Jewish Religious Leadership: Image and Reality, Vol. 2

While Israel is producing an overabundance of rabbis, the American Jewish community, it seems, is experiencing the shortage of qualified personal. In addition to the questions of quantity, the direction and the role that is played by the Jewish leaders is questioned as well. These two volumes, a product of a multi-year project to examine the challenges facing current Jewish religious leaders—rabbis, cantors, educators, and lay congregation leaders— and read at two conferences, is an attempt to place contemporary circumstances within a larger historical framework. The work represents a tangible outcome of those deliberations. The volumes review a broad sweep of the Jewish historical experience, starting with the essays on charismatic leadership in the Hebrew Bible and ending with contemporary Israel and the United States. The essays encompass Jewish life in environments as diverse as ancient Alexandria and small-town America; they range over medieval communities in Muslim lands and in Christian Tuscany; they encompass the key centers of medieval Ashkenaz and Sepharad, Germany and Spain; they include offshoot groups, such as the Karaites, and also examine the largest centers of Jewish activity in ancient Palestine and Babylonia, medieval Egypt, and pre-Holocaust Poland and Russia. Contributors run the gamut from historians to anthropologists; Bible scholars and talmudists have contributed, as have students of modern literature, philosophy, and sociology. Though organized in roughly chronological fashion and with due deference to milieu, articles in these volumes can be read profitably for how they resonate with one another even when they are concerned with communities at quite a remove in time and place.