginning with his now-classic "Resisters and Accommodators" and "The Orthodox Synagogue", which provide the general viewpoint for what follows, this collection proceeds to individual case studies that examine the ways in which Orthodox Jews understood Christian religious threats, the challenges of modern Zionist ideologies, the varieties of Orthodox lay behavior, profiles of influential Orthodox rabbis, the styles of American Orthodox synagogues, and a description of one type of Orthodox day-school education.

Kaddish

Kaddish
Author: Leon Wieseltier
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 604
Release: 2009-11-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0307557235

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.

The Bible's Many Voices

The Bible's Many Voices
Author: Michael Carasik
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2014-04-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0827609353

The most common English translations of the Bible often sound like a single, somewhat archaic voice. In fact, the Bible is made up of many separate books composed by multiple writers in a wide range of styles and perspectives. It is, as Michael Carasik demonstrates, not a remote text reserved for churches and synagogues but rather a human document full of history, poetry, politics, theology, and spirituality. Using historic, linguistic, anthropological, and theological sources, Carasik helps us distinguish between the Jewish Bible’s voices—the mythic, the historical, the prophetic, the theological, and the legal. By articulating the differences among these voices, he shows us not just their messages and meanings but also what mattered to the authors. In these contrasts we encounter the Bible anew as a living work whose many voices tell us about the world out of which the Bible grew—and the world that it created. Listen to the author's podcast.