Judaism
As a result of the Holocaust, Judaism has become a non-European religion; its three major centres, which together include more than three-fourths of world Jewry, are Israel, the Slavic region of the former Soviet Union, and the United States. Although Jews constitute only a small fraction of the population of the United States, Judaism plays an important role in American life; with Roman Catholicism and Protestantism it is regarded as one of the major American faiths. Similarly, in the international realm of Western religion, Judaism has been welcomed as a partner able to deal with other major religions as an equal on issues such as anti-Semitism, human rights, and world peace. Within its own community, Jewry is faced with the increasing secularization of Jewish identity in its three major centres, each in its own way. In the United States the open society and the “melting pot” ideologies of past generations have fostered among many Jews a sense of Jewish identity increasingly devoid of concrete religious, national, or historical content; in the former Soviet Union, government policy from the 1930s had banned the teaching of Judaism and Jewish culture to the young and had severely ... (200 of 86,975 words)Contemporary Judaism