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...

Maimonides’ grand epistle to the scholars of lunel

Scholars in Lunel corresponded with Maimonides regarding various decisions in his Mishneh Torah (Code).  Maimonides’ rejoinder opened with an unusual rhymed prose epistle, translated and annotated here for the first time by Charles H. Sheer. The author explores Maimonides’ letter in the context o...

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...

The bible, the talmud, and the new testament

Born in Slutzk, Russia, in 1805, Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik is a largely forgotten member of the prestigious Soloveitchik rabbinic dynasty. Before Hayyim Soloveitchik developed the standard Brisker method of Talmudic study, or Joseph Dov Soloveitchik helped to found American Modern Orthodox Judaism,...

Daughter of the shtetl

Daughter of the Shtetl is an unusual memoir by an uneducated but sharply observant Jewish woman. Through the eyes of Doba-Mera, we experience the class divisions in shtetl and synagogue; pogroms and wars; working conditions in sewing shops; revolutionary circles around 1905; as well as aspects of...

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).

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...

Sin•a•gogue

This volume presents the concepts of sin and failure in Jewish thought, weaving together biblical and rabbinic studies to reveal a holistic portrait of the notion of sin and failure within Jewish thought.

Judaism’s challenge

This book highlights the challenges that face Judaism, captured by the dual implication of election: divine love and enmity with others. This challenge takes on great urgency in the context of advances in interfaith relations and a contemporary Jewish theology of world religions.

Rabbi joseph dov soloveitchik on the experience of prayer

Through a careful reading of R. Soloveitchik’s texts dealing with this topic, the book follows the consciousness of prayer across its various stages until maturity, starting with an analysis of Worship of the Heart, through to Reflections on the Amidah and other writings.

Piety and rebellion

Piety and Rebellion examines the span of the Hasidic textual tradition from its earliest phases to the 20th century. The essays collected in this volume focus on the tension between Hasidic fidelity to tradition and its rebellious attempt to push the devotional life beyond the borders of conventi...

Making bodies kosher

Integrates archival and ethnographic material to explore healthcare concerns over time  Original study of Haredi Jews in the UK, whereas most focus on Israel or the USA  Explores the continuum of maternity care & child health in a ‘hard to reach’ minority

The banality of heidegger

Jean-Luc Nancy provides an analysis of the anti-Semitic aspects of Heidegger’s recently published Black Notebooks. Nancy refers to a philosophical or “historial” anti-Semitism marked, nonetheless, by the “banality” of ordinary anti-Semitism pervading Europe. Heidegger’s thought is placed in the b...

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...

The talmud

The life and times of an enduring work of Jewish spiritualityThe Babylonian Talmud, a postbiblical Jewish text that is part scripture and part commentary, is an unlikely bestseller. Written in a hybrid of Hebrew and Aramaic, it is often ambiguous to the point of incomprehension, and its subject m...

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.

Women of the gilte legende

The first modern translation of one of the most influential books to come from the middle ages.The Gilte Legende was widely read as a model for everyday life, including the education of women through examples set by early Christian martyrs. This book divides the lives of female saints into: the "...

With my shadow

“There is an air of earnestness and sincerity about [Domin’s] poems—they don’t perform linguistic tricks . . . They are highly specific, idiosyncratic, and beautifully ordinary. Reading her, one is filled with a sense of natural wonder . . . Kafatou, who knew Domin, has sympathetically rendered a...

The closed book

A groundbreaking reinterpretation of early Judaism, during the millennium before the study of the Bible took center stageEarly Judaism is often described as the religion of the book par excellence—a movement built around the study of the Bible and steeped in a culture of sacred bookishness that e...

Old truths and new clichés

From the Nobel Prize–winning writer, a new collection of literary and personal essaysOld Truths and New Clichés collects nineteen essays—most of them previously unpublished in English—by Isaac Bashevis Singer on topics that were central to his artistic vision throughout an astonishing and prolifi...

Onto center stage

The Biblical narrative is usually very terse and cryptic. Over the millennia, Jewish scholars often painted a patriarchal picture with women ‘in their place’. This book puts these women—some are role models—into the context of an ancient society, bringing them imaginatively from the sidelines o...

Reclaiming the wicked son

This book takes the ideas of six well-known secular Jewish philosophers and views them through the lens of Jewish thought, thereby understanding their writings as part of the Jewish intellectual tradition.

Creation and the persistence of evil

This paperback edition brings to a wide audience one of the most innovative and meaningful models of God for this post-Auschwitz era. In a thought-provoking return to the original Hebrew conception of God, which questions accepted conceptions of divine omnipotence, Jon Levenson defines God's auth...

Reorienting the east

The first comprehensive investigation of premodern Jewish travel writing about the Islamic worldReorienting the East explores the Islamic world as it was encountered, envisioned, and elaborated by Jewish travelers from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. The first comprehensive investigat...

Jesus in the talmud

Scattered throughout the Talmud, the founding document of rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity, can be found quite a few references to Jesus--and they're not flattering. In this lucid, richly detailed, and accessible book, Peter Schäfer examines how the rabbis of the Talmud read, understood, and us...

The rise and fall of the jewish gangster in america

This book tracks the rise and fall of an underworld culture that bred some of America's greatest racketeers, bootleggers, gamblers, and professional killers, examining the careers of such high-profile figures as Meyer Lansky and Benjamin Bugsy Siegel.

The columbia history of jews and judaism in america

This is the first anthology in more than half a century to offer fresh insight into the history of Jews and Judaism in America. Beginning with six chronological survey essays, the collection builds with twelve topical essays focusing on a variety of important themes in the American Jewish and Jud...

A confiscated memory

Yfaat Weiss tells the story of an Arab neighborhood in Haifa that later acquired iconic status in Israeli memory. In the summer of 1959, Jewish immigrants from Morocco rioted against local and national Israeli authorities of European origin. The protests of Wadi Salib generated for the first time...

Jews in post-war wrocław and l'viv

Izabela Kazejak examines the process of re-establishing Jewish communities in two cities: Wrocław, which passed from Germany to Poland in 1945, and L’viv, which passed from Poland to Soviet Ukraine.

The jews of the middle east and north africa in modern times

Despite considerable research on the Jewish diaspora in the Middle East and North Africa since 1800, there has until now been no comprehensive synthesis that illuminates both the differences and commonalities in Jewish experience across a range of countries and cultures. This lacuna in both Jewis...

Tears of history

Pierre Birnbaum offers a timely reconsideration of the tear-stained pages of Jewish history and the persistence of antisemitism.

Hebrew

Keren Mock provides a strikingly original multidisciplinary account of the transformation of Hebrew from an ancient sacred tongue to a secular spoken language.

New york’s yiddish theater

In the early decades of the twentieth century, a vibrant theatrical culture took shape on New York City's Lower East Side. Original dramas, comedies, musicals, and vaudeville, along with sophisticated productions of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov, were innovatively staged for crowds that rivaled...

My ukraine

A collection of Leonid Finberg's writings and a testament to his reflections on culture, history, and the present.

Beginner's ladino with online audio

Longing and belonging

This volume explores the history of Jewish life and experience in the modern Islamic worldLonging and Belonging investigates the lives of Jews among Muslims in the modern age, both inside and outside the Ottoman Empire and after its demise. Here, modern Jewish protagonists are revealed as active ...

Boycott, divestment, sanctions

As international awareness of the apartheid nature of Israel grows, Omar Barghouti offers a manifesto for winning Palestinian civil rights.

The posthumous landscape

A photographic tribute that highlights the stories behind remnants of Jewish communal life in post-war Poland, western Ukraine, Lithuania, and Latvia.In 1992 Canadian documentary filmmaker and photographer David Kaufman travelled to Poland to produce a television program about hidden child surviv...

A doctor’s memoir of the romanian holocaust

Based on notes kept while incarcerated in the concentration camps and ghettos of Transnistria, Dr. Kessler's gripping Holocaust memoir tells a story of calculated murder, resistance, and survival.In the aftermath of the Romanian Holocaust, Transnistria, a little-known region north of Odessa, betw...

The false prophets of peace

This critique of Left Zionism argues a Jewish-only state cannot offer peace or justice for Palestinians

Resisting persecution