"Since the groundbreaking publication of Postmissionary Messianic Judaism (2005), Mark Kinzer has challenged theologians and religious leaders to consider the essential ecumenical vocation of Jewish disciples of Jesus. Proposing a bilateral ecclesiology in solidarity with Israel, he argued that the overcoming of Christian supersessionism required a robust affirmation of the distinctive calling of Jews within the community of Jesus the Messiah. In this way, Kinzer's work put the issue of Jewish followers of Jesus on the theological agenda for those seeking a reparative reconfiguration of the relationship between the church and the Jewish people. In recent years, Kinzer has attended to the theological implications of this perspective and has widened his focus to include not only the Messianic Jewish movement but also Jews within Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches. The present collection of essays reflects this wider concern. According to Kinzer, the theological stones of contention are Christology conceived of as Messianology, ecclesiology understood as Israelology, and eschatology imagined as Zionology. Moreover, it is the presence of Jewish disciples of Jesus that concretizes these theological abstractions in the form of Jewish flesh and blood, summoning Jews and Christians to rethink their relationship to one another in ways that express their essential mutual dependence." --

This volume commemorates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Jewish Publication Society of America, celebrated in Philadelphia on April 5th and 6th, 1913. It offers a glimpse into the society's early history and its role in promoting Jewish culture and literature in America. Founded in 1888, the Jewish Publication Society aimed to disseminate religious, historical, and scientific works in the English language. This anniversary publication provides insights into the organization's activities, including its publications, membership, and contributions to Jewish intellectual life in the United States. "The Jewish Publication Society Of America Twenty-fifth Anniversary" serves as a valuable historical record for scholars and anyone interested in the development of Jewish institutions in America. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Warsaw. The Jewish Metropolis offers analyses of the cultural, religious, political and intellectual history of Warsaw Jewry, once the leading Jewish metropolis in Europe and the world.

In a series of nine original essays, the editors and other leading American historians bring dramatically new perspectives to bear on our understanding of the West, its Jews, and other Americans, both old and new. Whether comparing the history of the Jews of the West with the Jewish experience in the older regions of the country or bringing attention to the uniquely local aspects of the western experience, the contributors to this landmark volume perceive the West as an increasingly important and vital presence in the nation's history. The agrarians of Utah's Clarion and the cureseekers of Denver, no less than the boomers of Tucson, have been representative Americans, Jews, and westerners. Essays on the role of intermarriage, the shared encounter of immigrants and migrants, and the response to the founding of the State of Israel by western pioneer families, tell us much about the interaction of the West with our American world nation.

What was it like to be poor in the Middle Ages? In the past, the answer to this question came only from institutions and individuals who gave relief to the less fortunate. This book, by one of the top scholars in the field, is the first comprehensive book to study poverty in a premodern Jewish community--from the viewpoint of both the poor and those who provided for them. Mark Cohen mines the richest body of documents available on the matter: the papers of the Cairo Geniza. These documents, located in the Geniza, a hidden chamber for discarded papers situated in a medieval synagogue in Old Cairo, were preserved largely unharmed for more than nine centuries due to an ancient custom in Judaism that prohibited the destruction of pages of sacred writing. Based on these papers, the book provides abundant testimony about how one large and important medieval Jewish community dealt with the constant presence of poverty in its midst. Building on S. D. Goitein's Mediterranean Society and inspired also by research on poverty and charity in medieval and early modern Europe, it provides a clear window onto the daily lives of the poor. It also illuminates private charity, a subject that has long been elusive to the medieval historian. In addition, Cohen's work functions as a detailed case study of an important phenomenon in human history. Cohen concludes that the relatively narrow gap between the poor and rich, and the precariousness of wealth in general, combined to make charity "one of the major agglutinates of Jewish associational life" during the medieval period.

This book presents an ethnographic history of the Old Yishuv. It describes and analyzes a significant community that reflected more than any other the various strands of Jewish life and the constraints and processes acting upon the Jewish world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. .

Throughout history the heritage of faith has been conveyed within the family and the congregation. In the New Covenant, the primary expression of spiritual life is the congregation, under godly elders, teaching, exhortation, and discipline. However, the first institution in the Bible is the family and only the family can raise children with an adequate appreciation of our faith and heritage. This guide exists to help families learn how to pass on the heritage of spiritual Messianic Jewish life. It is not an exhaustive or fully adequate guide, but is one that each family should complement with their own creativity.

"A new history of twentieth-century North Africa, that gives voice to the musicians who defined an era and the vibrant recording industry that carried their popular sounds from the colonial period through decolonization. If twentieth-century stories of Jews and Muslims in North Africa are usually told separately, Recording History demonstrates that we have not been listening to what brought these communities together: Arab music. For decades, thousands of phonograph records flowed across North African borders. The sounds embedded in their grooves were shaped in large part by Jewish musicians, who gave voice to a changing world around them. Their popular songs broadcast on radio, performed in concert, and circulated on disc carried with them the power to delight audiences, stir national sentiments, and frustrate French colonial authorities. With this book, Christopher Silver provides the first history of the music scene and recording industry across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and offers striking insights into Jewish-Muslim relations through the rhythms that animated them. He traces the path of hit-makers and their hit records, illuminating regional and transnational connections. In asking what North Africa once sounded like, Silver recovers a world of many voices--of pioneering impresarios, daring female stars, cantors turned composers, witnesses and survivors of war, and national and nationalist icons--whose music still resonates well into our present"--

"A new history of twentieth-century North Africa, that gives voice to the musicians who defined an era and the vibrant recording industry that carried their popular sounds from the colonial period through decolonization. If twentieth-century stories of Jews and Muslims in North Africa are usually told separately, Recording History demonstrates that we have not been listening to what brought these communities together: Arab music. For decades, thousands of phonograph records flowed across North African borders. The sounds embedded in their grooves were shaped in large part by Jewish musicians, who gave voice to a changing world around them. Their popular songs broadcast on radio, performed in concert, and circulated on disc carried with them the power to delight audiences, stir national sentiments, and frustrate French colonial authorities. With this book, Christopher Silver provides the first history of the music scene and recording industry across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and offers striking insights into Jewish-Muslim relations through the rhythms that animated them. He traces the path of hit-makers and their hit records, illuminating regional and transnational connections. In asking what North Africa once sounded like, Silver recovers a world of many voices--of pioneering impresarios, daring female stars, cantors turned composers, witnesses and survivors of war, and national and nationalist icons--whose music still resonates well into our present"--

Two creative centres of Jewish life rose to prominence in the twentieth century, one in Israel and the other in the United States. Although Israeli and American Jews share kinship and history drawn from their Eastern European roots, they have developed divergent cultures from their common origins, often seeming more like distant cousins than close relatives. This book explores why this is so, examining how two communities that constitute eighty percent of the world's Jewish population have created separate identities and cultures. Using examples from literature, art, history, and politics, leading Israeli and American scholars focus on the political, social, and memory cultures of their two communities, considering in particular the American-Jewish challenge to diaspora consciousness and the Israeli struggle to forge a secular, national Jewish identity. At the same time, they seek to understand how a sense of mutual responsibility and fate animates American and Israeli Jews who reside in distant places, speak different languages, and live within different political and social worlds.

Darwin provoked Jews as well as Christians, and this book examines leading nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American progressive Jewish thinkers who wrestled with evolutionary theories. In particular there was a widespread commitment to the application of biological evolutionary theory to history and cosmology, and a fascination with the evolution of ethical systems within human societies, bearing in mind mankind's bestial origins and new challenges for understanding religious traditions. It is argued that Reform Jewish discussions about the nature of God have been more profoundly shaped by engagement with evolutionary theory than has been recognized before and that, in fact, evolutionary thought provides the key conceptual framework for understanding the distinctive development of Reform Judaism in North America. --

This book describes political and sociological developments in Israel before and after the February 2009 elections, alongside an analysis of electoral trends. It provides an effective analysis of contemporary political and sociological Israeli history. Rather than focusing narrowly on electoral politics alone, this book broadens its focus to make it relevant to undergraduate and graduate students in Middle Eastern, Israeli and Jewish studies and the liberal arts. Israel at the Polls has been updated and published annually for thirty years, providing readers with up-to-date analysis and continuity of scholarship; this book offers an expert long-term assessment of Israeli politics. This book was published as a special issue of Israel Affairs.

This is a story of discovery. Like many kids in immigrant families, I avoided dealing with "old country" family history--and like many of us, I was later moved to go on a quest to discover my roots. This book, Searching for Butsnevits: A Shtetl Tale, is part autobiography, part social history, and part detective story--where the search is for a missing community rather than a missing person. The book is an encounter with the past, with the history of my family in Ukraine in the early 1900s, and includes information about Jewish life in the area and what's happened since to the place and the people, as well as a rare firsthand account of the flight of my family from Ukraine in 1920 in the wake of the pogroms that swept the country following the Russian Revolution.

Delve into the fascinating world of ancient Jewish texts with this groundbreaking study from renowned scholar Elkan Nathan Adler. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of Hebrew language and culture, Adler offers insightful commentary on the significance and history of these rare and valuable documents. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

'Bill Freund, the late social historian and leading analyst of African history, passed away in 2020 soon after finishing his autobiography. Often described as the academy's 'outsider insider', he was an eminent South African historian who published prodigiously in the areas of labour, capital and economic history. What influenced this American-educated academic to become such an astute and trusted observer of the political economy in Africa? We follow Bill's intellectual journey from a modest Jewish home in Chicago in the 1950s to the Universities of Chicago, Yale, Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, and finally to a permanent teaching position at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. Peppered in between the commentaries on academic life are stories of his travels, poems he wrote for loved ones, and endearing anecdotes of friendships that shaped his life. As an 'outsider', both in the United States and abroad, he is able to offer rich insights into the world of Africanists and their scholarship on different continents. His thoughtful and balanced observations on late- and post-apartheid South Africa are especially interesting and refreshing. This posthumously published autobiography will give deeper insight into this unusual man and the world that shaped him - and which he in turn influenced through a deep commitment to rigorous scholarship. It includes a select bibliography of Bill Freund's many publications as well as a foreword by Robert Morrell on the making of this autobiography."--Amazon description.

Few questions have agitated thoughtful Jews as much as the one touching on identity. The problem arose originally from the situation of the Jews as a diaspora community. From the time of Philo and probably before, great energies have been expended by Jews in seeking to understand the meaning of the Jewish dispersion. In recent times the problem has been transformed from a largely academic and relig ious issue into a political one, to wit the furious debates in modern Israel over the citizenship quandary. For more than twenty years now the Jewish State has been rocked by violent and often acrimonious discussion over the who is a Jew controversy. The consequences of these exchanges have had reverberations all over the Jewish world since a final determination of this issue could not but have important bearing on present-day diaspora communities. For reasons that are natural and understandable Israeli historians such as Baer, Dinur and Kauffman have written extensively and brilliantly about the diaspora dimensionin Jewishhistory. Theirfocus, however, has been influenced strongly by the re-birth of Israel as a political entity in this century. This has predisposed them not unex pectedly to view the vast historical sweep of diaspora history aspart of a spectrum which reflects the return to Israel as a dominant shading in the analysis.

First published in 1928, Palestine Old and New is a historical travel guide providing a preliminary account of Palestine through the eye of a Zionist. The book takes the reader through the natural landscape of Palestine, familiarizing them with the local Muslim, Jewish and Christian populations, and providing both historical and Biblical accounts of various sites. As the chief immigration officer in British Mandate of Palestine from 1921 to 1934, the intended audience of the author was the Jews thinking about immigrating to Palestine, but his descriptive portrayal of the currently occupied territory is a rich account for present readers of the Palestine that was. The language used is a reflection of its era and no offence is meant by the Publishers to any reader by this republication. This book will be of interest to students of history, political science, international relations and geography.

This volume brings together thirty-four essays and ar- ticles by Werner J. Cahnman representing four decades (1940-1980) of work by an extraordinary, multidisciplinary scholar. Cahnman's work encompasses the experiences of a German Jewish refugee, an economist turned sociologist, and a scholar of Judaism. Part 1 contains personal and autobiographical writings and includes analyses of the cultural ambiguities of Jewish assimilation in Germany and Austria. Part 2 is devoted to sociological essays ranging from a critical assessment of Gunnar Myrdal's landmark study of the problems of race and democracy, An American Dilemma , to a probing look at the stigma of obesity, based on empirical research, a subject very much in the news today and that shows Cahnman ahead of his time. Part 3 offers some of Cahnman's most perceptive essays dealing with geopolitical themes. Included are theoretically based writings that help to clarify the methods and concepts of geopolitics, marking the intellectual beginnings of the global approach to world affairs. Here Cahnman broached the possibility of a united Europe (1944), realized sixty years later in the formation of the European Union. The twelve essays of Part 4 return to Cahnman's ever-present concern with Jews and Judaism. They present a wide-ranging historical-sociological view, from the Jews of Vienna in the 1930s to the American scene in the 1960s, to the still-unresolved problematics of Arab-Israeli relations, with Cahnman arguing for coexistence and a two-state solution for Jews and Arabs. The volume, carefully selected and assembled by the editors, presents for the first time essays representing the full range of Werner Cahnman's scholarship and thought. It will be of interest to students of sociology, history, political science, and Judaic studies.

Dating from the sixteenth century, there were hundreds of shtetls—Jewish settlements—in Eastern Europe that were home to a large and compact population that differed from their gentile, mostly peasant neighbors in religion, occupation, language, and culture. The shtetls were different in important respects from previous types of Jewish settlements in the Diaspora in that Jews had rarely formed a majority in the towns in which they lived. This was not true of the shtetl, where Jews sometimes comprised 80% or more of the population. While the shtetl began to decline during the course of the nineteenth century, it was the Holocaust which finally destroyed it. During the last thirty years the shtetl has attracted a growing amount of scholarly attention, though gross generalizations and romanticized nostalgia continue to affect how the topic is treated. This volume takes a new look at this most important facet of East European Jewish life. It helps to correct the notion that the shtetl was an entirely Jewish world and shows the ways in which the Jews of the shtetl interacted both with their co-religionists and with their gentile neighbors. The volume includes chapters on the history of the shtetl, its myths and realities, politics, gender dynamics, how the shtetl has been (mis)represented in literature, and the changes brought about by World War I and the Holocaust, among others. Contributors: Samuel Kassow, Gershon David Hundert, Immanuel Etkes, Nehemia Polen, Henry Abramson, Konrad Zielinski, Jeremy Dauber, Israel Bartel, Naomi Seidman, Mikhail Krutikov, Arnold J. Band, Katarzyna Wieclawska, Yehunda Bauer, and Elie Wiesel. This is the first book published in the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies Series .

In Light of My Eye, Paula Jacques, born in Egypt, recreates the vanished world of cosmopolitan Cairo with remembered affection and amusing dialogue. Her novel depicts the turbulent waning days of its once thriving Jewish community, during the strange and ominous time between the collapse of the Egyptian monarchy and Nasser's rise to power. At its center are the pre-adolescent Mona Castro and her family, whose lives and destinies the author evokes in a series of scenes that veer between poignancy and wit. Mona's coming of age is marked by her youthful rebellion against her domineering mother, Becky; the illness of the beloved family patriarch, Joucky; and her half-innocent dalliance with an older man, a refugee from eastern Europe. The surrounding ensemble of relatives, whose family gatherings attempt to cope with a history that will overwhelm them, shifts the focus from Mona' s tale to a chronicle of a proud, doomed family.