While early Zionists envisioned the Jewish state as an outpost of Europe in the Middle East, modern Israel is geographically speaking located in Asia and incorporates elements from both Orient and Occident. This book sheds light on how the Mediterranean region, its history, traditions, climate, and attitudes have shaped Israeli lived experience and consciousness. It offers new perspectives on the evolving phenomenon of Yam Tikhoniut (hebr. Mediterraneanism), which centers around the longing to find a "natural" place in order that Israel be accommodated in the region, both culturally and politically. This book explores Mediterraneanism as reflected in popular music, literature, architecture, and daily life and analyzes the ways in which the notion comprises cultural identity, societal concepts, and political realities. This book is also available in paperback.

The American Jewish Year Book, now in its 116th year, is the annual record of the North American Jewish communities and provides insight into their major trends. Part I presents a forum on the Pew Survey, "A Portrait of American Orthodox Jews." Part II begins with Chapter 13, "The Jewish Family." Chapter 14 examines "American Jews and the International Arena (April 1, 2015 - April 15, 2016), which focuses on US-Israel Relations. Chapters 15-17 analyze the demography and geography of the US, Canadian, and world Jewish populations. In Part III, Chapter 18 provides lists of Jewish institutions, including federations, community centers, social service agencies, national organizations, synagogues, Hillels, day schools, camps, museums, and Israeli consulates. In the final chapters, Chapter 19 presents national and local Jewish periodicals and broadcast media; Chapter 20 provides academic resources, including Jewish Studies programs, books, articles, websites, and research libraries; and Chapter 21 presents lists of major events in the past year, Jewish honorees, and obituaries. An invaluable record of Jewish life, the American Jewish Year Book illuminates contemporary issues with insight and breadth. It is a window into a complex and ever-changing world. Deborah Dash Moore, Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of History and Judaic Studies, and Director Emerita of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, University of Michigan A century from now and more, the stately volumes of the American Jewish Year Book will stand as the authoritative record of Jewish life since 1900. For anyone interested in tracing the long-term evolution of Jewish social, political, religious, and cultural trends from an objective yet passionately Jewish perspective, there simply is no substitute. Lawrence Grossman, American Jewish Year Book Editor (1999-2008) and Contributor (1988-2015)

Praeger, in collaboration with the distinguished International Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization, Jerusalem, and in association with Israeli's Open University, has undertaken the publication of this multi-volume series. Binah brings together for the first time in English seminal articles in Jewish history, thought, and culture. This landmark series, edited by Joseph Dan and under the general supervision of Moshe Davis, will provide resource materials for students enrolled in courses in Jewish studies, religion, history, literature, sociology, cultural anthropology, and philosophy. Binah includes topics from the Biblical period through the 20th century. Each volume of articles is approximately 300 pages in length. An introduction explains the criteria for selecting the articles and indicates their contribution to Jewish history, thought, and culture. The articles, not previously translated, are adapted from their original Hebrew sources in order to make them more accessible to the undergraduate reader, but the editors have made every effort to remain faithful to the intent of the original authors. Each article is preceded by a statement that indicates the original source, a brief biographical sketch of the author placing the article within the framework of his life-work, and the name of the translator/adaptor. The series is bound in both a hardcover library version and in a loose-leaf fomat, allowing the instructor maximum flexibility in utilizing the materials. By special arrangement, purchasers acquire the right to make copies of the articles for student use. Thus, instructors can virtually build a package of readings for their students.

In The Religious Cultures of Dutch Jewry an international group of scholars examines aspects of religious belief and practice of pre-emancipation Sephardim and Ashkenazim in Amsterdam, Curacao and Surinam, ceremonial dimensions, artistic representations of religious life, and religious life after the Shoa. The origins of Dutch Jewry trace back to diverse locations and ancestries: Marranos from Spain and Portugal and Ashkenazi refugees from Germany, Poland and Lithuania. In the new setting and with the passing of time and developments in Dutch society at large, the religious life of Dutch Jews took on new forms. Dutch Jewish society was thus a microcosm of essential changes in Jewish history.

"Taking the Jewish community as a focal point, this book thoroughly explores the various "borders" geographical divides, religious affiliations, gender boundaries, genre divisions that ruled the lives and intellectual production of late medieval Jews"--Provided by publisher.

Series: Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum Section 1 - The Jewish people in the first century Historial geography, political history, social, cultural and religious life and institutions Edited by S. Safrai and M. Stern in cooperation with D. Flusser and W.C. van Unnik Section 2 - The Literature of the Jewish People in the Period of the Second Temple and the Talmud Section 3 - Jewish Traditions in Early Christian Literature

Finalist for the 2013 National Jewish Book Award, American Jewish Studies For centuries, Jews were one of the few European cultures without any official public theatrical tradition. Yet in the modern era, Jews were among the most important creators of popular theater and film-especially in America. Why? In Theatrical Liberalism, Andrea Most illustrates how American Jews used the theatre and other media to navigate their encounters with modern culture, politics, religion, and identity, negotiating a position for themselves within and alongside Protestant American liberalism by reimagining key aspects of traditional Judaism as theatrical. Discussing works as diverse as the Hebrew Bible, The Jazz Singer, and Death of a Salesman-among many others-Most situates American popular culture in the multiple religious traditions that informed the worldviews of its practitioners. Offering a comprehensive history of the role of Judaism in the creation of American entertainment, Theatrical Liberalism re-examines the distinction between the secular and the religious in both Jewish and American contexts, providing a new way of understanding Jewish liberalism and its place in a pluralist society. With extensive scholarship and compelling evidence, Theatrical Liberalism shows how the Jewish worldview that permeates American culture has reached far beyond the Jews who created it.

In October of 1943, the Danish resistance rescued almost all of the Jews in Copenhagen from roundups by the occupying Nazis. In the years since, Jews have become deeply engaged in a Danish culture that presents very few barriers of anti-Semitism or prejudice. This telling ethnographic study explores the questions that such inclusion raises for the Danish Jews, and what their answers can tell us about the meaning of religion, ethnicity, and community in modern society.

Social scientists have long argued that modernity poses challenges to traditional ethnic communities, by breaking down the networks of locality, kinship, religion, and occupation that have held such communities together. For Danish Jews, inclusion into the larger society has led to increasing fragmentation, as the community has split into a bewildering array of religious, social, and political factions. The community's persistent vitality in the face of such fragmentation, and the ongoing importance of Jewishness to the self-identity of its members, points to a new understanding of the meaning of ethnic community in contemporary society.

Dealing with major issues in Jewish biomedical law, this book focuses upon the influence of morality, the rise of patient autonomy, and the role played by scientific progress in this area of Jewish Law. The book examines Jewish Law in comparison with canon, common, and modern Israeli law.

This is a scholarly reassessment of the 'Jewish Question' in Germany (1910-1933). Anthony Kauders challenges the view that, following Hitler's rise to power, anti-Semitism radically increased among the majority of Germans. He argues that the Weimar Republic was also very influential in changing people's attitudes towards the Jews and their place in German society. Through a study of Dusseldorf and Nuremberg, two German towns of comparable size but disparate regional, religious, and economic characteristics, he explores the attitudes of journalists, politicians, clerics, and ordinary people. Using local and national archival material, Dr Kauders is able to show that, whereas before the First World War most Germans would distance themselves from racial anti-Semitism, after 1918 many Germans agreed with volkisch agitators that Jews were, in a variety of ways, alien to the national community.

Critical presentation of the whole evidence concerning Jewish history, institutions, and literature from 175 BC to AD 135; with updated bibliographies.

The purpose of The Jewish Communities in New England is to inform readers about the Jewish community in each of the six New England States: Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Factual, inspirational, and poetic, it serves as a scholarly guide to institutions of Jewish life in this dynamic American region. Stocked with valuable information about community, schools, restaurants, and synagogues, Keith Warwick's study will appeal to members of the Jewish community, sociologists, teachers, cultural anthropologists, and the general reader.

Articles examine the city of Jerusalem and other Jewish communities of the Mediterranean diaspora, as reflected in the writings of Luke, Josephus and Philo. Topics covered include social identity, everyday life and religious practice. This will be of interest to students of Roman history, biblical studies, ancient Judaism and Hellenistic history.

Nobel Laureate Simon Kuznets, famous as the founder of modern empirical economics, pioneered the quantitative study of the economic history of the Jews. Yet, until now, his most important work on the subject was unpublished. This second collection of previously unavailable material issued by Transaction brings to the public, for the first time, the most important economic work written on Jewish migration since that of Werner Sombart a century ago.

This volume of Kuznets' work includes three main essays. The first, titled "Immigration and the Foreign Born," was Kuznets' first work on immigration and discusses the impact of the general foreign born on the U.S. Kuznets and his co-author, Ernest Rubin, offer the essay as a quantitative antidote to the misinformation that led many Jews to support the restrictions ending Jewish migration in the 1920s. The second, "Israel's Economic Development," discusses the impact of mass immigration and other factors on Israeli productivity, providing in English for the first time one of the first detailed studies of the economic development of the state of Israel. The final essay, on "Immigration of Russian Jews to the United States," is the most famous of Kuznets' writings and provides a clear view, backed by a seminal paper that launched the contemporary social scientific study of Jewry. It discusses the details of the labor force, skills, and general structure of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the U.S.

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?

Volume 19 of The Jewish Law Annual is a festschrift in honor of Professor Neil S. Hecht. It contains thirteen articles, ten in English and three in Hebrew. Several articles are jurisprudential in nature, focusing on analysis of halakhic institutions and concepts. Elisha Ancselovits discusses the concept of the prosbul, asking whether it is correct to construe it as a legal fiction, as several scholars have asserted. He takes issue with this characterization of the prosbul, and with other scholarly readings of Tannaitic law in general. The concepts of dignity and shame are addressed in two very different articles, one by Nahum Rakover, and the other by Hanina Ben-Menahem. The former discusses halakhic sources pertaining to the dignity inherent in human existence, and the importance of nurturing it. The latter presents a fascinating survey of actual legal practices that contravened this haklakhic norm. Attestations of these practices are adduced not only from halakhic and semi-halakhic documents, but also from literary, historical, and ethnographic sources. Three articles tackle topical issues of considerable contemporary interest. Bernard S. Jackson comments on legal issues relating to the concept of conversion arising from the story of the biblical heroine Ruth, and compares that concept to the notion of conversion invoked by a recent English court decision on eligibility for admission to denominational schools. An article by Dov I. Frimer explores the much agonized-over question of halakhic remedies for the wife whose husband refuses to grant her a get (bill of divorce), precluding her remarriage. Frimer s focus is the feasibility of inducing the husband to grant the get through monetary pressure, specifically, by awarding the chained wife compensatory tort damages. Tort remedies are also discussed in the third topical article, by Ronnie Warburg, on negligent misrepresentation by investment advisors. Two papers focus on theory of law. Shai Wozner explores the decision rules conduct rules dichotomy in the Jewish law context, clarifying how analysis of which category a given law falls under enhances our understanding of the law s intent. Daniel Sinclair explores the doctrine of normative transparency in the writings of Maimonides, the Hatam Sofer, and R. Abraham Isaac Kook, demonstrating that although transparency was universally endorsed as an ideal, some rabbinical authorities were willing to forego transparency where maintenance of the halakhic system itself was imperiled. An article by Alfredo M. Rabello reviews the primary and secondary literature on end-of-life issues, and contextualizes the much-discussed talmudic passage bAvoda Zara 18a. And an article by Chaim Saiman offers a critical survey of the main approaches to conceptualizing and teaching Jewish law in American universities; it also makes suggestions for new, and perhaps more illuminating pedagogic direction. In the Hebrew section, an intriguing article by Berachyahu Lifshitz presents a comparison of Persian and talmudic law on the status of promises and the role of the divine in their enforcement. Yuval Sinai discusses the halakhic law of evidence, particularly the well-known "two witnesses" requirement and departures from it. The volume closes with a historical article by Elimelech Westreich on the official rabbinical court in nineteenth century Jerusalem. It focuses on the rabbinical figures who served on the court, the communities for whom it adjudicated, and its role in the broader geopolitical and sociocultural context.

This fascinating book has two aims. The first is to draw attention to the existence of a persisting and virtually unrecognised tradition of 'philosemitism' which manifested itself in Britain and elsewhere in the English-speaking world during every significant international outbreak of antisemitism during the century after 1840. The second is to offer a typology of philosemitism, distinguishing between varieties of support for the Jewish people.

Drawing on twenty years of research, this is the definitive biography of Primo Levi. Over the last seventy years, Primo Levi (1919-87) has been recognized as the foremost literary witness of the extermination of the European Jews. In Primo Levi: An Identikit, a product of twenty years of research, Marco Belpoliti explores Levi's tormented life, his trajectory as a writer and intellectual, and, above all, his multifaceted and complex oeuvre. Organized in a mosaic format, this volume devotes a different chapter to each of Levi's books. In addition to tracing the history of each book's composition, publication, and literary influences, Belpoliti explores their contents across the many worlds of Primo Levi: from chemistry to anthropology, biology to ethology, space flights to linguistics. If This Is a Man, his initially rejected masterpiece, is also reread with a fresh perspective. We learn of dreams, animals, and travel; of literary writing, comedy, and tragedy; of shame, memory, and the relationship with other writers such as Franz Kafka and Georges Perec, Jean Amery and Varlam Shalamov. Fundamental themes such as Judaism, the camp, and testimony innervate the book, which is complemented by photographs and letters found by the author in hitherto unexplored archives. This will be the definitive book on Primo Levi, a treasure trove of stories and reflections that paint a rich, nuanced composite portrait of one of the twentieth century's most unique and urgent voices.

What is the value of medical research? With contributions from anthropologists, sociologists and activists, this approach brings into focus the forms of value - social, epistemic, and economic - that are involved in medical research practices and how these values intersect with everyday living. Though their work covers wide empirical ground -from HIV trials in Kenya and drug donation programs in Tanzania to industry-academic collaborations in the British National Health Service - the authors share a commitment to understanding the practices of medical research as embedded in both local social worlds and global markets. Their collective concern is to rethink the conventional ethical demarcations betwweenpaid and unpaid research services in light of the social and material organisation of medical research practices. . Rather than warn against economic incursions into medical knowledge and health practice, or, alternatively, the reduction of local experience to the standards of bioethics, we hope to illuminate the array of practices, knowledges, and techniques through which the value of medical research is brought into being. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journal of Cultural Economy.

Nobel Laureate Simon Kuznets, famous as the founder of modern empirical economics, pioneered the quantitative study of the economic history of the Jews. Yet until now his most important work on the subject was unpublished. These volumes bring to the public, for the first time, the most important work written on Jewish economic history since that of Werner Sombart a century ago.

In the first volume, Kuznets uses extensive, original data to trace trends in the economic life of American Jews. He measures quantitatively for the first time the legendary economic success of American Jews and discusses the foundations of these achievements. Tracing their distinctive concentration in the professions, he exposes the causes of the extreme inequalities in American Jewish economic life. The immigrant origin of nearly all American Jews offers a unique case study in the process of assimilation that made American Jewry the ultimate American success story. This offers an ideal prelude to the second forthcoming volume, Comparative Perspectives on Jewish Migration.

The volume's editors also provide a unique perspective on Kuznets' work. In the introduction, Weyl shows that many of Kuznets' most influential ideas, were inspired by his study of the economic history of the Jews. Through careful analysis of shared themes, and dozens of hours of detailed interviews, Lo and Weyl reveal a new dimension of Kuznets' thought to historical inquiry.

The terms Israel, Palestine, and conflict conjure up a set of images of struggles between two peoples over territory and sovereignty in the heart of the Middle East. However, there are conficts within that confict that contribute to the seemingly endless violence in the region. This book examines one of those conflicts, between Jewish Israelis, focusing on the case of right-wing religious settlers in Israeli-occupied territories, and the liberal left-wing public that vehemently opposes the settlers and their project. This is a conflict that has taken on central importance in the current political climate as the settlers are seen by many in the region as a threat to both democracy and peace with the Palestinians. At the same time, those religiously motivated settlers question the limits of liberal democracy and deem liberal Israeli practices as threatening to the very future of the State of Israel. In Israel the socio-religious-political scene tends to be depicted in sets of binary oppositions: right/left, religious/secular, in favor/opposed to settlement in post-1967 occupied territories. Arguing that these binaries are not the most useful conceptualization, Dalsheim employs recent fieldwork to place the two sets of apparently incommensurable discourses and practices in a single frame. During the year preceding the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, or "disengagement," she carried out ethnographic fieldwork among Israeli settlers on both sides of the Green Line in that region. She argues that this conflict between Israeli settlers arises from the suppression of sameness, rather than difference, focusing on the commonalities among settlers in the Gaza Strip and liberal Israelis (often from kibbutz communities) in the Western Negev across the Green Line. By shedding light on the roots of this intractable conflict, Dalsheim makes it possible to examine lesser known socio-religious-political positions and constellations of identity that challenge the limits of what appear to be the currently available options for Israel/Palestine.

The controversy over culture and British 20th century economic performance has raged for many decades. Now, through selecting a control population, the link between British and American cultural values and entrepreneurship is finally unearthed. Using new evidence of Jewish immigration, mobility, and assimilation, Andrew Godley shows that despite similar backgrounds and opportunities, the Jews in London were far less entrepreneurial, preferring to remain as workers. However, in America Jews moved en masse into self-employment creating an innovative, dynamic economy while Britain remained stagnant and conservative.

Bringing together contributions from tweleve outstanding scholars, volume 20 of this distinguished annual demonstrates in what extremely varied - and often controversial - ways Communisim and Jewish history interacted during the so-called short twentieth century. Among the key issues examined in this volume are whether, when, and why a disproportionate number of Jews (by origin if not by belief) joined the Communist movement; how significant a role they played in that movement and in the Jewish world; what policies were pursued by the Communist regimes and parties towards the Jewish people as well as Jewish party memebers; and what impact the association - real or imagined - between Jews and Communists had on the rise of antisemitism.