When non-Orthodox Jews become frum (religious), they encounter much more than dietary laws and Sabbath prohibitions. They find themselves in the midst of a whole new culture, involving matchmakers, homemade gefilte fish, and Yiddish-influenced grammar. Becoming Frum explains how these newcomers learn Orthodox language and culture through their interactions with community veterans and other newcomers. Some take on as much as they can as quickly as they can, going beyond the norms of those raised in the community. Others maintain aspects of their pre-Orthodox selves, yielding unique combinations, like Matisyahu's reggae music or Hebrew words and sing-song intonation used with American slang, as in "mamish (really) keepin' it real." Sarah Bunin Benor brings insight into the phenomenon of adopting a new identity based on ethnographic and sociolinguistic research among men and women in an American Orthodox community. Her analysis is applicable to other situations of adult language socialization, such as students learning medical jargon or Canadians moving to Australia. Becoming Frum offers a scholarly and accessible look at the linguistic and cultural process of "becoming."

Bring Jewish values to life with an engaging blend of mitzvot middot and timeless Jewish wisdom.

Two major interpretations of Mendelssohn's achievements have attained prominence in recent works. One interpretation, defended most recently by David Sorkin and Edward Breuer, casts Mendelssohn as a Jewish traditionalist who uses the language of enlightened German philosophy to bolster his pre-modern religious beliefs. The other interpretation, defended by Allan Arkush, casts Mendelssohn as a radical Deist who defends Judaism exoterically in order to avoid arousing opposition from his co-religionists while facilitating their social integration into enlightened European society. In Faith and Freedom, Michah Gottlieb stakes out a middle position. He argues that Mendelssohn defends pre-modern Jewish religious concepts sincerely, but in so doing, unconsciously gives them a humanistic valence appropriate to life in a diverse, enlightened society. Gottlieb sees the Pantheism Controversy as part of a broader assessment of Mendelssohn's theological-political philosophy, framed in terms of Mendelssohn's relation to his two greatest Jewish philosophical predecessors, Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) and Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). While Mendelssohn's relation to Maimonides and Spinoza has been discussed sporadically, Faith and Freedom is the first book-length treatment of this subject. The connection is particularly instructive as both Maimonides and Spinoza wrote major theological-political treatises and exercised profound influences on Mendelssohn. Not surprisingly, Mendelssohn is deeply ambivalent about both of these figures. He reveres Maimonides for what he sees as his synthesis of Judaism with secular knowledge, while seeming deeply disturbed by Maimonides's elitism, his equivocation regarding many of the tenets of theism, his espousing religious coercion, and his intolerant view of Gentiles. As for Spinoza, Mendelssohn respects him as a model for how a Jew can fruitfully contribute to science and philosophy and be a model of ethical rectitude. But Mendelssohn objects to Spinoza's atheism, advocacy of state religion, debunking of Jewish chosenness, and rejection of Jewish law. For Mendelssohn, reason best preserves human dignity and freedom by upholding the individual's right to arrive at truth on their own and determine their own beliefs independently of all authority. As such, reason demands that the state respect diversity of thought and religious expression. Mendelssohn interprets faith in the Jewish sense as trust in God's providential goodness, arguing that reason affirms this as well. But he recognizes the difficulty of establishing metaphysical truth rationally and so in his final works adumbrates a form of religious pragmatism. The faith-reason debate rages again today. Gottlieb explores Mendelssohn's theological-political thought with an eye to axiological and political dimensions of the debate.

Top World Guild Award Winner This book is about an idea-namely, that Scripture mandates a Jewish return to the historical region of Palestine-which in turn morphed into a political movement, rallied around a popular slogan ("A country without a nation for a nation without a country"), and eventually contributed to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Christian Zionism continues to influence global politics, especially U.S. foreign policy, and has deeply affected Jewish-Christian and Muslim-Christian relations. Donald M. Lewis seeks to provide a fair-minded, longitudinal study of this dynamic yet controversial movement as he traces its lineage from biblical sources through the Reformation to various movements of today. He explores Christian Zionism's interaction with other movements, forces, and discourses, especially in eschatological and political thought, and why it is now flourishing beyond the English-speaking world. Throughout he demonstrates how it has helped British and American Protestants frame and shape their identity. A Short History of Christian Zionism seeks to bring clarity and context to often-heated discussions.

Jewish thought is, in many ways, a paradox. Is it theology or is it philosophy? Does it use universal methods to articulate Judaism's particularity or does it justify Judaism's particularity with appeals to illuminating the universal? These two sets of claims are difficult if not impossible to reconcile, and their tension reverberates throughout the length and breadth of Jewish philosophical writing, from Saadya Gaon in the ninth century to Emmanuel Levinas in the twentieth. Rather than assume, as most scholars of Jewish philosophy do, that the terms "philosophy" and "Judaism" simply belong together, Hughes explores the juxtaposition and the creative tension that ensues from their cohabitation, examining adroitly the historical, cultural, intellectual, and religious filiations between Judaism and philosophy. Breaking with received opinion, this book seeks to challenge the exclusionary, particularist, and essentialist nature that is inherent to the practice of something problematically referred to as "Jewish philosophy." Hughes begins with the premise that Jewish philosophy is impossible and begins the process of offering a sophisticated and constructive rethinking of the discipline that avoids the traditional extremes of universalism and particularism.

Throughout history, Jews have often been regarded, and treated, as "strangers." In The Stranger in Early Modern and Modern Jewish Tradition, authors from a wide variety of disciplines discuss how the notion of "the stranger" can offer an integrative perspective on Jewish identities, on the non-Jewish perceptions of Jews, and on the relations between Jews and non-Jews in an innovative way. Contributions from history, philosophy, religion, sociology, literature, and the arts offer a new perspective on the Jewish experience in early modern and modern times: in contact and conflict, in processes of attribution and allegation, but also self-reflection and negotiation, focused on the figure of the stranger.

Marc Ellis maintains that the most vital questions about Judaism are prefigured in the work of Elie Wiesel, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Hannah Arendt, and Emmanuel Levinas. Ellis's work is framed by encounters with each thinker's work, focusing on topics of God, the Holocaust, the prophetic legacy, philosophical and ethical standpoints, and Jewish empowerment and dissent.Two generations after the Holocaust and Israel's founding, Ellis argues that the uncertain future of Judaism requires a deeply personal and intellectual exploration of Jewish tradition and identity, in conversation with the best philosophical and theological minds of recent years.

A Muslim curator and archivist who preserves in his native Timbuktu the memory of its rabbi. An evangelical Kenyan who is amazed to meet a living ""Israelite."" Indian Ocean islanders who maintain the Jewish cemetery of escapees from Nazi Germany. These are just a few of the encounters the author shares from his sojourns and fieldwork. An engaging read in which the author combines the rigors of academic research with a ""you are there"" delivery. Conveys thirty-five years of social science fieldwork and reverential travel in Sub-Saharan Africa. A great choice for the ecumenical-minded traveller.

No matter what we would make of Jesus, says Schalom Ben-Chorin, he was first a Jewish man in a Jewish land. Brother Jesus leads us through the twists and turns of history to reveal the figure who extends a "brotherly hand" to the author as a fellow Jew. Ben-Chorin's reach is astounding as he moves easily between literature, law, etymology, psychology, and theology to recover "Jesus' picture from the Christian overpainting." A commanding scholar of the historical Jesus who also devoted his life to widening Jewish-Christian dialogue, Ben-Chorin ranges across such events as the wedding at Cana, the Last Supper, and the crucifixion to reveal, in contemporary Christianity, traces of the Jewish codes and customs in which Jesus was immersed. Not only do we see how and why these events also resonate with Jews, but we are brought closer to Christianity in its primitive state: radical, directionless, even pagan. Early in his book, Ben-Chorin writes, "the belief of Jesus unifies us, but the belief in Jesus divides us." It is the kind of paradox from which arise endless questions or, as Ben-Chorin would have it, endless opportunities for Jews and Christians to come together for meaningful, mutual discovery.

This work offers a fresh reading of Paul's appropriation of Abraham in Gal 3:6-29 against the background of Jewish data, especially drawn from the writings of Philo of Alexandria. Philo's negotiation on Abraham as the model proselyte and the founder of the Jewish nation based on his trust in God's promise relative to the Law of Moses provides a Jewish context for a corresponding debate reflected in Galatians, and suggests that there were Jewish antecedents that came close to Paul's reasoning in his own time. This volume incorporates a number of new arguments in the context of scholarly discussion of both Galatian 3 and some of the Philonic texts, and demonstrates how the works of Philo can be applied responsibly in New Testament scholarship.

The widespread assumption that Jewish religious tradition is mediated through words, not pictures, has left Jewish art with no significant role to play in Jewish theology and ethics. "Judaism and the Visual Image" argues for a Jewish theology of image that, among other things, helps us re-read the creation story in Genesis 1 and to question why images of Jewish women as religious subjects appear to be doubly suppressed by the Second Commandment, when images of observant male Jews have become legitimate, even iconic, representations of Jewish holiness. Raphael further suggests that 'devout beholding' of images of the Holocaust is a corrective to post-Holocaust theologies of divine absence from suffering that are infused by a sub-theological aesthetic of the sublime. Raphael concludes by proposing that the relationship between God and Israel composes itself into a unitary dance or moving image by which each generation participates in a processive revelation that is itself the ultimate work of Jewish art.

Over half of all American Jewish children are being raised by intermarried parents. This demographic group will have a tremendous impact on American Judaism as it is lived and practiced in the coming decades. To date, however, in both academic studies about Judaism and in the popular imagination, such children and their parents remain marginal. Jennifer A. Thompson takes a different approach. In Jewish on Their Own Terms , she tells the stories of intermarried couples, the rabbis and other Jewish educators who work with them, and the conflicting public conversations about intermarriage among American Jews. Thompson notes that in the dominant Jewish cultural narrative, intermarriage symbolizes individualism and assimilation. Talking about intermarriage allows American Jews to discuss their anxieties about remaining distinctively Jewish despite their success in assimilating into American culture. In contrast, Thompson uses ethnography to describe the compelling concerns of all of these parties and places their anxieties firmly within the context of American religious culture and morality. She explains how American and traditional Jewish gender roles converge to put non-Jewish women in charge of raising Jewish children. Interfaith couples are like other Americans in often harboring contradictory notions of individual autonomy, universal religious truths, and obligations to family and history. Focusing on the lived experiences of these families, Jewish on Their Own Terms provides a complex and insightful portrait of intermarried couples and the new forms of American Judaism that they are constructing.

Judaic reasoning is discussed from the standpoint of modern logic. Andrew Schumann defines Judaic logic, traces Aristotelian influence on developing Jewish studies in Judaic reasoning, and shows the non-Aristotelian core of fundamentals of Judaic logic. Further, Schumann proposes some modern approaches to understanding and formalizing Judaic reasoning, including Judaic semantics and (non-Aristotelian) syllogistics.

In The Qumran Manuscripts of Lamentations: A Text-Critical Study, the first large-scale investigation of the topic, Gideon Kotze establishes how the four Lamentations manuscripts from Qumran present the content of the biblical book. Kotze takes as his point of departure the contributions of the Dead Sea scrolls to the discipline of Old Testament textual criticism and treats the Qumran manuscripts of Lamentations, the Masoretic text and the ancient translations as witnesses to the content of the book and not only as witnesses to earlier forms of its Hebrew text. By focusing the analysis on variant readings and textual difficulties, the study arrives at a better understanding of these manuscripts as representatives of both the text and the content of Lamentations.

Economic Morality and Jewish Law compares the way in which welfare economics and Jewish law determine the propriety of an economic action, whether by a private citizen or the government. Espousing what philosophers would call a consequentialist ethical system, welfare economics evaluates the worthiness of an economic action based on whether the action would increase the wealth of society in the long run. In sharp contrast, Jewish law espouses a deontological system of ethics. Within this ethical system, the determination of the propriety of an action is entirely a matter of discovering the applicable rule in Judaism's code of ethics. This volume explores a variety of issues implicating morality for both individual commercial activity and economic public policy. Issues examined include price controls, the living wage, the lemons problem, short selling, and Ronald Coase's seminal theories on negative externalities. To provide an analytic framework for the study of these issues, the work first delineates the normative theories behind the concept of economic morality for welfare economics and Jewish law, and presents a case study illustrating the deontological nature of Jewish law. The book introduces what for many readers will be a new perspective on familiar economic issues. Despite the very different approaches of welfare economics and Jewish law in evaluating the worthiness of an economic action, the author reveals a remarkable symmetry between the two systems in their ultimate prescriptions for certain economic issues.