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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Non-Christian religions > Judaism > General
The life and times of an enduring work of Jewish spirituality The
Babylonian Talmud, a postbiblical Jewish text that is part
scripture and part commentary, is an unlikely bestseller. Written
in a hybrid of Hebrew and Aramaic, it is often ambiguous to the
point of incomprehension, and its subject matter reflects a narrow
scholasticism that should hardly have broad appeal. Yet the Talmud
has remained in print for centuries and is more popular today than
ever. Barry Scott Wimpfheimer tells the remarkable story of this
ancient Jewish book, explaining why the Talmud is at once a
received source of traditional teachings, a touchstone of cultural
authority, and a powerful symbol of Jewishness for supporters and
critics alike.
We can calculate financial fraud, but how do we measure bad faith?
How can we evaluate the words of the pharmaceutical industry or of
eco-scientific ideologies, or the subtle deception found in
political scheming? Henri Atlan sheds light on these questions
through the concept of "ona'ah," which in Hebrew refers to both
fraud in financial transactions and the verbal injury inflicted by
speech. The world of "ona'ah" is a world of an "in-between," where
the impossible purity of absolute Platonic truth gives way to a
more relative notion--the near-theft, the quasi-lie. Today it seems
that no discourse is safe from fraudulent excesses, be they
intentional or no. As both philosopher and biologist, Atlan works
on several registers. He forges links between the Talmud, the
Kabbalah, and the big questions of our time, multiplying the
bridges between science, philosophy, and current ethical dilemmas.
In a context of financial and moral crises that appear to be
weakening our democracies, Henri Atlan's work allows us to rethink
the status of fraud in the contemporary world.
The term 'rabbi' predominantly denotes Jewish men qualified to
interpret the Torah and apply halacha, or those entrusted with the
religious leadership of a Jewish community. However, the role of
the rabbi has been understood differently across the Jewish world.
While in Israel they control legally powerful rabbinical courts and
major religious political parties, in the Jewish communities of the
Diaspora this role is often limited by legal regulations of
individual countries. However, the significance of past and present
rabbis and their religious and political influence endures across
the world. Rabbis of Our Time provides a comprehensive overview of
the most influential rabbinical authorities of Judaism in the 20th
and 21st Century. Through focussing on the most theologically
influential rabbis of the contemporary era and examining their
political impact, it opens a broader discussion of the relationship
between Judaism and politics. It looks at the various centres of
current Judaism and Jewish thinking, especially the State of Israel
and the USA, as well as locating rabbis in various time periods.
Through interviews and extracts from religious texts and books
authored by rabbis, readers will discover more about a range of
rabbis, from those before the formation of Israel to the most
famous Chief Rabbis of Israel, as well as those who did not reach
the highest state religious functions, but influenced the relation
between Judaism and Israel by other means. The rabbis selected
represent all major contemporary streams of Judaism, from
ultra-Orthodox/Haredi to Reform and Liberal currents, and together
create a broader picture of the scope of contemporary Jewish
thinking in a theological and political context. An extensive and
detailed source of information on the varieties of Jewish thinking
influencing contemporary Judaism and the modern State of Israel,
this book is of interest to students and scholars of Jewish
Studies, as well as Religion and Politics.
2013 Finalist, 26th Annual Oregon Best Book Award Normal 0
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Douglass, one of the most prominent figures in African-American and
United States history, was born a slave, but escaped to the North
and became a well-known anti-slavery activist, orator, and author.
In The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass, Nicholas Buccola
provides an important and original argument about the ideas that
animated this reformer-statesman. Beyond his role as an
abolitionist, Buccola argues for the importance of understanding
Douglass as a political thinker who provides deep insights into the
immense challenge of achieving and maintaining the liberal promise
of freedom. Douglass, Buccola contends, shows us that the language
of rights must be coupled with a robust understanding of social
responsibility in order for liberal ideals to be realized. Truly an
original American thinker, this book highlights Douglass's rightful
place among the great thinkers in the American liberal tradition.
Podcast - Nicholas Buccola on Frederick Douglass and Liberty.
Rabbinic Creativity in the Modern Middle East provides a window for
readers of English around the world into hitherto almost
inaccessible halakhic and ideational writings expressing major
aspects of the cultural intellectual creativity of
Sephardic-Oriental rabbis in modern times. The text has three
sections: Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, and each section discusses a
range of original sources that reflect and represent the creativity
of major rabbinic figures in these countries. The contents of the
writings of these Sephardic rabbis challenge many commonly held
views regarding Judaism's responses to modern challenges. By
bringing an additional, non-Western voice into the intellectual
arena, this book enriches the field of contemporary discussions
regarding the present and future of Judaism. In addition, it
focuses attention on the fact that not only was Judaism a Middle
Eastern phenomenon for most of its existence but that also in
recent centuries important and interesting aspects of Judaism
developed in the Middle East. Both Jews and non-Jews will be
enriched and challenged by this non-Eurocentric view of modern
Judaic creativity.
This book traces the mixing of musical forms and practices in
Istanbul to illuminate multiethnic music-making and its
transformations across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It
focuses on the Jewish religious repertoire known as the Maftirim,
which developed in parallel with "secular" Ottoman court music.
Through memoirs, personal interviews, and new archival sources, the
book explores areas often left out of those histories of the region
that focus primarily on Jewish communities in isolation, political
events and actors, or nationalizing narratives. Maureen Jackson
foregrounds artistic interactivity, detailing the life-stories of
musicians and their musical activities. Her book amply demonstrates
the integration of Jewish musicians into a larger art world and
traces continuities and ruptures in a nation-building era. Among
its richly researched themes, the book explores the synagogue as a
multifunctional venue within broader urban space; girls, women, and
gender issues in an all-male performance practice; new technologies
and oral transmission; and Ottoman musical reconstructions within
Jewish life and cultural politics in Turkey today.
Heresy is a central concept in the formation of Orthodox
Christianity. Where does this notion come from? This book traces
the construction of the idea of 'heresy' in the rhetoric of
ideological disagreements in Second Temple Jewish and early
Christian texts and in the development of the polemical rhetoric
against 'heretics,' called heresiology. Here, author Robert Royalty
argues, one finds the origin of what comes to be labelled 'heresy'
in the second century. In other words, there was such as thing as
'heresy' in ancient Jewish and Christian discourse before it was
called 'heresy.' And by the end of the first century, the notion of
heresy was integral to the political positioning of the early
orthodox Christian party within the Roman Empire and the range of
other Christian communities. This book is an original contribution
to the field of Early Christian studies. Recent treatments of the
origins of heresy and Christian identity have focused on the second
century rather than on the earlier texts including the New
Testament. The book further makes a methodological contribution by
blurring the line between New Testament Studies and Early Christian
studies, employing ideological and post-colonial critical methods.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that during the last
century, most especially during and since the 1960s, the language
of spirituality has become one of the most significant ways in
which the sacred has come to be understood and judged in the West,
and, increasingly, elsewhere. Whether it is true that
'spirituality' has eclipsed 'religion' in Western settings remains
debatable. What is incontestable is that the language of
spirituality, together with practices (most noticeably spiritual,
complementary, and alternative medicine), has become a major
feature of the sacred dimensions of contemporary modernity. Equally
incontestably, spirituality is a growing force in all those
developing countries where its presence is increasingly felt among
the cosmopolitan elite, and where spiritual forms of traditional,
complementary, and alternative medicine are thriving. This new
four-volume Major Work collection from Routledge provides a
coherent compilation of landmark texts which cannot be ignored by
those intent on making sense of what is happening to the sacred as
spirituality-more exactly what is taken to be spirituality-develops
as an increasingly important lingua franca, series of practices,
and as a humanistic ethicality.
This book explores the life and thought of one of the most
important but least known figures in early Zionism, Nathan
Birnbaum. Now remembered mainly for his coinage of the word
"Zionism," Birnbaum was a towering figure in early Jewish
nationalism. Because of his unusual intellectual trajectory,
however, he has been written out of Jewish history. In the middle
of his life, in the depth of World War I, Birnbaum left his
venerable position as a secular Jewish nationalist for religious
Orthodoxy, an unheard of decision in his time. To the dismay of his
former colleagues, he adopted a life of strict religiosity and was
embraced as a leader in the young, growing world of Orthodox
political activism in the interwar period, one of the most
successful and powerful movements in interwar central and eastern
Europe.
Jess Olson brings to light documents from one of the most complete
archives of Jewish nationalism, the Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum
Family Archives, including materials previously unknown in the
study of Zionism, Yiddish-based Jewish nationalism, and the history
of Orthodoxy. This book is an important meditation on the
complexities of Jewish political and intellectual life in the most
tumultuous period of European Jewish history, especially of the
interplay of national, political, and religious identity in the
life of one of its most fascinating figures.
For decades, Koren's combination Siddur-Humash has been a favorite
in Israel. For the first time this convenient volume is available
in an American edition. The Koren Talpiot Shabbat Humash offers all
the tefillot recited on Shabbat according to American custom and
when visiting Israel, from Erev Shabbat though Motza'ei Shabbat,
together with the Torah and Haftara readings. The Hebrew text is
laid out in Koren style, in Koren Siddur and Tanakh Fonts, and
discreet English instructions throughout. Published in cooperation
with the Orthodox Union.
Festive cover by renowned Jerusalem artist Yair Emanuel.
Since the late 1700s, when the Jewish community ceased to be a
semiautonomous political unit in Western Europe and the United
States and individual Jews became integrated-culturally, socially,
and politically-into broader society, questions surrounding Jewish
status and identity have occupied a prominent and contentious place
in Jewish legal discourse. This book examines a wide array of legal
opinions written by nineteenth- and twentieth-century orthodox
rabbis in Europe, the United States, and Israel. It argues that
these rabbis' divergent positions-based on the same legal
precedents-demonstrate that they were doing more than delivering
legal opinions. Instead, they were crafting public policy for
Jewish society in response to Jews' social and political
interactions as equals with the non-Jewish persons in whose midst
they dwelled. Pledges of Jewish Allegiance prefaces its analysis of
modern opinions with a discussion of the classical Jewish sources
upon which they draw.
Approaching the Bible in an original way-comparing biblical heroes
to heroes in world literature-Elliott Rabin addresses a core
biblical question: What is the Bible telling us about what it means
to be a hero? Focusing on the lives of six major biblical
characters-Moses, Samson, David, Esther, Abraham, and Jacob-Rabin
examines their resemblance to hero types found in (and perhaps
drawn from) other literatures and analyzes why the Bible depicts
its heroes less gloriously than do the texts of other cultures: *
Moses founds the nation of Israel-and is short-tempered and
weak-armed. * Samson, arrogant and unhinged, can kill a thousand
enemies with his bare hands. * David establishes a centralized,
unified, triumphal government-through pretense and self-deception.
* Esther saves her people but marries a murderous, misogynist king.
* Abraham's relationships are wracked with tension. * Jacob fathers
twelve tribes-and wins his inheritance through deceit. In the end,
is God the real hero? Or is God too removed from human constraints
to even be called a "hero"? Ultimately, Rabin excavates how the
Bible's unique perspective on heroism can address our own
deep-seated need for human-scale heroes.
This career-spanning anthology from prominent Jewish historian
David Biale brings over a dozen of his key essays together for the
first time. These pieces, written between 1974 and 2016, are all
representative of a method Biale calls "counter-history": "the
discovery of vital forces precisely in what others considered
marginal, disreputable and irrational." The themes that have
preoccupied Biale throughout the course of his distinguished
career-in particular power, sexuality, blood, and secular Jewish
thought-span the periods of the Bible, late antiquity, and the
Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Exemplary essays in this
volume argue for the dialectical relationship between modernity and
its precursors in the older tradition, working together to "brush
history against the grain" in order to provide a sweeping look at
the history of the Jewish people. This volume of work by one of the
boldest and most intellectually omnivorous Jewish thinkers of our
time will be essential reading for scholars and students of Jewish
studies.
A political crisis erupts when the Persian government falls to
fanatics, and a Jewish insider goes rogue, determined to save her
people at all costs. God and Politics in Esther explores politics
and faith. It is about an era in which the prophets have been
silenced and miracles have ceased, and Jewish politics has come to
depend not on commands from on high, but on the boldness and belief
of each woman and man. Esther takes radical action to win friends
and allies, reverse terrifying decrees, and bring God's justice
into the world with her own hands. Hazony's The Dawn has long been
a cult classic, read at Purim each year the world over. Twenty
years on, this revised edition brings the book to much wider
attention. Three controversial new chapters address the
astonishingly radical theology that emerges from amid the political
intrigues of the book.
"Contemplative Nation" challenges the long-standing view that
theology is not a vital part of the Jewish tradition. For political
and philosophical reasons, both scholars of Judaism and Jewish
thinkers have sought to minimize the role of theology in Judaism.
This book constructs a new model for understanding Jewish
theological language that emphasizes the central role of
theological reflection in Judaism and the close relationship
between theological reflection and religious practice in the Jewish
tradition. Drawing on diverse philosophical resources, Fisher's
model of Jewish theology embraces the multiple forms and functions
of Jewish theological language. Fisher demonstrates the utility of
this model by undertaking close readings of an early rabbinic
commentary on the book of Exodus ("Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael ") and
a work of modern philosophical theology (Franz Rosenzweig's "The
Star of Redemption"). These readings advance the discussion of
theology in rabbinics and modern Jewish thought and provide
resources for constructive Jewish theology.
This book invites readers to reconsider what they think they know
about the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis, from the
creation of the world, through the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel,
the Flood, and the Tower of Babel, to the introduction of Abraham.
Edwin M. Good offers a new translation of and literary commentary
on these chapters, approaching the material as an ancient Hebrew
book. Rather than analyzing the chapters in light of any specific
religious position, he is interested in what the stories say and
how they work as stories, indications in them of their origins as
orally performed and transmitted, and how they do and do not
connect with one another. Everyone, from those intimately familiar
with Genesis to those who have never read it before, will find
something new in "Genesis 1-11: Tales of the Earliest World."
Empire-critical and postcolonial readings of Revelation are now
commonplace, but scholars have not yet put these views into
conversation with Jewish trauma and cultural survival strategies.
In this book, Sarah Emanuel positions Revelation within its ancient
Jewish context. Proposing a new reading of Revelation, she
demonstrates how the text's author, a first century CE Jewish
Christ-follower, used humor as a means of resisting Roman power.
Emanuel uses multiple critical lenses, including humor, trauma, and
postcolonial theory, together with historical-critical methods.
These approaches enable a deeper understanding of the Jewishness of
the early Christ-centered movement, and how Jews in antiquity
related to their cultural and religious identity. Emanuel's volume
offers new insights and fills a gap in contemporary scholarship on
Revelation and biblical scholarship more broadly.
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