BERLIN (JTA) — Germany’s top Jewish leader urged Protestants to confront and condemn anti-Jewish teachings of Martin Luther, who began the Protestant Reformation. Speaking at a conference in Berlin last week, Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said he hopes for a clear sign from the Protestant Church condemning Luther’s…
● Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition By David Nirenberg W.W. Norton & Company, 624 pages, $35 Anti-Semitism’s eternal recurrence is so puzzling that it can invite mystification. Even the secularist Yiddish poet Yitzchak Katznelson, grappling with the Nazi extermination of European Jewry, resorted to religious myth. In his “Song of the Murdered Jewish People” (completed shortly…
The Austrian Jewish psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl (1905-1997), author of “Man’s Search for Meaning”, an inspiring account of his concentration camp experiences, enlightened many generations of students. None more so than a budding Austrian theologian Eric Gritsch, who in 1950 was mentored by Frankl, as the former described in a 2009 memoir. Now…
Bibliophiles, history buffs, religionists, and the plain curious will find “Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,” the new exhibit at the main branch of the New York Public Library, an extraordinary glimpse into the history of the Abrahamic faiths and their commonalities. Partly sponsored by the Coexist Foundation, a New York non-profit dedicated “to promote…
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