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Jewish Mysticism: From Ancient Times through Today
by Marvin A. SweeneyQuestions of how the divine presence is understood and interacts within the world have been around since the time of the biblical prophets. The Jewish mystical tradition conceives God as active, just, powerful, and present while allowing for divine limitation so as to understand the relationship between G-d and the Jewish people in their history. Jewish Mysticism surveys Jewish visionary and mystical experience from biblical and ancient Near Eastern times through the modern period and the emergence of modern Hasidism. Marvin Sweeney provides a comprehensive treatment of one of the most dynamic fields of Jewish studies in the twenty-first century, providing an accessible overview of texts and interpretative issues. Sweeney begins with the biblical period, which most treatments of Jewish mysticism avoid, and includes chapters on the ancient Near East, the Pentateuch, the Former Prophets and Psalms, the Latter Prophets, Jewish Apocalyptic, the Heikhalot Literature, the Sefer Yetzirah and early Kabbalistic Literature, the Zohar, Lurianic Kabbalah and the Shabbetean Movement, and the Hasidic Movement. Placing Jewish apocalyptic literature into the larger development of ancient Jewish visionary and mystical experience, Sweeney fills gaps left by the important but outdated work of others in the field. Ideal for the scholar, student, or general reader, Jewish Mysticism provides readers with a fresh understanding of the particular challenges, problems, needs, and perspectives of Judaism throughout its history.
Jewish Mysticism and Kabbalah: New Insights and Scholarship (Jewish Studies in the 21st Century #2)
by Frederick E GreenspahnOver the past generation, scholars have devoted increasing attention to the diverse forms that Jewish mysticism has taken both in the past and today: what was once called “nonsense” by Jewish scholars has generated important research and attention both within the academy and beyond, as demonstrated by the popular fascination with figures such as Madonna and Demi Moore and the growing interest in spirituality. In Jewish Mysticism and Kabbalah, leading experts introduce the history of this scholarship as well as the most recent insights and debates that currently animate the field in a way that is accessible to a broad audience. From mystical outpourings in ancient Palestine to the Kabbalah Centre, and from attitudes towards gender to mystical contributions to Jewish messianic movements, this volume explores the various expressions of Jewish mysticism from antiquity to the present day in an engaging style appropriate for students and non-specialists alike.
Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of a City and a People
by Jeffrey S. Gurock Deborah Dash Moore Annie Polland Daniel Soyer Diana L. Linden Howard B. RockThe definitive history of Jews in New York and how they transformed the city Based on the acclaimed multi-volume series, City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, Jewish New York reveals the multifaceted world of one of the city’s most important ethnic and religious groups. Spanning three centuries, Jewish New York traces the earliest arrival of Jews in New Amsterdam to the recent immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union. Jewish immigrants transformed New York. They built its clothing industry and constructed huge swaths of apartment buildings. New York Jews helped to make the city the center of the nation’s publishing industry and shaped popular culture in music, theater, and the arts. With a strong sense of social justice, a dedication to civil rights and civil liberties, and a belief in the duty of government to provide social welfare for all its citizens, New York Jews influenced the city, state, and nation with a new wave of social activism. In turn, New York transformed Judaism and stimulated religious pluralism, Jewish denominationalism, and contemporary feminism. The city’s neighborhoods hosted unbelievably diverse types of Jews, from Communists to Hasidim. Jewish New York not only describes Jews’ many positive influences on New York, but also exposes the group’s struggles with poverty and anti-Semitism. These injustices reinforced an exemplary commitment to remaking New York into a model multiethnic, multiracial, and multireligious world city.
Jewish Odesa: Negotiating Identities and Traditions in Contemporary Ukraine (The Modern Jewish Experience)
by Marina Sapritsky-NahumJewish Odesa: Negotiating Identities and Traditions in Contemporary Ukraine explores the rich Jewish history in Ukraine's port city of Odesa. Long considered both a uniquely cosmopolitan and Jewish place, Odesa's Jewish character has shifted since the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine gained its independence.Drawing on extensive field research, Marina Sapritsky-Nahum examines how the role of Russian language and culture, memories of the Soviet political project, and Odesan's place in a Ukrainian national project have all been questioned in recent years.Jewish Odesa reveals how a city once famous for its progressive Jewish traditions has become dominated by Orthodox Judaism and framed by the agendas of international Jewish organizations embedded in a religiosity that is foreign to the city. Russia's war in Ukraine has forced Jewish identities with ties to Odesa to change still further.
The Jewish Oil Magnates of Galicia: Part One: The Jewish Oil Magnates: A History, 1853-1945 by Valerie Schatzker; Part Two: The Jewish Oil Magnates, A Novel by Julien Hirszhaut, Translated by Miriam Beckerman, Edited by Valerie Schatzker
by Miriam Beckerman Julien Hirszhaut Anthony Polonsky Valerie SchatzkerThe near-annihilation of Europe's Jews in the Second World War destroyed not only much of their history, but also knowledge of the contributions they made to the regions in which they lived. In The Jewish Oil Magnates of Galicia, Valerie Schatzker rescues the almost-forgotten story of the Jews who became the "wildcatters" and oil barons in one of the world's first petroleum industries. Combining a history of Galicia's petroleum industry with an annotated English translation of Julien Hirszhaut's Yiddish novel Di yiddishe naftmagnatn (The Jewish Oil Magnates), Schatzker traces the near-century-long boom and bust cycle that took place in the Austro-Hungarian province - from the perilous, back-breaking work of digging for oil by hand, to the introduction of the Canadian drill that increased production. Galician Jews worked in the industry from its beginning to its final days under German occupation. They were pioneers in exploration, refining, and marketing, and in the first part of the twentieth century were prominent among its technical, scientific, and managerial leaders. After the First World War, as borders shifted and minorities clashed, oil resources declined. During the Second World War, Nazi occupiers, using Jewish slave labourers, squeezed out the last barrels for their war effort. Schatzker's study and Hirszhaut's novel illuminate and inform each other: her monograph provides the historical context for the novel and his novel provides colour and detail, personalizing the history. Together, they offer a valuable glimpse into Jewish life in a vanished era.
Jewish Options: Pluralistic Identities in 21st Century America (Studies of Jews in Society #8)
by Arnold Dashefsky Ira M. Sheskin J.Alan WinterThis book offers an examination of an expanding set of options for being Jewish in contemporary American society. It examines the evolution of Jewish identity across five epochs of Jewish civilization as well as the transformation of the American Jewish experience across four centuries. In addition, an institutional history and a geographic, demographic, and religious profile of American Jews are presented, including an outline of contemporary Jewish options to express Jewish identity in twenty-first century America. Readers will gain an understanding of how these options developed via the provision of a socio-historical and a social scientific analysis of each option in one integrated volume. The book also discusses contemporary challenges to the continuity of American Jewish community and identity including the issues of education, interfaith marriage, and philanthropy.
The Jewish People: Their History and Their Religion
by David Goldberg John RaynerThe first part of this illustrated volume offers a survey of Jewish history and literature. The second part presents what the preface describes as "a thematic analysis of the teachings and practice of Judaism".
The Jewish People and the Holy Land: A Zondervan Digital Short
by Henry H. HalleyDerived from Halley’s Bible Handbook, a world-renowned, accessible guide to the Bible now in its 25th edition, this digital short sketches the history of the Jewish people in the Holy Land from the time of Jesus until the present day. Useful for students of the Bible and church history, The Jewish People and the Holy Land will also fascinate readers wanting to better understand the historic roots of the modern state of Israel.
Jewish People, Yiddish Nation
by Kalman WeiserNoah Prylucki (1882-1941), a leading Jewish cultural and political figure in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe, was a proponent of Yiddishism, a movement that promoted secular Yiddish culture as the basis for Jewish collective identity in the twentieth century. Prylucki's dramatic path - from russified Zionist raised in a Ukrainian shtetl, to Diaspora nationalist parliamentarian in metropolitan Warsaw, to professor of Yiddish in Soviet Lithuania - uniquely reflects the dilemmas and competing options facing the Jews of this era as life in Eastern Europe underwent radical transformation.Using hitherto unexplored archival sources, memoirs, interviews, and materials from the vibrant interwar Jewish and Polish presses, Kalman Weiser investigates the rise and fall of Yiddishism and of Prylucki's political party, the Folkists, in the post-World War One era. Jewish People, Yiddish Nation reveals the life of a remarkable individual and the fortunes of a major cultural movement that has long been obscured.
Jewish Peoplehood
by Noam PiankoAlthough fewer American Jews today describe themselves as religious, they overwhelmingly report a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people. Indeed, Jewish peoplehood has eclipsed religion--as well as ethnicity and nationality--as the essence of what binds Jews around the globe to one another. In Jewish Peoplehood, Noam Pianko highlights the current significance and future relevance of "peoplehood" by tracing the rise, transformation, and return of this novel term. The book tells the surprising story of peoplehood. Though it evokes a sense of timelessness, the term actually emerged in the United States in the 1930s, where it was introduced by American Jewish leaders, most notably Rabbi Stephen Wise and Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, with close ties to the Zionist movement. It engendered a sense of unity that transcended religious differences, cultural practices, geographic distance, economic disparity, and political divides, fostering solidarity with other Jews facing common existential threats, including the Holocaust, and establishing a closer connection to the Jewish homeland. But today, Pianko points out, as globalization erodes the dominance of nationalism in shaping collective identity, Jewish peoplehood risks becoming an outdated paradigm. He explains why popular models of peoplehood fail to address emerging conceptions of ethnicity, nationalism, and race, and he concludes with a much-needed roadmap for a radical reconfiguration of Jewish collectivity in an increasingly global era. Innovative and provocative, Jewish Peoplehood provides fascinating insight into a term that assumes an increasingly important position at the heart of American Jewish and Israeli life.
Jewish Philadelphia: A Guide to Its Sights & Stories
by Linda NesviskyExperience Philadelphia's Jewish history with a nine-site walking tour through the city's oldest streets. Discover the treasures of the Rosenbach Museum and Library and stories of the immigrant experience at the new National Museum of American Jewish History. Find out how the Liberty Bell became inscribed with a passage from the Torah and where to find some of the best Reubens in the city. Encouraged by Penn's charter of religious tolerance, Jewish people have flocked to Philadelphia since before the Revolutionary War, and in turn they have made remarkable contributions to the City of Brotherly Love. With a walking tour and a series of intriguing vignettes, tour guide Linda Nesvisky leads readers down colonial streets to discover the surprising history of the Jewish community in Philadelphia into the twenty-first century.
Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom and Revenge
by Edward KritzlerA history of Sephardic Jews in the New World, involving intrigue, horror, defeat, survival, and victory over the Spanish Inquisition.At the end of the fifteenth century, the Spanish Inquisition forced many Jews to flee the country. The most adventurous among them took to the high seas as freewheeling outlaws. In ships bearing names such as the Prophet Samuel, Queen Esther, and Shield of Abraham, they attacked and plundered the Spanish fleet while forming alliances with other European powers to ensure the safety of Jews living in hiding.Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean is the entertaining saga of a hidden chapter in Jewish history and of the cruelty, terror, and greed that flourished during the Age of Discovery. Readers will meet such daring figures as “the Great Jewish Pirate” Sinan, Barbarossa’s second-in-command; the pirate rabbi Samuel Palache, who founded Holland’s Jewish community; Abraham Cohen Henriques, an arms dealer who used his cunning and economic muscle to find safe havens for other Jews; and his pirate brother Moses, who is credited with the capture of the Spanish silver fleet in 1628—the largest heist in pirate history.Filled with high-sea adventures—including encounters with Captain Morgan and other legendary pirates—and detailed portraits of cities stacked high with plunder, such as Port Royal, Jamaica, Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean captures a gritty and glorious era of history from an unusual and eye-opening perspective.Praise for Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean“[Kritzler] covers an impressive interdisciplinary range-combining politics, economics and religion-that should satisfy fans of religious history and swashbuckling true stories.” —Publishers Weekly“Kritzler captures the spirit of that violent, lawless epoch and combines it with an interesting ethnic perspective.” —Booklist“Kritzler’s intellectual odyssey . . . shares various sagas of individual Jews who took to the sea as pirates, or masterminded the pirate operations from land. . . . The material is so rich that the book is never boring.” —San Francisco Chronicle“Surprising adventures on the high seas with some rogues of the Diaspora.” —Kirkus Reviews
Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom--and Revenge
by Edward KritzlerIn this lively debut work of history, Edward Kritzler tells the tale of an unlikely group of swashbuckling Jews who ransacked the high seas in the aftermath of the Spanish Inquisition. At the end of the fifteenth century, many Jews had to flee Spain and Portugal. The most adventurous among them took to the seas as freewheeling outlaws. In ships bearing names such as the Prophet Samuel, Queen Esther, and Shield of Abraham, they attacked and plundered the Spanish fleet while forming alliances with other European powers to ensure the safety of Jews living in hiding. Filled with high-sea adventures–including encounters with Captain Morgan and other legendary pirates–Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean reveals a hidden chapter in Jewish history as well as the cruelty, terror, and greed that flourished during the Age of Discovery.
Jewish Pittsburgh (Images of America)
by Barbara BurstinBy the mid-19th century, Jews from German lands began settling in Pittsburgh, later to be followed by Jews from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires and Romania. They founded businesses and organizations such as Giant Eagle, Kaufmann's Department Store, Montefiore Hospital, the Pittsburgh Playhouse, the Civic Light Opera, and the Pittsburgh Pirates. Sophie Masloff became the first woman and the first Jew to serve as mayor, and civic reformer and lawyer A. Leo Weil, philanthropist Leon Falk Jr., and social justice crusader Florence Reizenstein all had schools named after them. From Allegheny City and "the Hill" to Squirrel Hill and the East End, the Jewish population preserved its distinct core community and contributed to its adopted city in multiple ways. Today, it numbers more than 40,000, and their story is one of grit, determination, risk taking, hard knocks, and no small measure of success.
Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism In Unquiet Places (New Anthropologies of Europe)
by Erica T. LehrerSince the end of Communism, Jews from around the world have visited Poland to tour Holocaust-related sites. A few venture further, seeking to learn about their own Polish roots and connect with contemporary Poles. For their part, a growing number of Poles are fascinated by all things Jewish. Erica T. Lehrer explores the intersection of Polish and Jewish memory projects in the historically Jewish neighborhood of Kazimierz in Krakow. Her own journey becomes part of the story as she demonstrates that Jews and Poles use spaces, institutions, interpersonal exchanges, and cultural representations to make sense of their historical inheritances.
Jewish Poland—Legends of Origin: Ethnopoetics and Legendary Chronicles (Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology)
by Haya Bar-ItzhakThe first appearance of Jews in Poland and their adventures during their early years of settlement in the country are concealed in undocumented shadows of history. What survived are legends of origin that early chroniclers, historians, writers, and folklore scholars transcribed, thus contributing to their preservation. According to the legendary chronicles Jews resided in Poland for a millennium and developed a vibrant community. <P><P> Haya Bar-Itzhak examines the legends of origin of the Jews of Poland and discloses how the community creates its own chronicle, how it structures and consolidates its identity through stories about its founding, and how this identity varies from age to age. Bar-Itzhak also examines what happened to these legends after the extermination of Polish Jewry during the Holocaust, when the human space they describe no longer exists except in memory. For the Polish Jews after the Holocaust, the legends of origin undergo a fascinating transformation into legends of destruction. <P><P> Jewish Poland-Legends of Origin brings to light the more obscure legends of origin as well as those already well known. This book will be of interest to scholars in folklore studies as well as to scholars of Judaic history and culture.
The Jewish Political Tradition, Volume 1: Authority
by Michael Walzer Yair Lorberbaum Menachem Lorberbaum Noam Zohar Noam J. ZoharThis book launches a landmark four-volume collaborative work exploring the political thought of the Jewish people from biblical times to the present. The texts and commentaries in Volume I address the basic question of who ought to rule the community. The contributors--eminent philosophers, lawyers, political theorists, and other scholars working in different fields of Jewish studies--discuss the authority of God, the claims of kings, priests, prophets, rabbis, lay leaders, and gentile rulers during the years of the exile, and issues of authority in the modern state of Israel.
The Jewish Presence in Latin America (Routledge Library Editions: Jewish History and Identity)
by Judith Laikin Elkin Gilbert MerkxOriginally published in 1987, this collection of essays is a major contribution toward developing a realistic picture of the Latin American Jewish communities in the late 20th Century. The book will be of interest to students of comparative studies, Jewish studies and Latin American studies and responds to the need to learn more about the Jewish communities of Latin America, both as a fragment of the Jewish diaspora and as an element in the economic and social life of the continent.
The Jewish Press and the Holocaust, 1939–1945
by Yosef GornyThis book represents comprehensive research into the world's Jewish press during the Second World War and explores its stance in the face of annihilation of the Jewish people by the Nazi regime in Europe. The research is based on the major Jewish newspapers that were published in four countries - Palestine, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union - and in three languages - Hebrew, Yiddish and English. The Jewish press frequently described the situation of the Jewish people in occupied countries. It urged the Jewish leaders and institutions to act in rescue of their brethren. It protested vigorously against the refusal of the democratic leadership to recognize that the Jewish plight was unique because of the Nazi intention to annihilate Jews as a people. Yosef Gorny argues that the Jewish press was the persistent open national voice fighting on behalf of the Jewish people suffering and perishing under Nazi occupation.
Jewish Primitivism (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture)
by Samuel J. SpinnerAround the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to explore the urgent questions surrounding their own identity and status in Europe as insiders and outsiders. Jewish primitivism found expression in a variety of forms in Yiddish, Hebrew, and German literature, photography, and graphic art, including in the work of figures such as Franz Kafka, Y.L. Peretz, S. An-sky, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Moï Ver. In Jewish Primitivism, Samuel J. Spinner argues that these and other Jewish modernists developed a distinct primitivist aesthetic that, by locating the savage present within Europe, challenged the idea of the threatening savage other from outside Europe on which much primitivism relied: in Jewish primitivism, the savage is already there. This book offers a new assessment of modern Jewish art and literature and shows how Jewish primitivism troubles the boundary between observer and observed, cultured and "primitive," colonizer and colonized.
Jewish Property After 1945: Cultures and Economies of Ownership, Loss, Recovery, and Transfer
by Jacob Ari LabendzQuestions arose after 1945, and have persisted, about the ownership of properties which had belonged to Jewish communities before the Second World War, to Holocaust victims and survivors, and to Jewish expellees from the Middle East and North Africa. Studies of these properties have often focused on their symbolic values, their places in cultures of memory and identity construction, and measures of justice achieved or denied.This collection explores contesting conceptions of ownership and property claims advanced in the post-war years. The authors focus considerably upon how conflicts over these properties both shaped and reflected shifting and competing ideas about Jewish belonging. They show their outcomes to have had considerable consequences for the lived experiences of both Jews and non-Jews around the world. This is because the properties in questions always maintained their worth as material assets, just as they could also impart financial liabilities and other responsibilities to their stewards, regardless of the morality of their title. The unique decision to include studies of European, Middle Eastern, and North African communities into one volume represents an attempt to achieve a more globally sensitive language for thinking about these histories, especially at their points of contact and mutual-reference. This book was originally published as a special issue of Jewish Culture and History.
Jewish Questions: Responsa on Sephardic Life in the Early Modern Period
by Matt GoldishIn Jewish Questions, Matt Goldish introduces English readers to the history and culture of the Sephardic dispersion through an exploration of forty-three responsa--questions about Jewish law that Jews asked leading rabbis, and the rabbis' responses. The questions along with their rabbinical decisions examine all aspects of Jewish life, including business, family, religious issues, and relations between Jews and non-Jews. Taken together, the responsa constitute an extremely rich source of information about the everyday lives of Sephardic Jews. The book looks at questions asked between 1492--when the Jews were expelled from Spain--and 1750. Originating from all over the Sephardic world, the responsa discuss such diverse topics as the rules of conduct for Ottoman Jewish sea traders, the trials of an ex-husband accused of a robbery, and the rights of a sexually abused wife. Goldish provides a sizeable introduction to the history of the Sephardic diaspora and the nature of responsa literature, as well as a bibliography, historical background for each question, and short biographies of the rabbis involved. Including cases from well-known communities such as Venice, Istanbul, and Saloniki, and lesser-known Jewish enclaves such as Kastoria, Ragusa, and Nablus, Jewish Questions provides a sense of how Sephardic communities were organized, how Jews related to their neighbors, what problems threatened them and their families, and how they understood their relationship to God and the Jewish people.
Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement (Goldstein-Goren American Jewish History #3)
by Joyce AntlerFinalist, 2019 PROSE Award in Biography, given by the Association of American PublishersFifty years after the start of the women’s liberation movement, a book that at last illuminates the profound impact Jewishness and second-wave feminism had on each otherJewish women were undeniably instrumental in shaping the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Yet historians and participants themselves have overlooked their contributions as Jews. This has left many vital questions unasked and unanswered—until now. Delving into archival sources and conducting extensive interviews with these fierce pioneers, Joyce Antler has at last broken the silence about the confluence of feminism and Jewish identity.Antler’s exhilarating new book features dozens of compelling biographical narratives that reveal the struggles and achievements of Jewish radical feminists in Chicago, New York and Boston, as well as those who participated in the later, self-consciously identified Jewish feminist movement that fought gender inequities in Jewish religious and secular life. Disproportionately represented in the movement, Jewish women’s liberationists helped to provide theories and models for radical action that were used throughout the United States and abroad. Their articles and books became classics of the movement and led to new initiatives in academia, politics, and grassroots organizing. Other Jewish-identified feminists brought the women’s movement to the Jewish mainstream and Jewish feminism to the Left. For many of these women, feminism in fact served as a “portal” into Judaism.Recovering this deeply hidden history, Jewish Radical Feminism places Jewish women’s activism at the center of feminist and Jewish narratives. The stories of over forty women’s liberationists and identified Jewish feminists—from Shulamith Firestone and Susan Brownmiller to Rabbis Laura Geller and Rebecca Alpert—illustrate how women’s liberation and Jewish feminism unfolded over the course of the lives of an extraordinary cohort of women, profoundly influencing the social, political, and religious revolutions of our era.
Jewish Radicals: A Documentary Reader (Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History #14)
by Tony MichelsJewish Radicals explores the intertwined histories of Jews and the American Left through a rich variety of primary documents. Written in English and Yiddish, these documents reflect the entire spectrum of radical opinion, from anarchism to social democracy, Communism to socialist-Zionism. Rank-and-file activists, organizational leaders, intellectuals, and commentators, from within the Jewish community and beyond, all have their say. Their stories crisscross the Atlantic, spanning from the United States to Europe and British-ruled Palestine. The documents illuminate in fascinating detail the efforts of large numbers of Jews to refashion themselves as they confronted major problems of the twentieth century: poverty, anti-semitism, the meaning of American national identity, war, and totalitarianism. In this comprehensive sourcebook, the story of Jewish radicals over seven decades is told for the first time in their own words.
Jewish Religious Conflicts (Routledge Revivals)
by Maurice SimonFirst published in 1950, Jewish Religious Conflicts gives an account of the principal cleavages that have taken place within the Jewish people since the close of the Old Testament over questions of religious faith, doctrine and practice. While passing in review the chief sects that have formed themselves during that period, it pays particular attention to the most recent cleavages, those between the ‘orthodox’ and ‘reform’, and between the ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ movements, which are dividing the Jewish community. This book will be of interest to students of religion and history.