Testimony Tensions and Tikkun

The Holocaust was a cataclysmic upheaval in politics, culture, society, ethics, and theology. The very fact of its occurrence has been forcing scholars for more than sixty years to assess its impact on their disciplines. Educators whose work is represented in this volume ask their students to grapple with one of the grand horrors of the twentieth century and to accept the responsibility of building a more just, peaceful world (tikkun olam). They acknowledge that their task as teachers of the Holocaust is both imperative and impossible; they must �teach something that cannot be taught,� as one contributor puts it, and they recognize the formidable limits of language, thought, imagination, and comprehension that thwart and obscure the story they seek to tell. Yet they are united in their keen sense of pursuing an effort that is pivotal to our understanding of the past-and to whatever prospects we may have for a more decent and humane future. A �Holocaust course� refers to an instructional offering that may focus entirely on the Holocaust; may serve as a touchstone in a larger program devoted to genocide studies; or may constitute a unit within a wider curriculum, including art, literature, ethics, history, religious studies, jurisprudence, philosophy, theology, film studies, Jewish studies, German studies, composition, urban studies, or architecture. It may also constitute a main thread that runs through an interdisciplinary course. The first section of Testimony, Tensions, and Tikkun can be read as an injunction to teach and act in a manner consistent with a profound cautionary message: that there can be no tolerance for moral neutrality about the Holocaust, and that there is no subject in the humanities or social sciences where its shadow has not reached. The second section is devoted to the process and nature of students' learning. These chapters describe efforts to guide students through terrain that hides cognitive and emotional land mines. The authors examine their responsibility to foster students' personal connection with the events of the Holocaust, but in such a way that they not instill hopelessness about the future. The third and final section moves the subject of the Holocaust out of the classroom and into broader institutional settings-universities and community colleges and their surrounding communities, along with museums and memorial sites. For the educators represented here, teaching itself is testimony. The story of the Holocaust is one that the world will fail to master at its own peril. The editors of this volume, and many of its contributors, are members of the Pastora Goldner Holocaust Symposium. Led since its founding in 1996 by Leonard Grob and Henry F. Knight, the symposium's scholars--a group that is interfaith, international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational--meet biennially in Oxfordshire, England.

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Inventing Jewish Ritual

Vanessa Ochs invites her readers to explore how Jewish practice can be more meaningful through renewing, reshaping, and even creating new rituals, such as naming ceremonies for welcoming baby girls, healing services, Miriam’s cup, mitzvah days, egalitarian wedding practices, and commitment ceremonies. We think of rituals—the patterned ways of doing things that have shared and often multiple meanings— as being steeped in tradition and therefore unalterable. But rituals have always been reinvented. When we perform ancient rituals in a particular place and time they are no longer quite the same rituals they once were. Each is a debut, an innovation: this Sabbath meal, this Passover seder, this wedding—firsts in their own unique ways. In the last 30 years there has been a surge of interest in reinventing ritual, in what is called minhag America. Ochs describes the range and diversity of interest in this Jewish American experience and examines how it reflects tradition as it revives Jewish culture and faith. And she shows us how to create our own ritual objects, sacred spaces, ceremonies, and liturgies that can be paths to greater personal connection with history and with holiness: baby-naming ceremonies for girls, divorce rituals, Shabbat practices, homemade haggadahs, ritual baths, healing services. Through these and more, we see that American Judaism is a dynamic cultural process very much open to change and a source of great personal and communal meaning. The ceramic “Tree of Life” spice container that appears on the cover of Inventing Jewish Ritual is by Susan Garson of Garson and Pakele Studios, www.garsonpakele.com

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American Book Publishing Record

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Tikkun

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Transforming Conflict through Communication in Personal Family and Working Relationships

A transformational approach to conflict argues that conflicts must be viewed as embedded within broader relational patterns and social and discursive structures. Central to this book is the idea that the origins of transformation can be momentary, situational, and small-scale or large-scale and systemic. The momentary involves shifts and meaningful changes in communication and related patterns that are created in communication between people. Momentary transformative changes can radiate out into more systemic levels, and systemic transformative changes can radiate inward to more personal levels. This book engages this transformative framework by bringing together current scholarship that epitomizes and highlights the contribution of communication scholarship and communication-centered approaches to conflict transformation in personal, family, and working relationships and organizational contexts. The resulting volume presents an engaging mix of scholarly chapters, think pieces, and personal experiences from the field of practice and everyday life. The book embraces a wide variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, including narrative, critical, intersectional, rhetorical, and quantitative. It makes a valuable additive contribution to the ongoing dialogue across and between disciplines on how to transform conflicts creatively, sustainably, and ethically.

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The Witness

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Tikkun Reader

Tikkun (teokun): To heal, repair, and transform the world. The Tikkun Reader is a collection of the best of Tikkun magazine from the past 20 years, providing the most cohesive collection of writings that articulate the progressive, left leaning religious perspective on the some of the most important issues in politics, culture, and society facing both Jews and non-Jews today. It includes contributions by such people as Naomi Wolf, Arthur Green, Harvey Cox, Amitai Etzioni, Daniel Berrigan, Neale Donald Walsch, Cornel West, Vandana Shiva, Dennis Kucinich, Jim Wallis, Deepak Chopra, and Noam Chomsky.

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On Listening to Holocaust Survivors Beyond Testimony

"Summarizes thirty years of the author's interviews and re-interviews with the same core group of Holocaust survivors. Survivors' recounting is thus approached, not as one-time testimony, but as the fruit of sustained conversation"--Provided by publisher.

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Philosopher as Witness The

Responses to Fackenheim’s reflections on the centrality of the Holocaust to philosophy, Jewish thought, and contemporary experience.

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No Going Back

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Alternative Press Index

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Imagine Coexistence

Publisher Description

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Tikkun

Gathers essays from the Tikkun magazine about politics, Jewish culture and philosophy, feminism, Israel, and Judaism

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Humanities index

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Religion Index One

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Trees Earth and Torah

Draws from biblical, rabbinical, medieval, and modern sources that address the significance and historical development of the holiday, offers several examples of a Seder tu B'Shvat, includes mystical writings along with Zionist and eco Jewish piec.

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Challenging Holocaust Ideology

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The Holocaust Rescuers

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Index to Book Reviews in Religion

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Index to Jewish Periodicals

An author and subject index to selected and American Anglo-Jewish journals of general and scholarly interests.

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