Information Resources
New and Notable
Recent Publications of Interest
(List posted in December 2003)
In an effort to help interested readers keep abreast of new publications in the disciplines that lie at the heart of the work of the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies, we offer a short list of recently-published books and brief descriptions of each book. These descriptions are not reviews: No positive or negative judgments are offered with regard to the books' contents.
New and Notable:
Conflict & Connection, by Moshe Aumann
Henry Ford and the Jews, by Neil Baldwin
No Longer Slaves, by Brad R. Braxton
Violence in God's Name, by Oliver McTerman
Christ on Trial, by Rowan Williams
The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, by John Howard Yoder
Of Special Interest:
The Darker Side of Genius, by Jacob Katz
Wagner: Race and Revolution, by Paul Lawrence Rose
Moshe Aumann. Conflict & Connection: The Jewish-Christian-Israel Triangle. Gefen Publishing House, 2003. In this book former Minister-Counselor for Relations with the Christian Churches at the Embassy
of Israel in Washington, D.C. Moshe Aumann provides
a historical overview of Christian teachings about Jews, Judaism, and Israel and maps the dramatic changes in those teachings effected in the last fifty years -- most particularly in the Christian recognition of the "historical continuity and ongoing vitality of Judaism and the Jewish people." Aumann's stated purposes are to inform the general Christian and Jewish public of these changes
and to highlight the challenges that still need to be overcome: theological anti-Judaism, proselytism, and hostility toward the State of Israel. In spite of these serious challenges, Aumann sees possibilities for a thoroughgoing transformation of the relationships between Church and Synagogue and Christian and Jewish communities, and of Christian attitudes toward the State of Israel. His conclusions cause Aumann to
ask if the developments he reports "bear the seeds of a fundamental and historic resolution of the centuries-old conflict between Christianity and Judaism."If you would like to purchase this book, click here.
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Neil Baldwin. Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate. Public Affairs (Perseus Book Group), 2001 and 2003. On February 23, 1997, Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List was shown for the first time on American network television. The sole commer-cial sponsor of the program was the Ford division of the Ford Motor Company. The notion that this particular film would be sponsored by a company whose founder was obsessively antisemitic struck Neil Baldwin, executive director of the National Book Foundation, as a mind-bending concept that "appealed to [his] sense of irony [and] . . . to his awareness that here resided an inade-quately told story in American history." The fruit of Baldwin's effort to tell the story adequately is Henry Ford and the Jews. Drawing upon oral history tran-scripts, archival correspondence, and family memoirs, Baldwin analyzes Ford's antisemitism. He produces a portrait of a man who, by reason of immense wealth and influence, represented a significant danger to American Jews. Baldwin tells how Ford acquired The Dearborn Independent for the express purpose of promulgating his Jew-hatred and used it to conduct a relentless media campaign; how he expended his own financial resources to disseminate worldwide the notorious forgery, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion; and how he provided economic support to antisemites in the United States. Baldwin also highlights Ford's relationship with Nazism; e.g., during World War II Ford's German subsid-iary, Ford-Werke, used forced and slave labor, and Adolf Hitler had Ford's portrait hanging in his first Nazi Party office. What sets Baldwin's work apart from other Ford biographies is his examination of reactions to Ford's antisemitism by American Jewish leaders and within the Jewish community.
If you would like to purchase this book, click here.
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Brad R. Braxton. No Longer Slaves: Galatians and African American Experience. The Liturgical Press, 2002. While on a trip to Africa, Brad Braxton experi-enced an epiphany: Reading the text of Galatians 4:7
-- "You are no longer a slave" -- he realized that, although freed long before from chattel slavery, many African Americans nevertheless are still shackled by the dominant white culture. He began to think in terms of
an "ideological Emancipation Proclamation." No Longer Slaves would appear to be a significant article of such
a proclamation. In this book Braxton draws Paul's first-century Letter to the Galatians into creative conversa-tion with twenty-first-century African American culture and experience, inviting that experience to inform the biblical text and reading the text in ways that liberate the experience. Braxton acknowledges that his perspec-tive is unusual and that his interpretation represents
a challenge to the scholarly tradition; but he wants "grassroots folk [to] discover new ways of being both African American and Christian," and he hopes "to liberate some saints on their way toward the kingdom." Brad Braxton is the Jessie Ball duPont Assistant Professor of Homiletics and Biblical Studies at Wake Forest University. He is an ordained Baptist minister
and formerly served as senior pastor of the Douglas Memorial Community Church here in Baltimore.If you would like to purchase this book, click here.
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Oliver McTernan. Violence in God's Name: Religion in an Age of Conflict. Orbis Books, 2003. The goal of Oliver McTernan's Violence in God's Name is to explicate pat-terns of religiously motivated violence and terrorism and to offer recommendations for conflict resolution and interfaith understanding. McTernan's credentials for this undertaking are impressive: He is a priest in an inner-city London parish, a regular broadcaster for the BBC, and a peace activist, and he has spent many years working in the field of conflict resolution. What especially troubles him is the failure of those involved in the peace process to acknowledge and address the religious and ethnic components of conflicts being fought all over the world. He explains that, while religion is not the prime cause of these conflicts, the religious factor does matter; it is not simply a proxy for political ambition, greed, grievance, or a desire for land. Those individuals who perform violent acts in God's name believe that they are engaged in the battle between good and evil and that they are carrying out a divinely inspired mission to protect their religious identity and values. Their fanaticism is born out of per-secution, oppression, chronic poverty, and the sense that their interests are being ignored. The fact that all major religions have at one time or another sanctioned acts of violence to either protect or promote their own sectarian interests provides the warrant for terrorists to claim that their destructive actions are morally justified. McTernan argues, therefore, that advocating tolerance is not enough. Nor is it enough for religious leaders to denounce their murderous co-religionists as "misguided fringe groups." Instead, he says, religious leaders need to recognize past religious ambivalence toward violence, to witness to the fundamental values of their respective faiths, to defend the rights of people who are different to believe in different ways, and to promote a respect for life above creed, dogma, and sectarian interests. McTernan's concern for these issues is palpable, as is his desire to open up the current debate on the connection between religion and conflict to the general reader.
If you would like to purchase this book, click here.
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Rowan Williams. Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgement. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000. Beginning with an examination of some ordinary uses of the word "trial"
-- learning by trial and error, a trial run, clinical trials, friendships that are tried and true -- Rowan Williams,
the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, concludes that
a trial is "an attempt to find out the truth." In four of the six chapters of Christ on Trial, Williams outlines
"the ways in which the evangelists let the truth of and about Jesus emerge in the way they narrate his trial." The final two chapters present Williams' reflections on Christian martyrdom and literary re-creations of Jesus' judges (primarily in Fyodor Dostoyevski's The Brothers Karamazov and Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita). Williams' goal in Christ on Trial is to teach readers how to cope with the challenges of their own personal trials in these trying times. Into his reflections on the biblical narratives Williams weaves material from fiction, nonfiction, theology, film, theater, and current events that serves both to sharpen the points he wants to make and to draw the reader in to stand with Christ at his trial. Each chapter in Christ on Trial concludes with discussion questions and a short prayer, which, combined with its brevity, makes this book very useful for small study groups, particularly for small-group study during the Lenten season.If you would like to purchase this book, click here.
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John Howard Yoder. Michael G. Carwright and Peter Ochs, eds. The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003. This book contains a posthumous collection of ten essays written by John Howard Yoder between 1971
and 1996 in support of his thesis that the Jewish-Christian schism "did not have to be." In his essays Yoder, who contributed to Jewish-Christian dialogue
not only as a writer and teacher but also through missionary activities and peacemaking efforts, attempts to explore the Jewish-Christian relationship without imposing upon it the patterns of supersessionism that have so marred Christian attitudes toward Judaism for most of the past two thousand years. Yoder's argument is designed to undercut the assumptions of Constantin-ian Christianity, which have dominated most forms of religious practice in the West, and to highlight links between the "free church" vision of Christianity and diaspora Judaism. The editors have placed Yoder's argument in two contexts that were of considerable importance to him: his decades-long dialogue with philosopher and rabbi Steven S. Schwarzschild, and
the vision of Jewish-Christian reconciliation in the
Letter to the Ephesians. The essays in this book have been redacted, corrected, and annotated by Michael
G. Cartwright, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion and Dean for Ecumenical and Interfaith Programs at the University of Indianapolis. The volume also includes explanatory and interpretive comments written by the editors. Cartwright's remarks are incorporated as an Afterword. Commentary by Peter Ochs, Bronfman Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Virginia, has been appended to each of Yoder's essays.If you would like to purchase this book, click here.
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Of Special Interest: The following two books are not new, but they are of special interest in connection with an ICJS project that is new -- an inquiry into the legacy
of Christian anti-Judaism in the choral arts.Jacob Katz. The Darker Side of Genius: Richard Wagner's Anti-Semitism. University Press of New England, 1986. It is well known that Richard Wagner was Adolf Hitler's favorite composer: Hitler saw and admired in Wagner an earlier exponent of his own
toxic racist ideology. A long-unquestioned association
of Nazism with Wagner's music accounts for the ban in Israel on its public performance. But in the process of conducting research for a 1979 lecture on Wagner's
role in the emergence of modern antisemitism, internationally-renowned scholar Jacob Katz uncovered evidence that prejudice can turn back on itself. Looking at his original line of inquiry from the opposite direction, Katz delved into the role that antisemitism played in Wagner's life and work. He found that Wagner was "obsessed by a deep-seated Judeophobia generated by conflict with his Jewish mentors and competitors" and that Wagner's anti-Jewish attitudes were clearly dis-cernible in his theoretical and journalistic writings. But Katz also asked if Wagner's anti-Jewish attitudes could be as readily discerned in his music. The Nazis certainly assumed that anti-Jewishness was part of Wagner's art, and they appropriated his music at least in part to legitimize their own worldview. Post-war critics of the Nazis uncritically accepted the Nazis' assumption. While Katz does not absolve Wagner of responsibility for his anti-Jewish views, he argues in The Darker Side of Genius that Wagner's music is not tainted by antisemi-tism and that there is very little in Wagner's artistic
work that can be connected to his racist views.If you would like to purchase this book, click here.
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Paul Lawrence Rose. Wagner: Race and Revolution. Yale University Press, 1992. Judging by the Intro-duction to Wagner: Race and Revolution, in which interpretations of Wagner's operas are based on an analysis of the reveolutionary and antisemitic elements he finds in them, Paul Lawrence Rose would take excep-tion to Jacob Katz's conclusion that Wagner's racist views did not extend to his artistic work. Noting that Wagner has been characterized as both a "virulent antisemite" and an "idealistic revolutionary," Rose explains that the assumed disjunct between these two identities -- which has played an important role in post-1945 attempts to rehabilitate Wagner's image and to separate him from Adolf Hitler -- rests on a misunder-standing of the German idea of revolution. People in
the West are conditioned to think of "revolution" as a progressive, left-wing phenomenon and of "race" as a right-wing aberration lacking any revolutionary content. Rose argues that German revolutionism, to which Wagner (also) subscribed, was a peculiar form of revolution in which the German race would free the human race from "a loveless and irrational way of life, symbolized, and at the same time made practical, by the Jews." Examining Wagner's place in German revolutionary culture, his theoretical and artistic works, the evolution of his thought, and his personality and personal relationships, Rose aims to break down the reluctance to accept revolutionary and antisemitic readings of Wagner's operas.If you would like to purchase this book, click here.
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