"This collection essays explore issues of historicity, spirituality, standardization and other topics central to the study of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish sacred music from 1801 to 1918. This volume captures the breadth of scholarship available in the field, as well as serving as a useful introduction for those readers just beginning their study of sacred music"--Provided by publisher.

Reaching from biblical times to the present day, Esther Benbassa’s prize-winning exploration of Jewish identity is both epic and comprehensive. She shows how in the Jewish world, the representation and ritualization of suffering have shaped the history of both the people and the religion. Benbassa argues that the nineteenth century gave rise to a Jewish ‘lachrymose’ historiography, and that Jewish history was increasingly seen to be a ‘vale of tears’—a development that has become even more pronounced since the Holocaust. The treatment of the Holocaust in the State of Israel now has the form of a civil religion. In principle within reach of everyone, the ‘duty of memory’ and the uniqueness of the genocide have mitigated for many Jews the loss of other traditions. The Israeli government invokes the memory of the Holocaust to neutralize threats to its interests—ensuring that suffering continues to be a central part of Jewish identity and positioning the State of Israeli as a redemptive force.

"This book asks fundamental questions about the uses of history. That it does so from a rootedness in Jewish history, an unassimilated location, is one part of its strength. But history alone doesn't confer this strength; the poet's continuing labor with Jewish meaning does. The other part, of course, is the integrity of its poetics. A Klepfisz poem lives amid complex tensions, even when its texture may appear transparent. There is a voice, sometimes voices, in these poems which can often best be heard by reading aloud. Her sense of phrase, of line, of the shift of tone, is almost flawless. But perfection is not what Irena Klepfisz is after. It is the tension between so many forces: Language, speechlessness, memory, politics, irony, compassion, hunger for what is lost, hunger for a justice still to be made, that makes this poetry crucial to the new unfoldings of history that we begin, in 1990, to imagine." -- from the introduction by Adrienne Rich

In the last three decades, hundreds of books and essays have been published on women, gender, and Jewish Studies. This burgeoning scholarship has not been adequately theorized, contextualized, or historicized. This book argues that Jewish feminist studies is currently constrained by multiple frames of reference that require re-examination, a self-critical awareness, and a serious reflective inquiry into the models, paradigms, and assumptions that inform, shape, and define this area of academic interest. This book is the first critical analysis of Jewish feminist scholarship, tracing it from its tentative beginnings in the late 1970s to contemporary academic articulations of its disciplinary projects. It focuses on the assumptions, evasions, omissions, inconsistencies, and gaps in this scholarship, and notably the absence of debate, contestation, and interrogation of authoritative articulations of its presumed goals, investments, and priorities. The book teases out implicit thinking about mapping, direction, and orientation from introductions to leading anthologies and engages critically with the few explicitly theoretical works on Jewish feminist studies, contesting ideas that have become hegemonic in some areas, and interrogating the limitations these theories impose on future trajectories in Jewish feminist studies. Each chapter outlines the theoretical assumptions that inform salient publications in the field, providing a close reading of scholarly texts that justify certain practices. The book is divided into four chapters, each of which focuses on a different frame of reference. It outlines the way in which the various frames that have so far been imposed on Jewish feminism, the ethnocentric, liberal, personal, masculinist, and essentialist, have arrested its theoretical elaboration and articulation. The book includes both interdisciplinary anthologies on gender and Jewish identity and disciplinary publications in history, literature, philosophy, cultural studies, and Holocaust studies.

"From the Nuremberg Trials to contemporary human rights, Jews have long played prominent roles in the making of international law. But the actual ties between Jewish heritage and legal thought remain a subject of mystery and conjecture even among specialists. This volume of biographical studies takes a unique interdisciplinary approach, pairing historians and legal scholars to explore how their Jewish identities and experiences shaped their legal thought and activism. Using newly-discovered sources and sophisticated interpretative methods, this book offers an alternative history of twentieth-century international legal profession - and a new model to the emerging field of international legal biography"--

One partner is Jewish, the other is a Christian. Do they celebrate Hanukkah, Christmas, or both? Do they worship in a church or a synagogue? How will the children be raised? This essential resource addresses the concerns of interfaith couples, and includes interviews with intermarried couples, a discussion of intermarriage in history, and more.

"Expands the horizons of Jewish virtue ethics, demonstrating how central virtue has been to the history of Jewish ethics"--

A unique memoir that interweaves poetry, narrative, meditation, and social history, A Spiritual Life explores the complex facets of a Jewish woman's spiritual coming-of-age, capturing the emotional and spiritual reality of contemporary Jews as well as religious seekers of all types. From the experiences of early childhood, to the spiritual awakening of a secular adolescent encountering Jewish tradition, to the alternately funny and searing tales of new-found independence, early married life, young motherhood, and midlife, Feld comments with remarkable honesty and clarity on the many stages of spiritual and artistic exploration and growth. Overarching all these accounts is the picture of how the cycle of the Jewish calendar year comes to provide an ever-renewing source of sustenance for the author's deepening spiritual expression.

How did ancient Jewish authors claim authority for their interpretations? How, after the a oeend of prophecya, could they claim the authority of revelation? Whom did one have to be, or aspire to be, in order to merit authority? Hindy Najman addresses these questions through close readings of ancient Jewish texts, e.g., Ezra-Nehemiah, Philo of Alexandria, 4Ezra, Dead Sea Scrolls, and Jubilees. In Seconding Sinai (Brill, 2003), Najman reconceived pseudepigraphy, developing the idea of a Mosaic discourse that comprised a series of ancient texts attributed to Moses. Here she develops the broader notion of a discourse tied to a founder, situating practices of pseudepigraphy and authoritative interpretation within a variety of ways of seeking perfection in ancient Judaism.

"Following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, Jews were faced with a world in existential chaos--both they and their God were rendered homeless. So the rabbis, aspirants for leadership of the post-destruction Jewish community, appropriated inherited traditions and used them as building blocks for a new religious structure. Not unexpectedly, given the circumstances, this new rabbinic formation devoted considerable attention to matters of space and place. Rabbinic Judaism: Space and Place offers the first comprehensive study of spatiality in Rabbinic Judaism of late antiquity, exploring how the rabbis reoriented the Jewish relationship with space and place following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. Drawing upon the insights of theorists such as Tuan and LeFebvre, who define the crisis that "homelessness" represents and argue for the deep relationship of human societies to their places, the book examines the compositions of the rabbis and discovers both a surprisingly aggressive rabbinic spatial imagination as well as places, most notably the synagogue, where rabbinic attention to space and place is suppressed or absent. It concludes that these represent two different but simultaneous rabbinic strategies for re-placing God and Israel--strategies that at the same time allow God and Israel to find a place anywhere. This study offers new insight into the centrality of space and place to rabbinic religion after the destruction of the Temple, and as such would be a key resource to students and scholars interested in rabbinic and ancient Judaism, as well as providing a major new case study for anthropologists interested in the study of space"--

The first comprehensive history of how Jews became citizens in the modern world For all their unquestionable importance, the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel now loom so large in modern Jewish history that we have mostly lost sight of the fact that they are only part of—and indeed reactions to—the central event of that history: emancipation. In this book, David Sorkin seeks to reorient Jewish history by offering the first comprehensive account in any language of the process by which Jews became citizens with civil and political rights in the modern world. Ranging from the mid-sixteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, Jewish Emancipation tells the ongoing story of how Jews have gained, kept, lost, and recovered rights in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, the United States, and Israel. Emancipation, Sorkin shows, was not a one-time or linear event that began with the Enlightenment or French Revolution and culminated with Jews' acquisition of rights in Central Europe in 1867–71 or Russia in 1917. Rather, emancipation was and is a complex, multidirectional, and ambiguous process characterized by deflections and reversals, defeats and successes, triumphs and tragedies. For example, American Jews mobilized twice for emancipation: in the nineteenth century for political rights, and in the twentieth for lost civil rights. Similarly, Israel itself has struggled from the start to institute equality among its heterogeneous citizens. By telling the story of this foundational but neglected event, Jewish Emancipation reveals the lost contours of Jewish history over the past half millennium.

Is patriarchy necessary to ensure responsible fathering? Lawrence H. Fuchs, author of Family Matters, argues that the link between male dominance and fatherhood is no longer iron-clad. Analyzing the universality of patriarchy and its incentives for cultural fatherhood, Fuchs concedes that the importance of biological differences between the sexes was a possible, even plausible, basis for the evolution of patriarchy. But in this timely work he imagines a new paradigm of fatherhood for a post-patriarchal age, one inspired by the history of Jewish patriarchy. Two millennia ago the rabbis established the strategies to curb the extreme abuses of patriarchy found in all civilizations. They did so by according wives significant sexual and economic rights. In the last two centuries as Jews became more integrated into the societies in which they lived, their unique variation of patriarchy was disrupted. Fuchs argues that the Jewish story sets the precedent for fundamental change in the nature of patriarchy today, thus breaking what may have been the evolutionary connection between male dominance and incentives for fatherhood. It is Fuchs's startling conclusion that the Jewish precedent points to the next step in evolution: fathers without patriarchy.

Identity Papers argues that contemporary Jewish American literature revises our understanding of Jewishness and Jewish difference. Moving beyond the reductive labeling of texts and authors as “too Jewish” or “not Jewish enough,” and focusing instead on narratives that portray Jewish regeneration through feminist Orthodoxy, queerness, off-whiteness, and intermarriage, Helene Meyers resists a lachrymose view of contemporary Jewish American life. She argues that such gendered, sexed, and raced debates about Jewish identity become opportunities rather than crises, signs of creative potential rather than symptoms of assimilation and deracination. Thus, feminist debates within Orthodoxy are allied to Jewish continuity by Rebecca Goldstein, Allegra Goodman, and Tova Mirvis; the geography of Jewish identity is racialized by Alfred Uhry, Tony Kushner, and Philip Roth; and the works of Jyl Lynn Felman, Judith Katz, Lev Raphael, and Michael Lowenthal queer the Jewish family as they reveal homophobia to be an abomination. Even as Identity Papers expands Jewish literary horizons and offers much-needed alternatives to the culture wars between liberal and traditional Jews, it argues that Jewish difference productively troubles dominant narratives of feminist, queer, and whiteness studies. Meyers demonstrates that the evolving Jewish American literary renaissance is anything but provincial; rather, it is engaged with categories of difference central to contemporary academic discourses and our national life.

Ancient biblical Judaism ascribed magical and supernatural properties to blood. Both Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity inherited this attitude toward blood, and adopted, each in its own way, symbolic and spiritualized rituals connected with blood. Throughout the centuries, Judaism and Christianity borrowed beliefs and rituals from one another. Argues that the blood libel emerged as a negative by-product of an increase in popular eucharistic piety. Encouragement for this accusation was provided by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which approved the doctrine of transubstantiation and heightened popular interest in blood, especially Christian blood. The alleged Jewish consumption of Christian blood seemed to prove the dogma of transubstantiation in popular consciousness. In the 19th century the blood libel emerged again in Europe, devoid of its theological underpinning but supplemented with a belief in blood as the bearer of heredity, and hence of the ethnic and racial traits of the person. Academic authorities, from August Rohling to the Nazi Erich Bischof, tried to prove the truth of the blood libel and created the theory of blood - i.e. racial pollution. It was in such a form that blood mysticism was picked up by the Nazis. The revival of the blood libel in the 19th century provoked a wave of literature refuting the accusation. Paradoxically, while Jews were vigorously rejecting the claim that human blood played a role in their rituals, some of them adopted the blood language of modern nationalism, a belief in the nation-making "Jewish blood".

The title of political theorist Alan L. Mittleman's captivating new book is drawn from the patriarch Jacob's blessing to his children and grandchildren. The blessing contains the promise that Judah will become a royal house, perhaps forever. Kings, of course, ceased in Israel, but politics did not. Regime replaced regime. National independence was compromised and lost, regained and lost again. Yet the attention to things political was never lost. Old texts were applied to new political realities. Political awareness and thought, constantly transformed and adapted to new historical exigencies, persisted among the Jews. In The Scepter Shall Not Depart from Judah , Mittleman looks at some of the central problems of political philosophy-such as fundamental rights and the common good-from the point of view of rabbinic Judaism. At the same time, he considers conceptual issues in Judaism-such as covenant and tradition-from the perspective of political philosophy. Mittleman's sources range from the ancient rabbis to contemporary political theorists, making this volume an important one for courses and research in both Jewish studies and political theory.

This book is the first to evaluate the development of feminist scholarship in various fields within Jewish studies. Eminent scholars in biblical studies, rabbinics, theology, history, literature, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and film studies assess the state of knowledge about women in each field, analyze how this knowledge has affected the mainstream of the discipline, and propose new questions and concepts to pursue. The authors - Joyce Antler, Lynn Davidman, Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Judith Hauptman, Paula E. Hyman, Sonya Michel, Judith Plaskow, Susan Starr Sered, Naomi Sokoloff, Shelly Tenenbaum, and Hava Tirosh-Rothschild - consider a range of fascinating issues.Among them are: whether Jewish culture is as patriarchal as is typically assumed; how gender arrangements in Jewish life are shaped by the structures and culture of the larger societies in which Jews live; the different ways in which changes in Jewish families over time and place are experienced by women and by men; whether women or men have been more reluctant to assimilate; and how segregation of the sexes has affected women's autonomy in different periods and locations in Jewish history. Together, the articles present a strong argument for the inclusion of gender as a category of analysis in all fields of Jewish studies.

In recent years, the high rate of intermarriage and other demographic factors have created a challenge for American Jewry: How can rabbis, policy planners, educators, and parents transmit most effectively Jewish religion, culture, and values to their children? Prior research shows that Jewish education is the one area in which communal leaders and lay people can act to make a positive difference in the future cultural transmission of Judaism. Family Matters offers groundbreaking essays on Jewish education by scholars drawn from anthropology, education, history, and sociology. Essays by Steven M. Cohen, Sylvia Barack Fishman, Shaul Kelner, Jeffrey S. Kress, Alex Pomson, Riv-Ellen Prell, and Jack Wertheimer range from interviews about educational decisions with families, teenagers, and Jewish educators to sweeping new statistical data about the actual state of Jewish education in American cities. Making new links among parents, community, and Jewish schools, Family Matters is a vital study in the sociology of the contemporaryAmerican Jewish community.

"Jewish vegan and vegetarian movements have become increasingly prominent in recent decades, as more Jews adopt plant-based lifestyles. In this book, scholars, rabbis, and activists explore the history of veganism and vegetarianism among Jews and present compelling new directions in Jewish thought, ethics, and foodways. Jewish Veganism and Vegetarianism asks how Judaism, broadly considered, has inspired people to eschew animal products and how those choices have enriched and defined Jewishness. It offers opportunities to meditate on what makes Jewish veganism and vegetarianism particularly Jewish and to pursue the intellectual, religious, and historical roots of those movements. It also tests their boundaries, examines connections to other movements, and calls attention to divisions among Jewish vegans and vegetarians and to the resistance they have faced. In part one, "Studies," authors present Jewish veganism and vegetarianism in historical, literary, and sociological context: from the time of the Talmud until the present, in North America, Europe, and Israel, and among rabbis, chefs, artists, activists, punks, and farmers. Part two, "New Directions," is focused on contemporary currents in Jewish vegan and vegetarian thought. The authors represent the cultural, theological, and ideological diversity among Jews invested in such conversations and introduce prominent debates within their movements. As a whole, the volume presents a wide-ranging survey of the place of veganism and vegetarianism in Judaism past and present"--

What makes a space Jewish? This wide-ranging volume revisits literal as well as metaphorical spaces in modern German history to examine the ways in which Jewishness has been attributed to them both within and outside of Jewish communities, and what the implications have been across different eras and social contexts. Working from an expansive concept of "the spatial," these contributions look not only at physical sites but at professional, political, institutional, and imaginative realms, as well as historical Jewish experiences of spacelessness. Together, they encompass spaces as varied as early modern print shops and Weimar cinema, always pointing to the complex intertwining of German and Jewish identity.

Discusses Jewish identity in America as reflected in the culture of immigrants and descendants of immigrants. Self-hatred or, at least, ambivalence about oneself in the face of native American values is one theme. Ch. 5 (pp. 98-125), "To Make 'a Jew': Projecting Antisemitism in Post-War America", analyzes two novels - Arthur Miller's "Focus" and Saul Bellow's "The Victim" - that explore the psychosocial dimensions of postwar antisemitism. They raise the question whether possibilities of Jewish-Gentile relations might lead to personal and social renovation. In "Focus", a crypto-fascist antisemite who has internalized racist stereotypes finally identifies symbolically as a Jew. In "The Victim", both Jew and Gentile partially overcome their mutual stereotyping. The main Jewish protagonist also overcomes some negative aspects of his self-image.