Lawrence Bush

Lawrence Bush is the author of several books of Jewish fiction and non-fiction, including Waiting for God: The Spiritual Explorations of a Reluctant Atheist and Bessie: A Novel of Love and Revolution.

Bush edits Jewish Currents, an independent, progressive magazine founded in 1946 and promotes Jewish identity as “a counterculture . . . in many ways antithetical to what drives our country today”.[1]

“Throughout the conservative onslaught of the past three decades,” Bush has editorialized in Jewish Currents, “we have argued repeatedly that Jewish identification with the have-nots is more consistent with our people’s history, tradition, self-interest, and prospects for continuity, than the currying of favor with the powers-that-be — especially when those powers resemble nothing more than Pharaoh, the imperial oppressor of Biblical Egypt.”[2]

Bush is the former editor of Reconstructionism Today, the quarterly magazine of the Jewish Reconstructionist movement. He was co-editor of Jews, an arts magazine and mail-art experience that was publIshed from 1999-2004. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, Tikkun, Moment, Reform Judaism and Mad magazine, among others. He provided updating and commentary for the millennial edition of Leo Rosten's classic, The Joys of Yiddish.

Bush served for more than a decade as speechwriter for Rabbi Alexander Schindler, the late leader of Reform Judaism in America. He has described himself as "an atheist who has nevertheless worked intimately in Jewish religious institutions as a writer and editor for much of my adult life.[3]

“There is a progressive pulse at the core of Jewish thought,” Bush has written. “It is this pulse — humanistic, engaged with the world, responsive to cultural evolution, dissatisfied with the status quo — that most keeps me engaged with Jewish identity and committed to its nurture. Notwithstanding contrary interpretations or even widespread indifference to the philosophical riches of Judaism, I’m drawn to the view of I.L. Peretz, who wrote that Jews who ‘wish to be true to ourselves’ should be asking ‘vital questions’ about ‘conscience, freedom, culture, ethics.’ [4]

Books by Lawrence Bush

References

  1. ^ “Judaism as a Counterculture,” Jewish Currents, September–October 2007
  2. ^ “The Tenacity of Jewish Liberalism,” Editorial, Jewish Currents, January–February 2009
  3. ^ "The Rabbi and the Atheist", by Andrew Silow-Carroll
  4. ^ “Judaism as a Counterculture,” Jewish Currents, September–October 2007

External links