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Menachem Kipnis (1878–1942) was one of the early twentieth-century’s greatest Jewish eastern European ethnomusicologists, folklorists, and photographers. He had a weekly column in the Warsaw Yiddish newspaper Haynt, retelling humorous old folk stories about the fictional Polish town of Chelm, populated exclusively by fools. At the same time, his photographs of Jewish life in eastern Europe regularly appeared in the Forverts (Forward), the most popular Yiddish daily newspaper in the United States. Now, for the first time, Kipnis’s stories and photographs are published together in a single book.

Menachem Kipnis brings these photographs and stories into dialogue with one another, bridging the Jewish communities in Poland and in America during the interwar period. This dialogue, between image and text, between European metropolis and American metropolis, captures a key historical moment when American Jews sought to imagine the lives of their coreligionists in the “Old Country” and eastern European urban Jews sought to distinguish themselves from their Jewish compatriots who were still living in the shtetl. Including an introductory essay, annotations, and an epilogue by Sheila E. Jelen, Menachem Kipnis suggests new ways of understanding both visual and literary depictions of eastern European Jewish culture between the two world wars.

Winner of the 2025 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Analytical-Descriptive Studies 

Winner of the 2023 Association for Jewish Studies Jordan Schnitzer First Book Prize

Judaism in the twenty-first century has seen the rise of the messianic Third Temple movement, as religious activists based in Israel have worked to realize biblical prophecies, including the restoration of a Jewish theocracy and the construction of the third and final Temple on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Through groundbreaking ethnographic research, Messianic Zionism in the Digital Age details how Third Temple visions have gained considerable momentum and political support in Israel and abroad . 
 
The role of technology in this movement’s globalization has been critical. Feldman skillfully highlights the ways in which the internet and social media have contributed to the movement's growth beyond the streets of Jerusalem into communities of former Christians around the world who now identify as the Children of Noah (Bnei Noah). She charts a path for future research while documenting the intimate effects of political theologies in motion and the birth of a new transnational Judaic faith.
 

The writer and journalist Moritz Gottlieb Saphir (1795–1858) was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in a Hungarian village and studied in a yeshiva but spent his professional life in the cities of Germany and Austria. He was one of the most popular authors and cultural figures in Central and Western Europe in the 19th century, which can be also seen from the fact that Alexandre Dumas, Sr. published a collection of his writings in French complete with a long essay expressing his admiration for Saphir. Together with his friends Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne, Saphir was the first Jewish author to achieve international fame. Like them, he converted to the Lutheran faith, but he never denied his Jewish origins and wrote appreciatively of Jewish food traditions.

His literary and journalistic innovations included publishing the first modern newspapers in Berlin, Munich and Vienna, developing a new style of humorous writing, introducing the journalistic genre of the feuilleton to Austria, authoring the first extended prose poem in the German language and writing the first study of vernacular Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine, as well as the first review of a Jewish cookbook and restaurant. Although due to censorship he had to largely eschew political subjects, he courageously fought for press freedom and against anti-Jewish prejudice. Although perhaps not a great writer, he was an important and intriguing figure of European cultural history who certainly doesn’t deserve the neglect his work has suffered since the early 20th century.

András Koerner’s book is the first modern monograph of him, which in addition to a detailed presentation of his eventful, interesting life and an examination of his personality, identity and work also includes the first-ever extensive annotated anthology of him in English.

Movie-Made Jews focuses on a rich, usable American Jewish cinematic tradition. This tradition includes fiction and documentary films that make Jews through antisemitism, Holocaust indirection, and discontent with assimilation. It prominently features the unapologetic assertion of Jewishness, queerness, and alliances across race and religion. Author Helene Meyers shows that as we go to our local theater, attend a Jewish film festival, play a DVD, watch streaming videos, Jewishness becomes part of the multicultural mosaic rather than collapsing into a generic whiteness or being represented as a life apart. This engagingly-written book demonstrates that a Jewish movie is neither just a movie nor for Jews only.
 
With incisive analysis, Movie-Made Jews challenges the assumption that American Jewish cinema is a cinema of impoverishment and assimilation. While it’s a truism that Jews make movies, this book brings into focus the diverse ways movies make Jews. 
 

In her memoir My Father, the Messiah, Gil Hochberg traces a father-daughter relationship as it transforms across decades—from intense closeness in childhood to a fraught distance as Hochberg’s father Yossi becomes increasingly convinced that he is the Messiah. After building a career as a statistician in the US, Yossi returns to Israel and becomes an avid Zionist, while having several psychotic episodes. Hochberg reconstructs her relationship with her father through an archive of letters between the two, as well as her father’s personal writings, painting a tender portrait of the non-normative family life within which Hochberg’s queer identity unfolds and a heart-rending account of her father’s mental decline. Hochberg crafts a powerful story of intimacy and loss that dovetails with sea changes in Israel’s religious and political environment since the 1990s.