Sherwin T. Wine Over the last two hundred years, many Jews have been alienated from the traditional religious establishment. Many of them created religious alternatives to Orthodoxy. The Reform, the Conservative, and the Reconstructionist movements are the result of their work. But there were also many alienated Jews who were not comfortable with any religious … More »
A Rabbi’s Journey to Humanistic Judaism
Peter H. Schweitzer I have often speculated that had I learned Hebrew as a child and then become bar mitzvah, I probably would not have undertaken an exploration of my Jewish roots in college (majoring in Judaic studies and becoming a student leader at Hillel), visited Israel to work on an archeological dig, or finally … More »
Molly’s Unforgettable Bat Mitzvah
Linda Arking Here was the challenge: How would we affirm the Jewish identity of our daughter who had grown up in a home with no Yiddish-speaking zayde, who took pride in Israel but did not identify personally with the country, and to whom the Holocaust, while horrific, seemed as remote as the Crusades? In other … More »
Being a Secular/Humanistic Jew in Israel
Yehuda Bauer It requires quite a lot of courage to be or to pronounce oneself a secular Jew. We represent a silent minority. Most people in our society who do not follow religious commandments or do not live an active religious life are not secular: they are just vacuum voids in their day-to-day life. We, … More »
Response to Secular Judaism
Riv-Ellen Prell One of the hallmarks of the postmodern world is an ever-growing spectrum of forms of religion and religious expression. While modernity produced the challenge to authority that, for example, created Judaism’s progressive and pietistic “denominations,” postmodernity has exploded and reconfigured the spectrum. Secular Judaism has been a product of both periods. The modern … More »
An Outside Look at Secular Judaism
Harvey Cox First, some admissions. Although I am not Jewish, I do not write as an innocent bystander. Many years ago, I wrote a book called The Secular City, wherein I tried to rehabilitate the perfectly respectable term “secular.” Second, for fifteen years I have participated in - as far as my conscience would allow … More »