A history of judaism

A sweeping history of Judaism over more than three millenniaJudaism has preserved its distinctive identity despite the extraordinarily diverse forms and beliefs it has embodied through the centuries. Martin Goodman provides a comprehensive look at how this great religion came to be, how it has ev...

A house unlocked

A story of jewish experience in mississippi

In this memoir, Waldoff searches into his Russian–Jewish parents’ experience and that of the Jewish community in Hattiesburg from the 1920s through the 1960s, revealing times of acceptance and prosperity, but also of fears of anti-Semitism when a Jew is convicted of murder and fears of Klan viole...

Advancing the learning agenda in jewish education

This volume is the first of its kind to bring together scholars from inside Jewish education and from the learning sciences to address core elements of Jewish education: its desired outcomes, the kinds of learning needed to achieve these, and how those kinds of learning actually occur.

After one-hundred-and-twenty

A deeply personal look at death, mourning, and the afterlife in Jewish traditionAfter One-Hundred-and-Twenty provides a richly nuanced and deeply personal look at Jewish attitudes and practices regarding death, mourning, and the afterlife as they have existed and evolved from biblical times to to...

American jewbu

A revealing look at the Jewish American encounter with BuddhismToday, many Jewish Americans are embracing a dual religious identity, practicing Buddhism while also staying connected to their Jewish roots. This book tells the story of Judaism's encounter with Buddhism in the United States, showing...

Antisemitism today and tomorrow

This book analyzes the two major trends in antisemitism today. Old antisemitism, based in religious and racist prejudices, has resurfaced in the wake of weakening nation states in a globalized world. "New" antisemitism, or the antisemitic narrativization of Israel, has grown in the shadow of the ...

Ashkenazi

From a prize-winning historian, the first comprehensive narrative history of Ashkenazi Jews: their culture, their religion, their daily lives, and their many migrationsCovering two millennia of history, from late antiquity to the twentieth century, this landmark volume by an eminent historian tra...

Being a nation state in the twenty-first century

Since the founding of the Zionist movement until today, the question of the relationship between “Church” and the state remains unresolved. This book is the historical and contemporary story of this conflict. It is impossible to understand the State of Israel properly without reading it.

Blooming spaces

Debora Vogel (1900-1942) wrote in Yiddish unlike anyone else. Yiddish, her fourth language after Polish, Hebrew, and German, became the central vehicle for her modernist experiments in poetry and prose. This ground-breaking collection presents the work of the key yet unrecognized figure in the co...

Catholic spectacle and rome's jews

A new investigation that shows how conversionary preaching to Jews was essential to the early modern Catholic Church and the Roman religious landscapeStarting in the sixteenth century, Jews in Rome were forced, every Saturday, to attend a hostile sermon aimed at their conversion. Harshly policed,...

Christ in celtic christianity

A new interpretation of Celtic Christianity, supported by images of Christ taken from manuscripts, metalwork and sculpture, and showing how it departed from continental practice largely due to a differing perception and application of Pelagianism.Christ in Celtic Christianity gives a new interpre...

Christian supremacy

A panoramic cultural and legal history that traces the roots of antisemitism and racism to early Christian theologySince the earliest days of Christianity, theologians expressed pervasive anxiety about Jews as equal members of society, and, with European expansion in the early modern period, that...

Closed doors, open minds

For some twenty years from the late 1960s, and thereafter following a brief pause, representatives of British Jewry’s religious orientations held closed-door meetings at the Chief Rabbi’s residence in attempts to bridge their communal and halachic differences. This volume explores their often fie...

Coming of age in medieval egypt

Much of what we know about life in the medieval Islamic Middle East comes from texts written to impart religious ideals or to chronicle the movements of great men. How did women participate in the societies these texts describe? What about non-Muslims, whose own religious traditions descended par...

Conversations with colleagues

Sixteen senior scholars of American Jewish history—among the men and women whose work and advocacy have moved their discipline into the mainstream of academia—converse on the intellectual and personal roads they have traveled in becoming leaders in their areas of expertise. Through their thoughtf...

Dialectic of separation

Drawing on both published and on unpublished sources, this volume offers the first-ever comprehensive reconstruction of Salomon Munk’s life and work, competently restores Munk to the pantheon of Wissenschaft scholars, and sheds fresh light on the emergence of the academic field of Jewish philosophy.

From antisemitism to anti-zionism

In fourteen chapters, leading scholars use the lenses of history, sociology, political science, psychology, philosophy, religion, and literature to examine, disentangle, and remove the disguises of the many forms of antisemitism and anti-Zionism that have inhabited or targeted the English-speakin...

From darkness to light

A compilation of personal testimonies of six Holocaust survivors. Amid their immense pain and suffering, they overcame every hurdle they encountered and realized their dream to live in Israel. Their love for Israel and their creation of families embody children, grandchildren, and great-grandchil...

Gendered violence

This is the first book to recognize and address the problem of mass rape of Jewish women during the pogroms in Ukraine during the Civil War (1917-1921).

Hasidism

A must-read book for understanding this vibrant and influential modern Jewish movementHasidism originated in southeastern Poland, in mystical circles centered on the figure of Israel Ba’al Shem Tov, but it was only after his death in 1760 that a movement began to spread. Today, Hasidism is witnes...

Hasidism and modern man

Hasidism, a controversial, mystical-religious movement of Eastern European origin, has posed a serious challenge to mainstream Judaism from its earliest beginnings in the middle of the eighteenth century. Decimated by the Holocaust, it has risen like a phoenix from the ashes and has reconstituted...

How judaism became a religion

A new approach to understanding Jewish thought since the eighteenth centuryIs Judaism a religion, a culture, a nationality—or a mixture of all of these? In How Judaism Became a Religion, Leora Batnitzky boldly argues that this question more than any other has driven modern Jewish thought since th...

How rabbis became experts

How rabbinic expertise was socially constructed, performed, and defended in Roman PalestineAt the turn of the common era, the Jewish communities of Roman Palestine saw the organization of a small group of literate Jewish men who devoted their lives to the interpretation and teaching of their sacr...

I, wandering jew

Combining history, detective story, and memoir, a surprising and revealing account of the antisemitic myth of “the Wandering Jew”The story behind the mythical figure of “the Wandering Jew” is one of the most fascinating tales in European history. In I, Wandering Jew, National Jewish Book Award–wi...

Immigrant baggage

From a bilingual master of the literary memoir comes this moving and humorous story of losing immigrant baggage and trying to reclaim it for his American future.

Inheriting abraham

How Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have reimagined Abraham in their own imagesJews, Christians, and Muslims supposedly share a common religious heritage in the patriarch Abraham, and the idea that he should serve only as a source of unity among the three traditions has become widespread in both...

Jewish questions

In Jewish Questions, Matt Goldish introduces English readers to the history and culture of the Sephardic dispersion through an exploration of forty-three responsa--questions about Jewish law that Jews asked leading rabbis, and the rabbis' responses. The questions along with their rabbinical decis...

Jews and the qur'an

A compelling book that casts the Qur’anic encounter with Jews in an entirely new lightIn this panoramic and multifaceted book, Meir Bar-Asher examines how Jews and Judaism are depicted in the Qur’an and later Islamic literature, providing needed context to those passages critical of Jews that are...

Jews and their roman rivals

How encounters with the Roman Empire compelled the Jews of antiquity to rethink their conceptions of Israel and the TorahThroughout their history, Jews have lived under a succession of imperial powers, from Assyria and Babylonia to Persia and the Hellenistic kingdoms. Jews and Their Roman Rivals ...

Judaism in practice

This collection of original materials provides a sweeping view of medieval and early modern Jewish ritual and religious practice. Including such diverse texts as ritual manuals, legal codes, mystical books, autobiographical writings, folk literature, and liturgical poetry, it testifies to the eno...

Maimonides in his world

While the great medieval philosopher, theologian, and physician Maimonides is acknowledged as a leading Jewish thinker, his intellectual contacts with his surrounding world are often described as related primarily to Islamic philosophy. Maimonides in His World challenges this view by revealing hi...

Maryam jameelah and the global muslim imagination

The life and work of an American Jewish convert to Islam who became a leading voice of the global Islamic Revival, explored through the lens of emotion in transnational religious identityMaryam Jameelah (1934–2012)—born Margaret Marcus in White Plains, New York—followed an unlikely journey, from ...

Messianism in medieval jewish thought

How did medieval Jewish scholars, from Saadia Gaon to Yitzhak Abravanel, imagine a world that has experienced salvation? What is the nature of reality in the days of the Messiah? This work explores reactions to the seductive promises of apocalyptic teachings, tracing their fluctuations between in...

Modern orthodoxy in american judaism

Modern Orthodoxy went from being a threatened entity on the American scene to a well-recognized and respected force in Judaism. This is the story of the renaissance of American Modern Orthodoxy, the story of invigoration and change.

Muslims and jews in france

This book traces the global, national, and local origins of the conflict between Muslims and Jews in France, challenging the belief that rising anti-Semitism in France is rooted solely in the unfolding crisis in Israel and Palestine. Maud Mandel shows how the conflict in fact emerged from process...

New directions in the history of the jews in the polish lands

Making use of the leading scholars in the field from Poland, Western Europe, North America and Israel, the volume provides a definitive overview of the history and culture of one of the most important communities in the long history of the Jewish people.

Print to fit

Ever since Adolph Ochs purchased The New York Times in 1896, its enduring masthead motto - “All The News That’s Fit To Print” – has become news that fits Times' discomfort with the idea, and since 1948 the reality, of a thriving democratic Jewish state in the historic homeland of the Jewish peopl...

Professor of apocalypse

The controversial Jewish thinker whose tortured path led him into the heart of twentieth-century intellectual lifeScion of a distinguished line of Talmudic scholars, Jacob Taubes (1923–1987) was an intellectual impresario whose inner restlessness led him from prewar Vienna to Zurich, Israel, and ...

Resurrecting the jew

An in-depth look at why non-Jewish Poles are trying to bring Jewish culture back to life in Poland todaySince the early 2000s, Poland has experienced a remarkable Jewish revival, largely driven by non-Jewish Poles with a passionate new interest in all things Jewish. Klezmer music, Jewish-style re...