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645 books match the query 'Judaism' and 37 start with c

cover of CCAR JOURNAL - SPRING 2020: HALACHAH AND REFORM JUDAISM

CCAR JOURNAL - SPRING 2020

HALACHAH AND REFORM JUDAISM

Elaine Rose Glickman

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2020

Central Conference of American Rabbis Spring 2020 journal.
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cover of CCAR Journal - Fall 2025: The Reform Jewish Quarterly: AI and the Rabbinate

CCAR Journal - Fall 2025

The Reform Jewish Quarterly: AI and the Rabbinate

Rabbanit Sara Tillinger Wolkenfeld and Rabbi Geoffrey A. Mitelman

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2025

This issue of the CCAR Journal explores the rapidly evolving intersection of artificial intelligence and the rabbinate. Through a range of reflective articles, contributors examine how AI is shaping Jewish life, leadership, and ethical discourse. The issue also contains general articles, new book reviews, and poetry.

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cover of CCAR Journal - Spring 2025: The Reform Jewish Quarterly

CCAR Journal - Spring 2025

The Reform Jewish Quarterly

Rabbi Edwin C. Goldberg

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2025

This edition of CCAR Journal considers various topics, including loneliness and the rabbinate, Judah and Tamar's encounter, and Jewish brides' breads. The issue also contains new book reviews, poetry and a CCAR responsum on removing a pacemaker from a corpse for reuse.
 

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cover of CCAR Journal - Spring 2026: The Reform Jewish Quarterly: The World Union for Progressive Judaism at One Hundred

CCAR Journal - Spring 2026

The Reform Jewish Quarterly: The World Union for Progressive Judaism at One Hundred

Rabbi Edwin C. Goldberg, Rabbi Daniel H. Freelander, Rabbi Professor Deborah Kahn-Harris

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2026

This issue, which celebrates the centenary of the founding of the World Union for Progressive Judaism in 1926, examines the impact of the WUPJ on the growth of Progressive Judaism around the globe. The articles explore the early history of the WUPJ and the creation of rabbinic seminaries, youth movements, and liturgies, as well as key regions of the movement: the United Kingdom, Europe, South Africa, South America, Australia and Aotearoa-New Zealand, and Israel. The issue also contains new book reviews and poetry. 

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cover of CCAR Journal - Summer 2025: The Reform Jewish Quarterly

CCAR Journal - Summer 2025

The Reform Jewish Quarterly

Rabbi Edwin C. Goldberg

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2025

This edition of CCAR Journal includes articles on women rabbis in South Africa, resurrection of the dead, chesed in Mussar, the Jewish history of bourbon, and much more. The issue also contains a book review, poetry, and a CCAR responsum on splitting cremated ashes for burial in two places.

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cover of CCAR Journal - Summer 2026: The Reform Jewish Quarterly

CCAR Journal - Summer 2026

The Reform Jewish Quarterly

Rabbi Edwin C. Goldberg

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2026

The Summer issue of CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly contains articles on prayer, beauty the Western Association of Reform Rabbis, a review of literature with implications for pastoral care, A.B. Yehoshua, and Rumi, along with book reviews and poetry.

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cover of CCAR Journal - Winter 2026: The Reform Jewish Quarterly

CCAR Journal - Winter 2026

The Reform Jewish Quarterly

Rabbi Edwin C. Goldberg

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2026

The Winter 2026 issue of CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly contains articles on the golem, American civic health, Hebrew Union College's new rabbinical curriculum, and Jewish history in the Islamic world. A responsum on burial of a person in a pet cemetery and a translation of the preface to Jacob Sasportas’s Tol’dot Yaakov are also included, along with book reviews and poetry.

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cover of CCAR Premarital Counseling Guide for Clergy - PDF Electronic Version: Strengthening Communication and Supporting Jewish Choices

CCAR Premarital Counseling Guide for Clergy - PDF Electronic Version

Strengthening Communication and Supporting Jewish Choices

Paula J. Brody

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2012

NOTE: This PDF is available for free for CCAR members. Please contact info@ccarpress.org for your free copy.

Includes ideas for pre- and post-marriage counseling sessions, with special sections for intermarrying and conversionary couples, suggestions for intake conversations, suggestions for rabbis who do not officiate and intermarriages, and sample questionnaires and handouts.
 
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cover of Caring for the Dead in Ancient Israel

Caring for the Dead in Ancient Israel

Kerry M. Sonia

SBL Press, 2020

A new reconstruction of cultic practices surrounding death in ancient Israel

In Caring for the Dead in Ancient Israel, Kerry M. Sonia examines the commemoration and care for the dead in ancient Israel against the broader cultural backdrop of West Asia. This cult of dead kin, often referred to as ancestor cult, comprised a range of ritual practices in which the living provided food and drink offerings, constructed commemorative monuments, invoked the names of the dead, and protected their remains. This ritual care negotiated the ongoing relationships between the living and the dead and, in so doing, helped construct social, political, and religious landscapes in relationship to the past. Sonia explores the nature of this cult of dead kin in ancient Israel, focusing on its role within the family and household as well as its relationship to Israel’s national deity and the Jerusalem temple.

Features:

  • A reevaluation of whether burial and necromantic rituals were part of the cult of dead kin
  • A portrait of the various roles Israelite women played in the cult of dead kin
  • A reassessment of biblical writers’ attitudes toward the cult of dead kin
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cover of Catholics and Jews in Twentieth-Century America

Catholics and Jews in Twentieth-Century America

Egal Feldman

University of Illinois Press, 2006

Rich with the insights of prominent Catholic and Jewish commentators and religious leaders, Catholics and Jews in Twentieth-Century America recounts the amazing transformation of a relationship of irreconcilable enmity to one of respectful coexistence and constructive dialogue.

Focusing primarily on the Catholic doctrinal view of the Jews and its ramifications, Egal Feldman traces the historicalroots of anti-Semitism, examining tenacious Catholic beliefsincluding the idea that the Jews lost their place as the chosen people with the coming of Christianity, deicide, and the conviction that their purported responsibility for the Crucifixion justified subsequent Jewish misery.

A new era of Catholic-Jewish relations opened in 1962 with Vatican II’s Declaration on the Jews, reversing the theology of contempt. Feldman explores the strides made in improving relations, such as the Vatican’s diplomatic recognition of the Jewish state, as well as a number of recent issues.

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cover of Changing Perspectives: Black-Jewish Relations in Houston during the Civil Rights Era

Changing Perspectives

Black-Jewish Relations in Houston during the Civil Rights Era

Allison E. Schottenstein

University of North Texas Press, 2021

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cover of Characterization in Midrash and Medieval Jewish Bible Commentaries

Characterization in Midrash and Medieval Jewish Bible Commentaries

Sivan Nir

SBL Press, 2024

Sivan Nir meticulously examines the reimaginings of the biblical figures Balaam, Jeremiah, and Esther in a wide range of Jewish texts from second-century rabbinic sources to medieval Jewish biblical commentaries. Nir’s unique approach analyzes the continuity, or lack thereof, that emerges when characterization is viewed in relation to and in contrast with its cross cultural context, including the contemporary conventions found in Hellenistic rhetoric and novels, Byzantine Christian literature, Islamic adab and Mu‘tazila literature, and more. Such an approach reveals a transition from typological depictions to richer, more lifelike portrayals—a transformation shaped by rival notions of literature and history. Nir translates the sources into accessible English for students and scholars of not only Jewish exegesis but also those in Christian theology, Islamic studies, and world literature.
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cover of Child Survivors of the Holocaust: The Youngest Remnant and the American Experience

Child Survivors of the Holocaust

The Youngest Remnant and the American Experience

Cohen, Beth B

Rutgers University Press, 2018

2017 Wiener Library Ernst Fraenkel Prize (WLEFP) Finalist

The majority of European Jewish children alive in 1939 were murdered during the Holocaust. Of 1.5 million children, only an estimated 150,000 survived. In the aftermath of the Shoah, efforts by American Jews brought several thousand of these child survivors to the United States. In Child Survivors of the Holocaust, historian Beth B. Cohen weaves together survivor testimonies and archival documents to bring their story to light. She reveals that even as child survivors were resettled and “saved,” they struggled to adapt to new lives as members of adoptive families, previously unknown American Jewish kin networks, or their own survivor relatives. Nonetheless, the youngsters moved ahead. As Cohen demonstrates, the experiences both during and after the war shadowed their lives and relationships through adulthood, yet an identity as “survivors” eluded them for decades. Now, as the last living link to the Holocaust, the voices of Child Survivors are finally being heard. 
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cover of Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism

Chosen Capital

The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism

Kobrin, Rebecca

Rutgers University Press, 2012

At which moments and in which ways did Jews play a central role in the development of American capitalism? Many popular writers address the intersection of Jews and capitalism, but few scholars, perhaps fearing this question’s anti-Semitic overtones, have pondered it openly. Chosen Capital represents the first historical collection devoted to this question in its analysis of the ways in which Jews in North America shaped and were shaped by America’s particular system of capitalism. Jews fundamentally molded aspects of the economy during the century when American capital was being redefined by industrialization, war, migration, and the emergence of the United States as a superpower.

Surveying such diverse topics as Jews’ participation in the real estate industry, the liquor industry, and the scrap metal industry, as well as Jewish political groups and unions bent on reforming American capital, such as the American Labor Party and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, contributors to this volume provide a new prism through which to view the Jewish encounter with America. The volume also lays bare how American capitalism reshaped Judaism itself by encouraging the mass manufacturing and distribution of foods like matzah and the transformation of synagogue cantors into recording stars. These essays force us to rethink not only the role Jews played in American economic development but also how capitalism has shaped Jewish life and Judaism over the course of the twentieth century.

Contributors:
Marni Davis, Georgia State University
Phyllis Dillon, independent documentary producer, textile conservator, museum curator
Andrew Dolkart, Columbia University
Andrew Godley, Henley Business School, University of Reading
Jonathan Karp, executive director, American Jewish Historical Society
Daniel Katz, Empire State College, State University of New York
Ira Katznelson, Columbia University
David S. Koffman, New York University
Eli Lederhendler, Hebrew University, Jerusalem
Jonathan Z. S. Pollack, University of Wisconsin—Madison
Jonathan D. Sarma, Brandeis University
Jeffrey Shandler, Rutgers University
Daniel Soyer, Fordham University
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cover of Citizenship, Faith, and Feminism: Jewish and Muslim Women Reclaim Their Rights

Citizenship, Faith, and Feminism

Jewish and Muslim Women Reclaim Their Rights

Jan Feldman

Brandeis University Press, 2011

Religious women in liberal democracies are “dual citizens” because of their contrasting status as members of both a civic community (in which their gender has no impact on their constitutional guarantee of equal rights) and a traditional religious community (which distributes roles and power based on gender). This book shows how these “dual citizens”—Orthodox Jewish women in Israel, Muslim women in Kuwait, and women of both those faiths in the U.S.—have increasingly deployed their civic citizenship rights in attempts to reform and not destroy their religions. For them, neither “exit” nor acquiescence to traditional religious gender norms is an option. Instead, they use the narrative of civic citizenship combined with a more authentic, if alternative reading of their faith tradition to improve their status.
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cover of Cleveland Jews and the Making of a Midwestern Community

Cleveland Jews and the Making of a Midwestern Community

Sean Martin

Rutgers University Press, 2020

This volume gathers an array of voices to tell the stories of Cleveland’s twentieth century Jewish community. Strong and stable after an often turbulent century, the Jews of Cleveland had both deep ties in the region and an evolving and dynamic commitment to Jewish life. The authors present the views and actions of community leaders and everyday Jews who embodied that commitment in their religious participation, educational efforts, philanthropic endeavors, and in their simple desire to live next to each other in the city’s eastern suburbs. The twentieth century saw the move of Cleveland’s Jews out of the center of the city, a move that only served to increase the density of Jewish life. The essays collected here draw heavily on local archival materials and present the area’s Jewish past within the context of American and American Jewish studies.
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cover of Come and Hear: What I Saw in My Seven-and-a-Half-Year Journey through the Talmud

Come and Hear

What I Saw in My Seven-and-a-Half-Year Journey through the Talmud

Adam Kirsch

Brandeis University Press, 2021

A literary critic’s journey through the Talmud.
 
Spurred by a curiosity about Daf Yomi—a study program launched in the 1920s in which Jews around the world read one page of the Talmud every day for 2,711 days, or about seven and a half years—Adam Kirsch approached Tablet magazine to write a weekly column about his own Daf Yomi experience. An avowedly secular Jew, Kirsch did not have a religious source for his interest in the Talmud; rather, as a student of Jewish literature and history, he came to realize that he couldn’t fully explore these subjects without some knowledge of the Talmud. This book is perfect for readers who are in a similar position. Most people have little sense of what the Talmud actually is—how the text moves, its preoccupations and insights, and its moments of strangeness and profundity. As a critic and journalist Kirsch has experience in exploring difficult texts, discussing what he finds there, and why it matters. His exploration into the Talmud is best described as a kind of travel writing—a report on what he saw during his seven-and-a-half-year journey through the Talmud. For readers who want to travel that same path, there is no better guide.
 
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cover of Coming of Age in Jewish America: Bar and Bat Mitzvah Reinterpreted

Coming of Age in Jewish America

Bar and Bat Mitzvah Reinterpreted

Patricia Keer Munro

Rutgers University Press, 2016

The Jewish practice of bar mitzvah dates back to the twelfth century, but this ancient cultural ritual has changed radically since then, evolving with the times and adapting to local conditions. For many Jewish-American families, a child’s bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah is both a major social event and a symbolic means of asserting the family’s ongoing connection to the core values of Judaism. Coming of Age in Jewish America takes an inside look at bar and bat mitzvahs in the twenty-first century, examining how the practices have continued to morph and exploring how they serve as a sometimes shaky bridge between the values of contemporary American culture and Judaic tradition.
 
Interviewing over 200 individuals involved in bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies, from family members to religious educators to rabbis, Patricia Keer Munro presents a candid portrait of the conflicts that often emerge and the negotiations that ensue. In the course of her study, she charts how this ritual is rife with contradictions; it is a private family event and a public community activity, and for the child, it is both an educational process and a high-stakes performance.
 
Through detailed observations of Conservative, Orthodox, Reform, and independent congregations in the San Francisco Bay Area, Munro draws intriguing, broad-reaching conclusions about both the current state and likely future of American Judaism.  In the process, she shows not only how American Jews have forged a unique set of bar and bat mitzvah practices, but also how these rituals continue to shape a distinctive Jewish-American identity.  
 
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cover of Communicating the Infinite: The Emergence of the Habad School

Communicating the Infinite

The Emergence of the Habad School

Naftali Loewenthal

University of Chicago Press, 1990

At the end of the eighteenth century the hasidic movement was facing an internal crisis: to what extent should the teachings of Baal Shem Tov and Maggid of Mezritch, with their implicit spiritual demands, be transmitted to the rank-and-file of the movement? Previously these teachings had been reserved for a small elite. It was at this point that the Habad school emerged with a communication ethos encouraging the transmission of esoteric to the broad reaches of the Jewish world. Communicating the Infinite explores the first two generations of the Habad school under R. Shneur Zalman of Liadi and his son R. Dov Ber and examines its early opponents.

Beginning with the different levels of communication in the teachings of the Baal Shem Tov and the Maggid and his disciples, Naftali Loewenthal traces the unfolding of the dialectic between the urge to transmit esoteric ideas and a powerful inner restraint. Gradually R. Shneur Zalman came to the fore as the prime exponent of the communication ethos. Loewenthal follows the development of his discourses up to the time of his death, when R. Dov Ber and R. Aaron Halevi Horowitz formed their respective "Lubavitch" and "Staroselye" schools. The author continues with a detailed examination of the teachings of R. Dov Ber, an inspired mystic. Central in his thought was the esoteric concept of self-abnegation, bitul, yet this combined with the quest to communicate hasidic teachings to every level of society, including women.

From the late eighteenth century onwards, the main problem for the Jewish world was posed by the fall of the walls of the social and political ghetto. Generally, the response was either to secularize, or abandon altogether, traditional Judaism or to retreat from the threatening modern world into enclave religiosity; by stressing communication, the Habad school opened the way for a middle range response that was neither a retreat into elitism nor an abandonment of tradition. Based on years of research from Hebrew and Yiddish primary source materials, Communicating the Infinite is a work of importance not only to specialists of Judaic studies but also to historians and sociologists.
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cover of Comparing Jewish Societies

Comparing Jewish Societies

Todd M. Endelman, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1997

Having unfolded in the diverse communities of the diaspora, Jewish experience lends itself almost effortlessly to comparative treatment. The contributors to this volume take up the challenge, examining Jewish societies from medieval to modern times, in Western and Eastern Europe, North and South America, North Africa, India, China, and the Middle East. The essays use the methodological strategies and theoretical insights of history, sociology, anthropology, and political science to explore such topics as Jewish and African nationalism; Arab and Jewish railway workers in British-ruled Palestine; East European Jewish immigrants in New York, London, and Paris; ritual murder trials in fin-de-siècle Central Europe; and Catholic and Jewish enlightenment movements. Further, because of their comparative structure and method, these essays stimulate fresh questions about the larger societies in which Jews lived--their values, practices, and structures. Comparing Jewish Societies will appeal to students and scholars at all levels who wish to break out of old frameworks to observe the Jews and their religion with a new, methodologically sophisticated eye. Todd M. Endelman is William Haber Professor of Modern Jewish History, University of Michigan.
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cover of Conflict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain

Conflict and Coexistence

Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain

Lucy K. Pick

University of Michigan Press, 2004

"An outstanding contribution not only to Spanish but to European history at large. Pick's book is the first to clarify the unity of purpose that drove Archbishop Rodrigo, a major figure not only as a historian and controversialist, but as a churchman whose military campaigns advanced the conquest of Muslim Spain and shifted the whole balance of power in the Iberian peninsula."
---J. N. Hillgarth, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto

"By focusing on the diversified activities of the talented mid-thirteenth-century archbishop of Toledo, Lucy Pick brilliantly illuminates the complex relations between the Christian conquerors of Spain and the conquered Muslim and Jewish populations. Students of medieval Spain, of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, of medieval Muslims and Islam, and of medieval Jews and Judaism will benefit from this excellent study."
---Robert Chazan, New York University.


In Conflict and Coexistence, Lucy Pick sets out to explain how Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived alongside one another in medieval Spain. By examining the life and works of Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, the Archbishop of Toledo (1209-47), Pick explains that the perceived threat of the non-Christian presence was managed through the subordination of Muslims and Jews.

Rodrigo stood at the center of a transformative period of history in the Iberian peninsula. During his long and varied career as archbishop, he acted as scholar, warrior, builder, and political leader. The wave of victories he helped initiate were instrumental in turning back the tide of Muslim attacks on Christian Spain and restarting the process of Christian territorial conquest. However, Toledo was still a multiethnic city in which Christians lived side by side with Jews and Muslims. As archbishop, he was faced with the considerable challenge of maintaining peace and prosperity in a city where religious passions and intolerance were a constant threat to stability.

This work seeks to examine Rodrigo's relations with the Muslims and Jews of his community both as he idealized them on paper and as he worked through them in real life. Though Rodrigo wrote an anti-Jewish polemic, and set out to conquer Muslim-held lands, he also used scholarly patronage and literary creation to combat internal and external, Christian and non-Christian threats alike. His intended and actual consequences of these varied techniques were to allow Christians, Muslims, and Jews to live together under Christian authority. Rodrigo was bound by practical necessity to find a means of accommodating these groups that was both effective and theologically satisfactory. Throughout this influential work, Pick examines the various aspects of Rodrigo's life and career that led to his policies and the consequences that his work and beliefs brought about in medieval Spain.

This book will be of interest to anyone who studies the history, religion, and literature of medieval Spain, to those interested in the transmission of learning from the Muslim to the Christian world, and to those who study intellectual life and development in medieval Europe.
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cover of Confronting Vulnerability: The Body and the Divine in Rabbinic Ethics

Confronting Vulnerability

The Body and the Divine in Rabbinic Ethics

Jonathan Wyn Schofer

University of Chicago Press, 2010

While imparting their ethical lessons, rabbinic texts often employ vivid images of death, aging, hunger, defecation, persecution, and drought. In Confronting Vulnerability, Jonathan Wyn Schofer carefully examines these texts to find out why their creators thought that human vulnerability was such a crucial tool for instructing students in the development of exemplary behavior.

These rabbinic texts uphold virtues such as wisdom and compassion, propound ideal ways of responding to others in need, and describe the details of etiquette. Schofer demonstrates that these pedagogical goals were achieved through reminders that one’s time on earth is limited and that God is the ultimate master of the world. Consciousness of death and of divine accounting guide students to live better lives in the present. Schofer’s analysis teaches us much about rabbinic pedagogy in late antiquity and also provides inspiration for students of contemporary ethics. Despite their cultural distance, these rabbinic texts challenge us to develop theories and practices that properly address our frailties rather than denying them.

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cover of Contemporary American Reform Responsa - PDF Electronic Version

Contemporary American Reform Responsa - PDF Electronic Version

Rabbi Walter Jacob

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1987

When is abortion permitted? Should smoking be banned in synagogue buildings? Do we recite Kaddish for a convicted criminal? May human blood be sold for medical purposes? What is the Reform position on the use of mikvah? These questions and more are the topic of this volume, edited by Rabbi Walter Jacob and originally published in 1987. The questions included in this volume reflect the concerns of Reform Jews at the time the book was published, and much of it is still relevant today.
 

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cover of Contemporary Catholic Approaches to the People, State, and Land of Israel

Contemporary Catholic Approaches to the People, State, and Land of Israel

Gavin D'Costa

Catholic University of America Press, 2021

After Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church began a process of stripping away anti-Jewish sentiments within its theological culture. One question that has arisen and received very scant attention regards the theological significance of the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 – and the attendant nakba, the plight of the Palestinian people. Some American evangelical Christians have developed a theology around the state of Israel, associating themselves with Zionism. Some Christian groups have developed a theology around the suffering of the Palestinian people and demand resistance to Zionism. This unique collection of essays from leading Catholic theologians from the United States, Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, England, and the Middle East reflect on the theological status of the land of Israel. These essays represent an exhaustive range of views. None avoid the new Catholic theology regarding the Jewish people. Some contributors see this as leading towards a positive theological affirmation of the state of Israel, while distancing themselves from Christian Zionists. All contributors are committed to rights of the Palestinian people. Some affirm the need for strong diplomatic and political support for Israel along with equal support for Palestinians, arguing that this is as far as the Church can go. Others argue that the Church’s emerging theology represents the guilt conscience of Europe at the cost of the Palestinian people. None deny the right of Jews to live in the land. Two Jewish scholars respond to the essays creating an atmosphere of genuine interfaith dialogue which serves Catholics to think further through these issues.
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cover of Contemporary Reform Responsa - PDF Electronic Version

Contemporary Reform Responsa - PDF Electronic Version

Rabbi Solomon B. Freehof

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1974

Can a synagogue share a building with a Unitarian Church? Can a religious marriage be performed without a civil marriage? Is it allowed to photocopy from books? Must a convert be buried in a Jewish cemetery?

These questions and more are the topic of this volume, edited by Dr. Solomon Freehof and originally published in 1974. The questions included in this volume reflect the concerns of Reform Jews at the time the book was published, much of which is still relevant today.
 

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cover of Contextualizing Israel's Sacred Writings: Ancient Literacy, Orality, and Literary Production

Contextualizing Israel's Sacred Writings

Ancient Literacy, Orality, and Literary Production

Brian B. Schmidt

SBL Press, 2015

An essential resource exploring orality and literacy in the pre-Hellenistic southern Levant and the Hebrew Bible

Situated historically between the invention of the alphabet, on the one hand, and the creation of ancient Israel's sacred writings, on the other, is the emergence of literary production in the ancient Levant. In this timely collection of essays by an international cadre of scholars, the dialectic between the oral and the written, the intersection of orality with literacy, and the advent of literary composition are each explored as a prelude to the emergence of biblical writing in ancient Israel. Contributors also examine a range of relevant topics including scripturalization, the compositional dimensions of orality and textuality as they engage biblical poetry, prophecy, and narrative along with their antecedents, and the ultimate autonomy of the written in early Israel. The contributors are James M. Bos, David M. Carr, André Lemaire, Robert D. Miller II, Nadav Na'aman, Raymond F. Person Jr., Frank H. Polak, Christopher A. Rollston, Seth L. Sanders, Joachim Schaper, Brian B. Schmidt, William M. Schniedewind, Elsie Stern, and Jessica Whisenant.

Features

  • Addresses questions of literacy and scribal activity in the Levant and Negev
  • Articles examine memory, oral tradition, and text criticism
  • Discussion of the processes of scripturalization
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cover of Controlling Corporeality: The Body and the Household in Ancient Israel

Controlling Corporeality

The Body and the Household in Ancient Israel

Berquist, Jon L.

Rutgers University Press, 2002

Human bodily existence is at the core of the Torah and the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures—from birth to death. From God’s creation of Adam out of clay, to the narratives of priests and kings whose regulations governed bodily practices, the Hebrew Bible focuses on the human body. Moreover, ancient Israel’s understanding of the human body has greatly influenced both Judaism and Christianity. Despite this pervasive influence, ancient Israel’s view of the human body has rarely been studied and, until now, has been poorly understood.

In this beautifully written book, Jon L. Berquist guides the reader through the Hebrew Bible, examining ancient Israel’s ideas of the body, the unstable roles of gender, the deployment of sexuality, and the cultural practices of the time. Conducting his analysis with reference to contemporary theories of the body, power, and social control, Berquist offers not only a description and clarification of ancient Israelite views of the body, but also an analysis of how these views belong to the complex logic of ancient social meanings. When this logic is understood, the familiar Bible becomes strange and opens itself to a wide range of new interpretations.

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cover of Conversion

Conversion

Miriam Bodian

Rutgers University Press, 2026

In Conversion, Miriam Bodian considers the now-universalized term "conversion" in a Jewish context as broadly as possible, as an act of socioreligious boundary crossing. It charts how, across the long arc of Jewish history from biblical times to the present, patterns of boundary crossing have developed and shifted, whether of Gentiles entering Jewish life or of Jews exiting from it. It analyzes the biblical passages that have informed Jewish thinking about what is required to become a Jew before turning to the early rabbis’ institution of a ritualized process of conversion. It then considers the protean ways in which Gentiles have become Jews and Jews have joined other religious communities from medieval to modern times. A further section is devoted to the complexities of conversion in the contemporary Jewish world, where conversions are not necessarily recognized across denominations, where substantial intermarriage has eroded the traditional boundaries between Jew and Gentile, and where the modern state of Israel plays a role that reaches beyond its borders in determining who is a Jew.
 
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cover of Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews

Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews

Cathy S. Gelbin and Sander L. Gilman

University of Michigan Press, 2017

Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews adds significantly to contemporary scholarship on cosmopolitanism by making the experience of Jews central to the discussion, as it traces the evolution of Jewish cosmopolitanism over the last two centuries. The book sets out from an exploration of the nature and cultural-political implications of the shifting perceptions of Jewish mobility and fluidity around 1800, when modern cosmopolitanist discourse arose. Through a series of case studies, the authors analyze the historical and discursive junctures that mark the central paradigm shifts in the Jewish self-image, from the Wandering Jew to the rootless parasite, the cosmopolitan, and the socialist internationalist. Chapters analyze the tensions and dualisms in the constructed relationship between cosmopolitanism and the Jews at particular historical junctures between 1800 and the present, and probe into the relationship between earlier anti-Semitic discourses on Jewish cosmopolitanism and Stalinist rhetoric.

 
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cover of Cosmopolitans and Parochials: Modern Orthodox Jews in America

Cosmopolitans and Parochials

Modern Orthodox Jews in America

Samuel C. Heilman and Steven M. Cohen

University of Chicago Press, 1989

Far from simply vanishing in the face of modernity, Orthodox Jews in the United States today are surviving and flourishing. Samuel C. Heilman and Steven M. Cohen, both distinguished scholars of Jewish studies, have joined forces in this pathbreaking book to articulate this vibrancy and to characterize the many faces of Orthodox Jewry in contemporary America. Who are these Orthodox Jews? How have they survived, what do they believe and practice and how do they accommodate the tension between traditional Jewish and modern American values? Drawing on a survey of more than one thousand participants, the authors address these questions and many more.

Heilman and Cohen reveal that American Jewish Orthodoxy is not a monolith by distinguishing its three broad varieties: the "traditionalists," the "centrists," and the "nominally" orthodox. To illuminate this full spectrum of orthodoxy the authors focus on the "centrists," taking us through the dimensions of their ritual observances, religious beliefs, community life, and their social, political, and sexual attitudes. Both parochial and cosmopolitan, orthodox and liberal, these Jews are characterized by their dualism, by their successful involvement in both the modern Western world and in traditional Jewish culture. In painting this provocative and fascinating portrait of what Jewish Orthodoxy has become in America today, Heilman and Cohen's study also sheds light on the larger picture of the persistence of religion in the modern world.
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cover of Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism

Covenant of Blood

Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism

Lawrence A. Hoffman

University of Chicago Press, 1995

Central to both biblical narrative and rabbinic commentary, circumcision has remained a defining rite of Jewish identity, a symbol so powerful that challenges to it have always been considered taboo. Lawrence Hoffman seeks to find out why circumcision holds such an important place in the Jewish psyche. He traces the symbolism of circumcision through Jewish history, examining its evolution as a symbol of the covenant in the post-exilic period of the Bible and its subsequent meaning in the formative era of Mishnah and Talmud.

In the rabbinic system, Hoffman argues, circumcision was neither a birth ritual nor the beginning of the human life cycle, but a rite of covenantal initiation into a male "life line." Although the evolution of the rite was shaped by rabbinic debates with early Christianity, the Rabbis shared with the church a view of blood as providing salvation. Hoffman examines the particular significance of circumcision blood, which, in addition to its salvific role, contrasted with menstrual blood to symbolize the gender dichotomy within the rabbinic system. His analysis of the Rabbis' views of circumcision and menstrual blood sheds light on the marginalization of women in rabbinic law. Differentiating official mores about gender from actual practice, Hoffman surveys women's spirituality within rabbinic society and examines the roles mothers played in their sons' circumcisions until the medieval period, when they were finally excluded.
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cover of Covenant of Justice: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations from Women of Reform Judaism

Covenant of Justice

Prayers, Poems, and Meditations from Women of Reform Judaism

Women of Reform Judaism

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2025

Covenant of Justice is a dynamic collection of prayers, poems, and reflections on the most pressing social justice issues of our time, viewed through the lens of Jewish tradition and covenant. Written by a diverse group of female, nonbinary, and genderfluid contributors, the pieces address key topics including racial equity, climate justice, gender equality, and reproductive rights. With a focus on action rooted in the Jewish value of tikkun olam (repairing the world), this book serves as both an educational resource and a call to action. Practical insights, historical context, and modern interpretations of Jewish texts make this an essential guide for individuals and communities striving to effect positive change. Covenant of Justice is an accessible, inspiring resource and call to action for readers from all walks of life seeking to build a more just world.

Copublished with Women of Reform Judaism
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cover of Crossing the River

Crossing the River

Shalom Eilati

University of Alabama Press, 2009

A child’s journey through war, memory, and survival—told with haunting clarity and poetic grace.

Crossing the River is a personal memoir—and more. Against the backdrop of Lithuania’s occupation—first by the Red Army, next by the Germans, and then again by the Russians—it is a story reflected through the prism of a sharp-eyed young child, Shalom Eilati. His story starts in the occupied Kovno Ghetto and ends with his flight across the Soviet border, through Poland and Germany and finally, his arrival in Palestine.

The adult survivor, while recalling the terrorized child that he was and how he then perceived the adult world, also takes stock of his present life. Throughout the memoir, Eilati attempts to reconcile his present life as a husband, father, scientist, and writer, with the images, feelings, and thoughts from the past that have left an indelible mark on his life and that continue to haunt him.

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cover of Cultural Disjunctions: Post-Traditional Jewish Identities

Cultural Disjunctions

Post-Traditional Jewish Identities

Paul Mendes-Flohr

University of Chicago Press, 2021

The identity of contemporary Jews is multifaceted, no longer necessarily defined by an observance of the Torah and God’s commandments. Indeed, the Jews of modernity are no longer exclusively Jewish. They are affiliated with a host of complementary and sometimes clashing communities—vocational, professional, political, and cultural—whose interests may not coincide with that of the community of their birth and inherited culture. In Cultural Disjunctions, Paul Mendes-Flohr explores the possibility of a spiritually and intellectually engaged cosmopolitan Jewish identity for our time. Reflecting on the need to participate in the spiritual life of Judaism so that it enables multiple relations beyond its borders and allows one to balance Jewish commitment with a genuine obligation to the universal, Mendes-Flohr lays out what this delicate balance can look like for contemporary Jews, both in Israel and in diasporic communities worldwide. Cultural Disjunctions walks us through the labyrinth of twentieth-century Jewish cultural identities and commitments. Ultimately, Mendes-Flohr calls for Jews to remain “discontent,” not just with themselves but also and especially with the reigning social and political order, and to fight for its betterment. 
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Cultural Revolution in Berlin

Jews in the Age of Enlightenment

Shmuel Feiner and Natalie Naimark-Goldberg

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2011

The Enlightenment, which marked a social and philosophical turn away from religion and toward science and reason, swept across Europe in the eighteenth century, and these civil and rational values were embraced byJewish intellectuals, bringing about a cultural revolution within traditional Jewish society. The story of this transformation is presented here through a close look at the works held in the Leopold Müller Memorial Library of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, which was the private library of Leopold Zunz, the father of the “Science of Judaism.”
 
As Shmuel Feiner and Natalie Naimark-Goldberg reveal in this insightful and approachable history, the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) was a multifaceted movement, articulated in many different ways in the varied settings where Jews lived. Rather than providing a comprehensive story of the Haskalah, Feiner and Naimark-Goldberg use these impressive literary treasures to trace the cultural transformation that took place mainly in Germany, from its moderate and scattered beginnings in the early 1700s, through the height of the movement in the second half of the eighteenth century, until its final stage around 1800, when the Haskalah began to give way to new movements and ideologies.
 
Richly illustrated with images of eighteenth-century manuscripts, books, and pamphlets, Cultural Revolution in Berlin provides an excellent guide to the significant cultural metamorphosis brought about by the Jewish Enlightenment.
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cover of Current Issues in Priestly and Related Literature: The Legacy of Jacob Milgrom and Beyond

Current Issues in Priestly and Related Literature

The Legacy of Jacob Milgrom and Beyond

Roy E. Gane

SBL Press, 2015

New directions and fresh insight for scholars and students

The single greatest catalyst and contributor to our developing understanding of priestly literature has been Jacob Milgrom (1923-2010), whose seminal articles, provocative hypotheses, and comprehensively probing books vastly expanded and significantly altered scholarship regarding priestly and related literature. Nineteen articles build on Milgrom's work and look to future directions of research. Essays cover a range of topics including the interpretation, composition and literary structure of priestly and holiness texts as well as their relationships to deuteronomic and extra-biblical texts. The book includes a bibliography of Milgrom's work published between 1994 and 2014.

Features:

  • Comparisons with Mesopotamian Hittite texts
  • Essays from a diverse group of scholars representing a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and methodologies
  • Charts and tables illustrate complex relationships and structures
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    cover of Current Reform Responsa - PDF Electronic Version

    Current Reform Responsa - PDF Electronic Version

    Rabbi Solomon B. Freehof

    Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2021

    This volume of Responsa was originally published in 1969 by Dr. Solomon Freehof, a leading scholar and Chair of the Responsa Committee of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. In these Responsa, Dr. Freehof presents his responses to questions concerning the observance and interpretation of traditional Jewish customs and law. Topics include conversion, holiday observance, medical ethics, ritual concerns, drug use, gambling, and much more.

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