This volume contributes to the growing interest in understanding the phenomenon of prayer and praying in the Hebrew Bible, Early Judaism, and nascent Christianity. Papers by the leading scholars in these fields revisit long-standing questions and chart new paths of inquiry into the nature, form, and practice of addressing the divine in the ancient world. The essays in this volume deal with particular texts of and about prayer, practices of prayer, as well as figures and locations (historical and literary) that are associated with prayer and praying. These studies apply a range of methods and theoretical approaches to prayer and the language of prayer in literatures of Early Judaism and Christianity. Some studies apply the classical methods of biblical studies to Second Temple texts of prayer, including form critical and text critical approaches; others engage in literary and narrative analysis of ancient works that recount discourse directed to the divine. Still other studies draw on anthropological and sociological analyses of prayer or marshal particular theories of discourse, ethics, and moral agency to offer fresh interpretations of address to God in the literature of Second Temple Judaism and earliest Christianity.

This is the story of perhaps the world's most unusual Jewish community, told through the eyes of the oldest member of one of its most unusual families. Solomon 'Momy' Levy is one of the best known figures in Gibraltar. Levy was the Rock's first civic mayor, and he is a prominent and cherished part of both civic and Jewish life. His friendships with the Governors of the Rock are legion. Solomon Levy's story is told with a wonderfully humorous approach, and it includes accounts of his schooling at the Jewish private school Carmel College in Britain; his astonishingly close family; his dealings with a succession of Governors; his attachment to the Queen and all things British; and his relations with the local Catholic clergy, particularly its bishop. Written by Michael Freedland, a renowned journalist and broadcaster, Man on the Rock is also very much the story of the Gibraltar community, which is Jewish in a way few others in the non-Charedi Diaspora are. Walk through the main street on a Shabbat and one will see shop after shop closed. Hence, unlike in other places, Saturday is not the busiest trading day of the week. Solomon Levy embodies this religious approach, as this anecdote demonstrates: As an officer in the Royal Gibraltar Regiment, he was asked to lead the 10-gun salute for the Queen's Birthday. The trouble was that it occurred on a Shabbat, so he consulted his rabbi. What do you have to do? asked the rabbi. Just shout, Fire , he replied. So do it, said the rabbi. I then walked all the way to the top of the rock and ordered Fire Everyone seemed happy with that.

Hebrew has survived as a continuously written literature for nearly 3,000 years. It is the oldest, and in some ways most successful, minority literature. While Hebrew is central to the social history of the Jews, its history also offers a panoramic window into the relationships of other minority literatures to their majority cultures.

Until 1948, written Hebrew was created primarily under the rule of empires, notably those of ancient Mesopotamia, Rome, medieval Islam, and Tsarist Russia. In this controversial volume, David Aberbach analyzes Hebrew's development, arguing that several of the most original periods in its history coincided with--and resulted partially from--imperial crisis. During these periods, social and political instability set off violence against the Jews. In each case a revolutionary body of Hebrew literature emerged, influenced decisively by the dominant culture, but asserting Jewish separatism and, to varying degrees, nationalism.

Revolutionary Hebrew offers a historical account of Judaism from biblical times to 1948, as exemplified through the growth or decline of Hebrew writing. Examining patterns in the social development of Hebrew, Aberbach explicates the role of Hebrew in the survival of Judaism and sheds light on the significance of literary creativity in ethnic survival.

Imagine a traditional Jewish community on the eve of the 19th century, and you will most likely picture the Eastern European shtetl. This prevailing European-oriented view obscures the fact that Jewry is a coat of many colors, with many diverse yet traditional manifestations, including the numerous Jewish communities of North Africa and Southwest Asia. While we know that in recent centuries such countries as Iraq, Tunisia, and Morocco contained a large proportion of the Jewish people, and that communities such as Fez, Aleppo, Tunis, and Baghdad were major centers of Jewish culture, our detailed knowledge of these Jewries remains limited.

Jews Among Muslims gathers together some of the most insightful work describing the life and culture of Jews in the traditional Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Spanning the vast belt from Morocco to Afghanistan, which has been dominated by Islam since the seventh and eighth centuries, Jewish communities have long coexisted alongside their Muslim neighbors. Revealing Jewish life in such countries as Yemen, Morocco, Iraq, Iran, Tunisia, Syria, and Kurdistan, Jews Among Muslims tells us much about Jewish religious life and leadership, economic status, connections to the state, social relations with surrouding ethnic groups, internal community organization, and family and gender roles.

Because the Holocaust, at its core, was an extreme expression of a devastating racism, the author contends it has special significance for African Americans. Locke, a university professor, clergyman, and African American, reflects on the common experiences of African American and Jewish people as minorities and on the great tragedy that each community has experienced in its history--slavery and the Holocaust. Without attempting to equate the experiences of African Americans to the experiences of European Jews during the Holocaust, the author does show how aspects of the Holocaust, its impact on the Jewish community worldwide, and the long-lasting consequences relate to slavery, the civil rights movement, and the current status of African Americans.

Written from a Christian perspective, this book argues that the implications of the Holocaust touch all people, and that it is a major mistake to view the Holocaust as an exclusively Jewish event. Instead, the author asks whether it is possible for both African Americans and Jewish Americans to learn from the experience of the other regarding the common threat that minority people confront in Western societies. Locke focuses on the themes of parochialism and patriotism and reexamines the role of the Christian churches during the Holocaust in an effort to challenge some of the prevailing views in Holocaust studies.

The American Jewish Year Book, now in its 117th year, is the annual record of the North American Jewish communities and provides insight into their major trends. The first chapter of Part I is an examination of how American Jews fit into the US religious landscape, based on Pew Research Center studies. The second chapter examines intermarriage. Chapters on "The Domestic Arena" and "The International Arena" analyze the year's events as they affect American Jewish communal and political affairs. Three chapters analyze the demography and geography of the US, Canada, and world Jewish populations. Part II provides lists of Jewish institutions, including federations, community centers, social service agencies, national organizations, synagogues, Hillels, day schools, camps, museums, and Israeli consulates. The final chapters present national and local Jewish periodicals and broadcast media; academic resources, including Jewish Studies programs, books, journals, articles, websites, and research libraries; and lists of major events in the past year, Jewish honorees, and obituaries.

Most Jews who now live in Germany have lived elsewhere. They are neither the remnant of those who survived the Holocaust nor those who are in transit to Israel or the United States. They are a disparate but vibrant and growing community of over 80,000 people. Forty thousand of them are members of official Jewish communities in today's Germany. Because of the Nazi past, this proportionately small number of individuals plays an out-of-scale role in German politics and world consciousness. As a study in the formation of minority communities within European national matrices, Cohn's work has interest for sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists as well. It is the only published work on the Jewish community in Germany today.

This unique and richly informative addition to American educational, religious, and cultural history examines the college life of Jews at Yale from the first Jewish graduate in 1809 to the present time, drawing comparisons to the Jewish experience at other elite colleges and universities and to the experiences of other minorities at Yale. In this revised edition, Oren draws on new interviews and references to present the dramatic events of the past twenty years, describing the tensions between majority and minority cultures in an academic world increasingly committed to inclusiveness and the solidification of meritocracy. Reviews of the earlier edition "An admirably probing and balanced account of a subject that was up to now considered taboo." -Lewis Coser "Dan A. Oren's meticulous research reveals how the traditional exclusivist conception of Yale University evolved gradually over time, and with what consequences for Jews and other original outsiders. . . . Judicious in tone, balanced and fluently written." -A.J. Sherman, Times Literary Supplement "A richly researched and well-written book." -Naomi W. Cohen, American Historical Review "A most complete, thoroughly researched, and well documented history." -Melvin Ezer, Educational Studies Dan A. Oren, M.D., is associate professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine.

Presents paintings and drawings of Jewish Lithuania with introductory articles. The artist's subjects are the poor people that live where Jews once lived, synagogues and churches. The captions explain the story of a lost community.

Is Jewish identity flourishing or in decline? Community leaders and scholarly researchers continually seek to determine the attitudes, beliefs, and activities that best measure Jewish identity. At issue, according to these studies, is the very survival of the Jewish community itself. But such studies rarely ask what actually is being examined when we attempt to assess "Jewish identity" or any identity. Most tend to assume that identity is a preexisting, relatively fixed frame of reference reflecting shared cultural and historical experiences.

Drawing on recent work in such fields as cultural studies, poststructuralist theory, postmodern philosophy, and feminist theory, Mapping Jewish Identities challenges this premise. Contesting conventional approaches to Jewish identity, contributors argue that Jewish identity should be conceptualized as an ongoing dynamic process of "becoming" in response to changing cultural and social conditions rather than as a stable defining body of traits.

Contributors, including Daniel Boyarin, Laura Levitt, Adi Ophir, and Gordon Bearn, examine such topics as American Jews' desires to connect with a lost immigrant past through photography, the complicated function of the Holocaust in the identity formation of contemporary Jews, the impact of the struggle with the Palestinians on Israeli group identity construction, and the ways in which repressed voices such as those of women, Mizrahim, and Israeli Arabs have changed our ways of thinking about Jewish and Israeli identity.

To the horrors of war and genocide in the twentieth century there were witnesses, among them Hermann Cohen, Emmanuel Levinas, Ernst Bloch, Leo Strauss, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, and Hans Jonas. All defined themselves as Jews and philosophers. Their intellectual concerns and worldviews often in conflict, they nevertheless engaged in fruitful conversation: through the dialogue between Zionist activism and heterodox forms of Marxism, in the rediscovery of hidden traditions of Jewish history, at the intersection of ethics and metaphysics. They shared a common hope for a better, messianic future and a deep interest in and reliance on the cultural sources of the Jewish tradition.

In this magisterial work, Pierre Bouretz explores the thought of these great Jewish philosophers, taking a long view of the tenuous survival of German-Jewish metaphysical, religious, and social thought during the crises and catastrophes of the twentieth century. With deep passion and sound scholarship, Bouretz demonstrates the universal significance of this struggle in understanding the present human condition. The substantial and established influence of the book's subjects only serves to confirm this theory.

Profoundly learned and amply documented, "Witnesses for the Future" explains how these important philosophers came to understand the promise of a Messiah. Its significant bearing on a number of fields--including religious studies, literary criticism, philosophy of history, political theory, and Jewish studies--encourages scholars to rethink and reassess the intellectual developments of the past 100 years.

In recent years the role of religion in the avant-garde has begun to attract scholarly interest. The present volume focuses on the work of the Romanian Jewish poet and visual artist Isidore Isou (1925-2007) who founded the lettrist movement in the 1940s. The Jewish tradition played a critical part in the Western avant-garde as represented by lettrism. The links between lettrism and Judaism are substantial, yet they have been largely unexplored until now. The study investigates the works of a movement that explicitly emphasises its vanguard position while relying on a medieval religious tradition as a source of radical textual techniques. It accounts for lettrism's renunciation of mainstream traditions in favour of a subversive tradition, in this case Jewish mysticism. The religious inclination of lettrism also affects the notion of the avant-garde. The elements of the Jewish tradition in Isou's theories and artistic production evoke a broader framework where religion and experimental art supplement each other.

The Book of Job has held a central role in defining the project of modernity from the age of Enlightenment until today. The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics and Hermeneutics offers new perspectives on the ways in which Job's response to disaster has become an aesthetic and ethical touchstone for modern reflections on catastrophic events. This volume begins with an exploration of questions such as the tragic and ironic bent of the Book of Job, Job as mourner, and theJoban body in pain, and ends with a consideration of Joban works by notable writers - from Melville and Kafka, through Joseph Roth, Zach, Levin, and Philip Roth.

Confronting Antisemitism on the Left aims to build on the legacy of Steve Cohen's That's Funny, You Don't Look Antisemitic, first published in 1984 and republished by No Pasaran Media in 2019. It draws extensively on Cohen's work, presenting a series of essays analysing the roots and contemporary construction of antisemitism on the political left, tracing its origins to primitive critiques of finance and capitalism, and, more recently, to a conspiracy-theorist form of anti-Zionism originating in Stalinism. Randall argues that a consistently democratic politics of working-class solidarity and equal rights can confront and overcome it.

This is a landmark study on Aby Warburg's life and work, translated into English.In ""Aby Warburg and Anti-Semitism"", Charlotte Schoell-Glass provides an unprecedented look at the life and writings of cultural critic Aby Warburg through the prism of Warburg's little-known political views. Schoell-Glass argues provocatively based on archival research that Warburg's work and teachings developed as a reaction to the growing anti-Semitism in Germany, which he saw as a threat to classical education and university scholarship. Translated into English for the first time, ""Aby Warburg and Anti-Semitism"" sheds much needed light on Warburg's views on Judaism and the politics of his time.Aby Warburg, scion of a well-known Jewish banking family in Hamburg, sacrificed his birthright to pursue a career as a private scholar. As an independent art historian, he devoted himself almost exclusively to reinterpreting the revival of antiquity within the Renaissance, urging other art historians to approach their work as a brand of the larger study of image making and philosophy. In this study, Schoell-Glass examines Warburg's most influential essays on Durer, Rembrandt, and the Sassetti Chapel and his most innovative concepts - the accessories of motion, the pathos formula, and the afterlife of antiquity - to illustrate how Warburg persistently showed a deep concern over a disappointing and unstable outside world within his own work. Schoell-Glass shows how Warburg attempts to make a response to anti-Semitism the only way he knew how, despite his awareness of the diminishing societal relevance of that response.From this study of Warburg, Schoell-Glass produces a multilayered case study of the encounter between twentieth-century politics and scholarship. Art historians, German historians, and scholars of Jewish studies and cultural studies will be grateful for this volume.

"This useful compilation of essays serves as an introduction and guide to the complexities arising from the theft of Jewish property during WWII...This anthology belongs in every library."
-- "Choice"

The campaign for the restitution of Jewish property stolen during the Holocaust has touched a raw nerve within European society, bringing many nations to confront their wartime past. Together with the end of the Cold War and generational change, the campaign has created a need to reevaluate conventional historical truths.

Following an unprecedented media campaign, pressure from Jewish organizations, and public opinion, more than 40 European commissions were established to investigate their fellow countrymen's behavior during the war and to ascertain how stolen property was dealt with in its aftermath.

The Plunder of Jewish Property During the Holocaust brings together a range of distinguished international experts to examine the major cases concerning restitution in several countries, covering specific issues such as Nazi gold, wartime theft of works of art, and the ownership of dormant accounts in Swiss banks. The contributors incorporate insights from diverse disciplines such as international law, economics, history, and political science which, taken as a whole, make clear that some chapters of European history will have to be rewritten.

With a preface by Edgar Bronfman and Israel Singer

The starting point for this compilation is the wish to rethink the concept of antisemitism, race and gender in light of Sartre's pioneering Reflexions sur la Question Juive seventy years after its publication. The book gathers texts by prestigious scholars from different disciplines in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, with the objective or revisiting this work locating it within the setting of two other pioneering - and we argue, related - publications, namely Simone De Beauvoir's Le deuxieme sexe of 1949 and Franz Fanon's Peau noire et masques blancs of 1952. This particular and original standpoint sheds new light on the different meanings and political functions of the concept of antisemitism in a political and historical context marked by the post-modern concepts of multi-ethnicity and multiculturalism.

Jewish radical thoughts and actions can be described in a variety of terms and dimensions. Often, there is a connection implied between left-wing ideas and activists as well as their radicalism. This volume surveys Jewish radicalisms and present different approaches on this global historical phenomenon which are conceptualised as three different phenomena: Cultural, political and religious radicalism. The volume is focussed on the 20th century and tries to grasp the manifold Ideas of Jewish radicalism and, thereby, wants to open up the discussion on this category. This discussion is needed not only within Jewish Studies to engage with this topic and broaden our understanding of Jewish Radicalism as well as to form a useful applicable category. This volume is to be understood as a call for and a contribution to this debate.

This chronology provides a detailed look at the history of Israel and the Jewish World from 1948 to the peace agreement with the PLO in September 1993. After a survey of the Holocaust and the immediate post-World War II years, the Edelheits begin their detailed chronology with the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948. The volume is augmented by a glossary, bibliography, and name, place, and subject indexes.

The historic signing of the Israel-Palestinian Arab peace accord of September 1993 in Washington, D.C., signalled the dawn of a new era in Middle Eastern politics. But, the often bewildering speed of recent events means that the historical background to those events has been lost, leading to confusion, misunderstanding, and misinformation. Scholars and interested readers alike need a source of clear and concise information on Israeli and Middle Eastern history in the last half-century.

Following up on "A World in Turmoil," this book reviews the most important events in the 45 year history of the reestablished state of Israel. Risen from the ashes of the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century--the near destruction of European Jewry during the Nazi Holocaust--the state of Israel represents both the Jewish return to sovereignty and is a touchstone for values of peace, honor, and national self-determination. It covers a broad spectrum of events connected with Israel, the postwar Jewish world, and the Middle East. From the ever-turning developments in Israeli political life to the battlefields of six wars, the text provides a useful introduction to the history of one of the world's most crucial regions. An introductory essay helps to place the events in their broader context, while a glossary, bibliography, and name, place, and subject indexes allow readers to seek more information on topics of interest.

For 300 years, American culture and society have been shaped by ethnic conflict. This book reveals how the unique characteristics of the American socio-political system have impacted intergroup conflict. This contributed volume collects the most current thinking on intergroup dynamics and on specific conflicts and specific groups with a special emphasis on the Jewish-American experience. The demographic portrait of this country has undergone vast changes. Many newly emerging groups that promote building group pride and solidarity are obtaining greater economic and political power. This current emphasis on groups also sheds light on the tribal dimension of the past in American life. This contributed volume examines how these forces are to be reconciled and will be of interest to students of sociology, religion, and multicultural studies.