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              Selected Sources for Additional Reading on Judaism
                         Part VII: Humanistic Judaism
         [Last Change: $Date: 1993/06/08 18:00:48 $ $Revision: 2.1 $]
                     [Last Post: Sun May  9 11:00:36 1993]

                                         "Humanistic Jews need a literature
                                         that clearly and boldly states what
                                         they think and believe" [Win85]

This message is intended to provide readers of soc.culture.jewish with a list
of references to allow them to learn more about the current practices, past
practices, beliefs, and history of the Humanistic Judaism Movement.

Humanistic Judaism is less well known than Orthodox, Conservative, and
Reform.  But, on a behavioral level, it claims to represent many more
American Jews than any of these official ideologies. Rabbi Sherwin Wine, the
founder of the movement, identifies three kinds of Jews who are neither
honestly Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform. He calls these types the
involuntary, the ethnic, and the humanistic. Rabbi Wine defines the
involuntary Jew is the individual of Jewish descent who finds no meaning
either in his past or in the unique practices of his ancestral religion.  He
defines the ethnic Jew is the person of Jewish descent who bears a strong
attachment to the Hebrew and Yiddish cultures out of which he emerged.

Rabbi Wine feels that these affiliations are negative. He prefers the
positive definition of Humanistic Jew:

   The Humanistic Jew is an individual, of either Jewish or non-Jewish
   descent, who believes in the ultimate value of self-respect and in the
   principles of humanism, community, autonomy, and rationality. He also
   finds meaning in the celebration of life as expressed through the
   historic Jewish calendar and seeks to interpret this calendar in a
   naturalistic way.  He perceives that the power he possesses to determine
   and control his own life is the result of two billion years of
   evolutionary history.  Therefore, his religious feeling re-enforces his
   sense of human dignity.

Humanistic Judaism was organized by Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine, who founded its
first congregation in Farmington Michigan. In 1969, Rabbi Wine helped to
found the Society of Humanistic Judaism, whose membership comprised ten
temples and chapters as of 1978.

Additional information on  Humanistic Judaism, as  well   as   publications on
Humanistic Judaism, may be obtained from:

                        Society for Humanistic Judaism
                          28611 W. Twelve Mile Road
                          Farmington Hills MI 48018
                                 313/478-7610

This list is organized as a digest; it may be successfully undigestified by
programs such as "gnus".

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Subject: Archival and Credits

This reading list is based on a reading list developed during research at the
University of Judaism in Los Angeles in January 1993. Other contributors
include David A Guberman. Suggestions for additions or deletions are welcome,
as are submissions of *brief* annotations of the entries.

All portions of the FAQ and of the reading lists are archived on
israel.nysernet.org [192.77.173.2] in the directory:

  ~ftp/israel/lists/scj-faq

They are available in the rtfm.mit.edu archives in the directory:

  pub/usenet/news.answers/judaism

The following files make up the reading lists and are in the "reading-lists"
subdirectory: general, traditional, chasidism, reform, conservative,
reconstructionist, humanistic, zionism, antisemitism, intermarriage,
periodicals. 

The following files make up the FAQ and are in the "FAQ" subdirectory:
01-FAQ-intro, 02-Who-We-Are, 03-Torah-Halacha, 04-Observance, 05-Worship,
06-Jewish-Thought, 07-Jews-As-Nation, 08-Israel, 09-Antisemitism,
10-Miscellaneous. 

The files may also be obtained via Email by sending a message to
mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with the following line in the body of the message:
        
        send usenet/news.answers/judaism/(portionname)

Where (portionname) is replaced by the appropriate subdirectory and filenames;
for example, to get the first part of the reading list, one would say:
        
        send usenet/news.answers/judaism/reading-lists/general

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Subject: VII.1. PHILOSOPHY OF MOVEMENT

[Win78] Wine, Sherwin T. _Humanistic Judaism_. Prometheus Books, Buffalo NY,
        1978. ISBN 0-87975-102-9

[Win85] Wine, Sherwin T. _Judaism Beyond G@d: A Radical New Way to be
        Jewish_. Society for Humanistic Judaism, Farmington Hills MI. ISBN
        0-912645-08-3. 1985.  

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Subject: VII.2. OTHER RELATED READING

Humanistic  Judaism, being such a young  movement, does not  yet have a large
body   of  literature. However,  there  are   a  number of   authors that  are
recommended reading by Rabbi Wine:

o CLASSICS OF HUMANISM: Epicurus, Democritus, August Comte, John Stuart Mill,
        Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Jean Paul Sartre, George Santayana.

o WRITINGS OF JEWS WHO WERE HUMANISTS: Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Erich
        Fromm, Walter Kippman, and Walter Kaufman

o LITERATURE OF SECULAR HISTORIANS:  Spinoza, Julius Wellhausen, Emile
        Durkeim, Max Weber, Simon Dubnow, Salo Baron, and Theodore Gaster

o WRITINGS OF JEWISH NATIONALISTS: I.L. Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, Chaim
        Zhitlowsky, Ahad Haam, Micah Berdichevsky, Theodore Herzl, Max
        Nordau, A.D.  Gordon, Ber Borochov, Saul Tchernikhovsky, Vladmir
        Jabotinsky, David Ben Gurion, and Haum Goldmann

o JEWISH ESSAYISTS AND NOVELISTS WHO ARE ARDENT HUMANISTS:  Saul Bellow,
        Albert Memmi, and George Steiner

Other books on Humanism and Judaism include:

[Eli88] Eliav, A.E. ("Lova").  _New Heart, New Spirit:  Biblical Humanism
        for Modern Israel_. Jewish Publication Society.  1988.  [Forward
        by Herman Wouk]


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Please mail additions or corrections to me at faigin@aero.org.

End of Judaism Reading List Part VII (Humanistic) Digest
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