A substantial but accessible guide to reading and applying Reform responsa.
Washofsky helps curious Reform Jews navigate religious law in this critical work.
Where religious law and modern life meet, there are always questions. In a religious tradition as concerned with ethics as Reform Judaism, the number of questions is especially vast. With this volume, the author, a rabbi and emeritus professor of Jewish law and practice, attempts to address some of these questions by placing them within the context of Reform Jewish thought. “Responsa,” he writes in his introduction, refers to the practice in ancient Rome “in which judges and litigants sent difficult questions of law to legal experts who would respond in writing with learned opinions. We use the word today to describe a similar genre in Jewish law, the sh’eilot ut’shuvot, ‘questions and answers.’” Despite the Reform Jewish belief in personal religious autonomy—the freedom (within limits) of each person to make their own religious decisions—guidelines remain useful for those curious about how their personal religious choices fit within the Jewish tradition. This book includes responsa on several potentially controversial areas of modern Jewish life, from issues of medical privacy and labor unions to the appropriateness of cremation, secular holidays, and the flying of national flags at synagogues. Washofsky not only presents relevant responsa but offers critical readings of them, offering a practical demonstration of how to interpret and sometimes reject the claims made on the religious doctrine in question. His prose is deft and analytical without being abstruse, as seen here when the author considers a responsa that claims Jewish law supports the right of workers to organize unions: “We should greet a sweeping statement like this with attention and, perhaps, a degree of skepticism. Do the sources in fact support it? The concept of a ‘labor union’ is not found in the Talmud, the ultimate proof text for all halachic argument.” Those curious about the tradition of responsa in the Reform tradition, or merely about the intersection of Jewish law and modern life, will find much here of interest.
A substantial but accessible guide to reading and applying Reform responsa.Pub Date: March 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780881236439
Page Count: 288
Publisher: CCAR Press
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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