Arnold Eisen, “Theology and Community,” in David Teutsch, ed., Imagining the Jewish Future (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 247-260 (original) (raw)
Related papers
This international symposium focuses on the decades from 1880-1950, a time of cultural, political, and economic ferment in Euro-American Jewish communities, when thinkers, writers, and artists generated a host of platforms and ideas about what shape the Jewish future would take in the twentieth century. Leading scholars gather to present papers and discuss the wide array of possibilities for Jewish life – many now forgotten – that this vibrant, often stormy period generated, and to consider how these trends both emerged from and further shaped the era’s views of what the future would hold.
Theology has not been the creative forte of the Jewish people throughout most of the last century. We have been too busily engaged in the process of surviving to have had the energy to devote to sustained religious re›ection. We have struggled to ‹nd our way as latecomers into modernity, to establish ourselves on new shores and amid unfamiliar cultural landscapes. We have survived an encounter with evil incarnate that cost us the lives of fully a third of the Jewish people, including an untold number of thinkers, teachers, and their students, Hasidic masters and disciples, many of whom in better times might have helped us to ‹gure out the puzzles of Jewish theology. For the past ‹fty years the Jewish people as a body politic has been fully and single-mindedly engaged in the task of reconstruction, in our case meaning above all building the State of Israel as a secure national home for the Jewish people and securing emigration rights for Jews who chose to go there. Besides these monumental undertakings, all else seemed to pale.
The Jewish Future – Commentary Magazine
Commentary Magazine, 2015
The Jewish people are in the initial stages of a demographic revolution, a change so profound and historic in nature that it will reshape the contours, character, and even the color of Jewry. Around the world, an unprecedented awakening is taking place. Descendants of Jews from all walks of life are looking to return to their roots and embrace their heritage. Israel and the Jewish people must reach out to them and welcome them back into our midst - for their sake and for ours.
From the early 1960s until several years ago, there was more or less a consensus among social scientists of American Jewry that there was a steady decline both numerically and qualitatively in American Jewish life and the American Jewish community. In the spring of 1964, for example, a very gloomy prognosis for the future of American Jewry was provided in two widely read and discussed articles. One was a cover story for Look magazine, entitled "The Vanishing American Jew," which focused on the declining American Jewish birth rate, and the other was Marshall Sklare's article in Commentary, entitled "Intermarriage and the Jewish Future," in which he warned that intermarriage is "a matter more crucial to Jewish survival than any other" and projected a bleak outlook for the Jewish future. Empirical studies of American Jewish communities throughout the 1960s and 1970s confirmed the continuing decline of the birth rate and rise of the intermar riage rate, and in 1977, a Midstream article argued the possibility of a decline of the American Jewish population to some 10,000 by the year 2076. Al though most social scientists argued that was an exaggeration, virtually no one questioned the trend of decline. In fact, the evidence of decline, both in proportion to the total American population and in absolute numbers, was dramatically evident. While in 1937, according to demographer Sidney Gold stein, Jews comprised 3.7 percent of the total American population, by the onset of the 1980s, they had declined to between 2.4 and 2.5 percent. Nor was it anticipated that there would be any growth from one of the other major Chaim I. Waxman, associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University, has written widely on the sociology of American Jews and is a past president of the Association for the Sociological Study of Jewry. In addition to books on other subjects, he is the author of America's Jews in Transition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), and he is now completing a book on the sociology of American aliya, to be published by Wayne State University ftess.
Recent work by scholars such as Sylvie-Anne Goldberg and Elisheva Carlebach has paid close attention to the forms of temporality in traditional Jewish cultures, and classic twentieth-century studies debated the origin and character of various forms of Jewish Messianism as well as the genre of Jewish apocalypse. This essay considers the possible relevance of Jewish rhetorics of temporality to the most likely current scenario of the human future: a deterioration of both numbers and quality of life, with no inevitable extinction or redemption to be envisioned as a narrative end-point. The recent television series "Battlestar Galactica" is closely examined, both for its specifi cally Jewish tropes and more generally as a narrative modeling of a regressive sequence without inevitable resolution. Most broadly, this meditation in the form of a dialogue challenges scholars to address their analyses to the current situation of the species, and to do so in a way that does not rely on antiquated ideologies of progress and enlightenment.
Jewish Rhetorics and the Contemplation of a Diminished Future
transversal, 2016
Recent work by scholars such as Sylvie-Anne Goldberg and Elisheva Carlebach has paid close attention to the forms of temporality in traditional Jewish cultures, and classic twentieth-century studies debated the origin and character of various forms of Jewish Messianism as well as the genre of Jewish apocalypse. This essay considers the possible relevance of Jewish rhetorics of temporality to the most likely current scenario of the human future: a deterioration of both numbers and quality of life, with no inevitable extinction or redemption to be envisioned as a narrative end-point. The recent television series “Battlestar Galactica” is closely examined, both for its specifically Jewish tropes and more generally as a narrative modeling of a regressive sequence without inevitable resolution. Most broadly, this meditation in the form of a dialogue challenges scholars to address their analyses to the current situation of the species, and to do so in a way that does not rely on antiquate...