A spiritual companion for those grieving infertility, pregnancy loss, or stillbirth, bringing solace from Jewish tradition. "This book begins where the others leave off. While the doctors do what they must do, when it is time for us to wait, or hope, or cry, or sleep, or pray, it is time for this book. The passages found within are drawn from the rich pool of spiritual responses that Judaism possesses. They reach out to us and embolden us to join our voices to the ancient prayers designed to get us through the night."--from the Introduction Enables those frustrated and pained in their attempts at parenthood to mourn the loss of a pregnancy or infertility through the prayers, rituals, and meditations of the Jewish tradition. This new edition--updated and expanded--includes guided questions and pages on which to add personal reflections of your own emotions and experiences along the path toward parenting.

The unique wisdom of Judaism comes from the Talmud and the Judaic sages' other ancient writings that preserve the tradition of the originally oral Torah, or Teachings of Moses. Sometimes surprising - "better sincere sin than hypocritical virtue" - and always penetrating and helpful - "who are rich? those who are happy with their lot" - the wisdom of the oral Torah is set forth on more than one hundred subjects, arranged alphabetically, in their sources' own words, here rendered in clear and easily readable English. This is the "how-to" book for people who think deeply about everyday life: facing death of a loved one, the duties and rights of women and men together, busy-ness versus real achievement, deceit, gossip, discretion, virtue, honor, forbearance, forgiveness.

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.

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.

The story of a group of Jewish women who journey to spirituality through community and ceremony.

"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"--

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.

Women of Faith, renowned for their unique combination of personality and truth, offer fresh new messages in four new topical study guides in the popular Women of Faith Study Guide Series. Each study guide, teeming with insights and quotes from the conference speakers provides twelve weeks of Bible study and a leader's guide for small groups.

Drawing on personal experience, history, literature, and in-depth interviews, the authors address the volatile issues that interfaith couples face as they discover the importance of religion and ethnicity in their lives

Confidently navigating the ancient wilderness, master educator Erica Brown guides readers through the tumultuous events of the book of Numbers in search of the key to successful leadership. How might a leader overcome unrest? How to contend with external challenges and internal doubts? And how to rekindle the faith of a people who have all but given up? Bringing together Bible and commentary, literature and philosophy, travelogues and corporate manuals, Leadership in the Wilderness presents a guide to good government, as relevant today as it was three thousand years ago.

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".

"God's Power in Me is an interactive 52-day devotional that encourages young readers 8-12 to break free from negative thinking and focus on the positive truths of who God made them to be. Through daily devotions paired with a 90-second affirmation kids can say aloud every day, readers will grow closer to God and learn to challenge the personal doubts that might be holding them back. I'm not good enough. I don't deserve to be their friend. And things will never change. Kids tell themselves things like this every day, and popular Bible teacher and speaker Margaret Feinberg wants to help them defeat those self-doubts and stop believing the lies-because God only tells us the truth about ourselves, and that truth is we are all meant to have a joyous and powerful life. Throughout the devotions in God's Power in Me, kids will discover quick daily affirmations they can hold on to, biblical teachings, and practical applications for their own lives, Inspiration to banish any negative thoughts and ideas they may have, and encouragement to stand in their own truths while also growing closer to God in the process"--

Blues and Yellows just don't mix, and that's how it's always been. No one remembers why. But then comes the day Midnight Blue takes a tumble along the road. His friends Navy and Powder Blue don't even stop to help! It's only when a Yellow comes along that everything changes forever. This creative story is sure to prompt rich conversations, encouraging new ways of seeing our neighbors and ourselves. A note for parents and educators is included.

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.

Representing the spectrum of subfields within Jewish Studies, the contributing scholars to this volume use beginnings as a hermeneutic stance to analyze texts in their area. While each essay is a significant contribution to its own subfield - Bible, Talmud, Kabbalah, Modern Jewish Thought, Feminist and Cultural Studies - the essays taken as a whole present new possibilities for exploring the space that is Jewish Studies and beginning an inquiry into what might constitute a definable hermeneutics of Jewish texts.

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.

"Haggadah means "the telling." The escape from Egypt is the defining legend, the central drama of the Jews. Every nation coalesces around such an epic; its people project themselves into the story, aspire to the virtues of its heroes, and through periodic retelling or dramatization, transmit their values to the next generation. The traditional Haggadah offers a set of instructions for conducting the Passover service, interspersed with readings from the Bible, rabbinical commentaries, legends, prayers, hymns and children's songs. Written by men and addressing men, the traditional text has not historically offered much space for women to see themselves as fully involved in or spoken to by the powerful drama of human freedom articulated by the Haggadah. In Haggadah: A Celebration of Freedom, Martha Shelley brings a new vision to the traditional text."--Jacket.

Music and religion have, throughout history, walked hand in hand. In the rites and rituals of small tribal religions, great world religions, and more recent New-Age and neo-heathen movements, different kinds of music have been used to celebrate the gods, express belief and help believers get in contact with the divine. This innovative book focuses on how mainstream and counter-cultural groups use religion and music to negotiate the challenges of modernisation and globalisation in the European context: a region under-explored by existing literature on the subject. With its internal ethnic diversity, ever-expanding borders and increasing differentiation, Europe has undergone massive dislocation in recent years. The authors show that, in the midst of such change, rock, pop and dance music may in their various forms be used by their practitioners as resources for new kinds of spiritual and religious identification, even as these forms are used as symbols of the deficiencies of secular society. Focusing on Christianity, Judaism, Islam and New Religious Movements, the book explores such topics as Norwegian Black Metal and Neo-paganism, contemporary Jewish Music in the UK, the French hip hop scene, the musical thinking of Muslim convert Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and European dance music culture. It offers an ideal introduction to leading-edge thinking at the exciting interface of 'music and religion'.