Download or read book Jews and Words written by Amos Oz and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-20 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIV Why are words so important to so many Jews? Novelist Amos Oz and historian Fania Oz-Salzberger roam the gamut of Jewish history to explain the integral relationship of Jews and words. Through a blend of storytelling and scholarship, conversation and argument, father and daughter tell the tales behind Judaism’s most enduring names, adages, disputes, texts, and quips. These words, they argue, compose the chain connecting Abraham with the Jews of every subsequent generation. Framing the discussion within such topics as continuity, women, timelessness, and individualism, Oz and Oz-Salzberger deftly engage Jewish personalities across the ages, from the unnamed, possibly female author of the Song of Songs through obscure Talmudists to contemporary writers. They suggest that Jewish continuity, even Jewish uniqueness, depends not on central places, monuments, heroic personalities, or rituals but rather on written words and an ongoing debate between the generations. Full of learning, lyricism, and humor, Jews and Words offers an extraordinary tour of the words at the heart of Jewish culture and extends a hand to the reader, any reader, to join the conversation. /div

Download or read book The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization Volume 1 written by Jeffrey H. Tigay and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Posen Library's groundbreaking anthology series—called "a feast of Jewish culture, in ten volumes" by The Chronicle of Higher Education—offers with Volume 1 an exploration of the culture of ancient Israel, including its literature, legal documents, and visual arts "Readers seeking primary texts, documents, images, and artifacts constituting Jewish culture and civilization will not be disappointed. More important, they might even be inspired. . . . This set will serve to improve teaching and research in Jewish studies at institutions of higher learning and, at the same time, promote, maintain, and improve understanding of the Jewish population and Judaism in general."—Booklist, Starred Review The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 1, covers the earliest period of Jewish civilization, from the second millennium BCE through 332 BCE. Organized by genre, this book presents a collection of some of the earliest products of Jewish culture, including extensive selections from the Tanakh and the Hebrew Bible; extrabiblical inscriptions and documents by and about Israelites and Jews, found by archaeologists in the lands of Israel, Egypt, and Mesopotamia; and images representing the visual culture of ancient Israel. Combining genres that have never been presented together in a single publication, Volume 1 illustrates ancient Israel’s cultural innovations and commonalities with neighboring societies.

Download or read book The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization Volume 9 written by Samuel D. Kassow and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 1088 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Posen Library’s groundbreaking anthology series—called “a feast of Jewish culture, in ten volumes” by the Chronicle of Higher Education—explores in Volume 9 global Jewish responses to the years 1939 to 1973, a time of unprecedented destruction, dislocation, agency, and creativity “An extensive look at Jewish civilization and culture from the eve of World War II to the Yom Kippur War . . . It’s a weighty collection, to be sure, but one that’s consistently engaging . . . An edifying and diverse survey of 20th-century Jewish life.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review “Readers seeking primary texts, documents, images, and artifacts constituting Jewish culture and civilization will not be disappointed. More important, they might even be inspired. . . . This set will serve to improve teaching and research in Jewish studies at institutions of higher learning and, at the same time, promote, maintain, and improve understanding of the Jewish population and Judaism in general.”—Booklist, starred review The ninth volume of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization covers the years 1939 to 1973, a period that editors Kassow and Roskies call “one of the most tragic and dramatic in Jewish history.” Organized geographically and then by genre, this book details Jewish cultural and intellectual resources throughout this era, particularly in political thought, literature, the visual and performing arts, and religion. This volume explores worldwide Jewish perceptions of momentous events that transpired in the mid‑twentieth century and how Jews redefined themselves across regions throughout an era rife with tragedy, displacement, and dispersion. The breadth and depth of this work goes beyond any comparable collection, with detailed insights and sharp focus to accompany its breathtaking scope. A major, ten‑volume anthology project more than a decade in the making, the Posen Library is an ideal reference tool for scholars, teachers, and students at all levels.

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 The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization Volume 5 written by Posen Library of Jewish culture and civilization (Lucerne, Switzerland) and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-21 with total page 1392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fifth volume of the Posen Library demonstrates through a rich array of texts and images the extraordinary diversity of Jewish life during the early modern period "A rich and varied gateway into the primary source material of early modern Jewish history that is very strong on geographical diversity. A magnificent achievement."--Adam Sutcliffe, King's College London The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 5, covering the early modern period (1500-1750), presents a variety of Jewish texts to demonstrate the diversity of Jewish culture and life. These texts originate from Eastern and Western Europe, the Americas, the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, Kurdistan, Persia, Yemen, India--in short, a worldwide diaspora. They embrace historical writing and religious scholarship, liturgical expression and economic records, ethics and personal devotion, correspondence and communal regulations, art and music, architecture and poetry. The simultaneous centrifugal and centripetal character of Jewish communities during this era illustrates the distinctiveness of the early modern period in Jewish history and informs developments in world history at large. Including texts written by women, a robust collection of images, and extensive material not previously accessible to English-language readers, this volume is rich, deep, and enlightening.

Download or read book The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture written by Robert Brody and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Geonic period from about the late sixth to mid-eleventh centuries is of crucial importance in the history of Judaism. The Geonim, for whom this era is named, were the heads of the ancient talmudic academies of Babylonia. They gained ascendancy over the older Palestinian center of Judaism and were recognized as the leading religious and spiritual authorities by most of the world's Jewish population. The Geonim and their circles enshrined the Babylonian Talmud as the central canonical work of rabbinic literature and the leading guide to religious practice, and it was a predominantly Babylonian version of Judaism that was transplanted to newer centers of Judaism in North Africa and Europe. Robert Brody's book -- the first survey in English of the Geonic period in almost a century -focuses on the cultural milieu of the Geonim and on their intellectual and literary creativity. Brody describes the cultural spheres in which the Geonim were active and the historical and cultural settings within which they functioned. He emphasizes the challenges presented by other Jewish institutions and individuals, ranging from those within the Babylonian Jewish setting -- specially the political leadership represented by the Exilarch -- to the competing Palestinian Jewish center and to sectarian movements and freethinkers who rejected rabbinic authority altogether. He also describes the variety of ways in which the development of Geonic tradition was affected by the surrounding non-Jewish cultures, both Muslim and Christian. "This book is a fresh and thorough examination of the period in question, a masterpiece of scholarship and erudition". -- Neil Danzig, Jewish Theological Seminary

Download or read book Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto written by David G. Roskies and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The powerful writings and art of Jews living in the Warsaw Ghetto Hidden in metal containers and buried underground during World War II, these works from the Warsaw Ghetto record the Holocaust from the perspective of its first interpreters, the victims themselves. Gathered clandestinely by an underground ghetto collective called Oyneg Shabes, the collection of reportage, diaries, prose, artwork, poems, jokes, and sermons captures the heroism, tragedy, humor, and social dynamics of the ghetto. Miraculously surviving the devastation of war, this extraordinary archive encompasses a vast range of voices—young and old, men and women, the pious and the secular, optimists and pessimists—and chronicles different perspectives on the topics of the day while also preserving rapidly endangered cultural traditions. Described by David G. Roskies as “a civilization responding to its own destruction,” these texts tell the story of the Warsaw Ghetto in real time, against time, and for all time.

Download or read book Between Friends written by Amos Oz and published by HMH. This book was released on 2013-09-24 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Jewish Book Award: A “gorgeous, rueful collection of eight linked stories” capturing the collective dreams of Israel in the 1950s (Chicago Tribune). These eight interconnected stories, set in the fictitious Kibbutz Yekhat, draw masterful profiles of idealistic men and women enduring personal hardships in the shadow of one of the greatest collective dreams of the twentieth century. A devoted father who fails to challenge his daughter’s lover, an old friend, a man his own age; an elderly gardener who carries on his shoulders the sorrows of the world; a woman writing perversely poignant letters to her husband’s mistress. Each of these stories is a luminous human and literary study; together they offer an eloquent portrait of an idea, and of a charged and fascinating epoch. Award-winning writer Amos Oz, who spent three decades living on a kibbutz, is at home and at his best in this “lucid and heartbreaking” award-winning collection (The Guardian). “Oz lifts the veil on kibbutz existence without palaver. His pinpoint descriptions are pared to perfection . . . His people twitch with life.” —The Scotsman “A collection of stories . . . that boasts the sense, scope and unity of a novel . . . Breathtaking.” —Irish Examiner “A complex and melancholic vision of people struggling to transcend their individuality for the sake of mundanely idealist goals.” —The Times Literary Supplement

Download or read book A Promise at Sobib r written by Philip “Fiszel” Bialowitz and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2010-11-30 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Promise at Sobibór is the story of Fiszel Bialowitz, a teenaged Polish Jew who escaped the Nazi gas chambers. Between April 1942 and October 1943, about 250,000 Jews from European countries and the Soviet Union were sent to the Nazi death camp at Sobibór in occupied Poland. Sobibór was not a transit camp or work camp: its sole purpose was efficient mass murder. On October 14, 1943, approximately half of the 650 or so prisoners still alive at Sobibór undertook a daring and precisely planned revolt, killing SS officers and fleeing through minefields and machine-gun fire into the surrounding forests, farms, and towns. Only about forty-two of them, including Fiszel, are known to have survived to the end of the war. Philip (Fiszel) Bialowitz, now an American citizen, tells his eyewitness story here in the real-time perspective of his own boyhood, from his childhood before the war and his internment in the brutal Izbica ghetto to his harrowing six months at Sobibór—including his involvement in the revolt and desperate mass escape—and his rescue by courageous Polish farmers. He also recounts the challenges of life following the war as a teenaged displaced person, and his eventual efforts as a witness to the truth of the Holocaust. In 1943 the heroic leaders of the revolt at Sobibór, Sasha Perchersky and Leon Feldhendler, implored fellow prisoners to promise that anyone who survived would tell the story of Sobibór: not just of the horrific atrocities committed there, but of the courage and humanity of those who fought back. Bialowitz has kept that promise. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association for School Libraries Best Books for High Schools, selected by the American Association for School Libraries Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the Public Library Association

Download or read book Prince of the Press written by Joshua Teplitsky and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Oppenheim (1664-1736), chief rabbi of Prague in the early eighteenth century, built an unparalleled collection of Jewish books and manuscripts, all of which have survived and are housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. His remarkable collection testifies to the myriad connections Jews maintained with each other across political borders, and the contacts between Christians and Jews that books facilitated. From contact with the great courts of European nobility to the poor of Jerusalem, his family ties brought him into networks of power, prestige, and opportunity that extended across Europe and the Mediterranean basin. Containing works of law and literature alongside prayer and poetry, his library served rabbinic scholars and communal leaders, introduced old books to new readers, and functioned as a unique source of personal authority that gained him fame throughout Jewish society and beyond. The story of his life and library brings together culture, commerce, and politics, all filtered through this extraordinary collection. Based on the careful reconstruction of an archive that is still visited by scholars today, Joshua Teplitsky's book offers a window into the social life of Jewish books in early modern Europe.--Publisher's website.

Download or read book In the Land of Israel written by Amos Oz and published by HMH. This book was released on 1993-10-31 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A snapshot of Israel and the West Bank in the 1980s, through the voices of its inhabitants, from the National Jewish Book Award–winning author of Judas. Notebook in hand, renowned author and onetime kibbutznik Amos Oz traveled throughout his homeland to talk with people—workers, soldiers, religious zealots, aging pioneers, desperate Arabs, visionaries—asking them questions about Israel’s past, present, and future. Observant or secular, rich or poor, native-born or new immigrant, they shared their points of view, memories, hopes, and fears, and Oz recorded them. What emerges is a distinctive portrait of a changing nation and a complex society, supplemented by Oz’s own observations and reflections, that reflects an insider’s view of a country still forming its own identity. In the Land of Israel is “an exemplary instance of a writer using his craft to come to grips with what is happening politically and to illuminate certain aspects of Israeli society that have generally been concealed by polemical formulas” (The New York Times).

Download or read book A Social History of Hebrew written by William M. Schniedewind and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-28 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than simply a method of communication shared by a common people, the Hebrew language was always an integral part of the Jewish cultural system and, as such, tightly interwoven into the lives of the prophets, poets, scribes, and priests who used it. In this unique social history, William Schniedewind examines classical Hebrew from its origins in the second millennium BCE until the Rabbinic period, when the principles of Judaism as we know it today were formulated, to view the story of the Israelites through the lens of their language. Considering classical Hebrew from the standpoint of a writing system as opposed to vernacular speech, Schniedewind demonstrates how the Israelites’ long history of migration, war, exile, and other momentous events is reflected in Hebrew’s linguistic evolution. An excellent addition to the fields of biblical and Middle Eastern studies, this fascinating work brings linguistics and social history together for the first time to explore an ancient culture.

Download or read book GI Jews written by Deborah Dash Moore and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004-11-11 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether they came from Sioux Falls or the Bronx, over half a million Jews entered the U.S. armed forces during the Second World War. Uprooted from their working- and middle-class neighborhoods, they joined every branch of the military and saw action on all fronts. Deborah Dash Moore offers an unprecedented view of the struggles these GI Jews faced, having to battle not only the enemy but also the prejudices of their fellow soldiers. Through memoirs, oral histories, and letters, Moore charts the lives of fifteen young Jewish men as they faced military service and tried to make sense of its demands. From confronting pork chops to enduring front-line combat, from the temporary solace of Jewish worship to harrowing encounters with death camp survivors, we come to understand how these soldiers wrestled with what it meant to be an American and a Jew. Moore shows how military service in World War II transformed this generation of Jews, reshaping Jewish life in America and abroad. These men challenged perceptions of Jews as simply victims of the war, and encouraged Jews throughout the diaspora to fight for what was right. At the same time, service strengthened Jews' identification with American democratic ideals, even as it confirmed the importance of their Jewish identity. GI Jews is a powerful, intimate portrayal of the costs of a conflict that was at once physical, emotional, and spiritual, as well as its profound consequences for these hitherto overlooked members of the "greatest generation."

Download or read book How to Cure a Fanatic written by Amos Oz and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-19 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proposes that the murderous violence that has riven our society is driven as much by confusion as by inescapable hatred. Challenging the reductionist division of people by race, religion, and class, Sen presents a vision of a world that can be made to move toward peace as firmly as it has spiraled in recent years toward brutality and war. - from publisher information.

Download or read book The Light of the Eyes written by Azariah ben Moses dei Rossi and published by Yale Judaica (Hardcover). This book was released on 2001 with total page 802 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The book contains innovative studies on a wide range of subjects, including chronology, the origins of the Septuagint, the antiquity of the Hebrew language, and the nature of biblical poetry. De' Rossi lends unprecedented attention to the evidence of Josephus while his critique of Philo of Alexandria was the first attempt to assess the Jewish status of this Hellenistic philosopher.

Download or read book History and Prophecy written by Brian Peckham and published by Anchor Bible. This book was released on 1993 with total page 904 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The controversial premise of History and Prophecy is that the Bible was created from the very outset as a work of literature; and not simply handed down in the form of oral stories from one generation to another." "In this explosive survey of the whole Hebrew Bible, author Brian Peckham cuts against the grain of scholarly opinion by taking seriously; the fact that the Bible is a work of literature - modeled on such ancient authors as Homer and Hesiod - and was undoubtedly the product of a literate society: the creation of people who knew how to read and write for an audience that read, listened, and understood. Peckham provides the evidence that the biblical text at first was written; that from the beginning it was read and provoked written response; that it was quoted and alluded to in later writings; that what seemed right or evident to one writer was disputed, corrected, and reinterpreted by another, that nothing of significance in the process was erased or omitted but was preserved and inscribed with the rest for all time." "In this provocative book, the biblical text is read as literature - from start to finish, as continuous, meaningful, and complete, with distinctive literary forms and genres. It was written to be read and performed. Its authors were poets, singers, orators, lawyers, priests, and scholars whose audiences were those gathered in the squares and gates of Jerusalem, or who met at wells and springs scattered throughout Israel. It comprised occasional drama, tragedy and comedy, ballads and speeches, debates and disputations traditional stories: in short, the stuff of books and libraries and literary appreciation." "Finally, History and Prophecy reconstructs the history of ancient Israel as it was understood and interpreted by the writers of the Bible. It traces the development of images and ideas about Israel's origin, makeup, and role in world affairs from their earliest literary expression through the most exciting and difficult centuries in the nation's history."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Download or read book Art Mimesis and the Avant Garde written by Andrew Benjamin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-07-26 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1991. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.