The Genizah

How did Jews in the ancient world depict the practices of their pagan contemporaries? In this study, Jesse Mirotznik investigates the portrayal of pagan worship in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Jewish literature. Scholars have assumed that the portrayals in these corpora are consistent over time. Mirotznik, however, shows that there is a fundamental discontinuity between earlier and later depictions of pagan worship. In the Hebrew Bible, these forms of worship are, for the most part, simply assumed to be sincere. By contrast, in ancient Jewish texts from approximately the end of the third century BCE and onward, such worship is increasingly presented as insincere, performed only instrumentally in the service of an ulterior motive. While the worshipers of other gods seem genuine in their devotion, these texts contend, they too must recognize the folly of such worship.

The Pickled City takes a glorious deep dive into the history of the iconic brined cucumber by tracing the pickle’s journey from ancient Mesopotamia to Eastern Europe to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, unearthing a hidden world of family stories and economic contributions that helped shape New York’s cultural, culinary, and literal foundations. With a foreword by pickle pioneer Sandor Katz and an astonishing wealth of photographs, historical images, documents, illustrations, advertisements, and more.

In the decades following the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, the former province of Galicia inspired the literary imagination of two German-language natives of this region, Joseph Roth and Soma Morgenstern. Galicia as a Literary Idea explores what their engagement with Galicia means for modern Jewish culture, history, and memory. For Roth and Morgenstern, Galicia encapsulates the rich interplay between contemporary developments – including urbanization, secularization, embourgeoisement, political self-determination, and new technologies – and traditional Jewish life in Eastern European villages and shtetls, characterized by tight-knit families and communities, religious observance and ritual, Yiddish language and culture, and Hasidic belief systems. Despite the tensions between these elements, this book presents them as a complex network rather than a battle between old and new, east and west, or tradition and modernity. German and Jewish studies scholar Kata Gellen also traces the shifting attachments of Galician Jews to German, a language that symbolized emancipation, culture, empire, and, ultimately, disillusionment and persecution. Through original readings of well-known and neglected works by Roth and Morgenstern, Gellen shows how the literary idea of Galicia is shaped by continuous struggle and emergent hope, whether as earthly possibility or redemptive promise. This book thereby uncovers the complex relationship between center and periphery in Jewish modernity and reanimates a dimension of modern Jewish literary history that has been obscured by the dark shadow of the Holocaust.

In the decades following the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, the former province of Galicia inspired the literary imagination of two German-language natives of this region, Joseph Roth and Soma Morgenstern. Galicia as a Literary Idea explores what their engagement with Galicia means for modern Jewish culture, history, and memory. For Roth and Morgenstern, Galicia encapsulates the rich interplay between contemporary developments – including urbanization, secularization, embourgeoisement, political self-determination, and new technologies – and traditional Jewish life in Eastern European villages and shtetls, characterized by tight-knit families and communities, religious observance and ritual, Yiddish language and culture, and Hasidic belief systems. Despite the tensions between these elements, this book presents them as a complex network rather than a battle between old and new, east and west, or tradition and modernity. German and Jewish studies scholar Kata Gellen also traces the shifting attachments of Galician Jews to German, a language that symbolized emancipation, culture, empire, and, ultimately, disillusionment and persecution. Through original readings of well-known and neglected works by Roth and Morgenstern, Gellen shows how the literary idea of Galicia is shaped by continuous struggle and emergent hope, whether as earthly possibility or redemptive promise. This book thereby uncovers the complex relationship between center and periphery in Jewish modernity and reanimates a dimension of modern Jewish literary history that has been obscured by the dark shadow of the Holocaust.

Bridge builder: My life since the Holocaust is the fourth and final volume of Shimon Redlich's autobiographical cycle, which began with Together and Apart in Brezany (2002), a description of relations among Poles, Ukrainians and Jews in his native town and his survival during the Holocaust. It continued with Life in Transit (2010), an account of his family's resettlement in postwar Lodz and a new life in Israel. A New Life in Israel (2018) portrayed his adjustment to life on a kibbutz and service in the Israel Defense Forces. In Bridge Builder, Redlich recounts his life since the late fifties. It features his academic journey from student in Jerusalem and the US to professor at Ben-Gurion University, his friendships, his encounters with Jews and non-Jews in Eastern Europe, and his unconventional approach to controversial topics. As in previous volumes, in Bridge Builder Redlich's own memories are supported and enriched by meticulous historical research.

Situated within the broadly understood subfield of environmental memory studies, this book explores Israeli forests as spaces of commemoration. It investigates their significance in the Jewish‑Israeli memory culture over the last century, as well as their role as a recurrent form of environmental memorial, understood as a commemoration that uses the organic as both the symbolic and the building substance. In doing so, it reveals the roles that the natural environment plays in memory practices: as a carrier of symbolic meanings, and also as an acting, more‑than‑human element of memorial spaces. Employing the perspective of environmental hermeneutics, the analysis is grounded in the realities of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and reflects on the intricate intersection of ideological, political, socio‑economic, personal, and institutional dimensions of local tree planting. Simultaneously, it draws from instances of arboreal commemorations found in other geographical and cultural contexts, situating the practice of memorial forests within the wider framework of environmental memory and its associated social practices. In this way, it offers instructive insights for other cases of arboreal remembrance, highlighting both the potential benefits and risks linked to environmental memorials. Utilising an interdisciplinary approach, this fascinating and groundbreaking volume will engage scholars and researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including Memory Studies, Cultural Geography, Israel Studies, and Environmental Humanities.

Intimate in voice and sweeping in historical reach, "Was It Just a Matter of Luck?" bears witness to the endurance of memory and the moral force of survival. Through the voice of his mother, Ray Kaner - a fiercely intelligent young woman who endured four years in the Lódź ghetto, brutal slave labor, and near death in Bergen-Belsen - Dr. Charles Kaner reconstructs her harrowing passage through the Holocaust and the sustaining power of sisterhood that helped her survive. Interwoven with his own journey as a second-generation survivor, Kaner traces how Ray transformed unspeakable trauma into purpose. In postwar America, she became a quiet but determined force in the preservation of Holocaust memory, helping to establish one of the nation's earliest survivor-testimony projects and laying crucial groundwork for what would become the Museum of Jewish Heritage. At once a son's act of devotion and a profound historical reckoning, Was It Just a Matter of Luck? asks not only how one woman survived, but how survival itself became a legacy.

An engaging biography that goes behind the myths to reveal the complex life of a transformative figure in modern American Judaism Rabbi, writer, teacher, and thinker, Mordecai M. Kaplan (1881–1983) was one of the leading Jewish personalities of twentieth-century America. Founder of the Reconstructionist movement, he was a maverick who reshaped religious faith and practice, generating controversy at every turn. Known for his relentless energy and imagination, Kaplan redefined Jewish identity, emphasizing reason over superstition and intellectual discovery over passive inheritance. He introduced new rituals, reevaluated the role of tradition, and advocated for a Judaism that evolved with the times and fostered an inclusive community. Drawn extensively from Kaplan’s private diaries and correspondence with family and close friends, Jenna Weissman Joselit’s intimate portrait of this influential and iconoclastic thinker sheds new light on the meaning of American Judaism, identity, the limits of belonging, and the role of faith in modern society.

This Handbook provides an examined and nuanced overview of the history and devlopment of Jewish philosophy, from antiquity up to current trends in the field. Editors Paul W. Franks and Yitzhak Y. Melamed have brought together an international team of philosophers and scholars to tackle a complex and multi-layered literary corpus that stretches over two millennia. This volume is comprised of six divisions, each telling the story of Jewish philosophy from a distinctive vantage point: an introductory section addressing the place and historiography of Jewish philosophy within broader academia; the history of Jewish philosophy with an eye towards major schools and periods; interactions between Jewish philosophy and other branches of the Jewish literarary tradition; interactions with non-Jewish philosophy; key topics in Jewish philosophy; and new directions in the field. The result is a uniquely comprehensive and multi-layered survey of this incredibly important intellectual tradition. Drawing from thinkers at the top of their field and edited by two of the most important philosophers working today, this Handbook is the authoritative guide to the history, development, and trajectory of Jewish philosophy.

This is a story of fighting men, struggling in a great cause. The Jewish Legion was organized and fought in the First World War, their goal the securing of The Land of Israel as a Jewish National state. But his story can not be told without telling also of British imperial intrigue, of promises lightly given and lightly broken, of the injustice founded in opportunism and confirmed by decree. Founder and guiding spirit of the Jewish Legion and architect of the plan for a Jewish army was Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940). He has written his story simply and faithfully, giving praise to the men who

Beyond the Elite focuses on the everyday social history of Jews in medieval northern and central Europe using four interpretive lenses: people, space, objects, and rituals. Contributors to this innovative volume discuss aspects of daily life through which non-elite Jews interacted with their Christian neighbors, while at the same time creating and affirming their own religious, social, and cultural identities. This volume makes possible a multifaceted understanding of different perspectives on Jewish life, demonstrating the extent to which medieval Jews were simultaneously integral to majority-Christian communities and also strangers within them. Based on scholarship conducted during a multiyear, team-conducted research project, Beyond the Elite addresses topics such as orphanhood, social exclusion, travel by river, local power struggles, architectural styles, pawnbroking, wedding customs, and religious rituals. More broadly, in detailing the rhythms of daily life during times of relative calm for Jewish communities, it becomes clear that anti-Jewish persecution and violence from the late thirteenth century was both manifested within and a rupture of existing social orders. Contributors: Tzafrir Barzilay, Elisheva Baumgarten, Neta Bodner, Nureet Dermer, Aviya Doron, Albert Evan Kohn, Miri Fenton, Annika Funke, Ariella Lehmann, Andreas Lehnertz, Eyal Levinson, Ido Noy, Erez Rochman, Miri Rubin, Hannah Teddy Schachter, Amit Shafran.

In this innovative intellectual biography, Oded Yisraeli offers an unprecedented, comprehensive portrait of Rabbi Moses b. Nahman, or Nahmanides (1194-ca. 1270), one of the greatest Jewish thinkers and writers of the Middle Ages. Nahmanides' creative energy spanned his long life, covering diverse fields - Talmudic and halakhic exegesis, biblical commentary, Kabbalah, homiletics, polemics, and poetry - that have all individually been the object of extensive scholarly study. This book brings the many facets of Nahmanides' work together, and breaks new ground by relating the circumstances of his life to the long arc of his intellectual career. Yisraeli examines Nahmanides' oeuvre in light of his time and place, reading his writings as a discourse with both movements within the Jewish world of his day and the lively scholasticism of thirteenth-century Western Europe. He takes account of changes over time both in the religious world around Nahmanides, and in his doctrine throughout his career, raising new questions about Nahmanides' work and the influences on his thought. Rooted in deep historical research and attention to social context, this book offers a new historical and biographical perspective that illuminates Nahmanides' religious and intellectual world.

Esther Kreitman’s fiction explores the realities of Jewish life in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Uncompromising in her critique of injustice and hypocrisy, she exposes the emptiness of those who maintain nothing of Judaism but rituals devoid of meaning. She insists on the dignity of those denied opportunity: the poor, women, and all excluded from modern education. Her characters love and work, despair and rebel as they move through the streets and homes of the shtetl, Warsaw, Antwerp, and London.

The second half of the book of Samuel contains some of the most dramatic stories in the Bible, portraying the unique character of King David, in all its power and complexity. The book explores David’s personal journey and the lives of those surrounding him, while also addressing foundational themes such as the significance of the Temple and the transformative power of repentance. As in I Samuel: A King in Israel, in II Samuel: David the King Rabbi Amnon Bazak analyzes the biblical chapters one by one, engaging in a deep exploration of the plain meaning of the text (peshat). Using both traditio

The existence and achievements of Jewish “self-rescuers” within Nazi-occupied Hungary remains, in spite of their significance, historically underexplored. In this illuminating chronicle of the life and work of a Jewish couple, László and Eugenia Szamosi, Remembering Resistance seeks to address this lacunae, offering a unique insight into a family’s personal history of resistance under the Nazi regime. Combining oral testimony from fellow survivors, with a previously-unpublished translation of László’s memoir, this book foregrounds the remarkable work of the Szamosis and their network, in rescuing Jews from the Death Marches and reuniting displaced families. Through doing so, this book offers a powerful framework for mediating how we remember Jewish experiences of the Holocaust.

Despite the fact that it was never really accepted as part of European academia before the Shoah, the tradition of Wissenschaft des Judentums that emerged after the Enlightenment period spread throughout most of the European-Jewish communities, creating independent institutions, producing an impressive record of research on Jewish history, religion, literature and culture, and engaging in a creative and critical dialogue with other scholarly disciplines. Building on new research topics and exploring innovative theoretical and methodological approaches, this volume, written by an interdisciplinary group of scholars, provides the first comparative, transnational history of the different traditions and networks of Jewish Studies in Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries. Particular emphasis is put on the mutual perceptions and interactions of those national and local traditions as well as on the impact the challenges of modernity had on Jewish scholarship and its self-definition within the different social and cultural contexts in Europe.

Blending history, collective biography, and literary criticism, author Lori Harrison-Kahan repositions the American West as a generative space for turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish women's literature. This book demonstrates that California-based writers Emma Wolf, Bettie Lowenberg, Harriet Lane Levy, Miriam Michelson, and Anna Strunsky played formative roles in Jewish American literary history. Shaped by ethno-religious, gender, class, and settler-colonial dynamics of San Francisco and the frontier, their works challenge masculinist views of Jewish literature and contrast dramatically with well-known stories of the New York ghetto. Mining print and archival sources (including newspapers, magazines, novels, letters, diaries, and unpublished writings), Harrison-Kahan narrates the obscured lives of these pioneering women and considers how literary communities―from bourgeois women's clubs to socialist bohemia―sustained them. With incisive purpose and clear-eyed nuance, West of the Ghetto showcases Jewish women writers' vital and wide-ranging contributions to American literary culture.

This book investigates and compares two contemporary Israeli peace movements through the angle of collective emotions, and specifically of hope Drawing on empirical qualitative research combining interviews with Jewish and Arab- Palestinian activists and ethnographic work, the work provides unique documentation of the birth and development of Standing Together (a mixed-gender peace movement) and Women Wage Peace (a women's peace movement). It explores the meaning of hope for Israeli peace activists, and shows the concrete efforts that both movements undertake to trigger hope, as part of an intersectional peace politics and of a non-partisan women's peace politics, respectively. The book also engages with the post-October 2023 developments in the Middle East, showing how both peace movements, now followed by others in the Israeli peace camp, continue to invest in their politics of hope amid devastation, fatigue and fear. Offering a gendered typology of hope-related emotion work useful beyond the cases at hand, the book proposes that collective hope-based action, combined with other emotions, might be powerful in all contexts of despair and protracted conflicts. This book will be of interest to students of peace and conflict studies, social and peace movements, gender studies, nonviolent resistance, international relations, and Israel- Palestine/Middle East