Jewish Lesbian Scholarship in a Time of Change is the first major work in Jewish lesbian studies in more than a decade. Once a vibrant field, few works in Jewish queer studies in recent years have looked at the experiences of, and scholarship on, Jewish women, feminists, and those identified as lesbians. Correcting a twenty-first century shift away from explicitly feminist investigations in Jewish queer and LBGTQ studies, this work signals a new trend of scholarly works in the field. The chapters span an array of genres, presenting the rich diversity of Jewish lesbians as they are, as well as of Jewish lesbian scholarship today. This collection makes an innovative contribution to Jewish studies, lesbian and queer studies, gender studies, as well as to racial and cultural diversity studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies.

Provides an in-depth analysis of social ideology and social relationships in late Second Temple Judaea, studying a range of archaeological material and sites to better understand both communal and individual trends in Jerusalem and its environs.

A unique chronicle of the hundred-year period when the Jewish people changed the world - and it changed them Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Bernhardt and Kafka. Between the middle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a few dozen men and women changed the way we see the world. But many have vanished from our collective memory despite their enduring importance in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Paul Ehrlich no chemotherapy. Without Siegfried Marcus no motor car. Without Rosalind Franklin genetic science would look very different. Without Fritz Haber there would not be enough food to sustain life on earth. These visionaries all have something in common - their Jewish origins and a gift for thinking outside the box. In 1847 the Jewish people made up less than 0.25% of the world's population, and yet they saw what others could not. How?

Blakeslee examines the history and current status of Jews and antisemitism in the United States to reveal what we know of antisemitism and the ways in which this knowledge is seriously flawed. He explores the significant historical role antisemitism played in the formation of Jewish advocacy organizations and the subsequent success they enjoyed over several decades of publicly combating antisemitism. He then examines three specific incidents in the 1990s and the ways the advocacy organizations responded.

Antisemitic attitudes and incidents in the United States have dropped steadily since the post World War II revelations about the Holocaust. While antisemitism has not disappeared entirely from the American scene, it has dwindled to the point where the Anti-Defamation League considers the average American not antisemitic. Blakeslee probes why, if this statement is accurate--and prevailing statistics suggest it is--prominent Jewish advocacy organizations continue to lavish so much attention and money on an issue of little actual significance. A provocative study for all sociologists, researchers, and concerned lay people involved with the heated debate over antisemitism, Jewish identity, assimilation, Black-Jewish relations, and organizational studies.

It is an all too common belief that Jews did nothing to resist their own fate in the Holocaust. However, the parallel realities of disintegrating physical and psychological conditions in the ghetto, and the efforts of ghetto undergrounds to counter both collaborationist judenrat policies and the despair of a beaten down population, could not but lead to a breakdown in spiritual life. James M. Glass examines spiritual resistance to the Holocaust and the place of this within political and violent resistance. He explores Jewish reactions to the murderous campaign against them and their creation of new spiritual and moral rules to live by. He argues that the Orthodox Jewish response to annihilation, often seen as unduly passive, was predicated in the insanity of the times and can be seen as spiritually noble.

This volume contributes to the growing field of comparative Jewish and American law, presenting twenty-six essays characterized by a number of distinct features. The essays will appeal to legal scholars and, at the same time, will be accessible and of interest to a more general audience of intellectually curious readers. These contributions are faithful to Jewish law on its own terms, while applying comparative methods to offer fresh perspectives on complex issues in the Jewish legal system. Through careful comparative analysis, the essays also turn to Jewish law to provide insights into substantive and conceptual areas of the American legal system, particularly areas of American law that are complex, controversial, and unsettled.

In this thoroughly researched work David M. Gitlitz traces the lives and fortunes of three clusters of sixteenth-century crypto-Jews in Mexico's silver mining towns. Previous studies of sixteenth-century Mexican crypto-Jews focus on the merchant community centered in Mexico City, but here Gitlitz looks beyond Mexico's major population center to explore how clandestine religious communities were established in the reales, the hinterland mining camps, and how they differed from those of the capital in their struggles to retain their Jewish identity in a world dominated economically by silver and religiously by the Catholic Church. In Living in Silverado Gitlitz paints an unusually vivid portrait of the lives of Mexico's early Settlers. Unlike traditional scholarship that has focused mainly on macro issues of the silver boom, Gitlitz closely analyzes the complex workings of the haciendas that mined and refined silver, and in doing so he provides a wonderfully detailed sense of the daily experiences of Mexico's early secret Jews.

Drawing on hitherto neglected archival materials, Zohar Segev sheds new light on the policy of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) during the Holocaust. Contrary to popular belief, he can show that there was an impressive system of previously unknown rescue efforts. Even more so, there is evidence for an alternative pattern for modern Jewish existence in the thinking and policy of the World Jewish Congress. WJC leaders supported the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine but did not see it as an end in itself. They strove to establish a Jewish state and to rehabilitate Diaspora Jewish life, two goals they saw as mutually complementary. The efforts of the WJC are put into the context of the serious difficulties facing the American Jewish community and its representative institutions during and after the war, as they tried to act as an ethnic minority within American society.

This comprehensive study of the piano music of award-winning American composer Samuel Adler will interest pianists, teachers, and anyone interested in the musical art of our day. American composer Samuel Adler has composed a huge and multi-faceted body of works ranging from symphonies, concertos, and oratorios to solos for every standard Western instrument, to a rich trove of vocal and choral music, to pieces for students. Among them, encompassing his compositional life of some seventy years, is an array of works for the piano: three concertos; fifteen solo pieces and sets of pieces; a sonata for two pianos; and four volumes of music for beginning and intermediate players. Bradford Gowen writes about each of these works with the knowledge of one who has studied, performed, and recorded Adler's piano music and has previously written about it. He begins with an overview of stylistic and pianistic traits found throughout these pieces and then examines each work chronologically according to genre, in a two-part format. The first part is an essay on the work's style, emotional content, and unique features, which at the same time places the work in the context of other music by Adler and by additional composers from the present and past eras. The second part, informal and practical, is directed to a pianist interested in getting to know this music. As a "lesson" on the piece, it offers specific suggestions for practicing and interpretation and many solutions to technical challenges. Rounding out the book are an in-depth interview with the composer plus six invaluable appendices.

1) explores Judeo-Spanish folksong repertoire in a group of case studies, 2) surveys the basics of Judeo-Spanish (Sephardic) history and culture, the historiography of the folksong in Ladino 3) illustrates a methodology of combining archival research and ethnography and assembling the information bits to constitute the song's "sonic ruin"

This book explains why more Jewish people survived in some German-occupied countries compared to others during World War II. Hollander demonstrates that collaborators sometimes played a surprising role in ensuring Jewish survival. Where high-ranking governing officials stayed in their countries and helped Nazi Germany, they could often "trade" their loyal cooperation in military and economic affairs for inefficient or incomplete implementation of the Final Solution. And while they sometimes did this because they had sincere moral objections to Nazi policy, they also did so because deporting local Jews was politically unpopular, because they regarded it as less important than winning the war, or because deporting Jews meant that the collaborators gave up potentially profitable opportunities to exploit them. This unique book has important implications for our understanding of state-sponsored violence, international hierarchy, and genocide, and it raises harrowing moral questions about the Holocaust and the nature of political evil.

Hartung works out both the linguistic and philosophy of language setting as well as socio-political and cultural implications of the radical critique of language developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by philosophers as diverse as Steinthal, Cohen, Simmel or Cassirer. He argues that the theories pleaded for a plurality of linguistic and cultural forms as well as for a new logic beyond the traditional nature/culture partition.

In the wake of the spatial and affective turns in Literary Studies in general, and the study of Jewish literatures in particular, this volume shifts focus from the extensity of exile and return to the intensities of sense of place and belonging across a moving landscape of 20th and 20st century literatures, Jewish and other. It brings together contemporary writers and literary scholars who collectively map these intensities onto a bodily word world in transit and textures of habitable, readable space as passage. Works by Helene Cixous, Cecile Wajsbrot, Alex Epstein, Almog Behar, and Svetlana Boym explore sites made up of layers of passages, taking configurations of sayability and readability as forms, poetic and political, of inhabiting the material world. The contributions by literary scholars explore the theoretical potential of a mapping of such sites in studies of modalities of belonging and unbelonging in modern and contemporary works of literature. The volume collects a collaborative investigation of the exigencies and potentialities of sense of place and belonging through literature, Jewish and other. It offers a literary perspective on current debates in a variety of fields, including literary criticism, human geography, architectural theory, and translation studies.

This book is a transnational study of rural and anti-Semitic violence around the triple frontier between Austria-Hungary, Romania and Tsarist Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. It focuses on the devastating Romanian peasant uprising in 1907 and traces the reverberations of the crisis across the triple frontier, analysing the fears, spectres and knee-jerk reactions it triggered in the borderlands of Austria-Hungary and Tsarist Russia. The uprising came close on the heels of the 1905-1907 social turmoil in Tsarist Russia, and brought into play the major issues that characterized social and political life in the region at the time: rural poverty, the Jewish Question, state modernization, and social upheavals. The book comparatively explores the causes and mechanisms of violence propagation, the function of rumour in the spread of the uprising, land reforms and their legal underpinnings, the policing capabilities of the borderlands around the triple frontier, as well as newspaper coverage and diplomatic reactions.

Introducing Judeo-Persian writings, this original collection gives parallel samples in Judeo-Persian and Perso-Arabic script and translations in English. Judeo-Persian writings not only reflect the twenty-seven centuries of Jewish life in Iran, but they are also a testament to their intellectual, cultural, and socioeconomic conditions. Such writings, found in the forms of verse or prose, are flavored with Judaic, Iranian and Islamic elements. The significant value of Judeo-Persian writing is found in the areas of linguistics, history and sociocultural and literary issues. The rhetorical forms and literary genres of epic, didactic, lyric and satirical poetry can be a valuable addition to the rich Iranian literary tradition and poetical arts. Also, as a Judaic literary contribution, the work is a representation of the literary activity of Middle Eastern Jews not so well recognized in Judaic global literature. This book is a comprehensive introduction to the rich literary tradition of works written in Judeo-Persian and also serves as a guide to transliterate many other significant Judeo-Persian works that have not yet been transliterated into Perso-Arabic script. The collection will be of value to students and researchers interested in history, sociology and Iranian and Jewish studies.

At eydes.de, the vast archive of The Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, with its 5000 hours of recorded testimony in Yiddish about Ashkenazic society in Europe, can now be accessed and researched via the Internet. In 18 contributions scholars comment on the collectiona (TM)s research potentials, discuss data and methodology and throw new light on the interactions between Yiddish and coterritorial cultures.

Basic Yiddish: A Grammar and Workbook comprises an accessible reference grammar with related exercises in a single volume. The workbook is structured around 36 short units, each presenting relevant grammar points which are explained using multiple examples in jargon-free language. Basic Yiddish is suitable for both class use as well as independent study. Key features include: * a clear, accessible format * many useful language examples * jargon-free explanations of grammar * abundant exercises with a full answer key Clearly presented and user-friendly, Basic Yiddish provides readers with the essential tools to express themselves in a wide variety of situations, making it an ideal grammar reference and practice resource for both beginners and students with some knowledge of the language.

Language and silence have usually been understood as opposites and assigned different values, but which one is positive and which negative? When people equate silence with suppression or repression, they argue that it is through language that we discover meaning. Yet people who perceive deep wisdom in silence believe that words falsify experience. Ranging widely across time and languages, Andrew Vogel Ettin explores the ways in which various biblical and traditional works as well as modern and contemporary texts - Jewish and non-Jewish, religious and literary - treat the nature of silence and speech and the tension between them. He situates this tension at the heart of the creative process and argues that language and silence need each other and contribute to the power and meaning of one another. Critically examining the idea of a "Judeo-Christian" culture, Ettin shows how silence is imposed by a dominant culture on another culture and how the dominated culture - in this case Judaism - becomes excluded from the historical conversation about values and ideas. He also demonstrates the broader uses of both speech and silence as cultural weapons by the vulnerable or oppressed, who have no other means of defense or witness. We generally interpret silence as a void, but Ettin shows it to be a mode of communication that carries the potential for intense variety. The loss of a public voice has implications for both the dominant and the dominated culture. The author examines these implications in the following contexts: contemporary feminist attempts, especially within Judaism, to rectify the masculine language of worship and Godhead in order to end language-generated alienation; the situationof the Yiddish writer as exemplary of a writer in exile or a language that is marginalized; the Jewish impulse toward universalism, with its corresponding danger of loss of voice; and the values of silence and speech arising from the experiences of the Holocaust. In the process, he considers the implications for multicultural societies. Speaking Silences is a broadly interdisciplinary work that will appeal to scholars and readers interested in modern and contemporary literature, Jewish studies, religion and literature, and aesthetics.

How do secular Jewish Israeli millennials feel about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, having come of age in the shadow of the Oslo peace process, when political leaders have used ethno-religious rhetoric as a dividing force? This is the first book to analyse blowback to Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli religious nationalism among this group in their own words, based on fieldwork, interviews and surveys conducted after the 2014 Gaza War. Offering a close reading of the lived experience and generational memory of participants, Gutkowski offers a new explanation for why attitudes to Occupation have grown increasingly conservative over the past two decades. Examining the intimate emotional ecology of Occupation, this book offers a new argument about neo-Romantic conceptions of citizenship. Beyond the case study, it also provides a new theoretical framework and methods for researchers and students studying emotion, religion, nationalism, secularism and political violence. -- .

The Six Day War in 1967 profoundly influenced how an increasing number of religious Zionists saw Israeli victory as the manifestation of God's desire to redeem God's people. Thousands of religious Israelis joined the Gush Emunim movement in 1974 to create settlements in territories occupied in the war. However, over time, the Israeli government decided to return territory to Palestinian or Arab control. This was perceived among religious Zionist circles as a violation of God's order. The peak of this process came with the Disengagement Plan in 2005, in which Israel demolished all the settlements in the Gaza Strip and four settlements in the West Bank. This process raised difficult theological questions among religious Zionists. This book explores the internal mechanism applied by a group of religious Zionist rabbis in response to their profound disillusionment with the state, reflected in an increase in religious radicalization due to the need to cope with the feelings of religious and messianic failure.

The triumph of Zionism has clouded recollection of competing forms of Jewish nationalism vying for power a century ago. This study explores alternative ways to construct the modern Jewish nation. Jewish nationalism emerges from this book as a Diaspora phenomenon much broader than the Zionist movement. Like its non-Jewish counterparts, Jewish nationalism was first and foremost a movement to nationalize Jews, to construct a modern Jewish nation while simultaneously masking its very modernity. Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia traces this process in what was the second largest Jewish community in Europe, Galicia. The history of this vital but very much understudied community of Jews fills a critical lacuna in existing scholarship while revisiting the broader question of how Jewish nationalism - or indeed any modern nationalism - was born. Based on a wide variety of sources, many newly uncovered, this study challenges the still-dominant Zionist narrative by demonstrating that Jewish nationalism was a part of the rising nationalist movements in Europe.

Prophecy was a wide-spread phenomenon in the ancient world - not only in ancient Israel but in the whole Eastern Mediterranean cultural sphere. This is demonstrated by documents from the ancient Near East, that have been the object of Martti Nissinen's research for more than twenty years. Nissinen's studies have had a formative influence on the study of the prophetic phenomenon. The present volume presents a selection of thirty-one essays, bringing together essential aspects of prophetic divination in the ancient Near East. The first section of the volume discusses prophecy from theoretical perspectives. The second sections contains studies on prophecy in texts from Mari and Assyria and other cuneiform sources. The third section discusses biblical prophecy in its ancient Near Eastern context, while the fourth section focuses on prophets and prophecy in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Even prophecy in the Dead Sea Scrolls is discussed in the fifth section. The articles are essential reading for anyone studying ancient prophetic phenomenon.

Exploring the fascinating history behind Iranian-Jewish immigration to Israel, this book offers a rare and untold history of one of Israel's Middle Eastern Jewish populations. Over the 20th century, thousands among Iran's Jewish community left their ancestral homes and immigrated to the Jewish State, while thousands of others remained in Iran, even after the birth of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Using firsthand narratives, the evolution of Zionist activities and recruitment in Iran over the last century is covered, alongside an Iranian-Jewish population that, unlike other Middle Eastern Jewish communities, did not ultimately arrive in the Holy Land as a majority of their community. For those that did arrive (or, make aliyah) the Israeli nation-building process had unique ramifications. The integrative process and current status of the Iranian community in Israel is also examined, providing an intimate picture of Iranian life in Israel, nearly 75 years after Israel's establishment. A natural addition to any collection on Jewish or Israeli history and essential reading for a full understanding of Iran-Israel relations, enthusiasts of Israeli nation-building and affairs, as well as Iranian history, demographics, and politics will find this book invaluable.

This work, the fruit of intense research work spanning several years, examines the first serious attempt by the descendants of the Sephardim-the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492-to "return to Sepharad" more than three decades after the abolition of the Inquisition. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a trend towards historical revisionism, backed by Liberals, whose influence was pivotal at the Cortes de Cadiz (the national assembly convened to assert Spanish sovereignty, introduce reform, and establish a modern Spanish nation), combined with economic factors, culminated in the abolition of the Inquisition in 1834. This paved the way, ideologically, for the freedom of worship to be proclaimed in Spain on the heels of La Septembrina, or La Gloriosa, the September Revolution of 1868 in which Queen Isabel II was deposed. European Sephardic Jews, galvanized by their perception of a tolerant Spain, decided to undertake a major project to initiate negotiations with the Spanish state.