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645 books match the query 'Judaism' and 172 start with t

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Tanu Rabbanan - Our Rabbis Taught

Joseph B. Glaser

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1990

Essays in commemoration of the Centennial of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. Includes four discourses which together present the agenda of the American Reform Movement. Historical overviews of Conference history complete this volumen.

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Textual Sources for the Study of Judaism

Edited and Translated by Philip S. Alexander

University of Chicago Press, 1990

"Alexander assembles material from Scripture and tradition, through religious law and ethical literature to a section on Society and the Jews, and prefaces the whole with an admirable introduction."—Jonathan Sacks, Jewish Chronicle

"The texts . . . which are drawn from over two thousand years of history, are usefully divided, annotated and glossed. They enable students to explore the tradition in a new way [and] give a marvellous insight into the richness and liveliness of the Jewish religion and culture: we are given wit and pathos in addition to popular story and religious law."—Janet Trotter, Resource

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The Aggada of the Bavli and Its Cultural World

Geoffrey Herman

SBL Press, 2018

Essays that explore the rich engagement of the Talmud with its cultural world

The Babylonian Talmud (Bavli), the great compilation of Jewish law edited in the late Sasanian era (sixth–seventh century CE), also incorporates a great deal of aggada, that is, nonlegal material, including interpretations of the Bible, stories, folk sayings, and prayers. The Talmud’s aggadic traditions often echo conversations with the surrounding cultures of the Persians, Eastern Christians, Manichaeans, Mandaeans, and the ancient Babylonians, and others. The essays in this volume analyze Bavli aggada to reveal this rich engagement of the Talmud with its cultural world.

Features:

A detailed analysis of the different conceptions of martyrdom in the Talmud as opposed to the Eastern Christian martyr accounts
Illustration of the complex ways rabbinic Judaism absorbed Christian and Zoroastrian theological ideas
Demonstration of the presence of Persian-Zoroastrian royal and mythological motifs in talmudic sources

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The Americanization of the Synagogue, 1820–1870

Leon A. Jick

Brandeis University Press, 1992

The Americanization of the Synagogue, 1820–1870

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The Anti-Journalist

Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe

Paul Reitter

University of Chicago Press, 2008

In turn-of-the-century Vienna, Karl Kraus created a bold new style of media criticism, penning incisive satires that elicited both admiration and outrage. Kraus’s spectacularly hostile critiques often focused on his fellow Jewish journalists, which brought him a reputation as the quintessential self-hating Jew. The Anti-Journalist overturns this view with unprecedented force and sophistication, showing how Kraus’s criticisms form the center of a radical model of German-Jewish self-fashioning, and how that model developed in concert with Kraus’s modernist journalistic style.

Paul Reitter’s study of Kraus’s writings situates them in the context of fin-de-siècle German-Jewish intellectual society. He argues that rather than stemming from anti-Semitism, Kraus’s attacks constituted an innovative critique of mainstream German-Jewish strategies for assimilation. Marshalling three of the most daring German-Jewish authors—Kafka, Scholem, and Benjamin—Reitter explains their admiration for Kraus’s project and demonstrates his influence on their own notions of cultural authenticity.

The Anti-Journalist is at once a new interpretation of a fascinating modernist oeuvre and a heady exploration of an important stage in the history of German-Jewish thinking about identity.

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The Anti-Semitic Moment

A Tour of France in 1898

Pierre Birnbaum

University of Chicago Press, 2011

In 1898, the Dreyfus Affair plunged French society into a yearlong frenzy. In Paris and provincial villages throughout the country, angry crowds paraded through the streets, threatening to attack Jews and destroy Jewish-owned businesses. Anger about the imagined power of Jewish capital, as well as fears of treason and racial degeneration, made anti-Semitism a convenient banner behind which social and political factions could fall in line. Anti-Semitic feelings that had been simmering in France for decades came boiling to the surface.

Here Pierre Birnbaum guides readers on a tour of France during this crisis. He shows that in the midst of violence, Jewish citizens bravely and effectively defended themselves and were aided by a police force determined to maintain order. Birnbaum paints a vivid portrait of French Jewish culture at the time and explains why the French state remained strong in this time of widespread unrest.

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The Apocalypse in Reformation Nuremberg

Jews and Turks in Andreas Osiander’s World

Andrew L. Thomas

University of Michigan Press, 2022

Lutheran preacher and theologian Andreas Osiander (1498–1552) played a critical role in spreading the Lutheran Reformation in sixteenth-century Nuremberg. Besides being the most influential ecclesiastical leader in a prominent German city, Osiander was also a well-known scholar of Hebrew. He composed what is considered to be the first printed treatise written by a Christian defending Jews against blood libel. Despite Osiander’s importance, however, he remains surprisingly understudied. The Apocalypse in Reformation Nuremberg: Jews and Turks in Andreas Osiander’s World is the first book in any language to concentrate on his attitudes toward both Jews and Turks, and it does so within the dynamic interplay between his apocalyptic thought and lived reality in shaping Lutheran identity. Likewise, it presents the first published English translation of Osiander’s famous treatise on blood libel. Osiander’s writings on Jews and Turks that shaped Lutherans’ identity from cradle to grave in Nuremberg also provide a valuable mirror to reflect on the historical antecedents to modern antisemitism and Islamophobia and thus elucidate how the related stereotypes and prejudices are both perpetuated and overcome.

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The Babylonian Genesis

The Story of the Creation

Alexander Heidel

University of Chicago Press, 1963

The origins of Judeo-Christian creation accounts: An complete, authoritative translation of all the extant cuneiform tablets of Babylonian creation stories

The Babylonian Genesis offers, in one compact, accessible volume, a complete translation of all the published cuneiform tablets of the various Babylonian creation stories, of both the Semitic Babylonian and the Sumerian material. Each creation account is preceded by a brief introduction from renowned scholar and translator Alexander Heidel dealing with the age and provenance of the tablets, the aim and purpose of the story, and everything else that a reader of any level of knowledge needs to understand these stories in their context. Also included is a translation and discussion of two Babylonian creation versions written in Greek. The final chapter presents a detailed examination of the Babylonian creation accounts in their relation to our Old Testament literature.

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The Beginning of Wisdom

Reading Genesis

Leon R. Kass

University of Chicago Press, 2006

“Extraordinary,” says the New York Times, “will leave no reader’s understanding of Genesis unchanged.”

Examining Genesis in a philosophical light, Leon Kass presents it not as a story of what happened long ago, but as the enduring story of humanity itself. He asserts that the first half of Genesis contains insights about human nature that “rival anything produced by the great philosophers.” Kass here reads these first stories—from Adam and Eve to the tower of Babel—as a mirror for self-discovery that reveals truths about human reason, speech, freedom, sexual desire, pride, shame, anger, and death. Taking a step further in the second half of his book, Kass explores the struggles in Genesis to launch a new way of life that addresses mankind’s morally ambiguous nature by promoting righteousness and holiness.

Even readers who don’t agree with Kass’s interpretations will find The Beginning of Wisdom a compelling book—a masterful philosophical take on one of the world’s seminal religious texts.

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The Besht

Magician, Mystic, and Leader

Immanuel Etkes

Brandeis University Press, 2012

Founded in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century, the Hasidic movement and its religious thinking have dramatically transformed modern Judaism. The figure of the Ba’al Shem Tov (known in acronym form as the BeSHT)—the purported founder of the Hasidic movement—has fascinated scholars, Jewish philosophers, and laypeople interested in popular Jewish mysticism in general and the contemporary Hasidic movement in all its variety. In this volume, Etkes enters a rich and heated debate over the origins of the movement, as well as the historicity of its mythic founder, Rabbi Israel Ba’al Shem Tov, who lived much of his life as a miracle worker. The eighteenth century, as Etkes vividly portrays, was the heyday of the kabbalists, who dabbled in the magical power of letters and words to solve personal and communal problems—and to earn a living. Etkes sheds light on the personality of the Besht, on his mysticism, and on his close circle of followers. But equally important, he challenges the popular myth of the Besht as a childlike mystic, wandering the fields in prayer, seeing visions and engaging in acts of godliness and piety. Although Etkes shows great empathy for his subject, the Besht who emerges in these pages is much more down to earth, much more a man of his times. Indeed, according to Etkes, it was never the intention of the Besht to found a religious movement. Etkes looks at the Besht’s mystical roots, examining him not only from the vantage point of a social historian, but as a religious figure. Moshe Rosman, author of Founder of Hasidism, a biography of the Besht, claims that In Praise of the Besht—a volume published about the Besht in 1814, many years after his death, which portrayed his character by means of stories told by his close followers—could not be a reliable source. Etkes, disputing this claim, shows definitively that this well-known text (translated and interpreted by, among others, Martin Buber) may indeed offer trustworthy accounts of the Besht’s life and thinking.

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The Birth of Doubt

Confronting Uncertainty in Early Rabbinic Literature

Moshe Halbertal

SBL Press, 2020

A systematic attempt to understand the rabbinic world through its approach to confronting uncertainty

In the history of halakhah, the treatment of uncertainty became one of the most complex fields of intense study. In his latest book, Moshe Halbertal focuses on examining the point of origin of the study of uncertainty in early rabbinic literature, including the Mishnah, Tosefta, and halakhic midrashim. Halbertal explores instructions concerning how to behave in situations of uncertainty ranging from matters of ritual purity, to lineage and marriage, to monetary law, and to the laws of forbidden foods. This examination of the rules of uncertainty introduced in early rabbinic literature reveals that these rules were not aimed at avoiding but rather at dwelling in the midst of uncertainty, thus rejecting the sectarian isolationism that sought to minimize a community’s experience of and friction with uncertainty.

Features:

A thorough investigation of the principles concerning how to behave in cases of uncertainty
An examination of two distinct modes for coping with uncertainty

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The Book of Margins

Edmond Jabès

University of Chicago Press, 1993

The death of Edmond Jabès in January 1991 silenced one of the most compelling voices of the postmodern, post-Holocaust era. Jabès's importance as a thinker, philosopher, and Jewish theologian cannot be overestimated, and his enigmatic style—combining aphorism, fictional dialogue, prose meditation, poetry, and other forms—holds special appeal for postmodern sensibilities.

In The Book of Margins, his most critical as well as most accessible book, Jabès is again concerned with the questions that inform all of his work: the nature of writing, of silence, of God and the Book. Jabès considers the work of several of his contemporaries, including Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Roger Caillois, Paul Celan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Leiris, Emmanuel Lévinas, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and his translator, Rosmarie Waldrop. This book will be important reading for students of Jewish literature, French literature, and literature of the modern and postmodern ages.

Born in Cairo in 1912, Edmond Jabès lived in France from 1956 until his death in 1991. His extensively translated and widely honored works include The Book of Questions and The Book of Shares. Both of these were translated into English by Rosmarie Waldrop, who is also a poet.

Religion and Postmodernism series

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The Book of Proverbs

A Social Justice Commentary

Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2022

The Book of Proverbs, attributed to King Solomon, is a profound collection of Jewish wisdom, song, and inspiration. Yet to contemporary readers, the text can appear vague, ambiguous, and contradictory. In this refreshing and relevant commentary, Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz challenges us to find modern meaning in this ancient text. Using his signature blend of social justice practice and Jewish thought from throughout history, Rabbi Yanklowitz shows how the words of Proverbs are strikingly pertinent to issues we face today. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Rabbi Yanklowitz explores such topics as income inequality, feminism, animal rights, environmentalism, and many more. The author’s commentary is paired with the full text of Proverbs—in both Hebrew and an updated, gender-accurate translation—so readers can glean their own insights.

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The Challenge of Catholic-Jewish Theological Dialogue

Matthew Tapie

Catholic University of America Press, 2024

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The Challenges of Sovereignty

Essays on Israel and Zionism

David Ellenson

Brandeis University Press, 2026

Key essays by a notable scholar address some of the most pressing questions facing Israel today.

Over the course of his rich career, David Ellenson—one of the most outstanding Jewish scholars, intellectuals, and thinkers of our time—probed the tension between tradition and modernity, especially as reflected in the ceaseless reinterpretation of liturgical and halakhic texts. Alongside that scholarly interest, largely centered on European Jewry, Ellenson produced an impressive body of work on Zionism and Israel.

This volume follows the arc of this body of work from Ellenson’s early articles on the Zionism of American rabbis to his last essay on the struggle between Jewish and democratic impulses in Israeli society. He draws on familiar sources of inquiry—Jewish prayers and legal sources—to chart changes in Israeli religious life and to excavate its theological-political foundation. What emerges is a profound meditation on some of the most important questions that Israel faces today: what does it mean to be Jewish in the state? What role should Halakhah play in a self-defined Jewish state? How should the state treat its non-Jewish minority? How deeply rooted is democracy in the state and its foundational texts? And can the state ever escape seemingly irrepressible internal and external conflict?

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The Choice

Converts to Judaism Share Their Stories

Arnine Cumsky Weiss and Carol Weiss Rubel

University of Scranton Press, 2010

In The Choice, Arnine Cumsky Weiss and Carol Weiss Rubel present the stories of forty-five converts to Judaism. These reflective narratives demonstrate that no two converts’ experiences are alike, yet most share some common characteristics: a spiritual uneasiness, fear, doubt, and a gradual development of spiritual and intellectual understanding and acceptance of conversion. The stories in The Choice will be a source of inspiration and affirmation for anyone who is struggling with a conversion decision or knows someone who is.

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The Community Rule

A Critical Edition with Translation

Sarianna Metso

SBL Press, 2019

An authoritative critical edition

The discovery and translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls transformed our understanding of the life and history of ancient Jewish communities when both rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity were emerging. As part of this rich discovery, the Community Rule serves to illuminate the religious beliefs and practices as well as the organizational rules of the group behind the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, there is no single, unified text of the Community Rule; rather, multiple manuscripts of the Community Rule show considerable variation and highlight the work of ancient Jewish scribes and their intentional literary development of the text. In this volume, Sarianna Metso brings together the surviving evidence in a new edition that presents a critically established Hebrew text with an introduction and an English translation.

Features:

A critical apparatus and textual notes
All the surviving evidence of the Community Rule
A new method for presenting complex developments and transmission history of ancient texts

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The Conflagration of Community

Fiction before and after Auschwitz

J. Hillis Miller

University of Chicago Press, 2011

“After Auschwitz to write even a single poem is barbaric.” The Conflagration of Community challenges Theodor Adorno’s famous statement about aesthetic production after the Holocaust, arguing for the possibility of literature to bear witness to extreme collective and personal experiences. J. Hillis Miller masterfully considers how novels about the Holocaust relate to fictions written before and after it, and uses theories of community from Jean-Luc Nancy and Derrida to explore the dissolution of community bonds in its wake.

Miller juxtaposes readings of books about the Holocaust—Keneally’s Schindler’s List, McEwan’s Black Dogs, Spiegelman’s Maus, and Kertész’s Fatelessness—with Kafka’s novels and Morrison’s Beloved, asking what it means to think of texts as acts of testimony. Throughout, Miller questions the resonance between the difficulty of imagining, understanding, or remembering Auschwitz—a difficulty so often a theme in records of the Holocaust—and the exasperating resistance to clear, conclusive interpretation of these novels. The Conflagration of Community is an eloquent study of literature’s value to fathoming the unfathomable.

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The Connections Paradigm

Ancient Jewish Wisdom for Modern Mental Health

David H. Rosmarin

Templeton Press, 2021

This book introduces an approach to mental health that dates back 3,000 years to an ancient body of Jewish spiritual wisdom. Known as the Connections Paradigm, the millennia-old method has been empirically shown to alleviate symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression. After being passed down from generation to generation and tested in clinical settings with private clients, it is presented to a broad audience for the first time.
The idea behind the paradigm is that at any given moment, human beings are either “connected” or “disconnected” across three key relationships. To be “connected” means to be in a loving, harmonious, and fulfilling relationship; to be “disconnected” means, of course, the opposite. The three relationships are those between our souls and our bodies, ourselves and others, and ourselves and God.

These relationships are hierarchal; each depends on the one that precedes it. This means that we can only connect with God to the extent that we associate with others, and we cannot connect with others if we don’t connect with ourselves. The author, Dr. David H. Rosmarin, devotes a section to each relationship and describes techniques and practices to become a more connected individual. He also brings in compelling stories from his clinical practice to show the process in action.

Whether you’re a clinician working with clients, or a person seeking the healing balm of wisdom; whether you’re a member of the Jewish faith, or a person open to new spiritual perspectives, you will find this book sensible, practical, and timely because, for all of us, connection leads to mental health.

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The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem

Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Few people thought as deeply or incisively about Germany, Jewish identity, and the Holocaust as Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem. And, as this landmark volume reveals, much of that thinking was developed in dialogue, through more than two decades of correspondence.
Arendt and Scholem met in 1932 in Berlin and quickly bonded over their mutual admiration for and friendship with Walter Benjamin. They began exchanging letters in 1939, and their lively correspondence continued until 1963, when Scholem’s vehement disagreement with Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem led to a rupture that would last until Arendt’s death a dozen years later. The years of their friendship, however, yielded a remarkably rich bounty of letters: together, they try to come to terms with being both German and Jewish, the place and legacy of Germany before and after the Holocaust, the question of what it means to be Jewish in a post-Holocaust world, and more. Walter Benjamin is a constant presence, as his life and tragic death are emblematic of the very questions that preoccupied the pair. Like any collection of letters, however, the book also has its share of lighter moments: accounts of travels, gossipy dinner parties, and the quotidian details that make up life even in the shadow of war and loss.
In a world that continues to struggle with questions of nationalism, identity, and difference, Arendt and Scholem remain crucial thinkers. This volume offers us a way to see them, and the development of their thought, anew.

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The Days Between

Blessings, Poems, and Directions of the Heart for the Jewish High Holiday Season

Marcia Falk

Brandeis University Press, 2014

The Jewish High Holidays—the ten days beginning with the New Year Festival of Rosh Hashanah and culminating with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement—constitute the most sacred period of the Jewish year. During this season, religious as well as nonaffiliated Jews attend synagogue services in unparalleled numbers. Yet much of what they find there can be unwelcoming in its patriarchal imagery, leaving many worshipers unsatisfied. For those seeking to connect more deeply with their Judaism, and for all readers in search of a contemplative approach to the themes of the fall season, poet and scholar Marcia Falk re-creates the holidays’ key prayers and rituals from an inclusive perspective. Among the offerings in The Days Between are Hebrew and English blessings for festive meals, prayers for synagogue services, and poems and meditations for quiet reflection. Emphasizing introspection as well as relationship to others, Falk evokes her vision of the High Holidays as “ten days of striving to keep the heart open to change.” Accessible and welcoming to modern readers, The Days Between is steeped in traditional sources and grounded in liturgical and biblical scholarship. It will serve as a meaningful alternative or supplement to the traditional liturgy for individuals, families, synagogues, and communities small and large—that is, for all who seek fresh meaning in the High Holidays.

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The Dead Sea Scrolls in Scholarly Perspective

A History of Research

Devorah Dimant

SBL Press, 2016

Now in paperback!

The volume covers Qumran scholarship in separate countries: the USA, Canada, Israel, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Italy, and Eastern Europe. Each essay carries a detailed bibliography for the respective country. Biographies of all the major scholars active in the field are briefly given as well. This book thereby exhaustively surveys past and present Qumran research, outlining its particular development in various circumstances and national contexts. For the first time, perspectives and information not recorded in any other publication are highlighted.

Features:

Paperback format of an essential Brill resource

Twenty-seven articles by twenty-six of the top scholars in the field

Contributions represent the work of more than sixty years of scholarly research

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The Economics of the Mishnah

Jacob Neusner

University of Chicago Press, 1990

In this compelling study, Jacob Neusner argues that economics is an active and generative ingredient of the system of the Mishnah. The Mishnah directly addresses such economic concerns as the value of work, agronomics, currency, commerce and the marketplace, and correct management of labor and of the household. In all its breadth, the Mishnah poses the question of the critical place occupied by the economy in society under God's rule.

The Economics of the Mishnah is the first book to examine the place of economic theory generally in the Judaic system of the Mishnah. Jacob Neusner begins by surveying previous work on economics and Judaism, the best known being Werner Sombart's The Jews and Modern Capitalism. The mistaken notion that Jews have had a common economic history has outlived the demise of Sombart's argument, and it is a notion that Neusner overturns before discussing the Mishnaic economics.

Only in Aristotle, Neusner argues, do we find an equal to the Mishnah's accomplishment in engaging economics in the service of a larger systemic statement. Neusner shows that the framers of the Mishnah imagined a distributive economy functioning through the Temple and priesthood, while also legislating for the action of markets. The economics of the Mishnah, then, is to some extent a mixed economy. The dominant, distributive element in this mixed economy, Neusner contends, derives from the belief that the Temple and its designated castes on earth exercise God's claim to the ownership of the holy land. He concludes by considering the implications of the derivation of the Mishnah's economics from the interests of the undercapitalized and overextended farmer.

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The End of Sacrifice

Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity

Guy G. Stroumsa

University of Chicago Press, 2009

The religious transformations that marked late antiquity represent an enigma that has challenged some of the West’s greatest thinkers. But, according to Guy Stroumsa, the oppositions between paganism and Christianity that characterize prevailing theories have endured for too long. Instead of describing this epochal change as an evolution within the Greco-Roman world from polytheism to monotheism, he argues that the cause for this shift can be found not so much around the Mediterranean as in the Near East.

The End of Sacrifice points to the role of Judaism, particularly its inventions of new religious life following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. The end of animal sacrifice gave rise to new forms of worship, with a concern for personal salvation, scriptural study, rituals like praying and fasting, and the rise of religious communities and monasticism. It is what Christianity learned from Judaism about texts, death, and, above all, sacrifice that allowed it to supersede Greco-Roman religions and, Stroumsa argues, transform religion itself.

A concise and original approach to a much-studied moment in religious history, The End of Sacrifice will be heralded by all scholars of late antiquity.

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The Essential Hayim Greenberg

Essays and Addresses on Jewish Culture, Socialism, and Zionism

Hayim Greenberg, Edited and introduced by Mark Raider, Foreword by Paul Mendes-Flohr

University of Alabama Press, 2016

Though well known to many scholars and critics in the field of Judaic studies, Hayim Greenberg remains relatively unknown. Since his death in 1953, Greenberg’s contributions to modern Jewish thought have largely fallen from view. In The Essential Hayim Greenberg: Essays and Addresses on Jewish Culture, Socialism, and Zionism, the first collection of Greenberg’s writings since 1968, Mark A. Raider reestablishes Greenberg as a prominent Jewish thinker and Zionist activist who challenged the prevailing orthodoxies of American Jewry and the Zionist movement.

This collection of thoroughly annotated essays, spanning the 1920s to the early 1950s, includes Greenberg’s meditations on socialism and ethics, profiles of polarizing twentieth-century figures (among them Trotsky, Lenin, and Gandhi), and several essays investigating the compatibility of socialism and communism. Greenberg always circles back, however, to the recurring question of how Jews might situate themselves in modernity, both before and after the Holocaust, and how Labor Zionist ideology might reshape the imbalances of Jewish economic life.

Alongside his role as an American Zionist leader, Greenberg maintained a lifelong commitment to the vitality of the Jewish diaspora. Rather than promoting Jewish autonomy and statehood, he argued for fidelity to the Jewish spirit. This volume not only seeks to restore Greenberg to his previous stature in the field of Judaic studies but also to return a vital and authentic voice, long quieted, to the continuing debate over what it means to be Jewish.

The Essential Hayim Greenberg provides an accessible text for scholars, historians, and students of Jewish studies, religion, and theology.

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The Exegetical Value of the Masoretic Pointing

Jan Joosten

SBL Press, 2020

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The Faith of Fallen Jews

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History

Edited by David N. Myers and Alexander Kaye

Brandeis University Press, 2013

From his first book, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, to his well-known volume on Jewish memory, Zakhor, to his treatment of Sigmund Freud in Freud’s Moses, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932–2009) earned recognition as perhaps the greatest Jewish historian of his day, whose scholarship blended vast erudition, unfettered creativity, and lyrical beauty. This volume charts his intellectual trajectory by bringing together a mix of classic and lesser-known essays from the whole of his career. The essays in this collection, representative of the range of his writing, acquaint the reader with his research on early modern Spanish Jewry and the experience of crypto-Jews, varied reflections on Jewish history and memory, and Yerushalmi’s enduring interest in the political history of the Jews. Also included are a number of little-known autobiographical recollections, as well as his only published work of fiction.

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The Fatal Embrace

Jews and the State

Benjamin Ginsberg

University of Chicago Press, 1993

In this provocative book, Benjamin Ginsberg examines the cycle of Jewish success and anti-Semitic attack throughout the history of the Diaspora, with a concentrated focus on the "special case" of America. For Ginsberg, the essential issue is not anti-Jewish feeling, but the conditions under which such sentiment is likely to be used in the political arena. The Fatal Embrace identifies the political dynamics that, historically, have set the stage for the persecution of Jews.

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The Figural Jew

Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought

Sarah Hammerschlag

University of Chicago Press, 2010

The rootless Jew, wandering disconnected from history, homeland, and nature, was often the target of early twentieth-century nationalist rhetoric aimed against modern culture. But following World War II, a number of prominent French philosophers recast this maligned figure in positive terms, and in so doing transformed postwar conceptions of politics and identity.

Sarah Hammerschlag explores this figure of the Jew from its prewar usage to its resuscitation by Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida. Sartre and Levinas idealized the Jew’s rootlessness in order to rethink the foundations of political identity. Blanchot and Derrida, in turn, used the figure of the Jew to call into question the very nature of group identification. By chronicling this evolution in thinking, Hammerschlag ultimately reveals how the figural Jew can function as a critical mechanism that exposes the political dangers of mythic allegiance, whether couched in universalizing or particularizing terms.

Both an intellectual history and a philosophical argument, The Figural Jew will set the agenda for all further consideration of Jewish identity, modern Jewish thought, and continental philosophy.

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The First Fifty Years

A Jubilee in Prose and Poetry Honoring Women Rabbis

Rabbi Sue Levi Elwell, Jessica Greenbaum, Rabbi Hara E. Person

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2023

The ordination of Rabbi Sally J. Priesand in 1972 was a watershed moment in Jewish history. In The First Fifty Years, contributors from across the Jewish and gender spectrums reflect on the meaning of this moment and the ensuing decades, both personally and for the Jewish community. In short pieces of new prose, authors—many of them pioneering rabbis—share stories, insights, analysis, and celebrations of women in the rabbinate. These are intertwined with a wealth of poetry that poignantly captures the spirit of this anniversary. The volume is a deep, heartfelt tribute to women rabbis and their indelible impact on all of us.

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The First Well

A Bethlehem Boyhood

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra

University of Arkansas Press, 1995

The First Well is an engaging autobiographical account of Jabra’s boyhood in Bethlehem, where he was born in 1920, and later in Jerusalem, where he moved as a teenager with his parents.Through the eyes and heart of a sensitive, highly imaginative boy, Jabra describes the first sources of his artistic sensibility—the houses, fields, and orchards of his childhood and the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures of Bethlehem and Jerusalem. The First Well is the story of his intellectual and spiritual growth nurtured and encouraged by his family, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and his teachers. His story is both captivatingly innocent and full of wisdom. Wordsworth’s observation, “The Child is father of the Man,” is entirely apt as Jabra’s literary and artistic interests take root and blossom. Here is a chronicle of the experiences and events he drew upon as he became one of the leading authors of the Arab world.

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The Footsteps of Israel

Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England

Andrew P. Scheil

University of Michigan Press, 2004

"This innovative, well-researched study looks at anti-Judaic rhetoric in the Old English and Latin texts of Anglo-Saxon England-a land lacking real Jews. The author isolates a common pool of inherited images for portraying the Jew, and teaches us to hear, especially in the vernacular, their increasingly dark and disturbing inflections." ---Roberta Frank, Yale University "The Footsteps of Israel is a fascinating study of a pervasive stereotype. Scheil's analysis of how Jews, with no real physical presence in Anglo-Saxon England, captured the imagination of writers of the period, is a superb achievement." ---Louise Mirrer, President and CEO, New-York Historical Society "The elegance of Scheil's prose weaves a unifying thread through the vast literary and historical tapestry he presents, moving with grace from Latin to Old English, from Bede to later authors, from Wordsworth and Blake to modern writers. He speaks elegantly of these texts' conversations with the past, and the Jews emerge as both enemies and spiritual antecedents of the 'New Israel' of Anglo-Saxon England." ---Stephen Spector, State University of New York, Stonybrook Jews are the omnipresent border-dwellers of medieval culture, a source of powerful metaphors active in the margins of medieval Christianity. This book outlines an important prehistory to later persecutions in England and beyond, yet it also provides a new understanding of the previously unrecognized roles Jews and Judaism played in the construction of social identity in early England. Andrew P. Scheil approaches the Anglo-Saxon understanding of Jews from a variety of directions, including a survey of the lengthy history of the ideology of England as the New Israel, its sources in late antique texts and its manifestation in both Old English and Latin texts from Anglo-Saxon England. In tandem with this perhaps more sympathetic understanding of the Jews is a darker vision of anti-Judaism, associating the Jews in an emotional fashion with the materiality of the body. In exploring the complex ramifications of this history, the author is the first to assemble and study references to Jews in Anglo-Saxon culture. For this reason, The Footsteps of Israel will be an important source for Anglo-Saxonists, scholars of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, scholars of medieval antisemitism in general, students of Jewish history, and medievalists interested in cultural studies.

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The Formation of a Modern Rabbi

The Life and Times of the Viennese Scholar and Preacher Adolf Jellinek

Samuel Joseph Kessler

SBL Press, 2022

An intellectual biography that critically engages Adolf Jellinek’s scholarship and communal activities

Adolf Jellinek (1821–1893), the Czech-born, German-educated, liberal chief rabbi of Vienna, was the most famous Jewish preacher in Central Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. As an innovative rhetorician, Jellinek helped mold and define the modern synagogue sermon into an instrument for expressing Jewish religious and ethical values for a new era. As a historian, he made groundbreaking contributions to the study of the Zohar and medieval Jewish mysticism. Jellinek was emblematic of rabbi-as-scholar-preacher during the earliest, formative years of communal synagogues as urban religious space. In a world that was rapidly losing the felt and remembered past of premodern Jewish society, the rabbi, with Jellinek as prime exemplar, took hold of the Sabbath sermon as an instrument to define and mold Judaism and Jewish values for a new world.

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The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate

Edited by Ruth Fredman Cernea

University of Chicago Press, 2005

Creation versus evolution. Nature versus nurture. Free will versus determinism. Every November at the University of Chicago, the best minds in the world consider the question that ranks with these as one of the most enduring of human history: latke or hamantash? This great latke-hamantash debate, occurring every year for the past six decades, brings Nobel laureates, university presidents, and notable scholars together to debate whether the potato pancake or the triangular Purim pastry is in fact the worthier food.

What began as an informal gathering is now an institution that has been replicated on campuses nationwide. Highly absurd yet deeply serious, the annual debate is an
opportunity for both ethnic celebration and academic farce. In poetry, essays, jokes, and revisionist histories, members of elite American academies attack the latke-versus-hamantash question with intellectual panache and an unerring sense of humor, if not chutzpah. The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate is the first collection of the best of these performances, from Martha Nussbaum's paean to both foods—in the style of Hecuba's Lament—to Nobel laureate Leon Lederman's proclamation on the union of the celebrated dyad. The latke and the hamantash are here revealed as playing a critical role in everything from Chinese history to the Renaissance, the works of Jane Austen to constitutional law.

Philosopher and humorist Ted Cohen supplies a wry foreword, while anthropologist Ruth Fredman Cernea provides historical and social context as well as an overview of the Jewish holidays, latke and hamantash recipes, and a glossary of Yiddish and Hebrew terms, making the book accessible even to the uninitiated. The University of Chicago may have split the atom in 1942, but it's still working on the equally significant issue of the latke versus the hamantash.

“As if we didn’t have enough on our plates, here’s something new to argue about. . . . To have to pick between sweet and savory, round and triangular, latke and hamantash. How to choose? . . . Thank goodness one of our great universities—Chicago, no less—is on the case. For more than 60 years, it has staged an annual latke-hamantash debate. . . . So, is this book funny? Of course it’s funny, even laugh-out-loud funny. It’s Mickey Katz in academic drag, Borscht Belt with a PhD.”—David Kaufmann, Forward

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The Guide of the Perplexed, Volume 1

Moses Maimonides

University of Chicago Press, 1963

The most authoritative translation of this classic work of Jewish thought

This monument of rabbinical exegesis written at the end of the twelfth century has exerted an immense and continuing influence upon Jewish thought. Its aim is to liberate people from the tormenting perplexities arising from their understanding of the Bible according only to its literal meaning. This edition contains extensive introductions by Shlomo Pines and Leo Strauss, a leading authority on Maimonides.

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The Guide of the Perplexed, Volume 2

Moses Maimonides

University of Chicago Press, 1963

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The Guide of the Perplexed

Complete in One Volume

Moses Maimonides

University of Chicago Press, 1963

The classic translation of this most important medieval Jewish text, presented in one volume for the first time.

The twelfth-century Judeo-Arabic text The Guide of the Perplexed is a monument of rabbinical exegesis and one of the most important works in the history of Jewish thought. Written by Moses ben Maimon,commonly known as Maimonides, the Guide aims to liberate people from the perplexities that arise from an understanding of the Bible based only on its literal meaning.

Shlomo Pines’s translation has served students and scholars for decades, and it is presented here, with Leo Strauss’s influential introduction, in one volume for the first time.

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The Hodayot (Thanksgiving Psalms)

A Study Edition of 1QHa

Eileen M. Schuller

SBL Press, 2012

1QHodayota is recognized as one of the most important of the Dead Sea Scrolls and key to understanding the specific worldview and piety of the Qumran community. It contains a collection of psalms giving thanks for deliverance, salvation, knowledge, and divine mercy. This volume contains the text of the reconstructed scroll of 1QHodayota published in Discoveries in the Judaean Desert volume 40 and the English translation from that volume, lightly revised. It provides the most up-to-date, accessible, and inexpensive access to the text, translation, and official numbering of the columns and lines of 1QHa.

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The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish

A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye

Barry Trachtenberg

Rutgers University Press, 2022

In the early 1930s in Berlin, Germany, a group of leading Eastern European Jewish intellectuals embarked upon a project to transform the lives of millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews around the world. Their goal was to publish a popular and comprehensive Yiddish language encyclopedia of general knowledge that would serve as a bridge to the modern world and as a guide to help its readers navigate their way within it. However, soon after the Algemeyne entsiklopedye (General Encyclopedia) was announced, Hitler’s rise to power forced its editors to flee to Paris. The scope and mission of the project repeatedly changed before its final volumes were published in New York City in 1966.

The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish untangles the complicated saga of the Algemeyne entsiklopedye and its editors. The editors continued to publish volumes and revise the encyclopedia’s mission while their primary audience, Eastern European Jews, faced persecution and genocide under Nazi rule, and the challenge of reestablishing themselves in the first decades after World War II. Historian Barry Trachtenberg reveals how, over the course of the middle decades of the twentieth century, the project sparked tremendous controversy in Jewish cultural and political circles, which debated what the purpose of a Yiddish encyclopedia should be, as well as what knowledge and perspectives it should contain. Nevertheless, this is not only a story about destruction and trauma, but also one of tenacity and continuity, as the encyclopedia’s compilers strove to preserve the heritage of Yiddish culture, to document its near-total extermination in the Holocaust, and to chart its path into the future.

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The Holocaust Averted

An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938-1967

Gurock, Jeffrey S

Rutgers University Press, 2015

The increasingly popular genre of “alternative histories” has captivated audiences by asking questions like “what if the South had won the Civil War?” Such speculation can be instructive, heighten our interest in a topic, and shed light on accepted history. In The Holocaust Averted, Jeffrey Gurock imagines what might have happened to the Jewish community in the United States if the Holocaust had never occurred and forces readers to contemplate how the road to acceptance and empowerment for today’s American Jews could have been harder than it actually was.

Based on reasonable alternatives grounded in what is known of the time, places, and participants, Gurock presents a concise narrative of his imagined war-time saga and the events that followed Hitler’s military failures. While German Jews did suffer under Nazism, the millions of Jews in Eastern Europe survived and were able to maintain their communities. Since few people were concerned with the safety of European Jews, Zionism never became popular in the United States and social antisemitism kept Jews on the margins of society. By the late 1960s, American Jewish communities were far from vibrant.

This alternate history—where, among many scenarios, Hitler is assassinated, Japan does not bomb Pearl Harbor, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt is succeeded after two terms by Robert A. Taft—does cause us to review and better appreciate history. As Gurock tells his tale, he concludes every chapter with a short section that describes what actually happened and, thus, further educates the reader.

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The Individual in History

Essays in Honor of Jehuda Reinharz

Edited by ChaeRan Y. Freeze, Sylvia Fuks Fried, and Eugene R. Sheppard

Brandeis University Press, 2015

Jehuda Reinharz, born in Haifa in 1944, spent his childhood in Israel and his adolescence in Germany, and moved with his family to the United States when he was seventeen. These three diverse geographies and the experiences they engendered shaped his formative years and the future of a prolific scholar who devoted his life to the study of the central role of leadership as Jews faced the challenges of emancipation and integration in Germany, the rise of modern antisemitism, the formation of Zionist youth culture and politics, and the transformation of Jewish politics in Palestine and the State of Israel. In this volume, eminent scholars in their respective fields extend the lines of Reinharz’s research interests and personal activism by focusing on the ideological, political, and scholarly contributions of a diverse range of individuals in Jewish history. Essays are clustered around five central themes: ideology and politics; statecraft; intellectual, social and cultural spheres; witnessing history; and in the academy. This volume offers a panoramic view of modern Jewish history through engaging essays that celebrate Reinharz’s rich contribution as a path-breaking and prolific scholar, teacher, and leader in the academy and beyond.

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The Jewish Middle Ages

Carol Bakhos

SBL Press, 2023

For many, the Middle Ages in general evokes a sense of the sinister and brings to mind a world of fear, superstition, and religious fanaticism. For Jews it was a period marked by persecutions, pogroms, and expulsions. Yet at the same time, the Middle Ages was also a time of lively cultural exchange and heightened creativity for Jews. In The Jewish Middle Ages, contributors explore the ways in which the stories of biblical women, including, Eve, Sarah, Hagar, Rebekah, Zipporah, Ruth, Esther, and Judith, make their way into the rich tapestry of medieval Jewish literature, mystical texts, and art, particularly in works emanating from Ashkenazic circles. Contributors include Carol Bakhos, Judith R. Baskin, Elisheva Baumgarten, Dagmar Börner-Klein, Constanza Cordoni, Rachel Elior, Meret Gutmann-Grün, Robert A. Harris, Yuval Katz-Wilfing, Sheila Tuller Keiter, Katrin Kogman-Appel, Gerhard Langer, Aurora Salvatierra Ossorio, and Felicia Waldman. These essays give us a glimpse into the role women played and the authority they assumed in medieval Jewish culture beyond the rabbinic centers of Palestine and Babylonia.

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The Jewish Radical Right

Revisionist Zionism and Its Ideological Legacy

Eran Kaplan

University of Wisconsin Press, 2005

The Jewish Radical Right is the first comprehensive analysis of Zionist Revisionist thought in the 1920s and 1930s, and of its ideological legacy in modern-day Israel. The Revisionists, under the leadership of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, offered a radical view of Jewish history and a revolutionary vision for its future. Using new archival material, Eran Kaplan examines the intellectual and cultural origins of the Zionist and Israeli Right, when Revisionism evolved into one of the most important movements in the Zionist camp. He presents revisionism as a form of integral nationalism, rooted in an ontological monism and intellectually related to the radical right-wing ideologies that flourished in the early twentieth century. Kaplan provocatively suggests that revisionism's legacies can be found both in the right-wing policies of Likud and in the heart of Post Zionism and its critique of mainstream (Labor) Zionism.

Published with support from the Koret Jewish Studies Program

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The Jewish Response to German Culture

From the Enlightenment to the Second World War

Jehuda Reinharz

Brandeis University Press, 1991

Seventeen scholars explore the interaction between a Jewish culture with its ancient heritage and an expansive German culture in the process of modernization.

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The Kingdoms of Israel and Judah in the Eighth and Seventh Centuries B.C.E.

Antoon Schoors

SBL Press, 2013

The period of Assyrian domination over Israel and Judah (ca. 750–650 B.C.E.) can be reconstructed with reasonable accuracy. For example, both biblical and extrabiblical records indicate that the northern kingdom (Israel) came to an end in 722 with the fall of Samaria, while several decades later Jerusalem, capital of the southern kingdom (Judah), narrowly escaped being taken by Sennacherib. The first half of the seventh century was dominated by Manasseh in Judah, who not only served his overlords the Assyrians but also practiced a bloody form of despotism. With regard to biblical literature, the eighth century was the period of Israel’s first great literary prophets: Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah. Other important texts, such as the Book of the Covenant, the early stories about the kings, the early forms of the patriarchal narratives in Genesis, and collections of proverbs, were either created or underwent profound editorial shaping during this time. This volume surveys the history of this formative period and presents a critical study of the biblical literature that originated within this historical context, as well as theological conclusions that readers may draw from these texts.

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The Last Consolation Vanished

The Testimony of a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz

Zalmen Gradowski

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A unique and haunting first-person Holocaust account by Zalmen Gradowski, a Sonderkommando prisoner killed in Auschwitz.

On October 7, 1944, a group of Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz obtained explosives and rebelled against their Nazi murderers. It was a desperate uprising that was defeated by the end of the day. More than four hundred prisoners were killed. Filling a gap in history, The Last Consolation Vanished is the first complete English translation and critical edition of one prisoner’s powerful account of life and death in Auschwitz, written in Yiddish and buried in the ashes near Crematorium III.

Zalmen Gradowski was in the Sonderkommando (special squad) at Auschwitz, a Jewish prisoner given the unthinkable task of ushering Jewish deportees into the gas chambers, removing their bodies, salvaging any valuables, transporting their corpses to the crematoria, and destroying all evidence of their murders. Sonderkommandos were forcibly recruited by SS soldiers; when they discovered the horror of their assignment, some of them committed suicide or tried to induce the SS to kill them. Despite their impossible situation, many Sonderkommandos chose to resist in two interlaced ways: planning an uprising and testifying. Gradowski did both, by helping to lead a rebellion and by documenting his experiences. Within 120 scrawled notebook pages, his accounts describe the process of the Holocaust, the relentless brutality of the Nazi regime, the assassination of Czech Jews, the relationships among the community of men forced to assist in this nightmare, and the unbearable separation and death of entire families, including his own. Amid daily unimaginable atrocities, he somehow wrote pages that were literary, sometimes even lyrical—hidden where and when one would least expect to find them.

The October 7th rebellion was completely crushed and Gradowski was killed in the process, but his testimony lives on. His extraordinary and moving account, accompanied by a foreword and afterword by Philippe Mesnard and Arnold I. Davidson, is a voice speaking to us from the past on behalf of millions who were silenced. Their story must be shared.

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The Law of God

The Philosophical History of an Idea

Rémi Brague

University of Chicago Press, 2007

The law of God: these words conjure an image of Moses breaking the tablets at Mount Sinai, but the history of the alliance between law and divinity is so much longer, and its scope so much broader, than a single Judeo-Christian scene can possibly suggest. In his stunningly ambitious new history, Rémi Brague goes back three thousand years to trace this idea of divine law in the West from prehistoric religions to modern times—giving new depth to today’s discussions about the role of God in worldly affairs.

Brague masterfully describes the differing conceptions of divine law in Judaic, Islamic, and Christian traditions and illuminates these ideas with a wide range of philosophical, political, and religious sources. In conclusion, he addresses the recent break in the alliance between law and divinity—when modern societies, far from connecting the two, started to think of law simply as the rule human community gives itself. Exploring what this disconnection means for the contemporary world, Brague—powerfully expanding on the project he began with The Wisdom of the World—re-engages readers in a millennia-long intellectual tradition, ultimately arriving at a better comprehension of our own modernity.

“Brague’s sense of intellectual adventure is what makes his work genuinely exciting to read. The Law of God offers a challenge that anyone concerned with today’s religious struggles ought to take up.”—Adam Kirsch, New York Sun

“Scholars and students of contemporary world events, to the extent that these may be viewed as a clash of rival fundamentalisms, will have much to gain from Brague’s study. Ideally, in that case, the book seems to be both an obvious primer and launching pad for further scholarship.”—Times Higher Education Supplement

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The Legend of the Middle Ages

Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam

Rémi Brague

University of Chicago Press, 2009

This volume presents a penetrating interview and sixteen essays that explore key intersections of medieval religion and philosophy. With characteristic erudition and insight, RémiBrague focuses less on individual Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thinkers than on their relationships with one another. Their disparate philosophical worlds, Brague shows, were grounded in different models of revelation that engendered divergent interpretations of the ancient Greek sources they held in common. So, despite striking similarities in their solutions for the philosophical problems they all faced, intellectuals in each theological tradition often viewed the others’ ideas with skepticism, if not disdain. Brague’s portrayal of this misunderstood age brings to life not only its philosophical and theological nuances, but also lessons for our own time.

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