front cover of Jewish Prince in Moslem Spain
Jewish Prince in Moslem Spain
Selected Poems of Samuel Ibn Nagrela
Samuel Ibn Nagrela
University of Alabama Press, 2005
Translated by Leon J. Weinberger

Of all the Hebrew poets of the 'Golden Age' in Spain, Samuel Ibn Nagrela (993-1056 A.D.) remains perhaps the most fascinating personality. A leading statesman in the kingdom of Granada, he was as successful in court as on the battlefield, maintaining a position of power for several decades while walking a political tightrope. Endowed with great literary talents, he opened up new paths in Hebrew poetry, and his mastery of its metrical intricacies was as consummate as his political and military skill.


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We Shall Build Anew
Stephen S. Wise, the Jewish Institute of Religion, and the Reinvention of American Liberal Judaism
Shirley Idelson
University of Alabama Press, 2022
How Rabbi Stephen S. Wise changed the trajectory of American Reform Judaism over the course of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first

In 1922, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, a leader of the Zionist movement, established the Jewish Institute of Religion (JIR), a nondenominational rabbinical seminary in New York City. Having already founded the thriving Free Synagogue movement and the American Jewish Congress, he intended to revolutionize American liberal Judaism. Wise believed mainstream American Jewish institutions had become outdated, and he championed a progressive Jewish nationalism that would fight alongside America’s leading proponents of social and economic justice.

We Shall Build Anew tells the little-known story of how Wise changed the trajectory of American Judaism for the next century. Through JIR, he trained a new cadre of young rabbis who shared his outlook, charged them with invigorating and reshaping Jewish life, and launched them into positions of leadership across the country. While Wise earned the ire of many mainstream Jewish leaders through his disregard for denominational distinctions, JIR became home to faculty and students of widely divergent religious and political viewpoints.

We Shall Build Anew is the first book dedicated exclusively to the history of the Jewish Institute of Religion. The story of Wise’s vision for American liberal Judaism is now more important than ever. As American Jewry becomes increasingly polarized around debates concerning religious doctrine as well as Zionism and Israel, the JIR model offers hope that progressives and conservatives, Zionists and non-Zionists, and Jews representing the full spectrum of religious life cannot only coexist but also work together in the name of a vibrant Judaism and a just and peaceful world.
 
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Talking Together
Letters of David Ignatow, 1946-1990
David Ignatow
University of Alabama Press, 1992
In his letters, David Ignatow finds company and shares the news with them and now, with us, his new company of readers
 
The letters of David Ignatow reveal the poet in “company” with a community of writers as he shares with them the details and nuances of his everyday existence: the key acts of friendship and enmity, of good news and bad, of struggle, work, success, and failure that comprise a life devoted to making art. The letters also serve as a vehicle for Ignatow to express his views on a whole range of issues from writing, teaching, and editing poetry, to his visions of the self, death and the cosmos. But the key is “company”—the support system that helps sustain the poet and that enables him to help others.
 
One of the many things we may learn from the letters of David Ignatow is the power of the individual to affect another’s life, to help sustain and even change it.
 
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Hunt the Devil
A Demonology of US War Culture
Robert L. Ivie
University of Alabama Press, 2015
Hunt the Devil is a timely and illuminating exploration of demonic imagery in US war culture. In it, authors Robert L. Ivie and Oscar Giner examine the origins of the Devil figure in the national psyche and review numerous examples from US history of the demonization of America’s perceived opponents. Their analysis demonstrates that American military deployments are often part of a cycle of mythical projection wherein the Devil repeatedly appears anew and must be exorcised through redemptive acts of war, even at the cost of curtailing democratic values.
 
Meticulously researched, documented, and argued, Hunt the Devil opens with contemporary images of the US’s global war on terror in the aftermath of 9/11. In five chapters devoted to the demonization of evildoers, witches, Indians, dictators, and Reds by American writers, in presidential rhetoric, and in popular culture, Ivie and Giner show how the use of demonization in the war on terror is only the most recent manifestation of a process that has recurred throughout American history.
 
In a sixth chapter, the authors introduce the archetype of the Trickster. Though not opposed to the Devil per se, the Trickster’s democratic impulses have often provided a corrective antidote to the corrosive and distorting effects of demonization. Invoking the framework of Carl Jung’s shadow aspect, Hunt the Devil offers the Trickster as a figure who can break the cycle of demonization and war.
 
The role of the mythic Devil in the American psyche has profound implications, not just for American diplomacy and the use of American arms in the world, but for the possibility of domestic peace within an increasingly diverse society. Hunt the Devil provides much of interest to readers and scholars in the fields of war, rhetorical studies, American Studies, US political culture, Jungian psychology, and mythography. 
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