Rosen founded Jews for Jesus group
Moishe Rosen, a flamboyant and controversial convert to Christianity who founded the missionary group Jews for Jesus, died Wednesday in San Francisco of prostate cancer. He was 78.
Rosen launched Jews for Jesus in San Francisco in 1973 and over the next decade turned it into a flourishing movement that drew thousands of converts from among the youthful seekers of the counterculture era. Its success stirred the wrath of Jewish leaders, who denounced Rosen as a cultist and fought back through groups such as Jews for Judaism.
Rosen appealed to potential converts with music, humor and street theater, an approach that resonated in the hippie culture that by the early 1970s was developing a strong spiritual component, with some youths turning to Eastern religions and others, like those in the era’s “Jesus people” movement, to forms of Christianity. Rosen saw himself as a kind of hybrid who did not regard a Jew who believed in Jesus as a contradiction.
“I never made the decision that I wanted to leave the Jewish community,” he told New York magazine in 1986. “We want to stay in and dissent — and we’ve been ostracized. We wouldn’t separate the two religions. We want a climate where all ideas can be accepted or rejected without previous indoctrination.”
Born in Kansas City, Mo., on April 12, 1932, Rosen grew up in Denver in an Orthodox Jewish family. He was an undergraduate at the University of Colorado in the late 1940s when he met a young Jewish woman named Ceil Starr. In 1953, three years after they were married in an Orthodox synagogue, she met an evangelical Christian and converted. Rosen soon followed her into the faith.
Gardner was math, science writer and paranormal debunker
Prolific mathematics and science writer Martin Gardner, known for popularizing recreational mathematics and debunking paranormal claims, died Saturday after a brief illness in Norman, Okla. He was 95.
Martin Gardner was born in 1914 in Tulsa, Okla., and earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at the University of Chicago.
He became a freelance writer, and in the 1950s wrote features and stories for several children’s magazines. His creation of paper-folding puzzles led to his publication in Scientific American magazine, where he wrote his “Mathematical Games” column for 25 years.
The column introduced the public to puzzles and concepts such as fractals and Chinese tangram puzzles, as well as the work of artist M.C. Escher.
Allyn Jackson, deputy editor of Notices, a journal of the American Mathematical Society, wrote in 2005 that Gardner “opened the eyes of the general public to the beauty and fascination of mathematics and inspired many to go on to make the subject their life’s work.”
The mathematics society awarded him its Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition in 1987 for his work on math, particularly his Scientific American column.
Gardner also became known as a skeptic of the paranormal and wrote columns for Skeptical Inquirer magazine. He wrote works debunking public figures such as psychic Uri Geller, who gained fame for claiming to bend spoons with his mind.
Most recently he wrote a feature published in Skeptical Inquirer’s March/April on Oprah Winfrey’s New Age interests.
From Herald news services
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