Here's a good site that may help you with your current assignment.
I found this posting at the Chabad website in the section on questions and answers. Remember that Chabad are Hassidic Jews and are therefore very Orthodox in their approach.I may be the wrong person to answer this question. Because, personally, I don't believe there are any "isms" in being Jewish. There are just Jews, our Torah, and our willingness to do it.
However, I'll try to give an objective description of what these "isms" mean in practical terms:
All the way up until the 19th century, there were just Jews. We kept the halachah -- which means the rabbinical interpretation of the rules and guidelines of the Torah -- and kept a steady tradition for 3,000 years since Sinai. If some individual or group went astray from halachah, they were generally estranged from the Jewish people.
Then came Reform. They said, "Things are changing. We are smarter now. We know there is no need to keep kosher, Shabbat, circumcision or believe in a return to Zion." In Germany, they said, "Berlin is our Jerusalem." In America, it was Washington.
Then came Conservative. They said, "These Reform rabbis have gone too far. We need to conserve some of the basic traditions of Judaism." So they revived a form of kosher eating, Shabbat and circumcision. And they weren't so convinced about the Washington thing.
The Jews who did not go along with any of this were labeled "Orthodox." They never asked for it, but that's what they got called. Personally, I cannot see myself as orthodox, since I think of my Jewishness as something very radical and, well, unorthodox.
I also don't see the point in reforming my Jewishness. I would much rather my Jewishness reform me. After all, all these things that the fathers of reform saw as obsolete back then have now come back into fashion and are rising in popularity every day. The number of kosher foods on the market, for example, rose by about 2000% in the last ten years. As for Jerusalem, well that's pretty obvious. The Reform movement had to make a sharp about-turn in 1948.
Now, I'll bet I've provoked more questions than I've answered. But that's okay. Because that's part of what being Jewish is about -- thinking out of the box and asking questions.
Rabbi Tzvi Freeman heads Chabad.org's Ask The Rabbi team, and is a senior member of the Chabad.org editorial team. He is the author of a number of highly original renditions of Kabbalah and Chassidic teaching, including the universally acclaimed "Bringing Heaven Down to Earth."
The following website has some very good, and brief, articles on Judaism. It's probably a good first stop when researching anything to do with Judaism. Use it in tandem with the Judaism 101 site.
Here's a link to a very interesting article on Moses from the BBC Religion & Ethics site. By the way, the picture above is of Charlton Heston in the movie "The Ten Commandments".
I was over at my friend Kate's house last Saturday night and I was browsing through some magazines that she had stacked next to her lounge. Now Kate was brought up a Catholic but recently she has been reading Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and Christopher Hitchens' "God Is Not Great". I know this because I saw them in her lounge room. In amongst the fashion, home decorating and music magazines was what I thought was a science magazine. I didn't really register the name but there was a lizard on the cover and it looked like a science magazine. I started flicking through it and began scanning some of the articles.
Here's an article that sheds some light on the Aztec ritual of human sacrifice.By Mark Stevenson, Associated Press
23 January 2005
MEXICO CITY (AP) -- It has long been a matter of contention: Was the Aztec and Mayan practice of human sacrifice as widespread and horrifying as the history books say? Or did the Spanish conquerors overstate it to make the Indians look primitive? In recent years archaeologists have been uncovering mounting physical evidence that corroborates the Spanish accounts in substance, if not number.
Using high-tech forensic tools, archaeologists are proving that pre-Hispanic sacrifices often involved children and a broad array of intentionally brutal killing methods.
For decades, many researchers believed Spanish accounts from the 16th and 17th centuries were biased to denigrate Indian cultures, others argued that sacrifices were largely confined to captured warriors, while still others conceded the Aztecs were bloody, but believed the Maya were less so.
"We now have the physical evidence to corroborate the written and pictorial record,'' said archaeologist Leonardo Lopez Lujan. He said, "some 'pro-Indian' currents had always denied this had happened. They said the texts must be lying.''
The Spaniards probably did exaggerate the sheer numbers of victims to justify a supposedly righteous war against idolatry, said David Carrasco, a Harvard Divinity School expert on Meso-American religion.
But there is no longer as much doubt about the nature of the killings. Indian pictorial texts known as "codices,'' as well as Spanish accounts from the time, quote Indians as describing multiple forms of human sacrifice.
Victims had their hearts cut out or were decapitated, shot full of arrows, clawed, sliced to death, stoned, crushed, skinned, buried alive or tossed from the tops of temples.
Children were said to be frequent victims, in part because they were considered pure and unspoiled.
"Many people said, 'We can't trust these codices because the Spaniards were describing all these horrible things,' which in the long run we are confirming,'' said Carmen Pijoan, a forensic anthropologist who found some of the first direct evidence of cannibalism in a pre-Aztec culture over a decade ago: bones with butcher-like cut marks.
In December, at an excavation in an Aztec-era community in Ecatepec, just north of Mexico City, archaeologist Nadia Velez Saldana described finding evidence of human sacrifice associated with the god of death.
"The sacrifice involved burning or partially burning victims,'' Velez Saldana said. "We found a burial pit with the skeletal remains of four children who were partially burned, and the remains of four other children that were completely carbonized.''
While the remains don't show whether the victims were burned alive, there are depictions of people -- apparently alive -- being held down as they were burned.
The dig turned up other clues to support descriptions of sacrifices in the Magliabecchi codex, a pictorial account painted between 1600 and 1650 that includes human body parts stuffed into cooking dishes, and people sitting around eating, as the god of death looks on.
"We have found cooking dishes just like that,'' said archaeologist Luis Manuel Gamboa. "And, next to some full skeletons, we found some incomplete, segmented human bones.'' However, researchers don't know whether those remains were cannibalized.
In 2002, government archaeologist Juan Alberto Roman Berrelleza announced the results of forensic testing on the bones of 42 children, mostly boys around age 6, sacrificed at Mexico City's Templo Mayor, the Aztec's main religious site, during a drought.
All shared one feature: serious cavities, abscesses or bone infections painful enough to make them cry.
"It was considered a good omen if they cried a lot at the time of sacrifice,'' which was probably done by slitting their throats, Roman Berrelleza said.
The Maya, whose culture peaked farther east about 400 years before the Aztecs founded Mexico City in 1325, had a similar taste for sacrifice, Harvard University anthropologist David Stuart wrote in a 2003 article.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, "The first researchers tried to make a distinction between the 'peaceful' Maya and the 'brutal' cultures of central Mexico,'' Stuart wrote. "They even tried to say human sacrifice was rare among the Maya.''
But in carvings and mural paintings, he said, "we have now found more and greater similarities between the Aztecs and Mayas,'' including a Maya ceremony in which a grotesquely costumed priest is shown pulling the entrails from a bound and apparently living sacrificial victim.
Some Spanish-era texts have yet to be corroborated with physical remains. They describe Aztec priests sacrificing children and adults by sealing them in caves or drowning them. But the assumption now is that the texts appear trustworthy, said Lopez Lujan, who also works at the Templo Mayor site.
For Lopez Lujan, confirmation has come in the form of advanced chemical tests on the stucco floors of Aztec temples, which were found to have been soaked with iron, albumen and genetic material consistent with human blood.
"It's now a question of quantity,'' said Lopez Lujan, who thinks the Spaniards -- and Indian picture-book scribes working under their control -- exaggerated the number of sacrifice victims, claiming in one case that 80,400 people were sacrificed at a temple inauguration in 1487.
"We're not finding anywhere near that ... even if we added some zeros,'' Lopez Lujan said.
Researchers have largely discarded the old theory that sacrifice and cannibalism were motivated by a protein shortage in the Aztec diet, though some still believe it may have been a method of population control.
Pre-Hispanic cultures believed the world would end if the sacrifices were not performed. Sacrificial victims, meanwhile, were often treated as gods themselves before being killed.
"It is really very difficult for us to conceive,'' Pijoan said of the sacrifices. "It was almost an honor for them.''
