Results by title
645 books match the query 'Judaism' and 22 start with b
Because My Soul Longs for You
Integrating Theology into Our LivesRabbi Edwin C. Goldberg and Rabbi Elaine S. Zecher
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2021
Because My Soul Longs for You seeks to answer one of the most enduring human questions: Where can we find God in our lives? While Jewish theologians have long pondered the "God question" from ethical and philosophical perspectives, the last century has made space for a more experiential theology: God is present in our lived experiences. Radical amazement, to use Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel's phrase, can be found in everyday life. Contributors to this volume share how they welcome God's presence into their lives, as well as the theological language they use to think and speak about this presence. Chapters explore how we experience God through prayer, text study, poetry, food, music, service, movement, meditation, interpersonal connection, and much more.
Becoming Frum
How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox JudaismSarah Bunin Benor
Rutgers University Press, 2012
Winner, 2013 Sami Rohr Choice Award for Jewish Literature
When non-Orthodox Jews become frum (religious), they encounter much more than dietary laws and Sabbath prohibitions. They find themselves in the midst of a whole new culture, involving matchmakers, homemade gefilte fish, and Yiddish-influenced grammar. Becoming Frum explains how these newcomers learn Orthodox language and culture through their interactions with community veterans and other newcomers. Some take on as much as they can as quickly as they can, going beyond the norms of those raised in the community. Others maintain aspects of their pre-Orthodox selves, yielding unique combinations, like Matisyahu’s reggae music or Hebrew words and sing-song intonation used with American slang, as in “mamish (really) keepin’ it real.”
Sarah Bunin Benor brings insight into the phenomenon of adopting a new identity based on ethnographic and sociolinguistic research among men and women in an American Orthodox community. Her analysis is applicable to other situations of adult language socialization, such as students learning medical jargon or Canadians moving to Australia. Becoming Frum offers a scholarly and accessible look at the linguistic and cultural process of “becoming.”
Beloved David—Advisor, Man of Understanding, and Writer
A Festschrift in Honor of David SternNaftali S. Cohn
SBL Press, 2024
Berlin for Jews
A Twenty-First-Century CompanionLeonard Barkan
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Barkan, voraciously curious and witty, offers a self-deprecating guide to the history of Jewish life in Berlin, revealing how, beginning in the early nineteenth century, Jews became prominent in the arts, the sciences, and the city’s public life. With him, we tour the ivy-covered confines of the Schönhauser Allee cemetery, where many distinguished Jewish Berliners have been buried, and we stroll through Bayerisches Viertel, an elegant neighborhood created by a Jewish developer and that came to be called Berlin’s “Jewish Switzerland.” We travel back to the early nineteenth century to the salon of Rahel Varnhagen, a Jewish society doyenne, who frequently hosted famous artists, writers, politicians, and the occasional royal. Barkan also introduces us to James Simon, a turn-of-the-century philanthropist and art collector, and we explore the life of Walter Benjamin, who wrote a memoir of his childhood in Berlin as a member of the assimilated Jewish upper-middle class. Throughout, Barkan muses about his own Jewishness, while celebrating the rich Jewish culture on view in today’s Berlin.
A winning, idiosyncratic travel companion, Berlin for Jews offers a way to engage with German history, to acknowledge the unspeakable while extolling the indelible influence of Jewish culture.
Beth Sholom Synagogue
Frank Lloyd Wright and Modern Religious ArchitectureJoseph M. Siry
University of Chicago Press, 2011
In a suburb just north of Philadelphia stands Beth Sholom Synagogue, Frank Lloyd Wright’s only synagogue and among his finest religious buildings. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 2007, Beth Sholom was one of Wright’s last completed projects, and for years it has been considered one of his greatest masterpieces.
Between Dixie and Zion
Southern Baptists and Palestine before IsraelWalker Robins
University of Alabama Press, 2020
Explores the roots of evangelical Christian support for Israel through an examination of the Southern Baptist Convention
One week after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) repeatedly and overwhelmingly voted down resolutions congratulating fellow Southern Baptist Harry Truman on his role in Israel’s creation. From today’s perspective, this seems like a shocking result. After all, Christians—particularly the white evangelical Protestants who populate the SBC—are now the largest pro-Israel constituency in the United States. How could conservative evangelicals have been so hesitant in celebrating Israel’s birth in 1948? How did they then come to be so supportive?
Between Dixie and Zion: Southern Baptists and Palestine before Israel addresses these issues by exploring how Southern Baptists engaged what was called the “Palestine question”: whether Jews or Arabs would, or should, control the Holy Land after World War I. Walker Robins argues that, in the decades leading up to the creation of Israel, most Southern Baptists did not directly engage the Palestine question politically. Rather, they engaged it indirectly through a variety of encounters with the land, the peoples, and the politics of Palestine. Among the instrumental figures featured by Robins are tourists, foreign missionaries, Arab pastors, converts from Judaism, biblical interpreters, fundamentalist rebels, editorialists, and, of course, even a president. While all revered Palestine as the Holy Land, each approached and encountered the region according to their own priorities.
Nevertheless, Robins shows that Baptists consistently looked at the region through an Orientalist framework, broadly associating the Zionist movement with Western civilization, modernity, and progress over and against the Arabs, whom they viewed as uncivilized, premodern, and backward. He argues that such impressions were not idle—they suggested that the Zionists were bringing to fruition Baptists’ long-expressed hopes that Israel would regain the prosperity it had held in the biblical era, the Holy Land would one day be revived, and biblical prophecies preceding the return of Christ would be fulfilled.
Between Two Homelands
Argentine Migration to and from IsraelAdrián Krupnik
University of Alabama Press, 2024
Emigration from Israel to other parts of the world has not yet received significant scholarly attention, as the subject is a sensitive one in Israeli society. Zionist ideology has long compelled Israelis to approach emigration from Israel through a biased lens. The Hebrew words aliyah and yerida, which mean, respectively, “ascent” and “descent,” are often used to refer to immigration and emigration. These ideological terms, which are charged with religious meaning, are heavily loaded with praise for immigrants and scorn for emigrants. Yet, thousands of Jews from all over the world have lived between two homelands, as the Israeli-Argentine case demonstrates. This study challenges the formerly dominant Zionist narrative that presents immigration to Israel as unique and emigration as a disgrace, shedding light on issues of immigrant identities, belonging, and expectations.
Covering the better part of the twentieth century and extending into the twenty-first, Adrián Krupnik bases his study both on interviews and on archival documents in English, Spanish, and Hebrew to give voice to Argentine migrants to and from Israel. The pursuit of two often irreconcilable ways of living—peace and economic prosperity—repeatedly vexed migrants moving in either direction. Many Jewish-Argentine migrants between 1980 and 2006 lost everything and became the “new poor” in both countries. Protracted recessions and incessant political crises in Argentina continued to drive migrants in one direction, only to arrive in an Israel submerged in the violence of multiple intifadas.
In our own era, one that will see unprecedented global migration patterns based on similar economic and political—and environmental—upheavals, Between Two Homelands serves as an important and informative cautionary tale of the personal, social, and economic stakes at play in an utterly unsettled globalized landscape.
Beyond Breaking the Glass
A Spiritual Guide to Your Jewish Wedding, Revised EditionRabbi Nancy H. Wiener, Dmin
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2012
This compendium explores the rich history of wedding rituals and customs practiced by Jews through the years. Included are multiple options of traditional, contemporary, and creative rituals as well as prayers for couples of all approaches, orientations, and identities.
Beyond Breaking the Glass is a rich source of practical information for planning a Jewish wedding, and includes a variety of ceremonies, checklists, references, and a planning timeline. This beautiful guidebook will help all couples create a wedding that will resonate with Jewish tradition while offering the very best of contemporary innovations.
Beyond Brutality
Reclaiming Female Presence in Bavli SotahJane Kanarek
Brandeis University Press, 2025
Beyond Brutality draws on feminist analysis and gender studies to examine tractate Sotah of the Babylonian Talmud as a literary unit. By interrogating how, why, and where women are invisible within Bavli Sotah, Jane Kanarek brings to light a ubiquitous female presence throughout the text. Despite the brutality of the sotah ritual—in which the woman accused of adultery is put through a divine ordeal intended to reveal her innocence or her guilt—this book demonstrates that Bavli Sotah is not primarily concerned with describing the sotah ritual or establishing male control over women. Instead, Bavli Sotah becomes a pedagogical text in which the sotah is secondary to moral and sinning men. As the sotah herself fades into the background, the sotah ritual nevertheless overflows its boundaries and weaves its way through a range of other topics within the tractate. In the process, Bavli Sotah teaches its audience who transmits and how one transmits rabbinic culture.
Biblical Judgments
New Legal Readings in the Hebrew BibleDaphne Barak-Erez
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Rather than offering a historical study, Barak-Erez draws upon famous court decisions from around the world to root her analysis in modern law. Organized by subject matter, Biblical Judgments analyzes how the themes of law and government, judging and judges, human rights and social justice, criminal law, private law, and family and inheritance law are presented through a number of different stories. In recounting the compelling narratives of the Hebrew Bible, Biblical Judgments exposes their inherent legal tensions and what we can learn about legal dilemmas today.
Birkon Artzi
Blessings and Meditations for Travelers to IsraelRabbi Serge Lippe
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2012
With dozens of individual prayers, meditations, and readings, this pocket-sized birkon is your guide to uncovering the miracles and the magic of Israel. Entries include prayers before leaving, upon arrival, and for specific cities, bodies of water, unique moments, and well-traveled sites within the State of Israel.
This collection is an indispensable resource for anyone seeking to pause and acknowledge place and moment, to create connection, and to fashion memory.
Birmingham's Rabbi
Morris Newfield and Alabama, 1895-1940Mark Cowett
University of Alabama Press, 1986
Taking a multidimensional approach, Cowett places Newfield's early life in the context of his Hungarian childhood and also relates Newfield’s career to those of fellow Hebrew Union College graduates and to national Reform Jewish history. The reader is made aware constantly of changing conditions in Birmingham, in Alabama, and in the south and how those changes affected Newfield’s congregants. Cowett illuminates Newfield’s efforts to help Jews maintain a sense of religious identity in a predominately Southern and Christian environment.
Based upon essential sources including interviews, newspapers, and manuscript collections in Alabama and at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, Cowett shows Newfield’s struggle to support social welfare efforts in Alabama during the Progressive Era. He recognized the need for Jews to develop bonds with other American ethnic groups. Cowett portrays him as a mediator between not only Jew and Christian but also black and white, labor and capital, liberal and conservative—in short, within the full spectrum of political and social exchange in an industrial city of the New South.
Blood Libel
The Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish HistoryHannah R. Johnson
University of Michigan Press, 2012
The ritual murder accusation is one of a series of myths that fall under the label blood libel, and describes the medieval legend that Jews require Christian blood for obscure religious purposes and are capable of committing murder to obtain it. This malicious myth continues to have an explosive afterlife in the public sphere, where Sarah Palin's 2011 gaffe is only the latest reminder of its power to excite controversy. Blood Libel is the first book-length study to analyze the recent historiography of the ritual murder accusation and to consider these debates in the context of intellectual and cultural history as well as methodology. Hannah R. Johnson articulates how ethics shapes methodological decisions in the study of the accusation and how questions about methodology, in turn, pose ethical problems of interpretation and understanding. Examining recent debates over the scholarship of historians such as Gavin Langmuir, Israel Yuval, and Ariel Toaff, Johnson argues that these discussions highlight an ongoing paradigm shift that seeks to reimagine questions of responsibility by deliberately refraining from a discourse of moral judgment and blame in favor of an emphasis on historical contingencies and hostile intergroup dynamics.
Blood Relations
Christian and Jew in The Merchant of VeniceJanet Adelman
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Adelman locates the promise—or threat—of Jewish conversion as a particular site of tension in the play. Drawing on a variety of cultural materials, she demonstrates that, despite the triumph of its Christians, The Merchant of Venice reflects Christian anxiety and guilt about its simultaneous dependence on and disavowal of Judaism. In this startling psycho-theological analysis, both the insistence that Shylock’s daughter Jessica remain racially bound to her father after her conversion and the depiction of Shylock as a bloody-minded monster are understood as antidotes to Christian uneasiness about a Judaism it can neither own nor disown.
In taking seriously the religious discourse of The Merchant of Venice, Adelman offers in Blood Relations an indispensable book on the play and on the fascinating question of Jews and Judaism in Renaissance England and beyond.
Books Like Sapphires
From the Library of Congress Judaica CollectionAnn Brener
Brandeis University Press, 2024
Books Like Sapphires showcases a wide range of Hebraic treasures from the storied collection at the Library of Congress, many of them for the first time. Tracing the history of Judaica collecting in the twentieth-century United States, the book illuminates varied works, telling their stories alongside vibrant color images. These include a unique manuscript about a betrothal scandal in Renaissance Crete, an illustrated Esther Scroll, a poem from 1477 celebrating the new technology of printing, amusing rhymed couplets in sixteenth-century Padua, and the Washington Haggadah. This book also tells the story of the patrons and collectors, first among them Jacob Schiff, as well as archivists and curators, who made the storied Judaica archive at the Library of Congress the precious resource that it is today.
Books and Readers in the Premodern World
Essays in Honor of Harry GambleKarl Shuve
SBL Press, 2018
A book about the role of books in shaping the ancient religious landscape
This collection of essays by leading scholars from a variety of academic disciplines explores the ongoing relevance of Harry Gamble’s Books and Readers in the Early Church (1995) for the study of premodern book cultures. Contributors expand the conversation of book culture to examine the role the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur’an played in shaping the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religions in the ancient and medieval world. By considering books as material objects rather than as repositories for stories and texts, the essays examine how new technologies, new materials, and new cultural encounters contributed to these holy books spreading throughout territories, becoming authoritative, and profoundly shaping three global religions.
Features:
- Comparative analysis of book culture in Roman, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic contexts
- Art-historical, papyrological, philological, and historical modes of analysis
- Essays that demonstrate the vibrant, ongoing legacy of Gamble’s seminal work
Bridging the Interpretive Abyss
Reading the New Testament after the Cultural Studies TurnLuis Menéndez-Antuña
SBL Press, 2025
Bringing Down the Temple House
Engendering Tractate YomaMarjorie Lehman
Brandeis University Press, 2022
While the use of feminist analysis as a methodological lens is not new to the study of Talmudic literature or to the study of individual tractates, this book demonstrates that such an intervention with the Babylonian Talmud reveals new perspectives on the rabbis’ relationship with the temple and its priesthood. More specifically, through the relationships most commonly associated with home, such as those of husband-wife, father-son, mother-son, and brother-brother, the rabbis destabilize the temple bayit (or temple house). Moving beyond the view that the temple was replaced by the rabbinic home, and that rabbinic rites reappropriate temple practices, a feminist approach highlights the inextricable link between kinship, gender, and the body, calling attention to the ways the rabbis deconstruct the priesthood so as to reconstruct themselves.
Brooklyn Odyssey
My Journey out of HasidismZalman Newfield
Temple University Press, 2026
Growing up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn as a member of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic Orthodox Jewish community, Zalman Newfield was raised in an atmosphere of strict gender segregation, rigorous religious education, and nearly all-consuming ritual practices. Trained to be a Lubavitch emissary, he traveled around the world doing Jewish outreach to help usher in the messianic redemption. However, after exposure to the wider world, he abandoned the faith of his youth.
Brooklyn Odyssey is Newfield’s poignant and hopeful memoir about exiting Orthodoxy. He recounts asserting his individuality and taking the radical step of shaving his beard. Reflective about his upbringing, Newfield is open to and curious about a world beyond Brooklyn while also maintaining his profound bond with his family and Jewish tradition. He writes candidly about his emotional, intellectual, and social experiences in and out of the Lubavitch community.
From pivotal moments of devastation, including the illness and death of his younger brother and of his revered spiritual leader Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, to moments of joyful resolve, including the decision to pursue a doctorate and marry a non-Orthodox Jew, Newfield takes readers on his moving and impactful journey.
Bulgaria's Synagogue Poets
The KastoreansEdited by Leon J. Weinberger
University of Alabama Press, 1983
Critical Edition with introduction and commentary by Leon J. Weinberger
This is the first in-depth study of three 11th- to 12th-century poets from Balkan Byzantium. Included are all of the known works by Moses b. Hiyya, Joseph b. Jacob Qalai, and Isaac b. Judah, collected from rare manuscripts and printed editions and from Geniza collections at Oxford and Cambridge. These works provide the evidence that the Balkan synagogue poets favored distinctive literary forms even as they show the strong influence of the Hispanic-Hebrew writers. Completing the volume are indexes of rabbinic, Aramaic, and payyetanic usages and tables of metonymical terms.Published by the Hebrew Union College Press, distributed by The University of Alabama Press.
Business Of Jews In Louisiana, 1840–1875
Elliot Ashkenazi
University of Alabama Press, 1988
Goes beyond institutional history to concentrate on commercial and social matters
The author’s findings imply that Jewish immigrants to the South in the first half of the 19th century came from particular locales with similar social, economic, and religious backgrounds, and they chose to live in the South because of those traditions. The experience of Jews with commercial capitalism, rather than landowning, in agricultural societies, gave the Jews of Louisiana a comparable niche in America, and they participated in the commercial aspects of a regional economy based on agricultural production. Commercial and family connections with other Jewish groups facilitated their development into a settled community. In growth and decline, Jewish communities in Louisiana and elsewhere became permanent features of the landscape and influenced, and were influenced, by the areas in which they lived.
By Words Alone
The Holocaust in LiteratureSidra DeKoven Ezrahi
University of Chicago Press, 1980