1. The etymology of this Hebrew (and derivatively Yiddish) word for heretic is 'Epicurean'.
2. A colleague of mine, Jeremy Wanderer, used a version of this joke at the beginning of his paper 'The Future of Jewish Practice' in Nicholas de Lange & Miri Freud-Kandel, eds.Modern Judaism: An Oxford Guide(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 254-264. As I told him the joke and suggested that he use it there, my use of it here should not be construed as plagiarism. It should go without saying, however, that I am obviously not the source of the joke. As with so many jokes, the source is unknown (to me) and thus, regrettably, cannot be acknowledged.
3. I use 'Orthodox' with a capital 'O' to denote the Jewish denomination and 'orthodox' with the small 'o' to denote traditional doxastic conformity. Part of what I shall be arguing in this paper is that orthodoxy does not entail Orthodoxy.
4. Not all non-Orthodox Jews are atheists, which is why I also refer here tootherdepartures from Jewish orthodoxy.
5. The dominant non-Orthodox denominations in Judaism are Reform Judaism (sometimes called 'Progressive Judaism', by its adherents, of course) and Conservative Judaism (with a capital 'C'). The latter, which gets its name relative to Reform not Orthodox Judaism, occupies the middle ground between the two. I shall use the adjective 'reform' (with a small 'r') to refer generically to those denominations that are not 'Orthodox' (with a capital 'O').