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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 Book of the Covenant 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...

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 and...

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...

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...

I'm No Hero

Journeys of a Holocaust Survivor

By Henry Friedman

Henry Friedman was robbed of his adolescence by the monstrous evil that annihilated millions of European Jews and changed forever the lives of those who survived. When the Nazis overran their home town near the...

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...

The Jewish Life Cycle

Rites of Passage from Biblical to Modern Times

By Ivan G. Marcus

In this original and sweeping review of Jewish culture and history, Ivan Marcus examines how and why various rites and customs celebrating stages in the life cycle have evolved through the ages and persisted to...

Studying the Jewish Future

By Calvin Goldscheider

Studying the Jewish Future explores the power of Jewish culture and assesses the perceived threats to the coherence and size of Jewish communities in the United States, Europe, and Israel. In an unconventional and provocative...

Theater of Acculturation

The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteenth Century

By Kenneth R. Stow

Generations of tourists visiting Rome have ventured into the small section between the Tiber River and the Capitoline Hill whose narrow, dark streets lead to the charming Fountain of the Tortoises, the brooding mass of...

Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America

By Alan Mintz

The Holocaust took place far from the United States and involved few Americans, yet rather than receding, this event has assumed a greater significance in the American consciousness with the passage of time. As a...

Imagining Russian Jewry

Memory, History, Identity

By Steven J. Zipperstein

This subtle, unusual book explores the many, often overlapping ways in which the Russian Jewish past has been remembered in history, in literature, and in popular culture. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including novels,...

Jews and Muslims

Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Modern Times

By Aron Rodrigue

Following the rise of Islam, many Jewish communities lived in predominantly Muslim lands. Muslim-Jewish co-existence was not seriously challenged until the modern period when European colonialism and the emergence of Zionism and Arab nationalism led...

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...