Traces the history and significance of the Jewish fall festival which commemorates the wandering of the Israelites in the wilderness and the festival with which they celebrated their arrival in the Promised Land.

Dr. Neruda is a man of success, talent, and a harrowing past. The son of a charismatic Spanish journalist and the fragile, black sheep of a Jewish American family, his personal history is one of incest, violence, lust, manipulation, and betrayal. But as a grown man, Dr. Neruda has learned to channel the agonies of his youth into the discipline of Freudian psychotherapy, brilliantly rescuing the wounded from the throes of their tormented psyches. Now one of his cases - one of his greatest successes - has violently unraveled. And Dr. Neruda is obsessed with finding out why. Interviewing the people who affected his patient's life and death, Dr. Neruda finds a den of darkly entwined and opposing psyches in a corporate American setting. Bosses and employees are fathers and sons; co-workers become lovers, sisters, and brothers; and evil, in the guise of society's most well-paid and seemingly happy people, is running rampant. Dr. Neruda, calm, rational master of his discipline, is going to cure this evil. He will do it by crossing the line between therapist and inquisitor, between confidant and lover. He will do it by playing out an erotic fantasy game with a beautiful, narcissistic woman and by humiliating her sadistic father. He will do it by venturing dangerously close to his own demons: the ghosts of his living father, his dying friend, and his dead mother. Obsessed with his cure for evil, will the man of reason see its cost?

More than any other topic, prophecy represents the point at which the Divine meets the human, the Absolute meets the relative. How can a human being attain the Word of God? In what manner does God, when conceived as eternal and transcendent, address corporeal, transitory creatures? What happens to God's divine Truth when it is beheld by minds limited in their power to apprehend, and influenced by the intellectual currents of their time and place? How were these issues viewed by the great Jewish philosophers of the past, who took the divine communication and all it entails seriously, while at the same time desired to understand it as much as humanly possible in the course of dealing with a myriad of other issues that occupied their attention? This book offers an in-depth study of prophecy in the thought of seven of the leading medieval Jewish philosophers: R. Saadiah Gaon, R. Judah Halevi, Maimonides, Gersonides, R. Hasdai Crescas, R. Joseph Albo and Baruch Spinoza. It attempts to capture the `original voice' of these thinkers by looking at the intellectual milieus in which they developed their philosophies, and by carefully analyzing their views in their textual contexts. It also deals with the relation between the earlier approaches and the later ones. Overall, this book presents a significant model for narrating the history of an idea.

An architectural history concentrating on the contribution of the Jewish community to Britain's urban landscape. Ten architects and art scholars offer essays on all the major Jewish building types, including synagogues, cemeteries, mikvaot (ritual baths) and social architecture.

"There is an academic cottage industry on the "Jewish Freud," aiming to detect Jewish influences on Freud, his own feelings about being Jewish, and suppressed traces of Jewishness in his thought. This book takes a different approach, turning its gaze not on Freud but rather on those who seek out his concealed Jewishness. What is it that propels the scholarly aim to show Freud in a Jewish light? Naomi Seidman explores attempts to "touch" Freud (and other famous Jews) through Jewish languages, seeking out his Hebrew name or evidence that he knew some Yiddish. Tracing a history of this drive to bring Freud into Jewish range, Seidman also charts Freud's responses to (and jokes about) this desire. More specifically, she reads the reception and translation of Freud in Hebrew and Yiddish as instances of the desire to touch, feel, "rescue," and connect with the famous Professor from Vienna"--

This in-depth examination of the Dead Sea Scrolls reveals their true heart: a missing link between ancient and modern Judaism. Because the Dead Sea Scrolls include the earliest known manuscripts of the Bible as well as Jewish documents composed just after the Hebrew biblical period, they contain a gold mine of information about the history of Judaism and the early roots and background of Christianity. Schiffman refocuses the controversy from who controls access to the Scrolls today to what the Scrolls tell us about the past. He challenges the prevailing notion of earlier Scrolls scholars that the Dead Sea Scrolls were proto-Christian, demonstrating instead their thorough-going Jewish character and their importance for understanding the history of Judaism.

The distinguished contemporary Jewish philosopher, teacher, and editor, Rabbi Eugene B. Borowitz, examines the responses of Jewish thought to the challenge of the modern world. This book celebrates the achievement of the thiinkers who responded to the unprecedented challenge modernity issued to Jewish faith. Large numbers in our community doubt God's existence, are skeptical about the revelation of the Torah, and cannot believe that the Jewish people has a unique role in human history. By studying the ideas of our great modern philosophers, wven when one disagrees with them one is stimulated to think more keenly about one's own Judaism.

Now in paperback! Taking Hold of Torah Jewish Commitment and Community in America Arnold M. Eisen A personal meditation on the meaning of Judaism today and a vision for revitalizing Jewish community and tradition in America. "Arnold M. Eisen offers a personal plea for—and a vision of—the revitalizing of American Judaism through a renewed relationship to Jewish tradition and the strengthening of Jewish communities." —Jewish Book News "...required reading for Jewish communal professionals, [Taking Hold of Torah] spells out the discontents and dreams of the baby boomers and their children who are reinventing Jewish communal life for the modern world." —Jewish Exponent "Melding autobiography with biblical exegesis, philosophical speculation and a program for Jewish educational reform, the book is an unbuttoned riff on what's ailing modern Jews." —Forward "...a personal story of a modern Jew trying to make sense of Judaism in a time when Jews can choose whether and how to be Jewish...." —The Jewish Advocate Jews, like other Americans, have both benefitted and suffered from the fraying of traditional loyalties that has come to characterize modern American culture. In each of the five chapters, Arnold M. Eisen examines a major issue or theme related to his vision for the renewal of Jewish communities—in terms of one of the five books of the Torah. What is the meaning and purpose of Jewish tradition? What is the significance of faith and covenant? What are the contemporary uses of ritual? What should a new agenda for politics in American Jewish life include? What legacy is to be left to future generations? This encouraging work is essential reading for anyone concerned with questions of Jewish faith and the future of Judaism in America. Arnold M. Eisen is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at Stanford University, a frequent speaker on issues related to contemporary Jewish life before lay and scholarly audiences throughout North America, and an active participant in communal discussions concerning the future of American Judaism. His publications include The Chosen People in America (Indiana University Press) and Rethinking Modern Judaism: Ritual, Commandment, Community, winner of a Koret Jewish Book Award. The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies Contents: Introduction 1. Genesis: Taking on Tradition 2. Exodus: History, Faith, and Covenant 3. Leviticus: Ritual and Community 4. Numbers: Politics in the Wilderness 5. Deuteronomy: Legacies

"Jewishness and the Human Dimension is a leading scholar's progress report on an effort to bring Jewishness broadly construed into dialogue with a wide range of thought in contemporary criticism, while linking those themes in turn to the question of planetary crisis. Each chapter emerges from and addresses the circumstances of its composition; a talk to New Jersey undergraduates inviting them to contemplate their lifespans vis-a-vis the life history of the species; a meeting to contemplate Jewish memory outside Europe and after 1945; an inaugural address as the author sought to make sense of leaving his home on the Lower East Side and making a new one in Kansas." "Two chapters on research and teaching in Jewish cultural studies as academic practice develop the notion of Jewish studies as a human science and examine how Jewish historiography, once a deeply conservative discipline, has integrated insights from anthropology and literary cultural studies. Boyarin also shares a dialogue with the Jerusalem-based physicist Martin Land on physical and cultural ideas of futurity and redemption. The book ends with a stark challenge to those who work in the contemporary humanities and social sciences: in order to be able to contribute to the possibility of sustained human life on Earth, we need to interrogate rigorously now the status of human differences."--

Pauline Wengeroff, the only nineteenth-century Russian Jewish woman to publish a memoir, sets out to illuminate the "cultural history of the Jews of Russia" in the period of Jewish "enlightenment," when traditional culture began to disintegrate and Jews became modern. Wengeroff, a gifted writer and astute social observer, paints a rich portrait of both traditional and modernizing Jewish societies in an extraordinary way, focusing on women and the family and offering a gendered account (and indictment) of assimilation. In Volume 1 of Memoirs of a Grandmother, Wengeroff depicts traditional Jewish society, including the religious culture of women, during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, who wished "his" Jews to be acculturated to modern Russian life.Pauline Wengeroff's Memoirs of a Grandmother offers a unique first-person window into traditionalism, modernity, and the tensions linking the two in nineteenth-century Russia. Wengeroff (1833–1916), a perceptive, highly literate social observer, tells a gripping tale of cultural transformation, situating her narrative in the experience of women and families. In Volume Two, Wengeroff claims that Jewish women were capable and desirous of adopting the best of European modernity but were also wedded to tradition, while Jewish men recklessly abandoned tradition and forced their wives to do the same. The result was not only marital and intergenerational conflict but also catastrophic cultural loss, with women's inability to transmit tradition in the home leading to larger cultural drift. Two of Wengeroff's children converted when faced with anti-Jewish educational and professional discrimination, unwilling to sacrifice secular ambitions and visions for the sake of a traditional culture they did not know. Memoirs is a tale of loss but also of significant hope, which Wengeroff situates not in her children but in a new generation of Jewish youth reclaiming Jewish memory. To them, she addresses her Memoirs, giving an "orphaned youth"―orphaned of their past and culture―a "grandmother."

"Over the centuries, the messianic tradition has provided the language through which modern Jewish philosophers, socialists, and Zionists envisioned a utopian future. Michael L. Morgan, Steven Weitzman, and an international group of leading scholars ask new questions and provide new ways of thinking about this enduring Jewish idea. Using the writings of Gershom Scholem, which ranged over the history of messianic belief and its conflicted role in the Jewish imagination, these essays put aside the boundaries that divide history from philosophy and religion to offer new perspectives on the role and relevance of messianism today"--

Robert Eisenman’s classic work, Islamic Law in Palestine and Israel: A History of the Survival of Tanzimat and Sharia, examines how Islamic law, such as Shari law, survived in Palestine and Israel in a pure form perhaps longer than in any other Ottoman successor state. It did this for a variety of reasons, chief among which are the innate conservatism of the British and the inability of the Israelis, particularly in the country’s early days, to do much about it. Besides Lebanon and Gaza, only in Israel did those three great monuments of Islamic and Ottoman modernism: the Ottoman Law of Family Rights, the Ottoman Land Code, and the Mecelle-i Akham-i Adliye, survive simultaneously.Author, Robert Eisenman, traces this continuity from Ottoman times in terms understandable to both specialists, lawyers, and laypersons. The anomaly of Islamic laws', such as Sharia law, survival against the backdrop of British legal concepts and renascent Jewish nationalism is delineated completely. Detailed attention is also given to the effect, or non-effect, of such Israeli reforms in Women’s Equal Rights Law on the Muslim community and on Islamic law, as well as to the creation of Israeli hybrid laws, such as the Land Law of 1969, and a new Israeli modernism.The situation in Israel today remains more or less the same. In some areas beyond the 1967 Green Lines, where Israeli Law has been applied, it is as described in this book. In others, which have not been annexed or where it has not, Jordanian Law for the most part still obtains - - -This work was originally carried out at the suggestion of Prof. Joseph Schacht. If it overstresses Islamic law in Palestine and Israel as a civil law for all persons (i.e., the Mecelle), it does so because he was particularly interested in this aspect of the problem. He himself had already done considerable work on other similar hybrids, that is the development of Anglo-Muhammadan Law in India and the various developments of Islamic law in Nigeria. That Palestine, and later Israel, turned out to be one of the last places where some of the great monuments of Islamic legislation of the Tanzimat and the Young Turk period survived, even after they had already been replaced in Turkey itself and other Ottoman successor states of the region, made the study all the more compelling.In the course of the research, it turned out that some of the most interesting developments took place in the areas of land law and personal status, outside the ongoing situation in civil law. Though Schacht would not have thought of the Land Code as an original piece of Islamic legislation, still one finds in it so much material of clear Islamic inspiration, that it would be difficult not to consider it. Besides, it contains some of the most fascinating material in the whole discussion and to have ignored it would have detracted from the work as a whole. The section on the code itself in Part One makes an attempt to separate out some of its more Islamic aspects from its Turkish customary ones. For this reason, too, in the first part, it was felt necessary to go into at some length the Islamic aspects of these Ottoman codification attempts generally, as no such similar study exists. For the discriminating reader, who cares about these fine-points, it is hoped this will suffice.

A comprehensive history of the Jews in Hungary from the Roman period up to the present. Describes, inter alia, legal restrictions on the Jews in the 11th-14th centuries; the expulsion of the Jews from Hungary in 1360 under King Lajos I; the blood libel in Nagysombat in 1494; the massacre of Jews in Buda by the Hungarian and Brandenburg armies in 1686, after recapturing the city from the Turks. Ch. 31 (pp. 347-357), "Istoczy and Tiszaeszlar, " deals with the first blood libel case in Hungary in the 19th century. Chs. 36-39 (pp. 442-534) deal with intellectual and political antisemitism in Hungary in the early 20th century (before 1938), including the period of Horthy's White Terror and the numerus clausus in Hungarian universities. Chs. 40-44 (pp. 535-595) deal with the anti-Jewish laws of 1938-39 and the Holocaust in Hungary. Notes that antisemitism did not disappear in Hungary after 1945. Contends that antisemitism in Hungary in the 20th century not only almost destroyed the highly acculturated Jewish community, but also harmed Hungarian culture, to which many Jews contributed.

The first book-length study of contemporary British Jewry, 'Turbulent Times: The British Jewish Community Today' examines the changing nature of the British Jewish community and its leadership since 1990. Keith Kahn-Harris and Ben Gidley contend that there has been a shift within Jewish communal discourse from a strategy of security, which emphasized Anglo-Jewry's secure British belonging and citizenship, to a strategy of insecurity, which emphasizes the dangers and threats Jews face individually and communally. This shift is part of a process of renewal in the community that has led to something of a 'Jewish renaissance' in Britain. Addressing key questions on the transitions in the history of Anglo-Jewish community and leadership, and tackling the concept of the 'new antisemitism', this important and timely study addresses the question: how has UK Jewry adapted from a shift from monoculturalism to multiculturalism?

Exile is an investigative memoir where faith, history, and anthropology meet. The breadth of countries covered--combined with historical analysis, personal anecdotes, and interviews--is not only certain to delight the senses, but also foster a greater understanding of the Jewish experience.

Aaron W. Hughes presents the first major study of dialogue as a Jewish philosophical practice. Examining connections between Jewish philosophy, the literary form in which it is expressed, and the culture in which it is produced, Hughes shows how Jews understood and struggled with their social, religious, and intellectual environments. In this innovative and insightful book, Hughes addresses various themes associated with the literary form of dialogue as well as its philosophical reception: Why did various thinkers choose dialogue? What did it allow them to accomplish? How do the literary features of dialogue construct philosophical argument? As a history of philosophical form, context, and practice, this book will interest scholars and students working at the intersections of religious studies, philosophy, and literature.

Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century encourages contemporary Jewish thinkers to reflect on the meaning of Judaism in the modern world by connecting these reflections to their own personal biographies. In so doing, it reveals the complexity of Jewish thought in the present moment. The contributors reflect on a range of political, social, ethical, and educational challenges that face Jews and Judaism today and chart a path for the future. The results showcase how Jewish philosophy encompasses the methodologies and concerns of other fields such as political theory, intellectual history, theology, religious studies, anthropology, education, comparative literature, and cultural studies. By presenting how Jewish thinkers address contemporary challenges of Jewish existence, the volume makes a valuable contribution to the humanities as a whole, especially at a time when the humanities are increasingly under duress for being irrelevant.

Aaron W. Hughes presents the first major study of dialogue as a Jewish philosophical practice. Examining connections between Jewish philosophy, the literary form in which it is expressed, and the culture in which it is produced, Hughes shows how Jews understood and struggled with their social, religious, and intellectual environments. In this innovative and insightful book, Hughes addresses various themes associated with the literary form of dialogue as well as its philosophical reception: Why did various thinkers choose dialogue? What did it allow them to accomplish? How do the literary features of dialogue construct philosophical argument? As a history of philosophical form, context, and practice, this book will interest scholars and students working at the intersections of religious studies, philosophy, and literature.

Deutsch was born in Dolni Kounice, Moravia, Austria, as Eliezer Deutsch, the son of Bernhard L. Deutsch, a merchant, and Elise Wiener. He always called himself Gotthard, an attempted translation into German of his Jewish given name. Deutsch entered Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau in October 1876. While attending seminary classes, he also enrolled in afternoon classes at the University of Breslau. At the seminary, he was influenced by the noted Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz. Matriculating in 1879 at the University of Vienna, two years later he received his Ph.D. in history.

Richard Sennett has spent an intellectual lifetime exploring how humans live in cities. In this pair of essays he visits two of the world's greatest cities at crucial moments in their history to meditate on the condition of exile in both geographical and psychic space: the Jewish Ghetto of Renaissance Venice, where state-imposed outsiderdom was translated into a rich community identity; and nineteenth-century Paris, a magnet for political exiles, where the experience of displacement seeped into the city's culture at large.--Back cover