Jewish Choices, Jewish Voices: Body

This JPS ethics series deals with some of the most critical moral issues of our time.

What are our obligations and rights to our own bodies? What does Judaism say about tattoos? Piercings? About our obligations to exercise and eat properly? What about smoking? Alcohol? Recreational drugs? Who owns our organs? What about our eggs and sperm? If resources are limited, whose body comes first and how do we decide? Why do so many young Jews suffer from eating disorders?

Each volume in this series presents traditional and contemporary sources on specific topics, followed by hypothetical cases and study questions to provoke discussion. Supplementing these are brief essays written by a diverse group—political figures and journalists, business professionals and authors, scholars and artists, young voices and old, traditional believers and iconoclasts. As a conclusion, Dorff and Newman present their own reflections, providing a counterpoint to the contributors' perspectives. These voices from the Jewish tradition and today’s Jewish community give us new questions and perspectives to think about and encourage us to consider our moral choices in a new light. Jewish Choices, Jewish Voices takes a hard look at important and controversial topics of our time. Future volumes include Power; War and National Security; Sexual Relations; and The Internet.

Elliot Dorff is the author of three JPS books on Jewish ethics: To Do the Right and the Good, Love Your Neighbor and Yourself, and Matters of Life and Death, and has edited several anthologies with multiple contributors. He and Louis Newman are co-editors of Contemporary Jewish Ethics and Morality (1995) and Contemporary Jewish Theology (1999). Dorff has served for many years on the Committee of Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly and is currently its Vice Chair. He is Rector and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the American Jewish University of Los Angeles. Louis Newman is the John M. and Elizabeth W. Musser Professor of Religious Studies and Director of Judaic Studies at Carleton College, and the author of Past Imperatives: Studies in the History and Theory of Jewish Ethics (1998), and co-editor with Dorff of two anthologies (see above). He is currently completing An Introduction to Jewish Ethics, a college textbook.