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As Ice Age glaciers left behind erratics, so the external forces of history tumbled the Irish into America. Existing both out of time and out of space, a diverse range of these Roman-Catholic immigrants saw their new country in a much different way than did the Protestants who settled and claimed it. These erratics chose backward looking tradition and independence over assimilation and embraced a quintessentially Irish form of subversiveness that arose from their culture, faith, and working-class outlook. David M. Emmons draws on decades of research and thought to plumb the mismatch of values between Protestant Americans hostile to Roman Catholicism and the Catholic Irish strangers among them. Joining ethnicity and faith to social class, Emmons explores the unique form of dissidence that arose when Catholic Irish workers and their sympathizers rejected the beliefs and symbols of American capitalism.

A vibrant and original tour de force, History’s Erratics explores the ancestral roots of Irish nonconformity and defiance in America.

An innovative translation and analysis of Hittite local festivals and of their economic and social dimensions for students and scholars

This English translation of the Hittite cult inventories provides a vivid portrait of the religion, economy, and administration of Bronze Age provincial towns and villages of the Hittite Empire. These texts report the state of local shrines and festivals and document the interplay between the central power and provincial communities on religious affairs. Brief introductions to each text make the volume accessible to students and scholars alike.

Features:

• Critical editions of Hittite cult inventories, some of which are edited for the first time, with substantial improvements in readings and interpretations
• The first systematic study of the linguistic aspects of Hittite administrative jargon
• An up-to-date study of Hittite cult images and iconography of the gods

Michele Cammarosano currently leads a Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft-funded project on Hittite cultic administration at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. His research interests focus on cuneiform palaeography and Hittite religion.

Hizbu’llah is the largest and most prominent political party in Lebanon, and one of the most renowned Islamist movements in the world. In this book, Amal Saad-Ghorayeb examines the organisation’s understanding of jihad and how this, together with its belief in martyrdom, brought about the withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces from Lebanon in May 2000.

Saad-Ghorayeb explores the nature of the party’s struggle against the West by studying its views on the use of violence against Westerners. Crucially, she also addresses the question of whether Hizbu’llah depicts this struggle in purely political or civilisational terms. The existential nature of the movement’s conflict with Israel is analysed and the Islamic roots of its anti-Judaism is unearthed.

The author explores the mechanics and rationale behind the party’s integration into the Lebanese political system, and sheds light on how it has reconciled its national idenitity with its solidarity with the Muslim umma.

Examining the politics of pools and beaches, Holy Waters reveals a surprising history about Haredi Jews and Israel. By looking at the battles to establish gender segregating swimming in Israel, which required a partnership between the Israeli government and its Haredi population to reshape public space, the book argues that the establishment of Israel created a new Haredi pragmatic politics. Unlike some Ultra-Orthodox Jews, who rejected the Jewish state entirely, these radical moderates worked with the state to make it feel more Jewish, and to improve life for its Haredi population, without embracing Zionist ideology. Holy Waters examines three cases: a failure to prevent mixed swimming in Jerusalem, the successful establishment of a separate beach in Tel Aviv, and the mixed results of a Diaspora awareness campaign. Connecting historical controversies to today’s debates of gender segregation, the book demonstrates how these radical moderates still influence Israel today.

This book is published with the support of the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award, administered by the Association for Jewish Studies.

Exploring how Southern Jews forged identity, community, and belonging in the evolving landscape of the New South.
 
Homelands is a case study of a unique ethnic group in North America—small-town southern Jews. Both Jews and southerners, Leonard Rogoff points out, have long struggled with questions of identity and whether to retain their differences or try to assimilate into the national culture. Rogoff shows how, as immigrant Jews became small-town southerners, they constantly renegotiated their identities and reinvented their histories.

The Durham-Chapel Hill Jewish community was formed during the 1880s and 1890s, when the South was recovering from the Reconstruction era and Jews were experiencing ever-growing immigration as well as challenging the religious traditionalism of the previous 4,000 years. Durham and Chapel Hill Jews, recent arrivals from the traditional societies of eastern Europe, assimilated and secularized as they lessened their differences with other Americans. Some Jews assimilated through intermarriage and conversion, but the trajectory of the community as a whole was toward retaining their religious and ethnic differences while attempting to integrate with their neighbors.

The Durham-Chapel Hill area is uniquely suited to the study of the southern Jewish experience, Rogoff maintains, because the region is exemplary of two major trends: the national population movement southward and the rise of Jews into the professions. The Jewish peddler and storekeeper of the 1880s and the doctor and professor of the 1990s, Rogoff says, are representative figures of both Jewish upward mobility and southern progress.
 

The book of Hosea is a labyrinth of juxtaposed images for God and God’s people, with such disparate metaphors as God the devouring lion and God the reviving dew. In Hosea’s God: A Metaphorical Theology, Mason D. Lancaster demonstrates that recent advances in metaphor theory help untangle these divergent portrayals of God. He analyzes fifteen metaphor clusters in Hosea 4–14 individually, then discerns patterns and reversals between the clusters. Finally, respecting the ancient value for emphasizing individual aspects of a depiction over a homogenized picture of the whole, the book identifies five characteristics of God prominent among the metaphors of Hosea. Based on this analysis, Lancaster asserts that Hosea’s metaphorical depiction of Yahweh ultimately derives from the primacy of Yahweh’s fidelity to Israel.