Slavery and the jews of medieval egypt

A new global history of the slave trade, the lives of enslaved people, and the role of slavery in the formation of Jewish and Arab-Islamic culture in the medieval Middle EastIn this book, Craig Perry mines a remarkable cache of fragmentary documents preserved in an Egyptian synagogue to write a n...

Reading herzl in beirut

How the Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center informed the PLO’s relationship to Zionism and IsraelIn September 1982, the Israeli military invaded West Beirut and Israel-allied Lebanese militiamen massacred Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Meanwhile, Israeli forces...

Recipes for the melting pot

Recipes for the Melting Pot tells the remarkable story of The Settlement Cook Book, demonstrating how it shaped Jewish American identity—and was in turn shaped by generations of Jewish women.

The jewish body

An encyclopedic survey of the Jewish body as it has existed and as it has been imagined from biblical times to the presentThat the human body can be the object not only of biological study but also of historical consideration and cultural criticism is now widely accepted. But why, Robert Jütte as...

The new jewish canon

The New Jewish Canon is both text and textbook of the Jewish intellectual and communal zeitgeist for the contemporary period. With both primary sources and analytical essays by leading scholars, this book offers a conceptual roadmap to make sense of the mass production and proliferation of new Je...

Thunder in the soul

Like the Hebrew prophets before him, the great American rabbi and civil rights leader reveals God’s concern for this world and each of us.Abraham Joshua Heschel, descended from a long line of Orthodox rabbis, fled Europe to escape the Nazis. He made the insights of traditional Jewish spirituality...

Critical theories of anti-semitism

This book is at once a philosophical reflection on key problems in the analysis of anti-Semitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists.

German-jewish history in modern times

A comprehensive historical survey of the Jewish presence in Central Europe from the seventeenth century to the Holocaust, German-Jewish History in Modern Times is a four-volume collective project by a team of leading scholars, offering a vivid portrait of Jewish History. The series is sponsored b...

A philosophical retrospective

As a young lecturer in philosophy and the eldest son of a prominent Jewish family, Alan Montefiore faced two very different understandings of his identity: the more traditional view that an identity such as his carried with it, as a matter of given fact, certain duties and obligations, and an opp...

Who made early christianity?

A revisionist history of the split between Jews and Christians and the role of Paul in fostering animosity between them.

Zion and state

This new and expanded edition of Zion and State includes a new preface and a new essay, "Between Revolution and Normalcy."

The duplicity of philosophy's shadow

Elliot R. Wolfson intervenes in the debate over Martin Heidegger and Nazism from a unique perspective, as a scholar of Jewish mysticism and philosophy who has been profoundly influenced by Heidegger’s work. He reveals crucial aspects of Heidegger’s thinking that betray an affinity with dimensions...

Broken tablets

Over thirty years, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida conversed across texts about the interrelation of philosophy, religion and literature. In Broken Tablets, Sarah Hammerschlag traces that conversation and argues for its political significance, highlighting the role that Judaism played in the...

Mobile modernity

Though the history of the German railway system is often associated with the transportation of Jews to labor and death camps, Todd Presner looks instead to the completion of the first German railway lines and their role in remapping the cultural geography and intellectual history of Germany's Jew...

Static forms

Shir Alon develops a new theory of the emergence of modernist literary forms through a series of parallel readings of Arabic and Hebrew prose.

Jewish property claims against arab countries

In the twenty years that followed the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, 800,000 Jews left their homes in Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Morocco, and several other Arab countries. Although the causes of this exodus varied, restrictive governmental measures and an outburst of anti-Semitic feeling during...

The sacred and film

This book about the transcendent cinema of Darren Aronofsky takes the reader on a journey through the selected filmography of this outstanding American director.

The sensual god

A humorous and enlightening look at the trouble religious thinkers got into as they struggled to make peace with God’s sensuality.

The holocaust in central european literatures and cultures

Relating the Holocaust to poetic and aesthetic phenomena has often been considered taboo, as only authentic testimony, documents, or at least 'unliterary', prosaic approaches were seen as appropriate. However, from the very beginning of Holocaust literature and culture, there were tendencies towa...

Jews and the american religious landscape

Jews and the American Religious Landscape explores major complementary facets of American Judaism and Jewish life through a comprehensive analysis of contemporary demographic and sociological data. The volume adds empirical value to questions concerning the strengths of Jews as a religious and cu...

Creating judaism

How can we define "Judaism," and what are the common threads uniting ancient rabbis, Maimonides, the authors of the Zohar, and modern secular Jews in Israel? Michael L. Satlow offers a fresh perspective on Judaism that recognizes both its similarities and its immense diversity. Presenting snapsho...

Open secret

Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994) was the seventh and seemingly last Rebbe of the Habad-Lubavitch dynasty. Marked by conflicting tendencies, Schneerson was a radical messianic visionary who promoted a conservative political agenda, a reclusive contemplative who built a hasidic sect into an in...

Wrestling with the angel

Wrestling with the Angel is a meditation on contemporary political, legal, and social theory from a psychoanalytic perspective

Parting ways

Judith Butler follows Edward Said's late suggestion that through a consideration of Palestinian dispossession in relation to Jewish diasporic traditions a new ethos can be forged for a one-state solution. Butler engages Jewish philosophical positions to articulate a critique of political Zionism ...

The arab and jewish questions

This book brings together leading scholars to consider how the “Jewish Question” and the “Arab Question” are entangled historically and in the present day. It offers critical analyses of Arab engagements with the question of Jewish rights alongside Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish considerations of...

The question of the animal and religion

Through an absorbing investigation into recent, high-profile scandals involving one of the largest kosher slaughterhouses in the world, located unexpectedly in Postville, Iowa, Aaron S. Gross makes a powerful case for elevating the category of the animal in the study of religion. Major theorists ...

Shakespeare and the jews

A new edition of the groundbreaking book that took full measure of how Jews were imagined in Shakespeare’s time.

Jews against prejudice

America's dark history of anti-Semitism, racism, and ethnic bigotry—and many of the efforts to combat such prejudice—has received growing attention in recent years. Yet one of the most important stories in America's struggle to overcome ethnic and religious hatred has gone largely untold. From th...

Judaism in america

Jews have been a religious and cultural presence in America since the colonial era, and the community of Jews in the United States today—some six million people—continues to make a significant contribution to the American religious landscape. Emphasizing developments in American Judaism in the la...

A modern heretic and a traditional community

Metaphysics of the profane

Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem are regarded as two of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. Together they produced a dynamic body of ideas that has had a lasting impact on the study of religion, philosophy, and literary criticism.Drawing from Benjamin's and Scholem's...

When the state winks

When the State Winks traces the performance of state-endorsed Orthodox conversion in Israel. Michal Kravel-Tovi complicates the popular perception that it is a "wink-wink" relationship in which both sides agree to treat pretenses of faith as real, developing new ways to think about the connection...

To the end of the earth

In 1981, while working as New Mexico State Historian, Stanley M. Hordes began to hear stories of Hispanos who lit candles on Friday night and abstained from eating pork. Puzzling over the matter, Hordes realized that these practices might very well have been passed down through the centuries from...