The Genizah

From one of the country's most innovative rabbis, an illuminating journey through Jewish teaching toward a new vision of religious experience in contemporary life Many of us long for spiritual belonging and connection, only to run up against our confusion, discomfort, even disgust with organized religion. Noa Kushner understands this well. As the founding rabbi of The Kitchen, a progressive, experimental San Francisco Jewish congregation, she has guided thousands of people into a relationship with religion they never thought they would or could experience. In this concise, soul-stirring book, Kushner offers a transformational picture of religion for the moments in life when we yearn to transcend our self-imposed limits. She proposes that we treat religion, at first, not as something we believe but as something we do, so we can pursue the profound questions that perspective unfolds. How does prayer work? How do religious traditions evolve? What is the relationship between religion and ethics? And most of all, why should we be religious? Through luminous storytelling from the Torah, Jewish fable, and her own life, Kushner crafts an elegant, persuasive case for religious community not only as an antidote to our society's corrosive obsession with status, but also a fundamental good in and of itself. Written in a Jewish idiom, but open to readers of all backgrounds, Pretend You Believe is a powerful meditation on God, responsibility, doubt, progress, justice, love, forgiveness, joy, and more. With this book, Kushner has captured the wonder of religious feeling, and inscribed an invitation to readers everywhere.

Just Language revisits the Weimar period and its representation in the postwar years to explore narratives of linguistic resistance in the works of Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan. How did this generation of exile writers grapple with their experiences of oppression and persecution? How did they create a language of resistance during the decades that prepared the Third Reich and the Shoah? Facing the devastations of World War I, the book explores how Walter Benjamin analyzed language’s ability to radically break the cyclical violence of war and examines his opposition to expansionism and imperialism in Weimar education and culture. Based on Benjamin’s analysis, Johannßen traces the postwar responses of Hannah Arendt and Paul Celan. While Arendt proposed strategies of metaphorical thinking to counteract the formation of totalitarianism, Celan mobilized silence as a poetic counterforce against oppression and erasure. Just Language argues that every linguistic act and practice, no matter how small or marginalized, entails the ethical task of opposing the normalization and institutionalization of political violence. By tracing how Benjamin and his interlocutors struggled against German fascism, Johannßen presents a memory-based critique of linguistic violence, opening a dialogue between German-Jewish writers and today’s debates on nondiscrimination, propaganda, and social justice.

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.

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.

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.