Rainbow Jews looks at the intersection of gay and Jewish identity in American and Israeli film and theater from the 1960s to the present. Through a close reading of the texts of numerous American and Israeli plays and films, Friedman evaluates some of the key conventions that have been employed to construct, critique, and reflect the connection between Jewishness and gay identity in the United States and Israel. Friedman also explores ways in which gay-Jewish playwrights and filmmakers have progressed the reevaluation of sexual norms within Judaism over the past three decades, inspiring and integrating Jewish members of the GLBT community into the overall Jewish historical narrative.

Jews, Christians and Muslims describe elements of their origins with close reference to the narrative of Abraham, including the complex story of Abraham's relations with Hagar. This volume sketches the significance of this narrative in the three traditions.

David Conway analyses why and how Jews, virtually absent from Western art music until the end of the eighteenth century, came to be represented in all branches of the profession within fifty years as leading figures - not only as composers and performers, but as publishers, impresarios and critics. His study places this process in the context of dynamic economic, political, sociological and technological changes and also of developments in Jewish communities and the Jewish religion itself, in the major cultural centres of Western Europe. Beginning with a review of attitudes to Jews in the arts and an assessment of Jewish music and musical skills, in the age of the Enlightenment, Conway traces the story of growing Jewish involvement with music through the biographies of the famous, the neglected and the forgotten, leading to a new and radical contextualisation of Wagner's infamous 'Judaism in Music'.

From a brilliant and witty comic book aficionado, this “scholarly but lively narrative” ( Kirkus Reviews ) reveals the links between Jews and the iconic superheroes of Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby. Many of us know that the superheroes at the heart of the American comic book industry were created by Jews. But you’d be surprised to learn how much these beloved characters were shaped by the cultural and religious traditions of their makers. Superman Is Jewish? follows the “people of the book” as they become the people of the comic book. With great wit and compelling arguments, Harry Brod situates superheroes within the course of Jewish-American history: they are aliens in a foreign land, like Superman; figures plagued by guilt for abandoning their families, like Spider-Man; and outsiders persecuted for being different, like the X-Men. Brod blends humor and sharp observation as he considers the overt and discreet Jewish characteristics of these well-known figures and explores how their creators integrated their Jewish identities and their creativity. Captivating, poignant, and packed with historical insights, this guided tour travels from the Passover Haggadah’s exciting action scenes of Moses’s superpowers through the Yiddish humor of Mad magazine to two Pulitzer Prizes awarded in one decade to Jewish comic book guys Art Spiegelman and Michael Chabon. “A witty, insightful exposé” ( Publisher’s Weekly ), Superman Is Jewish? is an endlessly fascinating American saga about an immigrant group that used comic books to see itself in new, empowering—and laughable—ways. You don’t even have to be Jewish to get a kick out of it.

The first female Conservative rabbi in the U.S. reflects on ancient Jewish traditions as a guide to reconciliation and peacebuilding in our lives, our communities, and our world.

"The Hebrew Bible is only part of ancient Israel's writings. Another collection of Jewish works has survived from late- and post-biblical times, a great library that bears witness to the rich spiritual life of Jews in that period. This library consists of the most varied sorts of texts: apocalyptic visions and prophecies, folktales and legends, collections of wise sayings, laws and rules of conduct, commentaries on Scripture, ancient prayers, and much, much more. While specialists have studied individual texts or subsections of this library, Outside the Bible seeks for the first time to bring together all of its major components into a single collection, gathering portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint, the biblical apocrypha, and pseudepigrapha, and the writings of Philo of Alexandria and Josephus. The editors have brought together these diverse works in order to highlight what has often been neglected; their common Jewish background. For this reason the commentaries that accompany the texts devote special attention to their references to Hebrew Scripture and to issues of halakhah (Jewish law), their allusions to motifs and themes known from later Rabbinic writings in Talmud and Midrash, their evocation of recent or distant events in Jewish history, and their references to other texts in this collection. The work of more than seventy-one contributing experts in a range of fields, Outside the Bible offers new insights into the development of Judaism and early Christianity. This three-volume set of translations, introductions, and detailed commentaries is a must for scholars, students, and anyone interested in this great body of ancient Jewish writings. The collection includes a general introduction and opening essays, new and revised translations, and detailed introductions, commentaries, and notes that place each text in its historical and cultural context. A timeline, tables, and a general index complete the set. "--

"Hard to believe but true: - The Passover Seder is a Greco-Roman symposium banquet - The Talmud rabbis presented themselves as Stoic philosophers - Synagogue buildings were Roman basilicas - Hellenistic rhetoric professors educated sons of well-to-do Jews - Zeus-Helios is depicted in synagogue mosaics across ancient Israel - The Jewish courts were named after the Roman political institution, the Sanhedrin - In Israel there were synagogues where the prayers were recited in Greek. Historians have long debated the (re)birth of Judaism in the wake of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple cult by the Romans in 70 CE. What replaced that sacrificial cult was at once something new-indebted to the very culture of the Roman overlords-even as it also sought to preserve what little it could of the old Israelite religion. The Greco-Roman culture in which rabbinic Judaism grew in the first five centuries of the Common Era nurtured the development of Judaism as we still know and celebrate it today. Arguing that its transformation from a Jerusalem-centered cult to a world religion was made possible by the Roman Empire, Rabbi Burton Visotzky presents Judaism as a distinctly Roman religion. Full of fascinating detail from the daily life and culture of Jewish communities across the Hellenistic world, Aphrodite and the Rabbis will appeal to anyone interested in the development of Judaism, religion, history, art and architecture. "--

What Is Jewish Literature? is a richly thoughtful analysis and comprehensive overview of what defines Jewish literature. It is an international collection, featuring authors and scholars who write in different languages from different literary, spiritual, and personal perspectives.The book explores long-standing What are the criteria for identifying Jewish literature? Are they language, religious affiliation of the author, religious sensibility, a distinctive Jewish imagination, or literary tradition?If the writer is the criterion, do Sholem Aleichem and Nathanael West really inhabit a shared universe? Is a text by S.Y. Agnon part of the same literary tradition as a play by Arthur Miller?Is Yiddish or Hebrew or Ladino the defining element? If so, where do we place Franz Kafka, Primo Levi, Elie Weisel, Saul Bellow, Nellie Sachs?Is tradition the yardstick? Do we then classify Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet as a Jewish novel... as Holocaust literature... as American fiction?What Is Jewish Literature? debates all these possibilities. It is a landmark collection that encourages the reader to participate in the quest for answers that defy simple responses.The contributors reflect the multilingual and multicultural nature of any discussion of Jewish literature. Their voices range from polemical to speculative, from scientific to lyrical.What Is Jewish Literature? is an enduring contribution to the literary resource for the scholar, the teacher, and the student and for any individual who strives to appreciate, evaluate, and understand the varied riches of Jewish writing.

"A multifaceted exploration of the Holocaust which connects its relationship with genocide, the importance of first-person histories of atrocity, and links to the 1948 Palestinian Nakba together in unprecedented fashion"--

A study of the 12th-century evolution of innovative anti-Jewish stereotypes and their impact on subsequent Western thought. The 12th century was a period of significant change and dislocation in the West; it witnessed the interaction of new societal circumstances and a prior ideational legacy, similar to events in the 19th-20th centuries. This interaction produced an innovative view of Jews which was fated to influence anti-Jewish perceptions up to the present. In the period of societal change, persecutory patterns emerged, directed at diverse societal outgroups, among them the Jews. The 12th-century stereotypes were permanently absorbed into the historic legacy of Christian anti-Jewish thinking. These stereotypes were based on a perception of Jewish hatred of Christianity and Christians, and that Jews commit acts of anti-Christian violence generated by this purported hatred (e.g. ritual murder, abuse of Christian symbols, moneylending abuses). The most pernicious anti-Jewish imagery involves stereotypes alleging mortal threats posed by Jews. States that every new stage in the evolution of anti-Jewish thinking is marked by dialectical interplay between a prior legacy of negative stereotypes and the realities of a new social context.

Product Description Journeys beyond the Pale is the first book to examine how Yiddish writers, from Mendele Moycher Sforim to Der Nister to the famed Sholem Aleichem, used motifs of travel to express their complicated relationship with modernization. The story of the Jews of the Pale of settlement encompasses current-day Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland. Review "This book is deliciously subversive. Garrett demonstrates that the major writers in Yiddish, a language without its own territory, wrote as if their Jewish subjects lived and traveled freely at the center of the world; not on its margins, not in a ghetto, not in a valorized state of exile."—David G. Roskies, Jewish Theological Seminary "Garrett’s work goes a long way towards conceptualizing and analyzing a phenomenon omnipresent in Yiddish short stories, novels, poetry, and drama, combining theoretical considerations of the journey in general and specific, nuanced readings of Jewish journeys in particular."—Jeremy Dauber, Columbia University "This kind of scholarship is vital for the further progress in Yiddish studies and its integration into the mainstream humanities."—Mikhail Krutikov, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and author of Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905–1914 From the Back Cover "This book is deliciously subversive. Garrett demonstrates that the major writers in Yiddish, a language without its own territory, wrote as if their Jewish subjects lived and traveled freely at the center of the world; not on its margins, not in a ghetto, not in a valorized state of exile."-David G. Roskies, Jewish Theological Seminary "Garrett's work goes a long way towards conceptualizing and analyzing a phenomenon omnipresent in Yiddish short stories, novels, poetry, and drama, combining theoretical considerations of the journey in general and specific, nuanced readings of Jewish journeys in particular."-Jeremy Dauber, Columbia University "This kind of scholarship is vital for the further progress in Yiddish studies and its integration into the mainstream humanities."-Mikhail Krutikov, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and author of Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905-1914 About the Author Leah V. Garrett is assistant professor of Judaic studies and English literature at the University of Denver, Colorado.

Focuses on authors: Nahman of Bratslav, Isaac Meir Dik, I.L. Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, Der Nister, Itzik Manger, and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Kosher pork—an oxymoron? Anna Shternshis's fascinating study traces the creation of a Soviet Jewish identity that disassociated Jewishness from Judaism. The cultural transformation of Soviet Jews between 1917 and 1941 was one of the most ambitious experiments in social engineering of the past century. During this period, Russian Jews went from relative isolation to being highly integrated into the new Soviet culture and society, while retaining a strong ethnic and cultural identity. This identity took shape during the 1920s and 1930s, when the government attempted to create a new Jewish culture, "national in form" and "socialist in content." Soviet and Kosher is the first study of key Yiddish documents that brought these Soviet messages to Jews, notably the "Red Haggadah," a Soviet parody of the traditional Passover manual; songs about Lenin and Stalin; scripts from regional theaters; Socialist Realist fiction; and magazines for children and adults. More than 200 interviews conducted by the author in Russia, Germany, and the United States testify to the reception of these cultural products and provide a unique portrait of the cultural life of the average Soviet Jew.

Social Functions of Synagogue Song: A Durkheimian Approach by Jonathan L. Friedmann paints a detailed picture of the important role sacred music plays in Jewish religious communities. Drawing upon the work of Émile Durkeim, the book examines how synagogue songs serve disciplinary, cohesive, revitalizing, and euphoric functions.

Text: English, Yiddish (translation)

Geoffery Hartman, one of the most distinguished literary scholars in America, has been a commentator on and participant in the literary-critical scene for more than forty years. He was one of the first to question the "formalism" of the New Critics, he helped to introduce such European critics as Benjamin, Malraux, Blanchot, Lacan, and Derrida to American audiences, and he has expanded our knowledge of the history of criticism by pointing to the relevance of the Jewish rabbinic tradition and of psychoanalytic modes of interpretation. This book -- a collection of Hartman's essays from throughout his career -- sheds new light on the last four turbulent decades of criticism. In a lengthy introduction to the book, Hartman tells us about his life, the scholars who were his teachers or colleagues (among them Rene Wellek, Erich Auerbach, Harold Bloom, and Paul de Man), and some of the intellectual issues he has grappled with over the course of his career. The essays in the volume, many of which are out of print or not previously collected, are arranged here in three parts: "Theory" (such influential pieces as "Understanding Criticism" and "The Voice of the Shuttle"); "Cases" (with subjects ranging from Shakespeare to Wordsworth and from Hitchcock to the mystery story); and "Speculations" (concluding with an essay on "Higher Education at the Millennium.") The collection -- vintage Hartman -- brings his exemplary work to a new generation of readers.

Examines the effect of the Holocaust on traditional attempts to explain the Jewish people's sufferings while retaining the concept of covenant with God. also examines its influence on the self-image of American Jewry. Analyzes the works of Elie Wiesel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, and Cynthia Ozick, among others, and suggests that awareness of a covenantal concept of Judaism is a criterion for authentic Holocaust literature. Adopts the definition of the Holocaust as a unique event - the plan to exterminate an entire nation, and describes various approaches to theological problems raised by the Holocaust.

Drawing on a mass of unpublished writings and archival sources from prerevolutionary Russian conservatories, this book offers an insightful account of the Jewish search for a modern identity in Russia through music, rather than politics or religion.

In drama and in musical comedy, in popular song and in symphonic music, in movies and in literature, Jews have contributed to American culture in the 20th century to a degree out of all proportion to their numbers. But does this vast creative output coalesce into something identifiable as an American Jewish culture? Stephen J. Whitfield answers this question with a resounding "yes!" Whitfield focuses on areas where the specifically Jewish contribution has been little explored. He surveys such fields as popular music, musical theater, and drama, focusing on key figures from Jerome Kern and the Gershwins to Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins; Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland to Irving Berlin and Bob Dylan; Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman to David Mamet and Wendy Wasserstein. At the same time, Whitfield tackles the complex issue of race and American Jewish culture, tracing the extensive interpenetrations of Jewish and African American music. He also offers a stunning examination of Jewish American representations of the Holocaust, focusing on stage and film adaptations of Anne Frank's Diary and on Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. In a poignant, final chapter, Whitfield ponders the future of American Jewish culture after a century of assimilationist pressure and mainstream success. The distinctive culture that he has traced through the 20th century, Whitfield concludes, may finally become submerged and lost. Only a renewed emphasis on Judaism itself, he believes, offers the hope for American Jews to maintain the dual cultural identities that they have so long succeeded in nurturing --