Reading the Torah Out Loud: A Journey of Lament and Hope »

What religious values and ultimate vision would you wish to pass along to your children? How does one sort through what is authentic and inauthentic in a religious tradition today and forge its future? These are the questions Marc Ellis attempts to answer in this personal yet programmatic work.

Ellis reflects on the encounters that have been decisive in his own religious realms: the personal and the political. His work is a meditation on what can be learned and retained from his encounters with the Catholic Worker movement, post-Holocaust theology, Latin America Liberation Theology, engagement with the Palestinian cause, and acknowledgment of Israeli violence.

Preface     ix
A Time to Mourn: The Golden Age of Constantinian Judaism     1
In Whose Court Are Jews of Conscience Called?
Jews, Palestinians, and the Evolving Liturgy of Destruction
Contesting Post-Holocaust Jewish Identity
The Watershed: 1967
Politicizing the Holocaust: Richard Rubenstein and Israel After     19
"Holocaust": Danger to the Rabbinic System
Mourning, Martyrdom, and the God of History
Primal Loyalties
Primal Paganism
Encountering a Prophetic Christianity: Political Realities and Spiritual Questions     33
Witnessing Radical Christianity
Fusing the Spiritual and the Political
Liberation and Loneliness: Searching for God and Community in North America     43
Toward a Black Theology of Liberation
Community in the Midst of Loneliness
Martin, Malcolm, and James
Gustavo Gutierrez and Liberation Theology: The Voice of Faithful Struggle     53
The Preferential Option
A Latin American Voice for Liberation
Job and the Defense of the Poor
Among the Palestinian People: Discovering a Jewish Theology of Liberation     65
Confronting the Uprising
War in the Holy Land
Friendship and Martyrdom
Journeying among Palestinian Refugees
Experiences of Occupation
Justice and the Other
Speaking Truth: Israel and Palestine in the American Jewish Understanding     84
Holocaust, Memory, and the Neoconservative Agenda
A Different Path
Struggling for Fidelity: Encountering Post-Holocaust Theologians     93
Narrative and Counternarrative
A Flourishing Jewish Dissent
Toward Neoconservatism
Surveying the Jewish-Christian Landscape: Reflections on the Political and Ecumenical "Deal"     104
Halakhah and Culpability
The Uprisings "Burning Children"
Toward a Jewish-Christian "Understanding"
Shattered Hopes: Loss and Solidarity in the Jewish and Palestinian Diaspora     115
The Failure of Oslo
A Dust-up at the Carter Presidential Center
A Political Double Standard in the Academy
An Unexpected Blessing: Edward Said's Religious Secularity     129
Dissent on the Question of Zionism
The Limits of Jewish Progressives
Constantinian Judaism Triumphant
An Unusual Rabbinic Ordination
Reading the Torah Out Loud: Reclaiming the Text in an Age When Israeli Star of David Helicopter Gunships Fly     145
Is There Violence at the Heart of the Jewish Covenant?
A Dark Vision
Is There Justice in the Land?
Practicing Exile Then and Now
Bury Arafat and Sharon Together
Epilogue: Standing Up     164
Bibliography     175
Index     179