Jewish Studies

Against the gloomy forecast of "The Vanishing Diaspora", the end of the second millennium saw the global emergence of a dazzling array of Jewish cultural initiatives, institutional modalities, and individual practices. These "Jewish Revival" and "Jewish...

It is easy to dismiss advertising as simply the background chatter of modern life, often annoying, sometimes hilarious, and ultimately meaningless. But Kerri P. Steinberg argues that a careful study of the history of advertising can reveal a wealth of...

A constant feature of Jewish culture in the medieval Mediterranean was the dedication of panegyric texts in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and other languages to men of several ranks: scholars, communal leaders, courtiers, merchants, patrons, and poets. Although...

Noted historian Pierre Anctil takes a deep dive into editorials devoted to Jews and Judaism in Quebec's daily Le Devoir in the first half of the twentieth century. Long one of the most discussed historiographical issues in Canadian Jewish history, these...

This is a new edition of a classic and highly controversial book that examines the history and consequences of Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. It is essential reading for anyone who wants a full understanding of the way religious extremism has affected...

A philosophical case against religious violenceWe live in an age beset by religiously inspired violence. Terms such as "holy war" are the stock-in-trade of the evening news. But what is the relationship between holiness and violence? Can acts such as...

Humor is the most celebrated of all Jewish responses to modernity. In this book, Ruth Wisse evokes and applauds the genius of spontaneous Jewish joking--as well as the brilliance of comic masterworks by writers like Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac...

Not in the Heavens traces the rise of Jewish secularism through the visionary writers and thinkers who led its development. Spanning the rich history of Judaism from the Bible to today, David Biale shows how the secular tradition these visionaries...

Albert Einstein was initially skeptical and even disdainful of the Zionist movement, yet he affiliated himself with this controversial political ideology and today is widely seen as an outspoken advocate for a modern Jewish homeland in Palestine. What...

Through moving interviews with five ordinary people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, Kristen Monroe casts new light on a question at the heart of ethics: Why do people risk their lives for strangers and what drives such moral choice? Monroe's...

Nineteenth-century Europe saw an unprecedented rise in the number of synagogues. Building a Public Judaism considers what their architecture and the circumstances surrounding their construction reveal about the social progress of modern European Jews...

Ruth R. Wisse is a leading scholar of Yiddish and Jewish literary studies and one of our most fearless public intellectuals on issues relating to Jewish society and culture. In this celebratory volume, Wisse's colleagues pay tribute to her with a...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780615808321Author Barbara Katzenstein JimenezFormat HardbackPage Count 356Imprint Gefen BooksPublisher Gefen BooksWeight(grams) 4074g

More than fifty years after it ended, the Holocaust continues to leave survivors and their descendants, as well as historians, philosophers, and theologians, searching for words to convey the enormity of that event. Efforts to express its realities and...

Following the rise of Islam, many Jewish communities lived in predominantly Muslim lands. Muslim-Jewish co-existence was not seriously challenged until the modern period when European colonialism and the emergence of Zionism and Arab nationalism led to...

The Holocaust took place far from the United States and involved few Americans, yet rather than receding, this event has assumed a greater significance in the American consciousness with the passage of time. As a window into the process whereby the...

Archaeology and Bible--two simple terms, often used together, understood by everybody. But are they understood properly? If so, why are both subject to such controversy? And what can archaeology contribute to our understanding of the Bible? These are the...

A Sephardi Sea tells the story of Jews from the southern shore of the Mediterranean who, between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, migrated from their country of birth for Europe, Israel, and beyond. It is a story that explores their contrasting memories...

The fiction of Nobel Laureate Shmuel Yosef Agnon is the foundation of the array of scholarly essays as seen through the career of Alan Mintz, visionary scholar and professor of Jewish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Mintz...

Nitzan Lebovic claims that political melancholy is the defining trait of a generation of Israelis born between the 1960s and 1990s. This cohort came of age during wars, occupation and intifada, cultural conflict, and the failure of the Oslo Accords. The...

Jewish anarchism has long been marginalized in histories of anarchist thought and action. Anna Elena Torres and Kenyon Zimmer edit a collection of essays which recovers many aspects of this erased tradition. Contributors bring to light the presence and...

Taking S. An-sky's expeditions to the Pale of Jewish Settlement as its point of departure, the volume explores the dynamic and many-sided nature of ethnographic knowledge and the long and complex history of the production and consumption of Jewish folk...

The Hebrew word zimzum originally means “contraction,” “withdrawal,” “retreat,” “limitation,” and “concentration.” In Kabbalah, zimzum is a term for God’s self-limitation, done before creating the world to create the world. Jewish mystic Isaac Luria...

A fascinating glimpse into the complex and often unexpected ways that women and ideas about women shaped widely read Jewish newspapers Between the 1880s and 1920s, Yiddish-language newspapers rose from obscurity to become successful institutions...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9783447058087Author Elvira GrozingerFormat HardbackPage Count 268Imprint HarrassowitzPublisher HarrassowitzWeight(grams) 6529g

An overview of the history of American Jewry using primary sources from Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States Jews Across the Americas is a groundbreaking sourcebook capturing the historical diversity and cultural breadth of...

Examines the social and political history of the Jews of Miskolc-the third largest Jewish community in Hungary-and presents the wider transformation of Jewish identity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It explores the emergence of a...

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...

Singing the Land: Hebrew Music and Early Zionism in America examines the proliferation and use of popular Hebrew Zionist music amongst American Jewry during the first half of the twentieth century. This music—one part in a greater process of instilling...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780853037156Author Jack KaganFormat PaperbackPage Count 287Imprint Vallentine Mitchell & Co LtdPublisher Vallentine Mitchell & Co Ltd

What Jewish history and wisdom teach us about coping with worry. Michele Klein brings her training in psychology and love of all things Jewish to the notion of worry-the normal, everyday angst that we all feel to varying degrees. She explores the ways...

A scholarly and thought-provoking work that places Jewish humor at the center of a discourse about Jewish and German relations through most of the twentieth century. At Wit's End explores the fascinating discourse on Jewish wit in the twentieth century...

This book tells the story of a Jewish Studies that hasn't fully happened-at least not yet. Newton asks what we mean when we say "Jewish Studies"-and when we imagine it not as mere amalgam but as a project. Jewish Studies offers a unique...

This book tells the story of a Jewish Studies that hasn't fully happened-at least not yet. Newton asks what we mean when we say "Jewish Studies"-and when we imagine it not as mere amalgam but as a project. Jewish Studies offers a unique...

In these pages Jonathan Boyarin invites us to share the intimate life of the Stanton Street Shul, one of the last remaining Jewish congregations on New York's historic Lower East Side. This narrow building, wedged into a lot designed for an old-law...

At the core of Judaism stands a body of traditions that have remained consistent over millennia. Yet, the practice of these rituals has varied widely across historical and cultural contexts. In Judaism in Transition, Carmel U. Chiswick draws on her...

Feminist theories maintain that gender issues are a ubiquitous component of our lives, intersecting with every aspect of the society in which we live and interact. Because the feminist debate has included questions important to Jewish discourse,...

Despite consensus about the importance of multigenerational analysis for studying the long-term impact of immigration, most studies in Israel have focused on the integration of first-generation migrants, neglecting key changes (in economic, social,...

Modern antisemitism and the modern discipline of sociology not only emerged in the same period, but-antagonism and hostility between the two discourses notwithstanding-also overlapped and complemented each other. Sociology emerged in a society where...

In a recent book, Following 9/11: Religion Coverage in the New York Times, Christopher Vecsey examines journalistic definitions of "religion," before and (especially) after the terrible events of September 11, 2001. Here he explores Times...