Authors /
Jodi Eichler-Levine
Jodi Eichler-Levine is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, where she holds a joint appointment with the women's and gender studies program. She is the author of Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children's Literature (2013).
The Jew in the Lotus
In August 1994, I was an introspective, brainy 16-year-old, fresh from a summer in Israel with a busload of other 16-year-olds. On my last morning in Jerusalem, I had watched the sun rise: cool breezes over ancient golden stones. I heard church bells ring and the Muslim call to prayer, whispering my own Hebrew dreams into fuzzy pink air. As a Jewish teen who went (reluctantly) to Israel for the Roman ruins but stayed for the prayers, when we chanted under desert stars I was suspended somewhere in between Reform Jewish teenagerhood and a future as a religious studies professor—plus my always evolving, complex relationship with Jewish adulthood.
This was when I first encountered Rodger Kamenetz’s The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet’s Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India.
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