Download or read book Resplendent Synagogue written by Thomas C. Hubka and published by Brandeis University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-02 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A provocative interpretation of the art and architecture of a pre-modern wooden synagogue. Thomas C. Hubka immersed himself in medieval and early-modern Jewish history, religion, and culture to prepare for this remarkable study of the 18th-century Polish wooden synagogue in the town of Gwoździec, now in present Ukraine"--
Download or read book Jews and the Renaissance of Synagogue Architecture 1450 1730 written by Barry L. Stiefel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the mid-fifteenth century, the Christian and Islamic governments of Europe had restricted the architecture and design of synagogues and often prevented Jews from becoming architects. Stiefel presents a study of the material culture and religious architecture that this era produced.
Download or read book Tradition Interpretation and Change written by Kenneth E. Berger and published by Hebrew Union College Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Minhag (custom) played a far greater and far more important role in medieval Ashkenazic society than in any other Jewish community. In upholding the authority of a custom, halakhic authorities frequently asserted that "custom prevails over halakhah." Furthermore, Ashkenazic authorities asserted that Ashkenazic custom is more authentic than the customs of other Jewish communities, including those of Sepharad (Spain). Given the importance attributed to minhag and the influence of the siddur commentaries of the circle of Hassidei Ashkenaz, which emphasize the precise formulation of liturgical texts, one might assume that Ashkenazic Jewry was committed to preserving ancestral custom and opposed to liturgical change. However, the reality is that the liturgy of Ashkenaz was never static. From a very early time, new liturgies and liturgical practices were incorporated into the service, the inclusion of various prayers was challenged, and variant readings of prayers became standard. Tradition, Interpretation, and Change focuses on developments in the Ashkenazic rite, the liturgical rite of most of central and eastern European Jewry, from the eleventh century through the seventeenth. Kenneth Berger argues that how a prayer or practice was understood, or the rationale for its recitation or performance, often had a profound effect on whether and when it was to be recited, as well as on the specific wording of the prayer. In some cases, the formulation of new interpretations served a conservative function, as when rabbinic authorities sought to find new, alternative explanations which would justify the continued performance of practices whose original rationale no longer applied. In other cases, new understandings of a liturgical practice led to changes in that practice, and even to the development of new liturgies expressive of those interpretations. In Tradition, Interpretation, and Change, Berger draws upon a wide body of primary sources, including classical rabbinic and geonic works, liturgical documents found in the Cairo genizah, medieval codes, responsa, and siddur commentaries, minhag books, medieval siddur manuscripts, and early printed siddurim, as well as a wealth of secondary sources, to provide the reader with an in-depth account of the history and history of interpretation of many familiar and not-so-familiar prayers and liturgical practices. While emphasizing the role that the interpretation ascribed to various prayers and practices had in shaping the liturgy of medieval and early modern Ashkenaz, Berger illustrates the degree to which Sephardic and kabbalistic influences, concern for the fate of the dead, the fear of demons, and the desire for healing and divine protection from a variety of dangers shaped both liturgical practice and the way in which those practices were understood.
Download or read book The Lives of Jewish Things written by Gabrielle Anna Berlinger and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2024-12-03 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the paths of Jewish things across time, place, and culture, this collection reveals complex stories of individual and collective struggles to survive.
Download or read book Categorically Jewish Distinctly Polish written by Moshe Rosman and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-16 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moshe Rosman's revolutionary approach has become a cornerstone of Polish Jewish historiography. Challenging conventions, he asserts that the 'marriage of convenience' between the Jews and the Polish--Lithuanian Commonwealth was a dynamic relationship that, though punctuated by crisis and persecution, developed into a saga of overall achievement and stability. With that fundamental message this book forges a thematic survey of Jewish history in early modern Poland. These essays, written by Rosman over the course of a distinguished career, have all been updated and enhanced with new detail and nuanced arguments, taking account not only of new archival material and research but also of the ongoing evolution of the author’s own knowledge and perspectives. Some appear here in English for the first time. The volume's structure highlights key topics for understanding the Polish Jewish past: relations between Jews and other Poles; Jewish communal life; Polish Jewish women; and hasidism. One section analyses how this past has been presented in both scholarly and popular modes. The essays are crafted to place them in dialogue with each other. Analytical introductions weigh their significance in the light of modern and postmodern Jewish and Polish historiography. An extensive general introduction sets the context of the history portrayed here, while a thoughtful conclusion elucidates the larger motifs that emerge.
Download or read book Jewish Religious Architecture written by Steven Fine and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish Religious Architecture explores ways that Jews have expressed their tradition in brick and mortar and wood, in stone and word and spirit. This volume stretches from the biblical Tabernacle to Roman Jerusalem, synagogues spanning two millenia and on to contemporary Judaism. Social historians, cultural historians, art historians and philologists have come together here to present this extraordinary architectural tradition. The multidisciplinary approach employed in Jewish Religious Architecture reveals deep continuities over time, together with the distinctly local— sometimes in surprising ways.
Download or read book The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization Volume 6 written by Elisheva Carlebach and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark project to collect, translate, and transmit primary material from a momentous period in Jewish culture and civilization, this volume covers what Elisheva Carlebach describes as a period "in which every aspect of Jewish life underwent the most profound changes to have occurred since antiquity." Organized by genre, this extensive yet accessible volume surveys Jewish cultural production and intellectual innovation during these dramatic years, particularly in literature, the visual and performing arts, and intellectual culture. The wide-ranging collection includes a diverse selection of sources created by Jews around the world, translated from a dozen languages. Representing a tumultuous time of changing borders, demographic shifts, and significant Jewish migration, this anthology explores the range of approaches of Jews, from welcoming to resistant, to the intertwining ideals of enlightenment and emancipation, "the very foundation of the Jewish experience in this period."
Download or read book Synagogues in Lithuania A M written by Aliza Cohen-Mushlin and published by VDA leidykla. This book was released on 2010-03-29 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Jewish History and Historiography written by Dean Phillip Bell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-10 with total page 863 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Jewish History and Historiography provides an overview of Jewish history from the biblical to the contemporary period, while simultaneously placing Jewish history into conversation with the most central historiographical methods and issues and some of the core source materials used by scholars within the field. The field of Jewish history is profitably interdisciplinary. Drawing from the historical methods and themes employed in the study of various periods and geographical regions as well as from academic fields outside of history, it utilizes a broad range of source materials produced by Jews and non-Jews. It grapples with many issues that were core to Jewish life, culture, community, and identity in the past, while reflecting and addressing contemporary concerns and perspectives. Divided into four parts, this volume examines how Jewish history has engaged with and developed more general historiographical methods and considerations. Part I provides a general overview of Jewish history, while Parts II and III respectively address the rich sources and methodologies used to study Jewish history. Concluding in Part IV with a timeline, glossary, and index to help frame and connect the history, sources, and methodologies presented throughout, The Routledge Companion to Jewish History and Historiography is the perfect volume for anyone interested in Jewish history.
Download or read book Jewish Cultural Studies written by Simon J. Bronner and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defines the distinctive field of Jewish cultural studies and its basis in folkloristic, psychological, and ethnological approaches. Jewish Cultural Studiescharts the contours and boundaries of Jewish cultural studies and the issues of Jewish culture that make it so intriguing—and necessary—not only for Jews but also for students of identity, ethnicity, and diversity generally. In addition to framing the distinguishing features of Jewish culture and the ways it has been studied, and often misrepresented and maligned, Simon J. Bronner presents several case studies using ethnography, folkloristic interpretation, and rhetorical analysis. Bronner, building on many years of global cultural exploration, locates patterns, processes, frames, and themes of events and actions identified as Jewish to discern what makes them appear Jewish and why. Jewish Cultural Studiesis divided into three parts. Part 1 deals with the conceptualization of how Jews in complex, heterogenous societies identify themselves as a cultural group to non-Jews and vice versa—such as how the Jewish home is socially and materially constructed. Part 2 delves into ritualization as a strategic Jewish practice for perpetuating peoplehood and the values that it suggests—for example, the rising popularity of naming ceremonies for newborn girls, simhat bat or zeved habat, in the twenty-first century. Part 3 explores narration, including the global transformation of Jewish joking in online settings and the role of Jews in American political culture. Bronner reflects that a reason to separate Jewish cultural studies from the fields of Jewish studies and cultural studies is the distinctiveness of Jewish culture among other ethnic experiences. As a diasporic group with religious ties and varying local customs, Jews present difficulties of categorization. He encourages a multiperspectival approach that considers the Jewish double consciousness as being aware of both insider and outsider perspectives, participation in ancient tradition and recent modernization, and the great variety and stigmatization of Jewish experience and cultural expression. Students and scholars in Jewish studies, cultural studies, ethnic-religious studies, folklore, sociology, psychology, and ethnology are the intended audience for this book.
Download or read book Reading Jewish Women written by Iris Parush and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2004 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this extraordinary volume, Iris Parush opens up the hitherto unexamined world of literate Jewish women, their reading habits, and their role in the cultural modernization of Eastern European Jewish society in the nineteenth century. Parush makes a paradoxical claim: she argues that because Jewish women were marginalized and neglected by rabbinical authorities who regarded men as the bearers of religious learning, they were free to read secular literature in German, Yiddish, Polish, and Russian. As a result of their exposure to a wealth of literature, these reading women became significant conduits for Haskalah (Enlightenment) ideas and ideals within the Jewish community. This deceptively simple thesis dramatically challenges and revamps both scholarly and popular notions of Jewish life and learning in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. While scholars of European women's history have been transforming and complicating ideas about the historical roles of middle-class women for some time, Parush is among the first scholars to work exclusively in Jewish territory. The book will be a very welcome introduction to many facets of modern Jewish cultural historyÑparticularly the role of womenÑwhich have too long been ignored.
Download or read book Jews in the Realm of the Sultans written by Yaron Ben-Naeh and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2008 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish society in the Ottoman Empire has not been the subject of systematic research. The seventeenth century is the main object of this study, since it was a formative era. For Ottoman Jews, the 'Ottoman century' constituted an era of gradual acculturation to changing reality, parallel to the changing character of the Ottoman state. Continuous changes and developments shaped anew the character of this Jewry, the core of what would later become known as 'Sephardi Jewry'.Yaron Ben-Naeh draws from primary and secondary Hebrew, Ottoman, and European sources, the image of Jewish society in the Ottoman Empire. In the chapters he leads the reader from the overall urban framework to individual aspects. Beginning with the physical environment, he moves on to discuss their relationships with the majority society, followed by a description and analysis of the congregation, its organization and structure, and from there to the character of Ottoman Jewish society and its nuclear cell - the family. Special emphasis is placed throughout the work on the interaction with Muslim society and the resulting acculturation that affected all aspects and all levels of Jewish life in the Empire. In this, the author challenges the widespread view that sees this community as being stagnant and self-segregated, as well as the accepted concept of a traditional Jewish society under Islam.
Download or read book Synagogues in Lithuania N written by Aliza Cohen-Mushlin and published by VDA leidykla. This book was released on 2010 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Contested Holdings written by Felicity Bodenstein and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-02-14 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Going beyond strictly legal and property-oriented aspects of the restitution debate, restitution is considered as part of a larger set of processes of return that affect museums and collections, as well as notions of heritage and object status. Covering a range of case studies and a global geography, the authors aim to historicize and bring depth to contemporary debates in relation to both the return of material culture and human remains. Defined as contested holdings, differing museum collections ranging from fine arts to physical anthropology provide connections between the treatment and conceptualization of collections that generally occupy separate realms in the museum world.
Download or read book Living the Life of Jewish Meditation written by Rabbi Yoel Glick and published by Jewish Lights Publishing. This book was released on 2014-09-22 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meditation empowers us to transcend our material mind-set and touch the Infinite and Eternal. “True meditation transforms the way we see reality.... It touches the place inside us where a spark of the Eternal dwells. Meditation unites us with our true Self.” —from the Introduction The life of meditation is much more than the act of sitting for half an hour or forty-five minutes and looking inward. It is a whole way of life. Through meditation we learn to live in a heightened awareness and walk at all times in the presence of God. Rabbi Yoel Glick brings wisdom from personal experience and Eastern traditions to illuminate and vitalize familiar Jewish rituals, vocabulary and imagery. He provides specific guidelines and practical techniques grounded in Judaism for each stage of the life of meditation, outlining the inner processes we encounter and the questions we face: How does meditation help us connect with the Collective Jewish Soul?What happens in our mind, body and soul when we meditate? How do we resist the pull of a material mind-set and live in expanded consciousness? What does it feel like to reach union with our spiritual source? • How do we remain aware of God’s living presence in our everyday life?
Download or read book Eliezer Zusman of Brody written by Zvi Orgad and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-06-08 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book Eliezer-Zusman of Brody: The Early Modern Synagogue Painter and His World focuses on the work methods of the synagogue painter Eliezer-Zusman of Brody, as a case study of Jewish cultural and artistic migration from Eastern Europe to German lands.
Download or read book The Formation of a Modern Rabbi written by Samuel Joseph Kessler and published by SBL Press. This book was released on 2022-12-16 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intellectual biography that critically engages Adolf Jellinek’s scholarship and communal activities Adolf Jellinek (1821–1893), the Czech-born, German-educated, liberal chief rabbi of Vienna, was the most famous Jewish preacher in Central Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. As an innovative rhetorician, Jellinek helped mold and define the modern synagogue sermon into an instrument for expressing Jewish religious and ethical values for a new era. As a historian, he made groundbreaking contributions to the study of the Zohar and medieval Jewish mysticism. Jellinek was emblematic of rabbi-as-scholar-preacher during the earliest, formative years of communal synagogues as urban religious space. In a world that was rapidly losing the felt and remembered past of premodern Jewish society, the rabbi, with Jellinek as prime exemplar, took hold of the Sabbath sermon as an instrument to define and mold Judaism and Jewish values for a new world.