This volume offers readers a critical engagement with the trenchant and candid efforts of one of the most thoughtful and earnest voices to emerge from within American Orthodoxy to address the theological and moral concerns that characterize our times.

"As a writer he was the disengaged onlooker who understood how his presence altered a place or a situation." This is how the Independent described Laurie Lee in their 1997 obituary of the much-loved author. In A Thousand Laurie Lees , another poet, Adam Horovitz, explores not only how the Slad Valley informed the man and his writing, but also how the valley itself was affected by its association with such an international figure, and how it has retained its particular identity since its description in Cider with Rosie . Shortly after Laurie Lee's death in 1997, a handful of locals dressed up as Lee and cycled right through the heart of Cider with Rosie country, stopping off at all the pubs on the way. They called their journey "The Night of a Thousand Laurie Lees." Slad valley man Horovitz draws on memoir, myth, and literature inspired by the valley and his walks through the Slad landscape, charting what has changed and what remains, from badger setts to "Notting Hill in Wellies," to celebrate the man and the landscape that made him.

In 2001, Ivan R. Dee began publication of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize–winner with the appearance of Donald Petersen’s Early and Late. The New Criterion, which has published poetry since 1984, is recognized as one of the foremost contemporary venues for poetry with a regard for traditional meter and poetic form. The magazine was thus an early leader in that poetic renaissance that has come to be called the New Formalism. For 2002 The New Criterion Poetry Prize was awarded to Adam Kirsch. His first book of poems, The Thousand Wells, is now published. Combining a passionate lyricism with commanding technical skill, Mr. Kirsch offers a beguiling and memorable sequence of poems that are deeply alive to the enchantments of nature and the chastenings of history. This is a remarkable debut by a notable young poet.

Bumped a little at corners, minor shelfwear. Contents clean, sound, bright. TPW

In this new collection of essays, Adam Michnik—one of Europe’s leading dissidents—traces the post-cold-war transformation of Eastern Europe. He writes again in opposition, this time to post-communist elites and European Union bureaucrats. Composed of history, memoir, and political critique, In Search of Lost Meaning shines a spotlight on the changes in Poland and the Eastern Bloc in the post-1989 years. Michnik asks what mistakes were made and what we can learn from climactic events in Poland’s past, in its literature, and the histories of Central and Eastern Europe. He calls attention to pivotal moments in which central figures like Lech Walesa and political movements like Solidarity came into being, how these movements attempted to uproot the past, and how subsequent events have ultimately challenged Poland’s enduring ethical legacy of morality and liberalism. Reflecting on the most recent efforts to grapple with Poland’s Jewish history and residual guilt, this profoundly important book throws light not only on recent events, but also on the thinking of one of their most important protagonists.

Following the Jewish Enlightenment, many eighteenth-century Jews chose not to observe the religious laws and customs that had earlier marked them as culturally different from their Christian peers. As the Jewish population became increasingly assimilated, an ultraorthodox movement also emerged, creating a discrete identity for a group within the Jewish community that opted not to move toward the mainstream but instead to embrace the traditional laws .By tracing the evolution of the approach of the Orthodox to their nonpracticing brethren, Adam S. Ferziger sheds new light on the emergence of Orthodoxy as a specific movement within modern Jewish society. In the course of this process, German Orthodoxy in particular articulated a new hierarchical vision of Jewish identity and the structure of modern Jewish society. Viewing Orthodox Judaism as no less a nineteenth-century phenomenon than Reform Judaism or Zionism, Ferziger looks at the ways it defined itself by its relationship to the nonobservant Jewish population. Ferziger argues that as the Orthodox movement emerged, it rejected the stance that the assimilated and nonobservers were deviant outcasts. Instead, they were accepted as legitimate members of a Jewish community, in which Orthodox Jews occupied the pinnacle, as the guardians of its tradition. This book's contribution, however, moves beyond a historical study of Orthodox Judaism. The sociological methodology that Ferziger employs enables the reader to appreciate how other religious groups have sought to carve out their places within the mosaic of modern society.

The Fence and the Neighbor traces the contours of two thinkers, Emmanuel Levinas and Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who crossed the divide between Talmud and philosophy “proper.” Adam Zachary Newton shows how the question of nationalism that has so long haunted Western philosophy—the question of who belongs within its “fence,” and who outside—has long been the concern of Jewish thought and its preoccupation with law, limits, and the place of Israel among the nations. To those unfamiliar with Talmudic thought Newton shows how deeply its language and concerns shape Levinas. He also offers an introduction to Leibowitz, a conservative religious thinker who was an outspoken gadfly and radically critical voice in the Israeli political scene. Together, their common origin in Jewish Eastern Europe, a common concern with national allegiance, and the common fence of religious Judaism that makes them intellectual neighbors are voiced in penetrating and original dialogue.

"Checking In comprises a long poem and a series of other post-conceptual pieces - concrete poems, homolinguistic translations, Yiddish aphorisms - that offer exuberant commentary on the timelessness of digital information and our ravenous appetite for data and connection. The title poem, composed as a series of faux social-media updates, is a parodic investigation of contemporary literary and pop culture. As a euphoric parade of "alternative facts" or "fake news," "Checking In" offers satiric comment on the state of American politics. Each ironically investigative line erupts as a self-reflexive mash-up, speaking to our seemingly insatiable desire for information while acknowledging how fraught that information can be. The Internet is not only voyeuristic but a mirage. We seek fulfillment but enter an unsettling, uninhibited flow of information in which every data point refers to itself and reinforces a techno-capitalist culture. Checking In founds a site of radical, grafted linkages, codes, indices, ludic identities. An interdisciplinary and paradoxical repository of fragments, analyses, echoes, and provocations, (re)presented in a slippery ellipsis of contexts and possibilities, its poems are inter-subjective theatres of infinite re-framing. From Gargantua and Pantagruel listening to They Might Be Giants to bill bissett and Slavoj i̓ ek Awake in the Red Desert of the Real, Checking In tours the shards of post-consumerist culture and reminds us we are living in a resonant present, where the past is always with us, and our icons, idols, and ideologies are posting, poking, sharing, and liking ̥Karasick's words luxuriate in the materiality of language and the production of meaning. She checks in with pop culture, media studies, semiotics, critical theory, feminist theory, and contemporary Canadian and American literature. The lover of language play, the poetry reader, and the academic alike will drink in this poet-performer's concoctions; as ever, they're fun, smart, and topical. With full-colour Vispo video stills by Jim Andrews."--

Merging autobiography, criticism, feminist theory and poetry in an economy of desire, Mêmewars puts a poetics of rupture, displacement, obsession and exile into praxis. This text writes against a sexist, imperialist discourse of mastery and idealization. It challenges the mythologies of cohesion, autonomy and stable identity―the capitalist vision of literary originality, where ownership is of prime value. As a book that calls into question beginnings and ends, Mêmewars has no closure and no “back” cover; six individual texts work from two separate beginnings: they clash in the “middle”―an unstable and shifting “centre.” However through a self-reflexive practice of authorization, intention is delegitimized as the centre-piece decentres, and becomes yet another beginning.

Adele Reinhartz has been studying and teaching the Gospel of John for many years. Earlier, she chose to ignore the love/hate relationship that the book provokes in her, a Jew, and took refuge in an "objective" historical-critical approach. At this stage her relationship to the Gospel was not so much a friendship as a business relationship. No longer willing to ignore the negative portrayal of Jews and Judaism in the text, nor the insight that her own Jewish identity inevitably does play a role in her work as an exegete, Reinhartz here explores the Fourth Gospel through the approach known as "ethical criticism," which is based on the metaphorical notion of the book as "friend"--not "an easy, unquestioning companionship," but the kind of honest relationship in which ethical considerations are addressed, not avoided. In a book as multilayered as the Gospel itself, Reinhartz engages in 4 different "readings" of the Fourth Gospel: compliant, resistant, sympathetic, and engaged. Each approach views the Beloved Disciple differently: as mentor, opponent, colleague, and as "other." In the course of each of these readings, she elucidates the three narrative levels that interpenetrate the Gospel: the historical, the cosmological, and the ecclesiological. In the latter, Reinhartz deals at length with the so-called expulsion theory, the dominant scholarly notion that the Johannine community, which included believers of Jewish, Gentile, and Samaritan origins, engaged in a prolonged and violent controversy with the local Jewish community, culminating in a "traumatic expulsion from the synagogue."

"Goy: Israel's multiple others and the birth of the gentile traces the development of the term and category of the goy from the Bible to rabbinic literature. Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi show that the category of the goy was born much later than scholars assume; in fact not before the first century CE. They explain that the abstract concept of the gentile first appeared in Paul's Letters. However, it was only in rabbinic literature that this category became the center of a stable and long standing structure that involved God, the Halakha, history, and salvation. The authors narrate this development through chronological analyses of the various biblical and post biblical texts (including the Dead Sea scrolls, the New Testament and early patristics, the Mishnah, and rabbinic Midrash) and synchronic analyses of several discursive structures. Looking at some of the goy's instantiations in contemporary Jewish culture in Israel and the United States, the study concludes with an examination of the extraordinary resilience of the Jew/goy division and asks how would Judaism look like without the gentile as its binary contrast"--Publisher's website.

The Strife of the Spirit explores such fundamental themes as the nature of the human soul, the path of the penitent, and the relationship between student and text. Rabbi Steinsaltz moves comfortably and effectively between essays and oral discourses, interviews and stories.

Arguing that the disciplines of economics and sociology are inter-related and vitally important to each other, this book discusses major issues such as the effects of urbanization, population growth, and the growth of various forms of nationalism from both economic and socio-political viewpoints. In addition the significance and limits of pure economics are examined, as are the sociological factors in modern economic theory, as well as power and economic law.

Adolph Saphir's classic meditation on chapter four, verse eight of the Book of James is treasured for its poignant spiritual assessment of the New Testament. "Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you." is the message at the heart of The Hidden Life. For the author, these words summarize most perfectly the exactness of God's message through the New Testament. With this as his basis, Adolph Saphir proceeds to discuss how to live with the Holy Trinity in mind. Yet his contemplations are rich in their variety; he visits such topics as Eastern mysticism found in religions of India and Islam, the discussions between God and Biblical figures such as Nicodemus, and the message brought by Christ to humankind. The meditations herein are supported by references to chapters of the New Testament, together with a variety of quotations from spiritual authors of antiquity and early modern times. Though his inquiry is winding with touches of eclecticism, Saphir never loses sight of the objective: growing closer to the spiritual essence of the Lord and Jesus Christ. The Saphir family converted from Judaism to Christianity when Adolph was a child. Intellectually apt, Adolph gained a Master's degree from Glasgow University, and went on to serve as a minister and missionary of some renown in the 19th century. Glasgow University made him an honorary Doctor of Divinity in 1878.

The core of the book is the set of photographs taken during the ballet's first production, albeit with "elaborate retouching" of the negatives by the photographer. An introduction by Richard Buckle tries to date the photographs more precisely, while an essay by Jennifer Dunning looks at the background to, and creation of, the ballet. An appendix by Ann Hutchinson Guest examines Nijinsky's personal dance notation system, in which he recorded the entire ballet. Also includes the French text of the Mallarme poem 'L'apres-midi d'un faune', along with Aldous Huxley's English version.