"In this new history, French author Georges Bensoussan retells the story of what life was like for Jews in the Arab world since 1850. During the early years of this time, it was widely believed that Jewish life in Arab lands was peaceful. Jews were protected by law and suffered much less violence, persecution, and inequality. Bensoussan takes on this myth and looks back over the history of Jewish-Arab relations in Arab countries. He finds that there is little truth to the myth and forwards a nuanced history of interrelationship that is not only diverse, but deals with local differences in cultural, religious, and political practice. Bensoussan divides the work into sections that cover 1850 to the end of WWI, from 1919 to the eve of WWII and then from WWII to the establishment of Israel and the Arab Wars. A new afterword brings the history of Jewish and Arab relations into the present day. Bensoussan has determined that the history of Jews in Arab countries is a history of slowly disintegrating relationships, increasing tension, violence, and persecution"--

The definitive resource on Judaism This is a remarkable feat of reference scholarship by renowned Cambridge professor and translator, Nicholas de Lange. With an approachable A to Z format, the book covers everything from Jewish traditions and biographical entries on key historical figures to theology, religious law and practice, and the history of Jewish thought. Each entry is presented with clarity, precision, and authority. With extensive cross-referencing and invaluable additional material such as a chronology of Judaism and the Jewish calendar, this is an essential companion for students of Jewish studies, Hebrew, religion, and theology, or anyone with a general interest in this rich religion.

For thousands of years the Jewish tradition has been a source of moral guidance, for Jews and non-Jews alike. As the essays in this volume show, the theologians and practitioners of Judaism have a long history of wrestling with moral questions, responding to them in an open, argumentative mode that reveals the strengths and weaknesses of all sides of a question. The Jewish tradition also offers guidance for moral conduct by individuals, communities, and countries and shows how to motivate people to do the good and right thing. The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics and Morality is a collection of original essays addressing these topics--historical and contemporary, as well as philosophical and practical--by leading scholars from around the world. The first section of the volume describes the history of the Jewish tradition's moral thought, from the Bible to contemporary Jewish approaches. The second part includes chapters on specific fields in ethics, including the ethics of medicine, business, sex, speech, politics, war, and the environment.

The stories in "Jewish Children" likely capture the joys, struggles, and everyday experiences of Jewish children growing up in the shtetls (Jewish villages) of Eastern Europe. Aleichem's writing often combines humor, warmth, and poignant observations about family, community, and tradition. The collection may include tales of mischief, friendship, and coming-of-age moments, as well as reflections on the unique cultural and religious heritage of Jewish communities. Aleichem's characters are typically colorful and memorable, offering readers insights into the rich tapestry of Jewish life and culture. Through "Jewish Children," Sholem Aleichem likely invites readers to immerse themselves in the world of Jewish childhood, where laughter and tears, dreams and aspirations, mingle against the backdrop of a changing world. The collection serves as a tribute to the resilience, humor, and enduring spirit of Jewish children throughout history.

Written one year after the momentous 1967, Six Day War, this book places those recent and dramatic events in the context of Jewish and world history.

"Howard Jacobson's funny, revealing and tender memoir of his path to becoming a writer. It's my theory that only the unhappy, the uncomfortable, the gauche, the badly put together, aspire to make art. Why would you seek to reshape the world unless you were ill-at-ease in it? And I came out of the womb in every sense the wrong way round. In Mother's Boy, Booker-Prize winner Howard Jacobson reveals how he became a writer. It is an exploration of belonging and not-belonging, of being an insider and outsider, both English and Jewish. Jacobson was forty when his first novel was published. In Mother's Boy he traces the life that brought him there. Born to a working-class family in 1940s Manchester, the great-grandson of Lithuanian and Russian immigrants, Jacobson was raised by his mother, grandmother and aunt Joyce. His father was a regimental tailor, as well as an upholsterer, a market-stall holder, a taxi driver, a balloonist, and a magician. Grappling always with his family's history and his Jewish identity, Jacobson takes us from the growing pains of childhood to studying at Cambridge under F.R. Leavis, and landing in Sydney as a maverick young professor on campus." --

Explores central questions in the history and theory of Jewish ethics, namely, the relationship between ethics and law, the relationship between ethics and theology, and the problems and prospects for constructing a contemporary Jewish ethic. 'Past Imperatives' explores the nature and development of Jewish ethics by analyzing three important sets of issues: the relationship between Jewish law and ethics, the relationship between Jewish ethics and theology, and the problems and prospects for constructing a contemporary Jewish ethic. The penetrating and provocative essays are drawn from a number of fields, including legal theory, literary theory, and theory of religion. These studies illuminate many previously uninvestigated aspects of Jewish biomedical ethics, covenant theology, and textual interpretation in Judaism. By exploring these issues within the larger context of historical and theoretical work in religious studies, 'Past Imperatives' moves beyond previous work in Jewish ethics, which has largely sought to offer moral guidance from a Jewish perspective. This volume boldly confronts the fact that Judaism encompasses many, sometimes contradictory, ethical perspectives and investigates their theological underpinnings, how they have developed, and how they differ from other moral and/or religious perspectives.

Michael Stanislawski's provocative study of Max Nordau, Ephraim Moses Lilien, and Vladimir Jabotinsky reconceives the intersection of the European fin de siecle and early Zionism. Stanislawski takes up the tantalizing question of why Zionism, at a particular stage in its development, became so attractive to certain cosmopolitan intellectuals and artists. With the help of hundreds of previously unavailable documents, published and unpublished, he reconstructs the ideological journeys of writer and critic Nordau, artist Lilien, and political icon Jabotinsky. He argues against the common conception of Nordau and Jabotinsky as nineteenth-century liberals, insisting that they must be understood against the backdrop of Social Darwinism in the West and the Positivism of Russian radicalism in the fin de siecle, as well as Symbolism, Decadence, and Art Nouveau. When these men turned to Zionism, Stanislawski says, far from abandoning their aesthetic and intellectual preconceptions, they molded Zionism according to their fin de siecle cosmopolitanism. Showing how cosmopolitanism turned to nationalism in the lives and work of these crucial early Zionists, this story is a fascinating chapter in European and Russian, as well as Jewish, cultural and political history.

An investigation of Jewish identity politics and Jewish contemporary ideology using both popular culture and scholarly texts. Jewish identity is tied up with some of the most difficult and contentious issues of today. The purpose in this book is to open many of these issues up for discussion. Since Israel defines itself openly as the 'Jewish State', we should ask what the notions of 'Judaism', 'Jewishness', 'Jewish culture' and 'Jewish ideology' stand for. Gilad examines the tribal aspects embedded in Jewish secular discourse, both Zionist and anti Zionist; the 'holocaust religion'; the meaning of 'history' and 'time' within the Jewish political discourse; the anti-Gentile ideologies entangled within different forms of secular Jewish political discourse and even within the Jewish left. He questions what it is that leads Diaspora Jews to identify themselves with Israel and affiliate with its politics. The devastating state of our world affairs raises an immediate demand for a conceptual shift in our intellectual and philosophical attitude towards politics, identity politics and history.

Designed as a reference work for the student and general reader, this Kabbalistic dictionary is a concise and handy guide to the history and treasures of the Jewish mystical tradition. It is the first dictionary of Kabbalah to provide an overview of the major themes of Jewish Kabbalistic thought as it developed over the centuries and also contains brief introductions to its major practitioners. In addition to the dictionary itself, the book contains a chronology of Kabbalah, a history of Kabbalah from ancient times to the present, maps, illustrations and an insight into the emergence of the Kabbalah Centre in California, where many celebrities, including Madonna, worship.

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.

Chs. 7 and 8 (pp. 79-110) discuss how the Holocaust has changed Jewish thought, especially on ethics and theology. In keeping with the principle of historicism of Judaism, contends that the Holocaust generated a set of new imperatives, including the importance of Jewish existence as a response to the Holocaust. Regards Rabbi Ephraim Oshry from Kovno as the first halakhic authority who began to alter Jewish ethics in the period of the Holocaust. Divides contemporary Jewish thinkers between those who recognize that the Holocaust was a unique event, and hence justify amendments in Jewish ethics and theology (e.g. Emil Fackenheim), and those who do not recognize it (e.g. Eliezer Berkovits); an intermediate attitude is held by Irving Greenberg.

"This book is written to counter a new sort of Anti-Semitism: Replacement Theology and to address other destructive, widespread distortions that cause Christians and Jews to misunderstand each other. History, stretching back to the Reformation, reveals a special commitment of Christians to the Jews as God's still elect people. This story needs to be told to help heal past wounds and to inspire more Christians to stand together in support of Israel.•What is the new anti-Semitism that is on the rise in sectors of Christianity? •What distortions are blinding people from seeing the Jews as God sees them? •What truth does history reveal that has been kept hidden?"--back cover.

"David Novak, one of the world's most distinguished Jewish theologians, offers a new interpretation of how the Jewish people and the Jewish tradition talk about God. The book traces the history and theology of God-talk in Judaism, and how it remains relevant, now more than ever, and speaks directly to contemporary issues such as human rights"--

Nineteenth-century European thought, especially in Germany, was increasingly dominated by a new historicist impulse to situate every event, person, or text in its particular context. At odds with the transcendent claims of philosophy and--more significantly--theology, historicism came to be attacked by its critics for reducing human experience to a series of disconnected moments, each of which was the product of decidedly mundane, rather than sacred, origins. By the late nineteenth century and into the Weimar period, historicism was seen by many as a grinding force that corroded social values and was emblematic of modern societys gravest ills. Resisting History examines the backlash against historicism, focusing on four major Jewish thinkers. David Myers situates these thinkers in proximity to leading Protestant thinkers of the time, but argues that German Jews and Christians shared a complex cultural and discursive world best understood in terms of exchange and adaptation rather than influence.After examining the growing dominance of the new historicist thinking in the nineteenth century, the book analyzes the critical responses of Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Leo Strauss, and Isaac Breuer. For this fascinating and diverse quartet of thinkers, historicism posed a stark challenge to the ongoing vitality of Judaism in the modern world. And yet, as they set out to dilute or eliminate its destructive tendencies, these thinkers often made recourse to the very tools and methods of historicism. In doing so, they demonstrated the utter inescapability of historicism in modern culture, whether approached from a Christian or Jewish perspective.

A challenging look at two great Jewish philosophers, and what their thinking means to our understanding of God, truth, revelation and reason. Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) is Jewish history's greatest exponent of a rational, philosophically sound Judaism. He strove to reconcile the teachings of the Bible and rabbinic tradition with the principles of Aristotelian philosophy, arguing that religion and philosophy ultimately must arrive at the same truth. Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) is Jewish history's most illustrious "heretic." He believed that truth could be attained through reason alone, and that philosophy and religion were separate domains that could not be reconciled. His critique of the Bible and its teachings caused an intellectual and spiritual upheaval whose effects are still felt today. Rabbi Marc D. Angel discusses major themes in the writings of Maimonides and Spinoza to show us how modern people can deal with religion in an intellectually honest and meaningful way. From Maimonides, we gain insight on how to harmonize traditional religious belief with the dictates of reason. From Spinoza, we gain insight into the intellectual challenges which must be met by modern believers.

The memoir of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall offers today's activists and readers an accessible and intimate examination of a crucial era in American radical history. Born in 1929 New Orleans to left-wing Jewish parents, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall's life has spanned nearly a century of engagement in anti-racist, internationalist political activism. In this moving and instructive chronicle of her remarkable life, Midlo Hall recounts her experiences as an anti-racist activist, a Communist Party militant, and a scholar of slavery in the Americas, as well as the wife and collaborator of the renowned African-American author and Communist leader Harry Haywood. Telling the story of her life against the backdrop of the important political and social developments of the 20th century, Midlo Hall offers new insights about a critical period in the history of labor and civil rights movements in the United States. Detailing everything from Midlo Hall's co-founding of the only inter-racial youth organization in the South when she was 16-years-old, to her pioneering work establishing digital slave databases, to her own struggles against cruel and pervasive sexism, Haunted by Slavery is a gripping account of a life defined by profound dedication to a cause.

First published in 1962, this book examines Germany's Free Youth Movement, a revolt of the younger generation in Germany from 1896 to 1933. This movement was one of the most significant factors in shaping modern Germany. Laqueur, who grew up in Germany, retraces the history of the movement, its central ideas, and its cultural background. He begins with its origins in 19th century, and goes on to examine the Jewish question, before moving on to the movement's roots in Germany around the time of the rise of National Socialism in the late 1920's and early 1930's. This book inspires all the ideas which continue to preoccupy proponents and students of generational conflict today.

Marcus Spiegel, a German Jewish immigrant, served with the 67th and 120th Ohio Volunteer regiments during the Civil War. He saw action in Virginia, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana, where he was fatally wounded in May 1864. These letters to Caroline, his wife, reveal the traumatizing experience of a soldier and the constant concern of a husband and father. Jean Powers Soman is a great-great-granddaughter of Marcus Spiegel. Her coeditor, Frank L. Byrne, is a professor of history at Kent State University and the editor of several books, including Haskell of Gettysburg: His Life and Civil War Papers.

"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"--