Download or read book Jewish Culture between Canon and Heresy written by David Biale and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-07 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This career-spanning anthology from prominent Jewish historian David Biale brings over a dozen of his key essays together for the first time. These pieces, written between 1974 and 2016, are all representative of a method Biale calls "counter-history": "the discovery of vital forces precisely in what others considered marginal, disreputable and irrational." The themes that have preoccupied Biale throughout the course of his distinguished career—in particular power, sexuality, blood, and secular Jewish thought—span the periods of the Bible, late antiquity, and the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Exemplary essays in this volume argue for the dialectical relationship between modernity and its precursors in the older tradition, working together to "brush history against the grain" in order to provide a sweeping look at the history of the Jewish people. This volume of work by one of the boldest and most intellectually omnivorous Jewish thinkers of our time will be essential reading for scholars and students of Jewish studies.
Download or read book Canonization and Alterity written by Gilad Sharvit and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-07-06 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers an examination of varied forms of expressions of heresy in Jewish history, thought and literature. Contributions explore the formative role of the figure of the heretic and of heretic thought in the development of the Jewish traditions from antiquity to the 20th century. Chapters explore the role of heresy in the Hellenic period and Rabbinic literature; the significance of heresy to Kabbalah, and the critical and often formative importance the challenge of heresy plays for modern thinkers such as Spinoza, Freud, and Derrida, and literary figures such as Kafka, Tchernikhovsky, and I.B. Singer. Examining heresy as a boundary issue constitutive for the formation of Jewish tradition, this book contributes to a better understanding of the significance of the figure of the heretic for tradition more generally.
Download or read book The Arab Jews written by Yehouda A. Shenhav and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the social history of the Arab JewsJews living in Arab countriesagainst the backdrop of Zionist nationalism. By using the term "Arab Jews" (rather than "Mizrahim," which literally means "Orientals") the book challenges the binary opposition between Arabs and Jews in Zionist discourse, a dichotomy that renders the linking of Arabs and Jews in this way inconceivable. It also situates the study of the relationships between Mizrahi Jews and Ashkenazi Jews in the context of early colonial encounters between the Arab Jews and the European Zionist emissariesprior to the establishment of the state of Israel and outside Palestine. It argues that these relationships were reproduced upon the arrival of the Arab Jews to Israel. The book also provides a new prism for understanding the intricate relationships between the Arab Jews and the Palestinian refugees of 1948, a link that is usually obscured or omitted by studies that are informed by Zionist historiography. Finally, the book uses the history of the Arab Jews to transcend the assumptions necessitated by the Zionist perspective, and to open the door for a perspective that sheds new light on the basic assumptions upon which Zionism was founded.
Download or read book Heresy Forgery Novelty written by Jonathan Klawans and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is commonly asserted that heresy is a Christian invention that emerged in late antiquity as Christianity distinguished itself from Judaism. Heresy, Forgery, Novelty probes ancient Jewish disputes regarding religious innovation and argues that Christianity's heresiological impulse is in fact indebted to Jewish precedents. In this book, Jonathan Klawans demonstrates that ancient Jewish literature displays a profound unease regarding religious innovation. The historian Josephus condemned religious innovation outright, and later rabbis valorize the antiquity of their traditions. The Dead Sea sectarians spoke occasionally-and perhaps secretly-of a "new covenant," but more frequently masked newer ideas in rhetorics of renewal or recovery. Other ancient Jews engaged in pseudepigraphy-the false attribution of recent works to prophets of old. The flourishing of such religious forgeries further underscores the dangers associated with religious innovation. As Christianity emerged, the discourse surrounding religious novelty shifted dramatically. On the one hand, Christians came to believe that Jesus had inaugurated a "new covenant," replacing what came prior. On the other hand, Christian writers followed their Jewish predecessors in condemning heretics as dangerous innovators, and concealing new works in pseudepigraphic garb. In its open, unabashed embrace of new things, Christianity parts from Judaism. Christianity's heresiological condemnation of novelty, however, displays continuity with prior Jewish traditions. Heresy, Forgery, Novelty reconsiders and offers a new interpretation of the dynamics of the split between Judaism and Christianity.
Download or read book The Politics of American Jews written by Herbert Frank Weisberg and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uses extensive data to show that everything we think we know about the voting behavior of American Jews is wrong.
Download or read book Aspects of Jewish Culture in the Middle Ages written by State University of New York at Binghamton. Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies. Conference and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1979-01-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These are the papers and discussions of the eighth annual conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies at the State University of New York, Binghamton. The topics discussed were the relationship between Jewish and medieval studies, the patristic basis for Christian attitudes on the Jews, the Hispanic literary tradition, Jewish Spain, problems in Jewish art, and myth criticism and medieval studies.
Download or read book Josephus in Modern Jewish Culture written by Andrea Schatz and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-05-20 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Josephus in Modern Jewish Culture offers pioneering studies of the intense and varied reception of the historian’s work in scholarship, religious and political debates, and in literary texts, from seventeenth-century Amsterdam to the “trials” of Josephus in the twentieth century.
Download or read book Translating the Jewish Freud written by Naomi Seidman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-04 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is an academic cottage industry on the "Jewish Freud," aiming to detect Jewish influences on Freud, his own feelings about being Jewish, and suppressed traces of Jewishness in his thought. This book takes a different approach, turning its gaze not on Freud but rather on those who seek out his concealed Jewishness. What is it that propels the scholarly aim to show Freud in a Jewish light? Naomi Seidman explores attempts to "touch" Freud (and other famous Jews) through Jewish languages, seeking out his Hebrew name or evidence that he knew some Yiddish. Tracing a history of this drive to bring Freud into Jewish range, Seidman also charts Freud's responses to (and jokes about) this desire. More specifically, she reads the reception and translation of Freud in Hebrew and Yiddish as instances of the desire to touch, feel, "rescue," and connect with the famous Professor from Vienna.
Download or read book The Jews of Summer written by Sandra Fox and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-21 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades directly following the Holocaust, American Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic Jewish culture, fearful that growing affluence and suburbanization threatened the future of Jewish life. Many communal educators and rabbis contended that without educational interventions, Judaism as they understood it would disappear altogether. They pinned their hopes on residential summer camps for Jewish youth: institutions that sprang up across the U.S. in the postwar decades as places for children and teenagers to socialize, recreate, and experience Jewish culture. Adults' fears, hopes, and dreams about the Jewish future inflected every element of camp life, from the languages they taught to what was encouraged romantically and permitted sexually. But adult plans did not constitute everything that occurred at camp: children and teenagers also shaped these sleepaway camps to mirror their own desires and interests and decided whether to accept or resist the ideas and ideologies their camp leaders promoted. Focusing on the lived experience of campers and camp counselors, The Jews of Summer demonstrates how a cultural crisis birthed a rite of passage that remains a significant influence in American Jewish life.
Download or read book The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth Century Europe written by Shmuel Feiner and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-06 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the eighteenth century, an ever-sharper distinction emerged between Jews of the old order and those who were self-consciously of a new world. As aspirations for liberation clashed with adherence to tradition, as national, ethnic, cultural, and other alternatives emerged and a long, circuitous search for identity began, it was no longer evident that the definition of Jewishness would be based on the beliefs and practices surrounding the study of the Torah. In The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe Shmuel Feiner reconstructs this evolution by listening to the voices of those who participated in the process and by deciphering its cultural codes and meanings. On the one hand, a great majority of observant Jews still accepted the authority of the Talmud and the leadership of the rabbis; on the other, there was a gradually more conspicuous minority of "Epicureans" and "freethinkers." As the ground shifted, each individual was marked according to his or her place on the path between faith and heresy, between devoutness and permissiveness or indifference. Building on his award-winning Jewish Enlightenment, Feiner unfolds the story of critics of religion, mostly Ashkenazic Jews, who did not take active part in the secular intellectual revival known as the Haskalah. In open or concealed rebellion, Feiner's subjects lived primarily in the cities of western and central Europe—Altona-Hamburg, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Breslau, and Prague. They participated as "fashionable" Jews adopting the habits and clothing of the surrounding Gentile society. Several also adopted the deist worldview of Enlightenment Europe, rejecting faith in revelation, the authority of Scripture, and the obligation to observe the commandments. Peering into the synagogue, observing individuals in the coffeehouse or strolling the boulevards, and peeking into the bedroom, Feiner recovers forgotten critics of religion from both the margins and the center of Jewish discourse. His is a pioneering work on the origins of one of the most significant transformations of modern Jewish history.
Download or read book Daughter of History written by Susan Suleiman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-23 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A photograph with faint writing on the back. A traveling chess set. A silver pin. In her new memoir, noted scholar and author Susan Rubin Suleiman uses such everyday objects and the memories they evoke to tell the story of her early life as a Holocaust refugee and American immigrant. In this coming-of-age story that probes the intergenerational complexities of immigrant families and the inevitability of loss, Susan looks to her own life as an example of how historical events shape our private lives. After the Nazis marched into Hungary in 1944, five-year old Susan learned to call herself by a Christian name, hiding with false papers in Budapest with her parents. While her relatives in the provinces would be among the 450,000 Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz, Susan's close family survived and even thrived in the years following the war. But when the Communist Party took over Hungary, Susan and her parents emigrated to Chicago by way of Vienna, Paris, Haiti, and New York. In her adult life as a prominent feminist professor, she rarely allowed herself to think about these chapters of her past—but eventually, when she had children of her own, she found herself called back to Budapest, unlocking memories that would change the direction of her scholarship and career. At the center of this richly textured memoir is a little girl who grows up happy despite the traumas of her early years, surrounded by a loving family. As a teenager in the 1950s, she is determined to become "100% American," until a post-college year in Paris leads her to realize that her European roots and Americanness can coexist. At once an intellectual autobiography and a reflection on the nature of memory, identity, and home, Daughter of History invites us to consider how the objects that underpin our lives become gateways to our past.
Download or read book No Longer Ladies and Gentlemen written by Viola Alianov-Rautenberg and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-24 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the sixty thousand German Jews who escaped Nazi Germany and found refuge in Mandatory Palestine between 1933 and 1941, migration meant radical changes: it transformed their professional and cultural lives and confronted them with a new language, climate, and society. Bridging German-Jewish and Israeli history, this book tells the story of German-Jewish migration to Mandatory Palestine/Eretz Israel as gender history. It argues that this migration was shaped and structured by gendered policies and ideologies and experienced by men and women in a gendered form—from the decision to immigrate and the anticipation of change, through the outcomes for family life, body, self-image, and sexuality. Immigration led to immediate transformations in allocations of tasks within the family, concepts of masculinity and femininity, and participation in the labor market and domestic life. Through a close examination of archival materials in German, English, and Hebrew, including administrative records, personal documents, newspapers, and oral history interviews conducted by the author, this book follows Jewish migrants along their journey from Germany and into the workplaces, living rooms, and kitchens of their new homeland, providing a new perspective on everyday life in Mandatory Palestine. Viola Alianov-Rautenberg's work illuminates key issues at the intersection of migration studies, German-Jewish studies, and Israeli history, demonstrating how the lens of gender enriches our understanding of social change, power, ethnicity, and nation-building.
Download or read book The Invention of a Tradition written by Immanuel Etkes and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Gaon of Vilna was the foremost intellectual leader of non-Hasidic Jewry in eighteenth-century Europe; his legacy is claimed by religious Jews, both Zionist and not. In the mid-twentieth century, Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Rivlin wrote several books advancing the myth that the Gaon was an early progenitor of Zionism. Following the 1967 War in Israel, messianic sentiments spread in some circles of the national-religious public in Israel, who embraced this myth and made it a central component of the historical narrative they advanced. For those who identified with the religious Zionist enterprise, the myth of the Gaon and his disciples as the first Zionists was seen as proof of the righteousness of their path. In this book, Israeli scholar Immanuel Etkes explores how what he calls the "Rivlinian myth" took hold, and demonstrates that it has no basis in historical reality. Etkes argues that proponents of the Rivlinian myth seek to blur the distinction between Zionism as a modern national movement or a religious one—a distinction that underlies many of the central conflicts of contemporary Israeli politics. As historian David Biale suggests in his brief foreword to this English translation, "what is at stake here is not only historical truth but also the very identity of Zionism as a nationalist movement."
Download or read book The Censor the Editor and the Text written by Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2007-08-06 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Censor, the Editor, and the Text, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin examines the impact of Catholic censorship on the publication and dissemination of Hebrew literature in the early modern period. Hebrew literature made the transition to print in Italian print houses, most of which were owned by Christians. These became lively meeting places for Christian scholars, rabbis, and the many converts from Judaism who were employed as editors and censors. Raz-Krakotzkin examines the principles and practices of ecclesiastical censorship that were established in the second half of the sixteenth century as a part of this process. The book examines the development of censorship as part of the institutionalization of new measures of control over literature in this period, suggesting that we view surveillance of Hebrew literature not only as a measure directed against the Jews but also as a part of the rise of Hebraist discourse and therefore as a means of integrating Jewish literature into the Christian canon. On another level, The Censor, the Editor, and the Text explores the implications of censorship in relation to other agents that participated in the preparation of texts for publishing—authors, publishers, editors, and readers. The censorship imposed upon the Jews had a definite impact on Hebrew literature, but it hardly denied its reading, in fact confirming the right of the Jews to possess and use most of their literature. By bringing together two apparently unrelated issues—the role of censorship in the creation of print culture and the place of Jewish culture in the context of Christian society—Raz-Krakotzkin advances a new outlook on both, allowing each to be examined through the conceptual framework usually reserved for the other.
Download or read book Blood and Belief written by David Biale and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-10-23 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A wonderful, rich, and fascinating book, and a great read. Biale explores the meanings of blood within Jewish and Christian cultures from the blood of the sacrifices of the book of Leviticus to the blood of the Eucharist to the blood of medieval blood libels and the place of blood in Nazi ideology. Biale shows that blood symbolism stands at the center of the divide between Judaism and Christianity. This book will be the point of departure for all future studies of the subject."—Shaye J.D. Cohen, Harvard University "I know of no other work that, through numerous insights and useful distinctions, so alerts us to and comprehensively documents the ongoing constitutive role of Christian and anti-Semitic perceptions of Jewish existence and the interactions between them. Whereas much contemporary historiography has become so specialized that historians have surrendered the larger picture, David Biale's panoramic perspective reveals the great value and interest of this work."—Steven E. Aschheim, author of Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad
Download or read book Rituals of Childhood written by Ivan G. Marcus and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In medieval times, when a Jewish boy of five began religious schooling, he was carried from home to a teacher and placed on the teacher's lap. He was then asked to recite the Hebrew alphabet and lick honey from the slate on which it was written, to eat magically inscribed cooked peeled eggs and cakes, to recite an incantation against a demon of forgetfulness, and then to go down to the riverbank with the teacher, where he was told that his future study of the Torah, like the rushing river, would never end. This book--Ivan Marcus's erudite and novel interpretation of this rite of passage--presents a new anthropological historical approach to Jewish culture and acculturation in medieval Christian Europe. Marcus traces ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman elements in the rite and then analyzes it from different perspectives, making use of narrative, legal, poetic, ethnographic, and pictorial sources, as well as firsthand accounts. He then describes contemporary medieval Christian images and initiation rites--including the eucharist and the Madonna and child--as contexts within which to understand the ceremony. He is the first to investigate how medieval Jews were aware of, drew upon, and polemically transformed Christian religious symbols into Jewish counterimages in order to affirm the truth of Judaism and to make sense of living as Jews in an intensely Christian culture.
Download or read book Torahism written by R. L. Solberg and published by Williamson College Press. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: www.TorahismBook.com - Are Christians required to keep the Law of Moses? How about the Ten Commandments? Was Jesus divine? Join R. L. Solberg in his new book, TORAHISM, where he confronts a modern heresy and dives into these and other critical questions related to the Jewish roots of the Christian faith. "It all began with a series of Facebook posts that an old friend posted just after Thanksgiving. He was aggressively taking Christians to task for celebrating the 'pagan' holiday of Christmas. This struck me as odd because I'd always known he and his wife to be strong Christians. And while I've debated with plenty of atheists over the alleged pagan roots of Christmas, I'd never heard this charge leveled by a fellow Christian. So I decided to chime in on his posts and soon discovered that I had stepped into a mystery of, well, biblical proportions..." ENDORSEMENTS: "Over a decade ago, I came to know Rob Solberg. He impressed me back then with his searching heart, scholarly mind, and passion for apologetics. He has now offered a masterful work, well researched and very well-argued. Were I still a seminary professor, I would require my students to write reviews on this volume." Dr. Stephen Drake, Former Professor of Ministry at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary "Impressively written and researched! Aberrant theologies have existed throughout time, requiring trusted biblical guides to bring much-needed reproof. Rob Solberg does this superbly in his book, Torahism. And, he accomplishes this task with much 'gentleness and respect' (1 Peter 3:15). Even if you are not immediately confronted with this heresy, a careful reading of Rob's book will deepen your understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ." Ed Smith, Ph.D., President, Williamson College "Engaging and well-developed content on a tough topic. Rob addresses lofty theological issues with incredible accessibility and application. He reminds us to not just stay in our heads and win arguments but to love people well as we fight for what is true." Derek Bareman, Lead Pastor, Church of the City Spring Hill "This is an excellent, balanced, scholarly refutation of the heretical teaching of Torahism. Solberg does so with a wide array of Scripture, great Christian writers across the centuries, and impeccable logic. Not only does it address and answer the challenge of this new heresy, it serves as an apologetic in the best tradition of Christian scholarship. Exceptional work. I have reviewed thousands of books in 30 years. This book deserves to be read!" Reverend David "Doc" Kirby (retired), Host of the On The Bookshelf podcast FROM THE FORWARD BY PAUL WILKINSON, Ph.D. - "The best conversations are those that happen spontaneously amongst sincere, passionate seekers wanting to learn, mature, and progress in their faith and life. R. L. Solberg has blessed us by inviting us into just such a conversation . . . This book is a read that flows because it originates in genuine conversations between friends and passionate believers. It is reminiscent of the ancient dialogues with questions, points, and counterpoints. But be sure to catch this truth: Solberg's work is not about how to do the least work for the most grace, nor is it about how to avoid obligations, duties, and work. No, much more than that, Solberg's question is about how we who claim to be children of God best glorify, worship, and obey him . . . Solberg wants to know what it means to be "godly" and "righteous" in light of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. I invite you into Rob and his friends' conversation. I was challenged, encouraged, and taught by the insights he brings to the fore. I pray that you heed his call to take seriously what it means for the Christian to live the godly life; to be like Jesus."
