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A Jewish Buddhist is a person with an ethnic Jewish background who believes in the tenets of a form of Buddhism.
Some practice forms of Dhyanam Buddhist meditation, chanting or spirituality. When the individual practices a particular religion, it may be both Judaism and Buddhism. However, in many cases their ethnic designation is Jewish while the individual's main religious practice is Buddhism. Rodger Kamenetz introduced the term JewBu or JUBU in his 1994 book The Jew in the Lotus.[1][2][3]
In her 2019 book on the subject, American JewBu, Emily Sigalow give different surveys and estimations about the Jewish percentage of the non-Asian American Buddhist population, going from 16.5% to around a third of the total number.[4]
At the 1893 Parliament of the World's Religions, a Jewish man named Charles Strauss declared himself a Buddhist[5] following talks by Buddhist delegates Soyen Shaku and Anagarika Dharmapala.[6]
After Zen's rise in popularity with the Beat Generation, a new wave of Jews became involved with Buddhism in the late 1960s. Prominent teachers included Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Shinge Roshi Sherry Chayat and Sharon Salzberg who founded the Insight Meditation Society, Sylvia Boorstein who teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, all of whom learned vipassana meditation primarily through Thai teachers.[7][8][9] Another generation of Jews as Buddhist teachers emerged in the early 2000s, including author Taro Gold, expounding Japanese traditions such as Nichiren Buddhism.[10]
- Alfred Bloom[11]
- Bhikkhu Bodhi[12]
- Sylvia Boorstein[13]
- Tara Brach[citation needed]
- Thubten Chodron[14]
- Leonard Cohen[15][16]
- Surya Das[17]
- Robert Downey Jr.[18]
- Mark Epstein[19]
- Anthony Ervin[20]
- Zoketsu Norman Fischer[21]
- Allen Ginsberg[22]
- Philip Glass[23]
- Tetsugen Bernard Glassman[24]
- Craig Taro Gold[25]
- Natalie Goldberg[26]
- Yuval Noah Harari[27]
- Joseph Goldstein[28]
- Shinge Roshi Cherry Chayat[29]
- Julius Goldwater[30]
- Daniel Goleman[31]
- Dan Harris[32]
- Goldie Hawn[33]
- Jon Kabat-Zinn[34]
- Ayya Khema[35]
- Jack Kornfield[36]
- Jay Michaelson[37]
- Ethan Nichtern[38]
- Mandy Patinkin[39]
- Jeremy Piven[40]
- Linda Pritzker[41]
- Nick Ribush[42]
- Jonathan F.P. Rose[43]
- Larry Rosenberg[44]
- Sharon Salzberg[45]
- Morrie Schwartz[46]
- Nyanaponika Thera[47]
- Helen Tworkov[48]
- Adam Yauch[49]
- Shinzen Young[50]
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