The Jews of Pinsk is the most detailed and comprehensive history of a single Jewish community in any language. This second portion of this study focuses on Pinsk's turbulent final sixty years, showing the reality of life in this important, and in many ways representative, Eastern European Jewish community. From the 1905 Russian revolution through World War One and the long prologue to the Holocaust, the sweep of world history and the fate of this dynamic center of Jewish life were intertwined. Pinsk's role in the bloody aftermath of World War One is still the subject of scholarly debates: the murder of 35 Jewish men from Pinsk, many from its educated elite, provoked the American and British leaders to send emissaries to Pinsk. Shohet argues that the executions were a deliberate ploy by the Polish military and government to intimidate the Jewish population of the new Poland. Despite an increasingly hostile Polish state, Pinsk's Jews managed to maintain their community through the 1920s and 30s—until World War Two brought a grim Soviet interregnum succeeded by the entry of the Nazis on July 4th, 1941. For the first volume of this two-volume collection, see The Jews of Pinsk, 1506-1880.

Did Dante Alighieri, author of ""The Divine Comedy"" as a young man in Florence sleep with Beatrice Portinari before and after her marriage? Did the poet travel after her death through Hell to find her again? The clues to this academic detective story, writes Mark Jay Mirsky, lie not only in Dante's earlier poetry, ""The New Life"", or in ""The Divine Comedy"", but in the ""Zohar of Moses de Leon"", a Jewish text written some years before and based on Neoplatonic ideas similar to those that inspired Dante. ""Purgatorio"" and ""Paradiso"", the second and third volumes of the ""Commedia"", are inaccessible to most reader unfamiliar with the boldness of Dante's use of the philosophical debate in the Middle Ages. Does Dante's ""Commedia"" hint at his hope of intimacy with Beatrice in the Highest Heaven? Mirsky distinctively traces the influence on Dante of Provencal poets, mediaeval theologians, Dante's personal life, and the sources of his classical education to propose a radical reading of Dante. The text compounds the riddles of dream, poetry, philosophy and Dante's concealed autobiography in his work. It treats the ""Commedia"" in the spirit of its title, as a hopeful and comic version of the other world.

This remarkable anthology of sixteen narratives from ancient and medieval Hebrew texts opens a new window onto the Jewish imagination. Presenting the captivating world of rabbinic storytelling, it reveals facets of the Jewish experience and tradition that would otherwise have remained unknown and examines the surprisingly deep connection between the values of classical Judaism and the art of imaginative narrative writing.

Virtually all the narratives appear here in English for the first time. Sometimes pious, sometimes playful, and sometimes almost scandalous, they are each accompanied by an introduction and notes. The select_ions are framed by essays by David Stern and Mark Jay Mirsky that examine the various moods and forms in which the rabbinic imagination found expression and explore the impact that this unique form of narrative has had on modern fiction. The translations are by Norman Bronznick, Yaakov Elman, Michal Govrin, Arthur Green, Martha Himmelfarb, Ivan Marcus, Mark Jay Mirsky, Joel Rosenberg, David Ruderman, Raymond Scheindlin, David Stern, and Avi Weinstein.

"No other anthology offers the English reader such a fluent but at the same time scripturally responsible rendering of classical Hebrew literature". -- David G. Roskies, Commentary

"Fills an important gap in our understanding of the diversity of Hebrew literary expression". -- Leonard Gordon, Religious Studies Review

"A book of delight.... For modern readers (the selections) are wondrously entertaining; they are also a glorious opportunity to enhance our appreciation of the imaginative genius of our forebears". -- Max D. Ticktin, The Jewish Monthly (B'nai B'rith International)