In this chapter, I discuss the origins, goals and activities of the Green Sabbath Project, a campaign to adapt the ancient biblical shabbat as a remedy for our collective environmental crises. Commemorating the creation of the world, this weekly practice has been indigenous to Western culture for nearly two millennia. It emerged from the holistic spiritual ecology of the ancient Israelites, who were devoted to the intertwined well-being of land and people, and opposed to internal socioeconomic inequality and the empires of the region. The economy in which shabbat was practised sought to ensure a circular or slow system, prevent unhealthy inequality and counter anthropocentrism. In our time, a weekly green sabbath or earth day that is properly practised—as radical intervention and not mere lip-service—offers a weekly interruption from the suicidal economic fantasy of infinite growth, a divestment from fossil fuels, investment in family and local community, rewilding, respite for both humans and other-than-humans and a ritualised forum for meditating on how we want to live. Green sabbaths could constitute a model and a foretaste of an ecologically sane world to come.

Der Artikel gibt einen Überblick über die verschiedenen Phasen von siebzig Jahren christlich-jüdischer Dialog und blickt in die Zukunft. Akzeptieren Christen die Konsequenzen, die aus der Immanenz des Judentums in ihrer Religion folgen? Vor allem in zentralen Handlungsfeldern der systematischen Theologie bleibt viel Raum für Entwicklung, allen voran der Christologie.

The history of the so-called “New Jewish School” in music began in 1908 in St. Petersburg with the founding of the Society for Jewish Folk Music by students from the St. Petersburg Conservatory. The end of this movement came with the invasion of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, and the dissolution of the Vienna Society for the Promotion of Jewish Music later that year. The fascinating and dramatic history of the New Jewish School is the subject of this monograph, which summarizes the author’s years of intensive international archival research. While many other national schools of music – such as the Russian, Czech or Hungarian – were able to develop freely and establish themselves in a favorable cultural environment, the Jewish school was violently suppressed. The reconstruction of its historical development in Russia and, after 1917, increasingly in other Eastern and Central European countries was first presented in German in 2004 and has since served as the basis for rediscovery of the valuable, highly original repertoire of New Jewish School composers. For this English-language publication, the entire book has been thoroughly revised and richly supplemented with extensive additional texts and materials.