Christian-Jewish relations have had changing fortunes throughout the centuries. Occasionally there has been peace and even mutual understanding, but usually these relations have been ones of tension, often involving recrimination and even violence. This volume addresses a number of the major questions that have been at the heart and the periphery of these tenuous relations through the years. The volume begins with a number of papers discussing relations as Christianity emerged from and defined itself in terms of Judaism. Other papers trace the relations through the intervening years. And a number of papers confront issues that have been at the heart of the troubled twentieth century. In all, these papers address a sensitive yet vital set of issues from a variety of approaches and perspectives, becoming in their own way a part of the ongoing dialogue.>

The Yudisher Theriak [Jewish Theriac] by Zalman Zvi of Aufhausen, first published in Hanau, in 1615, was a response to an anti-Jewish work titled Judischer abgestreiffter Schlangenbalg [Jewish Shed Snakeskin], written by a Jewish convert to Chistianity, Samuel Friedrich Brenz, and published in Nurnberg and Augsburg in 1614. Brenz's work was part of a genre of anti-Jewish books and pamphlets written in German and addressed to Christians that purported to reveal how Jews mocked and blasphemed against the Christian religion, cursed their Christian neighbors, and engaged in magic and witchcraft in order to inflict damage to their possessions and livelihoods. The name of Zalman Zvi's book is a direct allusion to Brenz's title, but it also hints at a larger purpose. Theriac is a Greek and Latin term that means "the antidote to the bite of a venomous snake." Perhaps Zvi hoped that his book would also serve as a theriac for the scourge of anti-Judaism, which was prevalent in his generation. The Yudisher Theriak presents an interesting picture of how a learned Jew might respond to the many accusations against Jews and Judaism that became standardized and were repeated from author to author. The Yudisher Theriak makes a passing appearance in most scholarly books and many articles written about Christian-Jewish relations. Its existence is acknowledged and occasionally a fact or idea is cited from it, but its arguments and ideas have not been integrated into the scholarly literature on this subject. One reason that it has not received the attention it deserves is its language. It is written in a form of Early Modern Yiddish, more influenced by German and less familiar than its contemporary eastern European variant. In addition, Zalman Zvi was a learned Jew who interspersed Hebrew phrases, rabbinic terminology, and allusions to rabbinic literature in his work. Morris Faierstein's goal in this work is not to respond to all the references and allusions in the scholarly literature that the original text touches on, but rather to make the work available in an annotated translation that can be a useful tool in the study of Jewish-Christian relations in the Early Modern period and, more broadly, for Early Modern Jewish historical and cultural studies. The analysis and clarification of the many issues raised in the Yudisher Theriak await further studies. Faierstein has taken the first step by making the work available to an audience wider than the very narrow band of specialists in Early Modern Yiddish literature. Scholars and students of Jewish-Christian relations and Early Modern Jewish historical and cultural studies will appreciate the availability of this previously inaccessible text.

This first full-scale account of Leviticus by a world renowned anthropologist presents the biblical work as a literary masterpiece. Seen in an anthropological perspective Leviticus has a mystical structure which plots the book into three parts corresponding to the three parts of the desert tabernacle, both corresponding to the parts of Mount Sinai. This completely new reading transforms the interpretation of the purity laws. The pig and other forbidden animals are not abhorrent, they command the same respect due to all God's creatures. Boldly challenging several traditions of Bible criticism, Mary Douglas claims that Leviticus is not the narrow doctrine of a crabbed professional priesthood but a powerful intellectual statement about a modern religion which emphasizes God's justice and compassion.

This work offers an exploration of the formation of the conception of 'catastrophic messianism' in the Gabriel Revelation. It features the first discussion of the recently discovered text "The Gabriel Revelation" - an apocalyptic text written on stone at the turn of the Common Era. This tablet provides revolutionary paths to the understanding of the historical Jesus and the birth of Christianity. It explores the formation of the conception of 'catastrophic messianism' in the Gabriel Revelation. According to this conception, the death of a messianic leader and his resurrection by the angel Gabriel after three days is an essential part of the redemptive process. This conception is a new key which enables us for the first time to understand the messianic vision of the historical Jesus.This important and fascinating book will thus shed new and revolutionary light on our basic view of Christianity. The Robert and Arlene Kogod Library of Judaic Studies publishes new research which provides new directions for modern Jewish thought and life and which serves to enhance the quality of dialogue between classical sources and the modern world. This book series reflects the mission of the Shalom Hartman Institute, a pluralistic research and leadership institute, at the forefront of Jewish thought and education. It empowers scholars, rabbis, educators and layleaders to develop new and diverse voices within the tradition, laying foundations for the future of Jewish life in Israel and around the world.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

aMasterfully weaving together stories of adolescent girls based on an analysis of their diaries, personal letters, and memoirs, Klapper illuminates the ways these young women grappled with contradictory feelings about their friends, family, and future...This compelling narrative deeply enriches our understanding of the intertwined roles played by gender, ethnicity, religion, and education in fostering American identity at the turn of the century.a
--"American Historical Review"

aMelissa R. Klapper has succeeded handsomely in surmounting the hurdles of her topic to create a coherent narrative of cultural change. She brings to her subject sensitivity to the stress of adolescence, mastery of her materials, and genuine affection for the experience of growing up female, Jewish, and American.a
--"Journal of American History"

aDrawing on diaries and magazines, historian Klapper recreates the world of Jewish girls in late 19th- and early 20th-century America. . . . This book's charm lies in its innovative and engaging focus on girlhood. Klapper . . . offers grace notes to a familiar narrative about the tensions between assimilation and tradition.a--"Publishers Weekly"

"Provides a revealing glimpse into the lives of adolescent girls at the turn of the century. Klapper's exhaustive search for the diaries of young Jewish women has produced a harvest of insights into their relationships to religion, to education, to domestic lives, and to girl culture."
--Alice Kessler-Harris, author of "In Pursuit of Equity"

"Melissa Klapper's pioneering volume, based on an astonishing wealth of primary sources, uncovers more than wehave ever known about the upbringing and education of Jewish girls in America from the Civil War to World War I. Covering everything from religious education to sex education, it explores what it meant to be a Jewish girl aged 12-20 during one of the most tumultuous eras in American history."
--Jonathan D. Sarna, Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History, Brandeis University

"Brings to life the lives of the 'ordinary' young women whom we encounter in these pages. By exploring the diaries of Jewish girls who used these private and personal sources to think about their conflicting ideas about identities, families, and futures, Melissa Klapper has shown them to be historical actors, and as such anything but ordinary. By combining intellectual matters of several literatures-the history of education, women's history, American Jewish history, the history of the United States over the course of a crucial six decade period-Klapper has made a substantial contribution to our understanding of the past and those who peopled it."
--Hasia Diner, Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History, New York University

"Klapper offers a thoughtful book on subjects too often ignored in both the literature of Jewish-Americans and of American girls."
-- "Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era"

Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920 draws on a wealth of archival material, much of which has never been published--or even read--to illuminate the ways in which Jewish girls' adolescent experiences reflected larger issues relating to gender, ethnicity, religion, and education.

Klapper explores the dual roles girls played as agents ofacculturation and guardians of tradition. Their search for an identity as American girls that would not require the abandonment of Jewish tradition and culture mirrored the struggle of their families and communities for integration into American society.

While focusing on their lives as girls, not the adults they would later become, Klapper draws on the papers of such figures as Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah; Edna Ferber, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Showboat; and Marie Syrkin, literary critic and Zionist. Klapper also analyzes the diaries, memoirs, and letters of hundreds of other girls whose later lives and experiences have been lost to history.

Told in an engaging style and filled with colorful quotes, the book brings to life a neglected group of fascinating historical figures during a pivotal moment in the development of gender roles, adolescence, and the modern American Jewish community.

Studies in Honor of Joseph S. Lukinsky makes a unique and welcomed contribution to the field of Jewish Education. While the Jewish communities from ancient times onward have made education a priority on the communal agenda, it is only since the mid-twentieth century that Jewish Education has developed as an academic field. From the start of his career, Joseph S. Lukinsky has been a leader in the development of the field, offering encouragement and guidance to young scholars, supporting their use of qualitative methods, and challenging them to examine the ideas of the modern Jewish philosophers. This book comprises a collection of articles and scholarly studies written in honor of Joseph S. Lukinsky on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. The wide range of subjects treated in these chapters reflects the catholicity of Professor Lukinsky's interests. The contributors to the volume, all noted scholars and educators, are his colleagues and former students. They include prominent academicians from throughout the United States and Israel. Readers of this volume will come away with an appreciation of Lukinsky's ability to stimulate an awareness of the potential of Jewish Education to enrich Western education as a whole, as well as to preserve and enhance the quality of Jewish life.

In this book, Harris Lenowitz explores the fascinating history of Jewish messianism. Looking in detail at all of the Jewish messiahs about whom anything is known, he introduces each of these figures in turn, and offers excerpts of the original texts that tell their stories. The messiahs whom we meet in these pages range from the inspiring to the tragic and bizarre. By examining the messianic idea in the tradition which gave birth to it, Lenowitz both sheds new light on this engrossing aspect of Jewish history and provides a firmer bases for understanding contemporary messianic groups.

Pairing the two concepts of diaspora and modernism, Allison Schachter formulates a novel approach to modernist studies and diasporic cultural production. Diasporic Modernisms illuminates how the relationships between migrant writers and dispersed readers were registered in the innovative practices of modernist prose fiction. The Jewish writers discussed-including S. Y. Abramovitsh, Yosef Chaim Brenner, Dovid Bergelson, Leah Goldberg, Gabreil Preil, and Kadia Molodowsky--embraced diaspora as a formal literary strategy to reflect on the historical conditions of Jewish language culture. Spanning from 1894 to 1974, the book traces the development of this diasporic aesthetic in the shifting centers of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, including Odessa, Jerusalem, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York. Through an analysis of Jewish writing, Schachter theorizes how modernist literary networks operate outside national borders in minor and non-national languages.
Offering the first comparative literary history of Hebrew and Yiddish modernist prose, Diasporic Modernisms argues that these two literary histories can no longer be separated by nationalist and monolingual histories. Instead, the book illuminates how these literary languages continue to animate each other, even after the creation of a Jewish state, with Hebrew as its national language.

For thousands of years, the Jewish people have endured many atrocities. Some may wonder why the Jewish people have been subjected to this treatment instead of those from other races. In The Sacrificial Lamb, author Joey Kiser explains that God has not forsaken Jewish followers, but instead has named them His chosen people.

Using historical biblical examples, Kiser shares his experience and ideas about the history of the Jewish people and his ideas about Islam and the Christian faith. "The Sacrificial Lamb" shows why the Jewish people were chosen to be sacrificed so the world would not perish-a sacrifice to ward off the Devil's plan to destroy mankind.

"The Sacrificial Lamb" illustrates that now is the time to understand-a time to open the minds and hearts of all of mankind so the truth will lead us all to a better place to create a new world full of love and people caring for one another. It makes way for a world ready for kindness, joy, and understanding so we can live in peace for a thousand years.

Of all Judaic rituals, that of giyyur is arguably the most radical: it turns a Gentile into a Jew - once and for all and irrevocably. The very possibility of such a transformation is anomalous, according to Jewish tradition, which regards Jewishness as an ascriptive status entered through birth to a Jewish mother.What is the internal logic of the ritual of giyyur, that seems to enable a Gentile to acquire an 'ascribed' identity? It is to this question, and others deriving from it, that the authors address themselves.Interpretation of a ritual such as giyyur is linked to broad issues of anthropology, religion and culture: the relation of 'nature' and 'culture' in the construction of group boundaries; the tension between ethnicity and religion; the interrelation of individual identity and membership in a collective. Fully aware of these issues, this groundbreaking study focuses upon a close reading of primary halakhic texts from Talmudic times down to the present as key to the explication of meaning within the Judaic tradition.In our times, the meaning of Jewish identity is a core issue, directly affecting the public debate regarding the relative weight of religion, nationality and kinship in determining basic aspects of Jewish life throughout the world. This book constitutes a seminal contribution to this ongoing discussion: it enables access to a wealth of halakhic sources previously accessible only to rabbinic scholars, fleshes out their meanings and implications within the cultural history of halakha, and in doing so situates halakha at the nexus of contemporary cultural discourse.The Robert and Arlene Kogod Library of Judaic Studies publishes new research which serves to enhance the quality of dialogue between Jewish classical sources and the modern world, to enrich the meanings of Jewish thought and to explore the varieties of Jewish life.

The concepts of purity and pollution are fundamental to the worldview reflected in the Hebrew Bible yet the ways that biblical texts apply these concepts to sexual relationships remain largely overlooked.
Sexual Pollution in the Hebrew Bible argues that the concept of pollution is rooted in disgust and that pollution language applied to sexual relations expresses a sense of bodily contamination resulting from revulsion.
Most texts in the Hebrew Bible that use pollution language in sexual contexts reflect a conception of women as sexual property susceptible to being "ruined" for particular men through contamination by others. In contrast, the Holiness legislation of the Pentateuch applies pollution language to men who engage in transgressive sexual relations, conveying the idea that male bodily purity is a prerequisite for individual and communal holiness.Sexual transgressions contaminate the male body and ultimately result in exile when the land vomits out its inhabitants.
The Holiness legislation's conception of sexual pollution, which is found in Leviticus 18, had a profound impact on later texts. In the book of Ezekiel, it contributes to a broader conception of pollution resulting from Israel's sins, which led to the Babylonian exile. In the book of Ezra, it figures in a view of the Israelite community as a body of males contaminated by foreign women. Yet the idea of female pollution rooted in a view of women as sexual property persisted alongside the idea of male pollution as an impediment to holiness.
Eva Feinstein illuminates why the idea of pollution adheres to particular domains of experience, including sex, death, and certain types of infirmity. Sexual Pollution in the Hebrew Bible allows for a more thorough understanding of sexual pollution, its particular characteristics, and the role that it plays in biblical literature.