"My son, the doctor": It's become a cliché, but its persistence reflects a unique connection between medicine and the modern Jewish experience. We examine this relationship in the exhibition I recently curated at the Yeshiva University Museum, titled "Trail of the Magic Bullet: The Jewish Encounter with Modern Medicine, 1860-1960."
Modern medicine emerged in the second half of the 19th century as innovative technologies and new theories of disease paved the way for extraordinary medical advances. For many Jews -- and for the Jewish community at large -- the field of scientific medicine presented new opportunities, new challenges and new ways to engage with modernity.
Through the lens of modern medicine, many aspects of the modern Jewish experience are revealed. We see the drive for social integration as well as the sting of anti-Semitism. We glimpse the need to help fellow Jews as well as the desire to look beyond the Jewish community. From this vantage, we can also observe the complex interaction between science, faith and tradition.
In the exhibition, we kept the focus on a few key stories that bring these dynamics to light. Beginning with individual Jews who became part of, and contributed to, the modern medical establishment, the exhibition then expands its perspective to look at examples of Jewish communal engagement with medicine. In the final section, we explore the intersection between Jewish tradition and modern medical practice. A newly commissioned video on contemporary Jewish bioethics by award-winning filmmaker Ilana Trachtman is juxtaposed with classical rabbinic texts -- a reminder that the trail of the magic bullet extends into both our past and our future.
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"My son, the doctor": It's become a cliché, but its persistence reflects a unique connection between medicine and the modern Jewish experience. We examine this relationship in the exhibition I recen...
"My son, the doctor": It's become a cliché, but its persistence reflects a unique connection between medicine and the modern Jewish experience. We examine this relationship in the exhibition I recen...
UPDATE: Urban Outfitters appears to have removed the shirt from their site. Today in Urban Outfitters Products That Are Pissing People Off: here's the so-called...
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In recent years, many new modern Haggadahs have been created, and they are likely to incorporate a list of "Contemporary Afflictions." As we find ourselves in the midst of the latest presidential election cycle, an affliction unto itself, here are 10 new ones.
I am perfectly aware that my criticism of Israel makes some Jews uncomfortable and, for some, disqualifies me for the Zionist label, which is a pity. The Jewish future needs all of us.
Zionism obliges me to forgo the personal and public privilege of total apology or the luxury of self-hatred. It obliges me to free myself from a sense of approaching apocalypse as well as of the inevitability of utopia.
The Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist and Jain leaders present at the White House did not simply want to find common cause in the present but determine systematic ways of articulating their religious values through action in the future.
Drake has never been reticent about his Jewish roots. But what does his latest song have to do with bar mitzvah? And how should we react when a video for a song that relates a life of private jets, expensive alcohol, pills and sexually aggressive women is shot in a synagogue?
Religious ritual is a way of structuring time so that we, not employers, the market or the media, are in control. Life needs its pauses, its chapter breaks, if the soul is to have space to breathe. Otherwise, we may not be in Egypt, but we can still be slaves.
Teaching about religions is not advocating for them any more than teaching about war advocates for war. And as for the objection that it would violate the separation between church and state, that's not true.
Go to any major hospital website, and look at the list of doctors' names.
You will see way more Muslim and Hindi names than Jewish ones.
(To HP--more of this, less of the Kardashians.)
What kind of an American are you?