Snapshot Five:  The Old New

In our six-part series, we will be exploring Judaism as a civilization.  Judaism is too broad a subject with too long and rich a history to be understood merely as a religion.  We will examine that civilization through the lens of that history, that religion, and those forces from both within and without that have shaped its development up until today.  

The emergence of Zionism in the late 19th and early 20th century upended a nearly 2000 history of Jewish statelessness.  Zionism presents itself as the essential tool for Jewish survival in a world that has never ceased to turn against its Jewish citizens.  And yet it also poses a challenge to the view of Judaism as a universal faith - one that need not be rooted in a particular soil.  In this session, we will address this conflict as we seek to understand our relationship with the Jewish state.