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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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

Autobiographical Jews

Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning

By Michael Stanislawski

Autobiographical Jews examines the nature of autobiographical writing by Jews from antiquity to the present, and the ways in which such writings can legitimately be used as sources for Jewish history. Drawing on current literary...

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...

Portrait of American Jews

The Last Half of the Twentieth Century

By Samuel C. Heilman

Has America been a place that has preserved and protected Jewish life? Is it a place in which a Jewish future is ensured? Samuel Heilman, long-time observer of American Jewish life, grapples with these questions...

Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History

The Roles and Representation of Women

By Paula E. Hyman

Paula Hyman broadens and revises earlier analyses of Jewish assimilation, which depicted “the Jews” as though they were all men, by focusing on women and the domestic as well as the public realms. Surveying Jewish...

Recent Archaeological Discoveries and Biblical Research

By William G. Dever

Archaeology and Bible--two simple terms, often used together, understood by everybody. But are they understood properly? If so, why are both subject to such controversy? And what can archaeology contribute to our understanding of the...

Zakhor

Jewish History and Jewish Memory

By Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. Foreword by Harold Bloom

“Mr. Yerushalmi’s previous writings . . . established him as one of the Jewish community’s most important historians. His latest book should establish him as one of its most important critics. Zakhor is historical thinking...

Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity

Conflict or Confluence?

By Lee I. Levine

Generations of scholars have debated the influence of Greco-Roman culture on Jewish society and the degree of its impact on Jewish material culture and religious practice in Palestine and the Diaspora of antiquity. Judaism and...

The Kiss of God

Spiritual and Mystical Death in Judaism

By Michael Fishbane

The lines of Michael Fishbane’s book trace the spiritual face of Judaism in one of its many appearances. Fishbane explores the quest for spiritual perfection in early rabbinic sources and in Jewish philosophy and mysticism....