Rodger Kamenetz

Rodger Kamenetz (born 1950) is an American poet and author best known for The Jew in the Lotus (1994), an account of the historic dialogue between rabbis and the XIV Dalai Lama.

[6] The book is structured as the interpretation of a single dream of his late mother, which Kamenetz modeled on Michel Butor's Histoire extraordinaire: essai sur un rêve de Baudelaire (1961).

Writing in the New York Times, Verlyn Klinkenborg cited its broader relevance as a book "about the survival of esoteric traditions in a world bent on destroying them.

Kamenetz popularized the term JUBU or Jewish Buddhist, interviewing poet Allen Ginsberg, vipassana teacher Joseph Goldstein, Ram Dass and other American Jews involved with bringing Eastern traditions to the West.

The Jew in the Lotus inspired a PBS documentary of the same name produced and directed by Laurel Chiten, released theatrically in New York, Los Angeles and Boston, and subsequently on Independent Lens on September 1, 1999.

A special seder was held in Washington, D.C., on April 24, 1997 and attended by the Dalai Lama, as well as by numerous U.S. dignitaries and celebrities, including Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys.

[12] The seder, as well as Kamenetz's visit with the Dalai Lama in 1997 was featured in the 1999 documentary, The Jew in the Lotus and is recounted in Stalking Elijah [13] Schocken/Nextbook Press published Burnt Books in 2010 in its Jewish Encounters series.

It is a dual biography of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka that finds surprising commonalities in their writings and engages kabbalah as a form of modern literature.

Since that time Kamenetz has been instrumental in shaping and articulating Natural Dreamwork a phenomenological approach focused on strong feelings held by the images in dreams.