The Genizah

From one of the country's most innovative rabbis, an illuminating journey through Jewish teaching toward a new vision of religious experience in contemporary life Many of us long for spiritual belonging and connection, only to run up against our confusion, discomfort, even disgust with organized religion. Noa Kushner understands this well. As the founding rabbi of The Kitchen, a progressive, experimental San Francisco Jewish congregation, she has guided thousands of people into a relationship with religion they never thought they would or could experience. In this concise, soul-stirring book, Kushner offers a transformational picture of religion for the moments in life when we yearn to transcend our self-imposed limits. She proposes that we treat religion, at first, not as something we believe but as something we do, so we can pursue the profound questions that perspective unfolds. How does prayer work? How do religious traditions evolve? What is the relationship between religion and ethics? And most of all, why should we be religious? Through luminous storytelling from the Torah, Jewish fable, and her own life, Kushner crafts an elegant, persuasive case for religious community not only as an antidote to our society's corrosive obsession with status, but also a fundamental good in and of itself. Written in a Jewish idiom, but open to readers of all backgrounds, Pretend You Believe is a powerful meditation on God, responsibility, doubt, progress, justice, love, forgiveness, joy, and more. With this book, Kushner has captured the wonder of religious feeling, and inscribed an invitation to readers everywhere.

Just Language revisits the Weimar period and its representation in the postwar years to explore narratives of linguistic resistance in the works of Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan. How did this generation of exile writers grapple with their experiences of oppression and persecution? How did they create a language of resistance during the decades that prepared the Third Reich and the Shoah? Facing the devastations of World War I, the book explores how Walter Benjamin analyzed language’s ability to radically break the cyclical violence of war and examines his opposition to expansionism and imperialism in Weimar education and culture. Based on Benjamin’s analysis, Johannßen traces the postwar responses of Hannah Arendt and Paul Celan. While Arendt proposed strategies of metaphorical thinking to counteract the formation of totalitarianism, Celan mobilized silence as a poetic counterforce against oppression and erasure. Just Language argues that every linguistic act and practice, no matter how small or marginalized, entails the ethical task of opposing the normalization and institutionalization of political violence. By tracing how Benjamin and his interlocutors struggled against German fascism, Johannßen presents a memory-based critique of linguistic violence, opening a dialogue between German-Jewish writers and today’s debates on nondiscrimination, propaganda, and social justice.