A Quote by Susan Jacoby

People think that, that conversion to Judaism is just a modern phenomenon. But there was an era in the late Roman Empire Judaism was not a proselytizing religion. It didn't go out looking for converts, but it accepted converts.
According to Miller, Pharisee Judaism is not a religion at all, but a secret society posing as a religion, a "sect with Judaism as a rite." She cites Moses Mendelssohn who wrote "Judaism is not a religion but a Law religionized."
In a way that somebody else converts to Judaism or becomes a Hare Krishna, I belong to the church of fried chicken.
I studied Judaism a lot. I studied religion in general, and I have never imposed my Judaism on my kids. They are what they want to be. I think... you must care for others. That's the correct religion, I think.
When Jews left Judaism, they didn't stop being religious. They simply swapped God-based Judaism for godless secular humanism and leftism. For left-wing Jews, Judaism is their ethnicity; leftism is their religion.
If you alter or obscure the Biblical portrait of God in order to attract converts, you don't get converts to God, you get converts to an illusion. This is not evangelism, but deception.
Judaism is a brilliant religion, and the main function of Judaism is to learn and read.
In Mesopotamia or Egypt, for example, the monarch had a god-like religious status. But this is not the case in Judaism. So that notion that religion can go on, when all the markers of power and trappings of monarchy disappear, ultimately serves the endurance of Judaism very well.
I find myself a little uncomfortable in the New Testament environment. And this is also true of what I would call late Judaism, the Judaism of the Second Temple and later.
The idea of Judaism as a flower, it a message for Jewish people, talking about the future. Many people associate Judaism with old and dry laws, and the Holocaust. But with this metaphor, Judaism for me is useful, pleasant, and fills me with good feelings.
I wear the Jewish star, but I'm not - I haven't converted to Judaism, and I'm not - I'm not - I'm not Jewish in the conventional sense because the Kaballah is a belief system that predates religion and predates Judaism as an organized religion.
My faith was undermined by the same sort of things that make people skeptics of religion in general. Part of it was, there was no real place for me in Judaism. Maybe if there was I would've hung in there, but I was attracted to the social-justice aspects of Judaism, and I was attracted to the prophets.
As success converts treason into legitimacy, so belief converts fiction into fact, and "nothing is but what is not.
There's an interesting contrast between born Catholics and converts. Converts are often much more rule-directed. Catholicism isn't something that they breathed in from their childhood, so they think that if you don't toe the line on abstract doctrine you can't be part of the Church.
I think it's a wonderful fact about Judaism - at least about the approach to Judaism I most relate to: There are no universal answers. We don't have it all figured out. God is unknowable.
I'm an atheist .I was raised in British reform Judaism, which is not like American reform Judaism, much less any other strain of organised religion. So: no cults here.
In Israel, there is no civil marriage. All elements of religious life - from the kosher certification of food to conversion to marriages and burials - are controlled by the rabbinate. In Israel, then, the official religion is not just Judaism. It's Orthodoxy.
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