Monotheism is usually considered Judaism's greatest contribution to world culture, but it is far from clear what monotheism is. This work examines the notion that monotheism is not so much a claim about the number of God as a claim about the nature of God. Seeskin argues that the idea of a God who is separate from his creation and unique is not just an abstraction but a suitable basis for worship. He examines this conclusion in the contexts of prayer, creation, sabbath observance, repentance, religious freedom, and love of God. Maimonides plays a central role in the argument both because of his importance to Jewish self-understanding and because he deals with the question of how philosophic ideas are embodied in religious ritual.

A Truly All-American Renaissance ProphetEven without any actual historical references, Lamah contends that the contents of this narrative is a true story in reality. And after all, what is reality?This poignant book is, in essence, a story that is all about the power and significance of love. It begins at the closing years of the 18th century and has its final installment of inspirational spiritual muse manifested during the early to mid-19th Century. The source of this loving tale is an earthbound disembodied soul of unprecedented spiritual substance, who remained in spirit close to the geographic origins of this prophetic story until the end of the 20th Century. It was then that several conspiring, sometimes tragic circumstances brought together two initiate, spiritually gifted Medicine Men whose lives in this Garden of Eden were necessarily separated by the passage of more than a hundred years. They would dedicate their modest lives to the healing of others' spirits through that immutable power of love, a love that was and should always remain necessarily unconditional, and always boundless.

Comparing the liberal Jewish ethics of the German-Jewish philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt, this book argues that both espoused a diasporic, worldly conception of Jewish identity that was anchored in a pluralist and politically engaged interpretation of Jewish history and an abiding interest in the complex lived reality of modern Jews. Arendt's indebtedness to liberal Jewish thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn, Abraham Geiger, Hermann Cohen, and Ernst Cassirer has been obscured by her modernist posture and caustic critique of the assimilationism of her German-Jewish forebears. By reorienting our conception of Arendt as a profoundly secular thinker anchored in twentieth century political debates, we are led to rethink the philosophical, political, and ethical legacy of liberal Jewish discourse.

This detailed examination of the "Torah" (the first five books of the Bible) lays particular emphasis on the role and character of the Torah's transcendent God, as its central protagonist. Viewing both the 'Torah' and its God as purely human creations, humanist Jordan Jay Hillman seeks in no way to devalue this hugely influential book. His aim instead is to reinterpret it as a still vital text that used theistic means appropriate to its time to inspire people toward their worthiest human purposes. It is thus for its 'timeless themes' rather than its 'dated particularities' (including its model of a transcendent God) that we should honour the 'Torah' in our time as both the wellspring of Judaic culture and a major influence on Christian and Islamic ethics and morals. From his humanist perspective and his background as a lawyer and professor of law at North-western University (now emeritus), Hillman offers many insights into the narrative and wide-ranging legal code of "Genesis", "Exodus", "Leviticus", "Numbers", and "Deuteronomy"- including their many contradictions and anomalies. His analysis draws on a broad scholarly consensus regarding the 'Documentary Theory', as it bears on the identities and periods of the Torah's human sources. This thorough explication of an often misunderstood ancient text will help humanists, and many theists alike, to appreciate the rich moral, ethical, and cultural heritage of the 'Torah' and its enduring relevance to our time.

First Order: Zeraim / Tractate Peah and Demay is the second volume in the edition of the Jerusalem Talmud, a basic work in Jewish Patristic. It presents basic Jewish texts on the organization of private and public charity, and on the modalities of coexistence of the ritually observant and the non-observant. This part of the Jerusalem Talmud has almost no counterpart in the Babylonian Talmud. Its study is prerequisite for an understanding of the relevant rules of Jewish tradition.

Throughout their history, the affliction of the Jewish people has been central to Jewish self-understanding. In the modern world, however, this paradigm of adversity is challenged by the success of the Jewish state of Israel and by the auspicious circumstances of Jews in the United States. Will this very success prove fatal to the survival of Judaism? Can the trends of assimilation and secularization be resisted? Why do certain Jewish groups, especially the Orthodox, continue to thrive in the face of these challenges? These are the questions that Bernard Susser and Charles Liebman ponder in this thoughtfuly and provocative work. They identify aspects of Orthodoxy - such as its reverence for study and its ability to set and maintain boundaries-that can be emulated by non-Orthodox jews, and suggest that these aspects may hold out the best hope for meaninful Jewish survival.

Thoroughly exploring the history of the conflict between Christians and Jews from medieval to modern times, this wide-ranging volume includes newly uncovered material from the recently opened post-Soviet archives. Anna Sapir Abulafia delineates controversial issues of inter-faith confrontation, and a number of eminent scholars from around the globe discuss openly and objectively the dynamics of Jewish creative response in the face of violence. Through the analysis of the histories of the Christian and Jewish religious traditions, this book provides a valuable understanding of their relationship as a modern day phenomenon.

On November 10, 1975, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution declaring Zionism a form of racism. The move shocked millions, especially in the United States- the country largely responsible for founding the UN. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the American Ambassador to the UN, denounced this attack on Israel as an anti-Semitic assault on democracy and stood up to the Soviet-backed alliance of Communist dictatorships and Third World autocracies that supported the resolution. His eloquent stand brought him celebrity in the U.S., but ultimately shortened his tenure at the UN by alienating American allies, adversaries, and much of the foreign policy establishment-including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Nevertheless, Moynihan's moment was a turning point: a harbinger of a shift in American culture and politics that would culminate in the Reagan Revolution. Moynihan paved the way for a more muscular, idealistic, neoconservative foreign policy and for a new style of defiant "cowboy" diplomacy. In this book, Gil Troy argues that America's idea of itself-still torn, in the mid-'70s, between post-Vietnam and -Watergate defeatism and a growing sense of optimism-changed with Moynihan, altering both the left and the right in ways that continue to play out in the 21st century. Much of the rhetoric of this era survives in domestic foreign policy debates and the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, suggesting that Moynihan's struggle has much to reveal about American politics and its position on the world stage.

After World War II, Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich (1921-2007) published works in English and German by eminent Israeli scholars, in this way introducing them to a wider audience in Europe and North America. The series he founded for that purpose, Studia Judaica, continues to offer a platform for scholarly studies and editions that cover all eras in the history of the Jewish religion.

This book sets out new theoretical foundations for Jewish social justice education by surveying and discussing Freirean critical pedagogy, Catholic models of social justice education, Jewish social justice literature and interviews with educators and activists. Jewish social justice education is an active and growing field, encompassing a diverse range of issues including the treatment of refugees, environmental justice, human rights, peace and justice in Israel/Palestine, gender equality, and LGBT+ inclusion. Yet Jewish social justice education remains an under-researched and under-theorized phenomenon. This lacuna has practical implications for the thousands of educators and activists across the world who are attempting to achieve social justice ends through the medium of Jewish education. In discussing the key philosophical, political and educational issues that emerge when discussing these topics, the author draws on thinkers including Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Alasdair MacIntyre and Jonathan Sacks. Matt Plen proposes three possible directions for a normative theory of Jewish social justice education: 'Jewish politics in a renewed public sphere', 'Jewish education for relational community building' and 'Jewish critical pedagogy for cultural emancipation'.

Volume 12 in the edition of the complete Jerusalem Talmud. Tractates Sanhedrin and Makkot belong together as one tractate, covering procedural law for panels of arbitration, communal rabbinic courts (in bare outline) and an elaborate construction of hypothetical criminal courts supposedly independent of the king's administration. Tractate Horaiot, an elaboration of Lev. 4:1-26, defines the roles of High Priest, rabbinate, and prince in a Commonwealth strictly following biblical rules.

This collection is about various topics in Jewish Studies by one of the greatest scholars of the previous century. The subjects span the whole length and breadth of Jewish history and literature, from 'A Hoard of Hebrew Manuscripts in Judaism' to 'The Dogmas of Judaism', and from 'Safed in the Sixteenth Century' to 'Abraham Geiger-Leopold Zunz'. In Encyclopedia Judaica, Meir Ben-Horin says, "Schecter's Studies in Judaism remain indispensable documents of American Jewish religious Conservatism."

"Random Destinations" examines how novels and short stories portray those who managed to escape from Central Europe in the 1930s following the rise of Nazism. They faced many concrete and psychological problems at their random destinations: language acquisition, adjustment to different mores, fitting into the community, coming to terms with having been rejected by their homeland, the conflict between the desire to remember and/or forget their past, and, above all, the need to reshape their identities. Their personal struggles are contextualized within their historical situation, both global and specific to their new locale. The book argues that fiction, by taking ordinary escapees' difficulties into account, paradoxically offers a subtler and more truer picture that sociological studies that have tended to foreground the successes of a few outstanding individuals.

This study tests the alternative to the theory that the Dead Sea Scrolls emanate from the Essene community. It advances the theory that the Qumran community continues the haburah of the first century B.C., and that it is closer in custom to the old haburah than is the Rabbinic community.

Although Christianity's precise influence on the Holocaust cannot be determined and the Christian churches did not themselves perpetrate the Final Solution, Robert Michael argues in "Holy Hatred" that the two millennia of Christian ideas and prejudices and their impact on Christians' behavior appear to be the major basis of antisemitism and of the apex of antisemitism, the Holocaust.

The book of Numbers in Hebrew, Bemidbar, In the Wilderness is a key text for our time. It is among the most searching, self-critical books in all of literature about what Nelson Mandela called the long walk to freedom. Its message is that there is no shortcut to liberty. Numbers is not an easy book to read, nor is it an optimistic one. It is a sober warning set in the midst of a text the Hebrew Bible that remains the West s master narrative of hope.

The Mosaic books, especially Exodus and Numbers, are about the journey from slavery to freedom and from oppression to law-governed liberty. On the map, the distance from Egypt to the Promised Land is not far. But the message of Numbers is that it always takes longer than you think. For the journey is not just physical, a walk across the desert. It is psychological, moral, and spiritual. It takes as long as the time needed for human beings to change....

You cannot arrive at freedom merely by escaping from slavery. It is won only when a nation takes upon itself the responsibilities of self-restraint, courage, and patience. Without that, a journey of a few hundred miles can take forty years. Even then, it has only just begun.

The biblical prohibition of images sets Judaism apart, together with Islam, from all other religious systems. This book attempts to explain the reasons for the prohibition - as well as its limits - and then shows how influential it has been in determining aspects of Jewish thinking in relation to such key concepts as holiness, symbolism, mediation between man and God, aesthetics and the role of memory in religion. Why is music the one art to which Judaism is hospitable? Is Judaism a religion of the ear rather than the eye? What is the real issue at stake in the age-old debate between Jerusalem and Athens? How do these issues relate to the iconoclastic movements in Byzantine Christianity and the Reformation? Lionel Kochan makes clear that to the prohibition of the graven image there is more than meets the eye.

Translated by J. Edward Crowley. This radical reconstruction of the origins of Judaism starts by observing that Josephus's sources on the early history of Israel do not agree with the Bible and that the oldest rabbinic traditions show no sign of a biblical foundation. Another interesting question is raised by the Samaritan claim, at the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, that they had only recently received the Sabbath from the Jews. From such details, Nodet creates a comprehensive line of argument that reveals two major sources of Judaism, as symbolized in the subtitle of his work: Joshua was the one who established locally in writing a statute and a law at the Shechem assembly, while the Mishnah was the ultimate metamorphosis of traditions brought from Babylon and combined with Judaean influences.>

This book is the original zionist classic by Theodor Herzl. The book is about the start of a Jewish state, and played a big role in Israel becoming a state. It is an important text for those studying the history of Israel and Theodor Herzl is undoubtedly the most important author modern Jewish studies. This is also an interesting read for those studying other religions, as Israel plays such a central role to most of the major religions of the world.