Goals of the Jewish Diploma Project Essay

1 Id-According to the Old Testament, what massacre took place shortly after Moses received the 10 Commandments and why did it take place? Briefly list the main events in Moses’ life according to the Old Testament. Do any Egyptian sources confirm the events narrated in the Old Testament?

Regardless of the growing frequency of Jewish migrating to the United States, the community continues to confront the many issues as part of their assimilation. Through this process of assimilating,

Since the beginning of the Judaism, the Jewish people have been subject to hardships and discrimination. They have not been allowed to have a stabile place of worship and have also faced persecution and atrocities that most of us can not even imagine. Three events that have had a big impact on the Jewish faith were the building and destruction of the First Great Temple, the Second Great Temple and the events of the Holocaust. In this paper, I will discuss these three events and also explain and give examples as to why I feel that the Jewish people have always been discriminated against and not allowed the freedom of worship.

What made this assignment difficult for me is that I do not know any Jewish people. I was not aware there was a Jewish synagogue found in Beaumont, Texas, twenty miles from my home. Additionally, I was not aware that Houston had a museum dedicated to the Holocaust either. Furthermore, I am ashamed to admit I was not aware that Jewish

This paper will examine and analyze the turning points in the construction of Jewish memory and the identity in Israel as influenced by and based on the events of the Holocaust.

The history of the Jewish people in Spain is certainly a pivotal time period that changed the future of the Jews and specifically, the Sephardic Jews. At the time of the issuing and signing of the Edict of Expulsion on March 31, 1492, Spanish Jews were experiencing the most persecution that had been felt in the many centuries of which the Jews had been in Spain. Spanish Jewry came to a dramatic end after almost a millennium of Jewish presence in the country. Spanish Jewry’s golden age, however, the Jews experienced almost no persecution, resulting in a new centre of Talmudic study, before suffering from a relapse of anti-Semitism that eventually led to the Inquisition and the Edict of Expulsion. (SOURCE 1) This essay will discuss and analyze

This essay is going to discuss the ways in which the Nazi’s persecuted the Jews between the years of 1933 to 1938. Through the rise of Nazism, Nazi beliefs and propaganda, Nuremberg laws and the Kristallnacht in which will be explained in detail, I will provide a knowledge based analysis of pre-war life and the initial lead up to the war.

The long-term impact on the life of European Jews after the war is in four major areas: state ownership, economics, migration and relations with other non-Jews . Geographically, prior to the war, they are with one state in one area, and after the war, they find themselves in a completely different political–cultural unit or state. Jews who formerly live in Russia, Austria, or Germany are no longer part of their normal geographical habitat can in another state . With these instabilities, their social mobility increases, and many Jews, move up into the bourgeois middle class. With the revision in character, in self-pride of culture, many develop a more secular Jewish identity, joining only Jewish organizations and socializing with only other Jews . These new demographics empty the policy of encouraging Jews to assume only agriculture roles and allow them to kept their World War I productive areas of labor, butchery, bakery, textile crafts, doctors, lawyers, and bankers. With this rapid upturn in crafts and education to make a living, it seems the new purpose for the Jews, are one of promise for them, and life is rewarding. Yet, in Europe’s degenerate Christian population, while many are still living in poverty they become unnatural, demon like evil spirits looking in any way to claw their way out of an

“Certainly, the world without the Jews would have been a radically different place. Humanity might have eventually stumbled upon all the Jewish insights. But we cannot be sure. All the great conceptual discoveries of the human intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they had been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time. The Jews had this gift. To them we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of human person; of the individual conscience and so a personal redemption; of collective conscience and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal and love as the foundation of justice, and many other items which constitute the

Judaism is a religion that almost seems uncommon in today’s era. Currently, the United States is occupied with just two percent of individuals who believe in judaism; Globally, only .2 percent of the population is Jewish, which means this religion isn’t practiced heavily by many. The USHMM (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) indicates that World War II was responsible for the death of more than six million innocent jews; this still impacts the jewish community today. Jews

Throughout the history of Judaism, Jewish people have faced ongoing persecution and discrimination. Despite these conflicts, the faith remains alive, strong, and continuously growing. Like many religions faced with adversity, Judaism has had to assimilate its faith to survive in an ever-changing world. One significant moment of change in the Jewish history, the fall of the Second Temple, had the opportunity to destroy Judaism, but the Jewish people bonded together and reformulated their religion in order to save their faith. The falling of the Second Temple marks a distinct change in the Jewish faith through the modification of ritual practices to accommodate their new mobile lifestyle. This change would forever impact the Jewish

I learned a lot of facts about Judaism that I had previously been ignorant to. I had no idea that we (Christians & Jews) maintained the same bible (The Old Testament) but that we interpreted certain events differently, such as Adam and Eve. “In Judaism, each and every human being is free to choose good or evil because each person stands before God in the same relationship that Adam and Eve did” (Esposito 77). I was unaware that Judaism did not believe in “original sin.” I had no knowledge of the fact that Jews did not believe that Christ was resurrected from the dead. I found it interesting how Jews have split into separate groups – Reform Jews, who believe that Judaism is a cultural inheritance and that neither the laws nor beliefs are

The purpose of this research paper will be to examine how Judaism rituals have helped the religion remained amongst the most prominent in the world. The use of tradition and rituals has been at the very core of its existence. Birth, adolescent, marriage and death rituals will be used to highlight how the Judaism way of life is not dependent on the written word but rather the actions of those who follow this historic Hebrew religion. The paper will begin with a brief outline of Judaism and its relationship with God and then continue with how the written word of the Torah has laid the basis for the many traditions still practiced in Judaism.

As will be evident when I proceed with the examination of Gordon’s essays, one of the main themes is the establishment of Jewish group identity; the negative diasporic identity Gordon creates is essential to compliment the positive future identity of the Jewish people. Following the definition of Fredrik Barth, group identity is created through shared fundamental cultural values and entails a membership that identifies themselves as members and which is identified by others as members. Group identity emerges when a group of people shares a common culture and this culture distinctly differs from the culture of other groups. Cultural features can be material such as dress, language, shape of house, or be based on basic values like standard of morality or excellence of achievement (Barth: 10-11). It is significant for identity creation, that while certain features are considered unifying, others are ignored. The features considered important for the self-identification of a certain group are the identity markers that make the group distinct from other groups (Barth: 14). National identity is one of the social identities that has had the most impact on historical events, with both positive and negative consequences, as for example the great romantic-national movement of the nineteenth century (Salazar 1998: 114). This movement affected the identity of the Jewish people in emphasizing their lack of nationhood. Jose Miguel Salazar defines national sentiment by four elements:

Over thousands of years, the religion of Judaism has evolved. With years of suffering, persecution, and dispersion the Jews’ religion stays constant. When researching the religion, the history is extremely strong, and the doctrine of the religion dates back thousands of years. With such a vast history, one might want to examine the change into modern society.