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Tradition, Modernity, and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy.

For many histories of Modern Orthodox Judaism, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch stands as the primary architect of the movement's encounter with modernity. In Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer and the Creation of a Modern Jewish Orthodoxy, distinguished scholar David Ellenson expands that narrative by recovering the life, thought, and enduring influence of one of Hirsch's most important contemporaries. Through a careful examination of Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer's writings, leadership, educational initiatives, and responses to the social and intellectual challenges of nineteenth-century Europe, Ellenson demonstrates how Hildesheimer helped forge a model of Orthodoxy that remained firmly committed to Jewish tradition while engaging constructively with the modern world.

Set against a period of profound cultural, political, and religious transformation, this volume explores the tensions confronting European Jewry as modernization, secular education, religious pluralism, and changing political realities reshaped Jewish communal life. Ellenson shows how Hildesheimer addressed these challenges not through rigid isolation but through a pragmatic and intellectually sophisticated approach that balanced fidelity to halakhah with openness to selected aspects of modern culture and scholarship. His vision helped establish a framework for Modern Orthodoxy that continues to influence contemporary Jewish thought and practice.

Beyond its biographical focus, the study provides broader insights into the emergence of Modern Orthodoxy as a religious and intellectual movement. By illuminating Hildesheimer's efforts to integrate traditional scholarship with contemporary realities, Ellenson offers readers a deeper understanding of how Judaism has negotiated the relationship between heritage and change. The result is both a compelling portrait of an influential rabbinic figure and an important examination of the forces that shaped modern Jewish religious identity.

Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer and the Creation of a Modern Jewish Orthodoxy is essential reading for scholars and students of Jewish studies, religious studies, theology, European history, intellectual history, and modern Judaism. It will also appeal to rabbis, educators, and general readers seeking to understand the historical roots of contemporary Orthodox Jewish life and the ongoing dialogue between tradition and modernity.

In 1984 at the Free University of Berlin, the African American poet Audre Lorde asked her Black, German-speaking women students about their identities. The women revealed that they had no common term to describe themselves and had until then lacked a way to identify their shared interests and concerns. Out of Lorde's seminar emerged both the term “Afro-German” (or “Black German”) and the 1986 publication of the volume that appeared in English translation as Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out. The book launched a movement that has since catalyzed activism and scholarship in Germany.

Remapping Black Germany collects thirteen pieces that consider the wide array of issues facing Black German groups and individuals across turbulent periods, spanning the German colonial period, National Socialism, divided Germany, and the enormous outpouring of Black German creativity after 1986.

In addition to the editor, the contributors include Robert Bernasconi, Tina Campt, Maria I. Diedrich, Maureen Maisha Eggers, Fatima El-Tayeb, Heide Fehrenbach, Dirk Göttsche, Felicitas Jaima, Katja Kinder, Tobias Nagl, Katharina Oguntoye, Peggy Piesche, Christian Rogowski, and Nicola Lauré al-Samarai.

A study of the deep history of the Wagnerian environmental imagination.
 
Richard Wagner’s operas are bursting with environmental imagery, from tittering birds to flowing rivers to towering trees. In Richard Wagner’s Political Ecology, Kirsten S. Paige asks where Wagner’s environmental imagination came from, how it was received by audience members and reconceived by stage directors, and how it refracts his politics. By tracing the ecological dimensions of the composer’s essays and dramas, Paige reveals how Wagner’s environmental imagination was inextricable from broader political concerns of his time.

The book begins by examining the way Wagner’s political ecology shape-shifted across its rhetorical, musical, scenographic, and technological permutations. Although Wagner’s essays and dramas invite a range of interpretations, for Paige, they point to an all-encompassing image of opera-as-climate. The book then turns to the ways Wagnerian drama—and opera more generally—at once participates in the industrial-technological lineage of climate change and helps spectators grapple with the challenges of living in a warming world. In providing the first close examination of Wagner’s artistic thought, practice, and reception in relation to nineteenth-century climate theory and the early history of environmentalism, Richard Wagner’s Political Ecology considers what it might mean to reimagine opera around ethical mandates of sustainability.

Exploring the full range of Novalis's (the pen name of the German poet and philosopher Friedrich von Hardenberg) work, von Molnar shows how he dealt, in theory and practice, with a central issue in Romanticism-the emerging concept of the autonomous self and its relation.

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) was one of the most brilliant and passionate minds drawn to the revolutionary socialist movement. An outstanding social and economic theorist of the twentieth century, and a dedicated political activist, she proved willing to go to prison and even give her life for her beliefs.

Providing an extensive overview of her writings, this volume contains a number of items never before anthologised. Her work was broad in scope tackling capitalism and socialism; globalisation and imperialism; history; war and peace; social struggles, trade unions, political parties; class, gender, race; the interconnection of humanity with the natural environment. The editors provide an extensive and informative introduction outlining and evaluating her life and thought.

This is the most comprehensive introduction to the range of Rosa Luxemburg’s thought.