This book examines the relationship between divine in/activity and human agency in the five books of the Megilloth-the books of Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, and Esther. As works of literature dating to the early Second Temple period (ca. 6th-3rd centuries BCE), these books and the implicit interpretation of these particular themes reflect the diverse cultural and theological dynamics of the time. Megan Fullerton Strollo contends that the themes themselves as well as the correlation between them should be interpreted as implicit theology insofar as they represent reflective interpretation of earlier theological traditions. With regard to divine in/activity, she argues that the Megilloth presents a certain level of skepticism or critical analysis of the Deity. From doubt to protest, the books of the Megilloth grapple with received traditions of divine providence and present experiences of absence, abandonment, and distance. As a correlative to divine in/activity, human agency is presented as consequential. In addition, the portrayal of human agency serves as a theological response insofar as the books advance the theme through specific references to and reevaluations of earlier theocentric traditions.

The books of Enoch are famed for having been “lost” in the Middle Ages but “rediscovered” by modern scholars. But was this really the case? This volume is the first to explore the reception of Enochic texts and traditions between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bringing specialists in antiquity into conversation with specialists in early modernity, it reveals a much richer story with a more global scope. Contributors show how Enoch and the era before the Flood were newly reimagined, not just by scholars, but also by European artists and adventurers, Kabbalists, Sufis, Mormons, and Ethiopian and Slavonic Christians.

Reveals how young American Jewish children come to develop their views about Israel Israel has long occupied a prominent place in the lives and imaginations of American Jews, serving as both a symbolic touchstone and a source of intercommunal conflict. In My Second-Favorite Country, Sivan Zakai offers the first longitudinal study of how American Jewish children come to think and feel about Israel, tracking their evolving conceptions from kindergarten to fifth grade. This work sheds light on the perception of Israel in the minds of Jewish children in the US and provides a rich case study of how children more generally develop ideas and beliefs about self, community, nation, and world. In contrast to popular views of America's youth as naive or uninterested, this book illuminates both the complexity of their thinking and their desire to be included in conversations about important civic and political matters. Zakai draws from compelling empirical data to prove that children spend considerable effort contemplating the very concepts that adults often assume they are not ready to discuss. Indeed, the book argues that over the course of their elementary school education, children develop and express deep interest in complex issues such as the intricacies of identity and belonging, conflicting ways of framing the past, and the demands of civic responsibility. Ultimately, Zakai argues that in order to take children's ideas seriously and better prepare them for a world full of disagreement, a substantive shift in educational practices is necessary.

This richly illustrated volume offers the most comprehensive and updated survey on about sixteen thousand Hebrew manuscript fragments reused as book-bindings and preserved in hundreds of libraries and archives in Italy. Contributions by the leading scholars in the field elucidate specific collections and genres no less than individual fragments, bringing to new life a forgotten library of medieval Jewish books, as almost 160 Talmudic codices, which include the Mishna, Tosefta, Palestinian Talmud and, for the most part, the Babylonian one, and several hitherto unknown texts. The contribution of these fragments to the ongoing research on the "European Genizah", as the Books within Books Project, and to Jewish Studies in general cannot be overestimated.

An intimate and hopeful collection of meaningful, smart, funny, sad, emotional, and inspiring essays from today’s authors and advocates about what it means to be Jewish, how life has changed since the attacks on October 7th, 2023, and the unique culture that brings this group together.

On October 7th, 2023, Jews in Israel were attacked in the largest pogrom since the Holocaust. It was a day felt by Jews everywhere who came together to process and speak out in ways some never had before. In this collection, 75 contributors speak to Jewish joy, celebration, laughter, food, trauma, loss, love, and family, and the common threads that course through the Jewish people: resilience and humor. Contributors include Mark Feuerstein, Jill Zarin, Steve Leder, Joanna Rakoff, Amy Ephron, Lisa Barr, Annabelle Gurwitch, Daphne Merkin, Bradley Tusk, Sharon Brous, Jenny Mollen, Nicola Kraus, Caroline Leavitt, and many others.

On Being Jewish Now is edited by Zibby Owens, bestselling author, podcaster, bookstore owner, and CEO of Zibby Media.

Media studies is an emerging discipline that is quickly making an impact within the wider field of biblical scholarship. This volume is designed to evaluate the status quaestionis of the Dead Sea Scrolls as products of an ancient media culture, with leading scholars in the Dead Sea Scrolls and related disciplines reviewing how scholarship has addressed issues of ancient media in the past, assessing the use of media criticism in current research, and outlining potential directions for future discussions.

King David if one of the most central figures in all of the major monotheistic traditions. He generally connotes the heroic past of the (more imagined than real) ancient Israelite empire and is associated with messianic hopes for the future. Nevertheless, his richly ambivalent and fascinating literary portrayal in the Hebrew Bible is one of the most complex of all biblical characters. This volume aims at taking a new, critical look at the process of biblical creation and subsequent exegetical transformation of the character of David and his attributed literary composition (the Psalms), with particular emphasis put on the multilateral fertilization and cross-cultural interchanges among Jews, Christians and Muslims.

This is a biography of Queen Berenice, the daughter of King Agrippa I, sister of King Agrippa II, wife of two kings and lover of the emperor designate Flavius Titus. A Jew of the 1st century, she witnessed some of the foundational events of her time like the emergence of Christianity and the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, is. She met and socialized with the most important people of her day - Philo the Philosopher (who was at one time her brother-in-law), Paul the Apostle (whose trial she witnessed) and Josephus the Historian who told part of her story.

The Dead Sea Scrolls have demonstrated the fluidity of biblical and early Jewish texts in antiquity. How did early Jewish scribes understand the nature of their pluriform literature? How should modern textual critics deal with these fluid texts? Centered on the Serekh ha-Yahad - or Community Rule - from Qumran as a test case, this volume tracks the development of its textual tradition in multiple trajectories, and suggests that it was not understood as a single, unified composition even in antiquity. Attending to material, textual, and literary factors, the book argues that ancient claims for textual identity ought to be given priority in discussions among textual critics about the ontology of biblical books

Explores the influence of Kabbalah in shaping America's religious identity In 1688, a leading Quaker thinker and activist in what is now New Jersey penned a letter to one of his closest disciples concerning Kabbalah, or what he called the mystical theology of the Jews. Around that same time, one of the leading Puritan ministers developed a messianic theology based in part on the mystical conversion of the Jews. This led to the actual conversion of a Jew in Boston a few decades later, an event that directly produced the first kabbalistic book conceived of and published in America. That book was read by an eventual president of Yale College, who went on to engage in a deep study of Kabbalah that would prod him to involve the likes of Benjamin Franklin, and to give a public oration at Yale in 1781 calling for an infusion of Kabbalah and Jewish thought into the Protestant colleges of America. Kabbalah and the Founding of America traces the influence of Kabbalah on early Christian Americans. It offers a new picture of Jewish-Christian intellectual exchange in pre-Revolutionary America, and illuminates how Kabbalah helped to shape early American religious sensibilities. The volume demonstrates that key figures, including the well-known Puritan ministers Cotton Mather and Increase Mather and Yale University President Ezra Stiles, developed theological ideas that were deeply influenced by Kabbalah. Some of them set out to create a more universal Kabbalah, developing their ideas during a crucial time of national myth building, laying down precedents for developing notions of American exceptionalism. This book illustrates how, through fascinating and often surprising events, this unlikely inter-religious influence helped shape the United States and American identity.

Moving away from focusing on wisdom as a literary genre, this book delves into the lived, embodied and formative dimensions of wisdom as they are delineated in Jewish sources from the Persian, Hellenistic and early Roman eras. Considering a diverse body of texts beyond later canonical boundaries, the book demonstrates that wisdom features not as an abstract quality, but as something to be performed and exercised at both the individual and community level. The analysis specifically concentrates on notions of a 'wise' person, including the rise of the sage as an exemplary figure. It also looks at how ancestral figures and contemporary teachers are imagined to manifest and practice wisdom, and considers communal portraits of a wise and virtuous life. In so doing, the author demonstrates that the previous focus on wisdom as a category of literature has overshadowed significant questions related to wisdom, behaviour and social life. Jewish wisdom is also contextualized in relation to its wider ancient Mediterranean milieu, making the book valuable for biblical scholars, classicists, scholars of religion and the ancient Near East and theologians.