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Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx

The Fight for a Secular World of Universal and Equal Rights

By Jonathan I. Israel

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a small but conspicuous fringe of the Jewish population became the world’s most resolute, intellectually driven, and philosophical revolutionaries, among them the pre-Marxist Karl Marx. Yet the roots...

A Best-Selling Hebrew Book of the Modern Era

The <I>Book of the Covenant</I> of Pinhas Hurwitz and Its Remarkable Legacy

By David B. Ruderman

In 1797, in what is now the Czech Republic, Pinḥas Hurwitz published Book of the Covenant. Nominally an extended commentary on a sixteenth-century kabbalist text, Pinḥas’s publication was in fact a compendium of scientific knowledge...

School Photos in Liquid Time

Reframing Difference

By Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer

From clandestine images of Jewish children isolated in Nazi ghettos and Japanese American children incarcerated in camps to images of Native children removed to North American boarding schools, classroom photographs of schoolchildren are pervasive even...

The Jewish Bible

A Material History

By David Stern

In The Jewish Bible: A Material History, David Stern explores the Jewish Bible as a material object—the Bibles that Jews have actually held in their hands—from its beginnings in the Ancient Near Eastern world through...

Lotty's Bench

The Persecution of the Jews of Amsterdam Remembered

By Gerben Post

August 26, 1945: Lotty Veffer arrived in Amsterdam. She was the only member of her family to have survived the war. Her parents and younger sister Carla had been gassed in Sobibor. There was no...

What We Talk about When We Talk about Hebrew (and What It Means to Americans)

By Naomi B. Sokoloff, Nancy E. Berg

Why Hebrew, here and now? What is its value for contemporary Americans? In What We Talk about When We Talk about Hebrew (and What It Means to Americans) scholars, writers, and translators tackle a series...

Losing Trust in the World

Holocaust Scholars Confront Torture

By Leonard Grob, John K. Roth

In July 1943, the Gestapo arrested an obscure member of the resistance movement in Nazi-occupied Belgium. When his torture-inflicting interrogators determined he was no use to them and that he was a Jew, he was...

Facing Death

Confronting Mortality in the Holocaust and Ourselves

By Sarah K. Pinnock

What do we learn about death from the Holocaust and how does it impact our responses to mortality today? Facing Death: Confronting Mortality in the Holocaust and Ourselves brings together the work of eleven Holocaust...

Lifesaving Letters

A Child's Flight from the Holocaust

By Milena Roth

In 1939, in the shadow of Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia, six-year-old Milena Roth was sent away from her home and her loving parents and taken to safety by what came to be know as the...

I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture

By Ruth R. Wisse

I. L. Peretz (1852–1915), the father of modern Yiddish literature, was a master storyteller and social critic who advocated a radical shift from religious observance to secular Jewish culture. Wisse explores Peretz’s writings in relation...

Writing in Tongues

Translating Yiddish in the Twentieth Century

By Anita Norich

Writing in Tongues examines the complexities of translating Yiddish literature at a time when the Yiddish language is in decline. After the Holocaust, Soviet repression, and American assimilation, the survival of traditional Yiddish literature depends...

Agnon's Moonstruck Lovers

The Song of Songs in Israeli Culture

By Ilana Pardes

Agnon's Moonstruck Lovers explores the response of Israel’s Nobel laureate S. Y. Agnon to the privileged position of the Song of Songs in Israeli culture. Standing at a unique crossroads between religion and secularism, Agnon...

Different Horrors, Same Hell

Gender and the Holocaust

By Myrna Goldenberg, Amy Shapiro

Different Horrors, Same Hell brings together a variety of essays demonstrating the breadth of contributions that feminist theory and gender analysis make to the study of the Holocaust. The collection provides new perspectives on central...

Encountering the Stranger

A Jewish-Christian-Muslim Trialogue

By Leonard Grob, John K. Roth

In an age when "collisions of faith" among the Abrahamic traditions continue to produce strife and violence that threatens the well-being of individuals and communities worldwide, the contributors to Encountering the Stranger--six Jewish, six Christian,...

Light and Shadows

The Story of Iranian Jews

By David Yeroushalmi

Light and Shadows highlights the 2,700-year history of Jews in Iran. It reveals centuries of oppression, fascinating cultural borrowings, and great artistic achievements. The story is told through rare archaeological artifacts, illuminated manuscripts, beautiful ritual...

Disappearing Traces

Holocaust Testimonials, Ethics, and Aesthetics

By Dorota Glowacka

In Disappearing Traces, Dorota Glowacka examines the tensions between the ethical and aesthetic imperatives in literary, artistic, and philosophical works about the Holocaust, in a search for new ways to understand the traumatic past and...

Make Yourself a Teacher

Rabbinic Tales of Mentors and Disciples

By Susan Handelman

Make Yourself a Teacher is a teaching book and a book about teaching. It discusses three dramatic, well-known stories about the student and teacher Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus from the Oral Torah. The stories of...

Rewriting Russia

Jacob Gordin's Yiddish Drama

By Barbara J. Henry

Jacob Gordin was the first major playwright of the "Golden Age" of New York's Yiddish theater, which was not just entertainment but also a public forum, a force for education and acculturation, and a battleground...

Boundaries of Jewish Identity

By Susan A Glenn, Naomi B. Sokoloff

The subject of Jewish identity is one of the most vexed and contested issues of modern religious and ethnic group history. This interdisciplinary collection draws on work in law, anthropology, history, sociology, literature, and popular...

Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia

By Brian J. Horowitz

The Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia (OPE) was a philanthropic organization, the oldest Jewish organization in Russia. Founded by a few wealthy Jews in St. Petersburg who wanted to...