Halakhah in the Making offers the first comprehensive study of the legal material found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and its significance in the greater history of Jewish religious law (halakhah).
Lila Corwin Berman asks why, over the course of the twentieth century, American Jews became increasingly fascinated, even obsessed, with explaining themselves to their non-Jewish neighbors.
This landmark contribution to ongoing debates about perceptions of the Jews in antiquity examines the attitudes of Greek writers of the Hellenistic period toward the Jewish people.
In this timely and compelling account of the contribution to immigrant rights made by religious activists in post-1965 and post-9/11 America, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo provides a comprehensive, close-up view of how Muslim, Christian, and Jewish groups are working to counter xenophobia.
Many years after making his way to America from Odessa in Soviet Ukraine, Emil Draitser made a startling discovery: every time he uttered the word "e;Jewish"e;-even in casual conversation-he lowered his voice.
The Crime of My Very Existence investigates a rarely considered yet critical dimension of anti-Semitism that was instrumental in the conception and perpetration of the Holocaust: the association of Jews with criminality.
Missing from most accounts of the modern history of Jews in Europe is the experience of what was once the largest Jewish community in the world-an oversight that Gershon David Hundert corrects in this history of Eastern European Jews in the eighteenth century.
Since Peter Stuyvesant greeted with enmity the first group of Jews to arrive on the docks of New Amsterdam in 1654, Jews have entwined their fate and fortunes with that of the United States-a project marked by great struggle and great promise.
In Todd Endelman's spare and elegant narrative, the history of British Jewry in the modern period is characterized by a curious mixture of prominence and inconspicuousness.
Blood contains extraordinary symbolic power in both Judaism and Christianity-as the blood of sacrifice, of Jesus, of the Jewish martyrs, of menstruation, and more.
The image of the Jewish child hiding from the Nazis was shaped by Anne Frank, whose house-the most visited site in the Netherlands- has become a shrine to the Holocaust.
This thought-provoking book, the first of its kind in the English language, reexamines the fifty-year-old nation of Israel in terms of its origins as a haven for a persecuted people and its evolution into a multi- cultural society.
Inspired by stories he heard in the West Bank as a child, Hillel Cohen uncovers a hidden history in this extraordinary and beautifully written book-a history central to the narrative of the Israel-Palestine conflict but for the most part willfully ignored until now.
This illuminating study explores a central but neglected aspect of modern Jewish history: the problem of abandoned Jewish wives, or agunes ("e;chained wives"e;)-women who under Jewish law could not obtain a divorce-and of the men who deserted them.
Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) is widely regarded today as one of the most original and intellectually challenging figures within the so-called renaissance of German-Jewish thought in the Weimar period.
Adventures in Yiddishland examines the transformation of Yiddish in the six decades since the Holocaust, tracing its shift from the language of daily life for millions of Jews to what the author terms a postvernacular language of diverse and expanding symbolic value.
Drawing from engrossing survivors' accounts, many never before published, The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943 recounts a heroic yet little-known chapter in Holocaust history.
A surprising number of Jews lived, literally and figuratively, "e;beyond the Pale"e; of Jewish Settlement in tsarist Russia during the half-century before the Revolution of 1917.
In this lively and intellectually engaging book, Galit Hasan-Rokem shows that religion is shaped not only in the halls of theological disputation and institutions of divine study, but also in ordinary events of everyday life.
In a work that challenges notions that have dominated New Testament scholarship for more than a hundred years, Israel Knohl gives startling evidence for a messianic precursor to Jesus who is described as the "e;Suffering Servant"e; in recently published fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In this thoughtful and penetrating study, Sara Raup Johnson investigates the creation of historical fictions in a wide range of Hellenistic Jewish texts.
Hannah Rochel Verbermacher, a Hasidic holy woman known as the Maiden of Ludmir, was born in early-nineteenth-century Russia and became famous as the only woman in the three-hundred-year history of Hasidism to function as a rebbe-or charismatic leader-in her own right.
In this bold rereading of Freud's cultural texts, Diane Jonte-Pace uncovers an undeveloped "e;counterthesis,"e; one that repeatedly interrupts or subverts his well-known Oedipal masterplot.
Diaspora, considered as a context for insights into Jewish identity, brings together a lively, interdisciplinary group of scholars in this innovative volume.
This book makes an illuminating contribution to one of Christianity's central problems: the understanding and interpretation of scripture, and more specifically, the relationship between the Old Testament and the New.
Although closely focused on the remarkable Hebrew First-Crusade narratives, Robert Chazan's new interpretation of these texts is anything but narrow, as his title, God, Humanity, and History, strongly suggests.
In Living Letters of the Law, Jeremy Cohen investigates the images of Jews and Judaism in the works of medieval Christian theologians from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas.
With this heady exploration of time and space, rumors and silence, colors, tastes, and ideas, Robert Bonfil recreates the richness of Jewish life in Renaissance Italy.
The essays in this volume highlight the multiple perspectives on Paradise from Second Temple Judaism and Christian origins to Augustine and rabbinic literature.
An essential biography of one of the Bible's most powerful and inspiring booksExodus is the second book of the Hebrew Bible, but it may rank first in lasting cultural importance.
