Search results for ""Hebrew Union College Press""

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion. David H. Aaron and Jason Kalman served as Editors for the current volume and Sonja Rethy as Managing Editor.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

In the 1660s, Jews of Iberian ancestry, many of them fleeing Inquisitorial persecution, established an agrarian settlement in the midst of the Surinamese tropics. The heart of this community-Jodensavanne, or Jews' Savannah-became an autonomous village with its own Jewish institutions, including a majestic synagogue consecrated in 1685. Situated along the Suriname River, some fifty kilometres south of the capital city of Paramaribo, Jodensavanne was by the mid-eighteenth century surrounded by dozens of Jewish plantations sprawling north- and southward and dominating the stretch of the river. These Sephardi-owned plots, mostly devoted to the cultivation and processing of sugar, carried out primarily by enslaved Africans, collectively formed the largest Jewish agricultural community in the world at the time and the only Jewish settlement in the Americas granted virtual self-rule. Sephardi settlement paved the way for the influx of hundreds of Ashkenazi Jews, who began to emigrate in the late seventeenth century from western and central Europe. Generally banned from Jodensavanne, these newcomers settled in Paramaribo, where they established their own cemeteries and historic synagogue. Meanwhile, slave rebellions, Maroon attacks, the general collapse of Suriname's economy, soil depletion, absentee land ownership, and a ravaging fire all contributed to the demise of the old Savannah settlement beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century..

Read more less

Within traditional Jewish commercial law, the laws of sale and fraud are surprisingly intelligible and fascinating for modern students of Jewish tradition. This translation of the relevant sections of the Shulhan Arukh, sometimes known as the ‘Code of Jewish Law’, has been prepared with the utmost care and attention to the technical nuances of legal terminology in both modern and ancient law. The Shulhan Arukh is the most widely consulted of the various legal codes in Judaism. Rabbinic tradition is in large part a tradition of law and jurisprudence. This tradition of law comprehends fields as diverse as the law of evidence and the dietary regimen, as laws on credit and debt and the laws of ritual purity. It follows naturally that many, if not most, of the great works of rabbinical literature are law books, commentaries on the law, and collections of cases. The principal legal code, or restatement, still authoritative among traditional Jews, is the Shulhan Arukh, compiled by Joseph b. Ephraim Karo of Safed (1488-1575) and glossed by Moses Isserles of Cracow (1520-1572). This work, published in four volumes, provided the rabbinic jurist or magistrate, as well as the learned layman, with a concise review of the various areas of Jewish law that might come to his attention. One such area of traditional Jewish law was the laws of buying and selling and the laws of fraud in sales. This particular domain within traditional Jewish commercial law is surprisingly intelligible and fascinating for modern students of Jewish tradition. Buying and selling are just as much a part of the modern world as they were of past ages. Moreover, the student of legal history or comparative law will find that this rabbinical code on sales and fraud in sales provides, at a glance, a view of the strata of Jewish legal development from the ancient period to the sixteenth century. Among the matters treated in this code are the formation of the agreement to buy and sell, the concept of acquisition as it relates to various types of property, legal capacity, and the requirement of good faith. The chapters on fraud reflect the moral and ethical values of Jewish tradition which are always implicit, and often explicit, in the rules of Jewish civil, criminal, and commercial legal codes. The material is clearly of interest to modern students of business ethics. A synopsis of the law of sale prefaces the work. It underscores some of the main features of this area of the law and furnishes some terminology and analysis of the material. While this synopsis does note some points of contrast and comparison with Roman law and medieval church law, it is not intended as a detailed historical or comparative study. It serves principally to introduce the text itself and establish some useful lines of understanding and classification. The translation of the laws of sale and fraud presented here has been prepared with the utmost care and attention to the technical nuances of legal terminology in both modern and ancient law. Its apparatus of notes and references includes material on the history of the printing of this translated portion of the Jewish legal tradition.

Read more less

The eighteen studies in this book continue the exploration of the Jewish sermon Saperstein began in his groundbreaking Jewish Preaching 1200-1800. His new research further illustrates the importance of this genre, largely ignored by modern scholarship, as an indispensible resource for understanding Jewish history, spirituality, and thought from the High Middle Ages to the beginning of the Emancipation in Europe. Saperstein's thematic studies explore the most important occasions for traditional rabbinic preaching: the Days of Awe and the Passover season. Two studies focus on the homiletical exegesis of classical Jewish texts, and two deal with the historical interaction of Christians and Jews. Saperstein discusses the diffusion of philosophical ideas through homiletics and identifies central conceptual issues presented in the Italian Jewish pulpit. Other essays include a critical analysis of the work of Saul Levi Morteira of Amsterdam, an examination of sermons in eighteenth-century Prague for indications of a traditional community in crisis, and homiletical evidence for a developing sense of patriotic identification with the state, even before Emancipation changed the legal status of the Jews. Saperstein also presents newly discovered sermonic texts in order to explore a full panoply of issues relating to historical context and genre. All are published for the first time with his annotated translation accompanying the Hebrew original. Included are a Guide for Preachers, sermons on repentance and on the Binding of Isaac, and three eulogies, the last a fascinating memorialization of the antisemitic empress Maria Theresa.

Read more less

In 1972, twenty-six-year-old Sally Jane Priesand from Cleveland, Ohio became the first in a line of women rabbis to receive ordination from the faculty of a rabbinical seminary. She was not first woman to study: nearly one hundred years earlier, Julia Ettinger had studied with Hebrew Union College's founder and first president, Isaac Mayer Wise. And HUC had formally agreed to ordain women fifty years before Priesand's ordination. But unprecedented transformations quickly swept over American Jewish life in the wake of Priesand's ordination. Women began to flourish in the American rabbinate. In just two decades, they comprised one-half of the student body in the Rabbinic School of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, one-half of the student body of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and approximately one-third of the student body of Jewish Theological Seminary. This collection of essays, written by distinguished rabbis and scholars, seeks to examine the significance of women in the modern rabbinate. The essays address the history of women's journey to ordination; how the existence of women rabbis changed and challenged Reform Judaism and the larger Jewish community; the impact this transformation of the rabbinate had on liturgy and theology, Jewish identity, and Jewish communal leadership; and how women rabbis might affect the future of the rabbinate, congregational life, and Jewish communal life in the twenty-first century. The authors trace the history of women in the rabbinate, the present impact of women rabbis, and possible trajectories in this changing face of Judaism.

Read more less

What will hold American Jewry and Israel together as the traditional "crisis glue" melts down and the familiar and practiced Israeli call for aid retreats to the remote background of each community's existence? This is the question addressed by participants in a 1996 conference sponsored by the Center for North American Jewry of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Beyond Survival and Philanthropy is a collection of answers to this complex question offered by thirty-one leading Israeli and American scholars, educators, journalists, and communal leaders. They consider the cultural currents that have shifted American Jewish attitudes toward Israel from a mobilization model to a search-for-personal-meaning model and trace the historical roots of present tensions between religious and secular Jews in Israel. The views of Yehezkel Kaufmann, Ahad Ha-Am, and David Ben-Gurion are used to help differentiate between the state of exile, the sense of exile, and the recognition of exile. The place of Israel in American Jewish education and the treatment of American Jewry in Israeli schools is considered, and the backstory of recent efforts to streamline the institutional complex that raises funds for Israel and local needs in American Jewish communities is explored. Speaker of the Knesset Avraham Berg presents his view of how the changing natures of both Zionism and Judaism will affect all Jews in the twenty-first century. Sometimes agreeing, sometimes disagreeing, but always expanding upon these presentations, authors of the response essays in the volume reflect and underscore the values that precipitated this discussion: recognition of the unity of the Jewish people and of the continuing to share diverse views and opinions in order to formulate and address the crucial and sometimes radical choices that confront American Jewry and Israel.

Read more less

For many centuries Jewish prayer was so dominated by its male creators and male readers that the Jewish woman's role in prayer seems to have been all but obliterated. Yet Jewish women have always prayed and, before prayer became standardized into a formal liturgy, Israelite women offered up spontaneous petitions and hymns to God as freely as did men. While they may not have been able to help constitute a minyan, and while many did not know Hebrew or Aramaic, women produced and used material for prayer at home. The Yiddish tkhines had its origin in a form of supplicatory prayer in the Talmud, whose original intent was to allow for individual private devotion during the standard prayer service. The private Yiddish prayers and devotions for Jewish women continued to use this term. They emerged in the world of premodern Ashkenazic Jewry and represent one of the richest and least-known forms of Jewish religious literature. Because modern sensibility seemed to reject them, and because Yiddish was quickly forgotten by second and third generation Jews in the West, they have been sadly neglected. Although a few have been individually translated into English, this is the first bilingual anthology ever to appear. The prayers in this volume are characterized by a highly personal and intimate style and mark occasions in the religious calendar, such as the Tkhine for the Blessing of the New Moon, as well as occasions in the life of a woman, such as the Tkhine for a Mother who Leads Her Child to Kheyder for the First Time. The tkhines are of great appeal and value to those who wish to hear the voices of Jewish women in history, study Yiddish literature and culture, or create new expressions of spirituality.

Read more less

In A Collage of Customs, Mark Podwal's imaginative and inventive interpretations of woodcuts from a 16th-century Sefer Minhagim (Book of Customs) allow us to see these historic images in a new light. Podwal brings humour and whimsy to religious objects and practices, while at the same time delivering profound and nuanced commentary on Jewish customs and history, both through his art and through his insightful accompanying text. The book appears in concert with an exhibition of Podwal's renderings at the Cincinnati Skirball Museum.

Read more less

A major influence on the development of rabbinic liturgical custom after the destruction of the Temple was the need to establish that this innovative worship of the heart was as acceptable to God as biblically prescribed sacrificial worship. Later Jewish communities and their leaders continually refined the details of the system they inherited to reflect their changing understandings of acceptable, meaningful, and constructive worship. These understandings have in turn been shaped not only by liturgical halakhah and active custom, but by new intellectual and social currents and by the vicissitudes of Jewish history. Ruth Langer uses the tools of historical scholarship and anthropological study of ritual to analyze some of the dynamics that have shaped Jewish liturgical law and determined the broader outlines of the prayer life of the Jews. After a consideration of the talmudic issues upon which the acceptability of prayer depends, she offers a basic list of legal principles derived by later generations from talmudic literature to ensure that prayer takes the form of blessings composed according to a very specific pattern and invoking God in a very precise way. She then investigates the development and implementation of the corollary that invoking this blessing formula in ways that deviate from the specific directions of the Talmud constitutes precisely inefficacious and even dangerous prayer. Questions about appropriate prayer language go beyond the blessing formula to the contents of the prayers themselves. Langer analyzes the battles fought over the legitimacy of inserting liturgical poetry into the fixed texts of the statutory liturgy and over the requirement of community for the proper recitation of certain prayers, specifically those that include the angelic liturgy. Although in each of these controversies the rabbis compromised by reinterpreting either legal theory or custom—or both—to bring them into harmony, their solutions have never been monolithic or simple. In its lucid illumination of those complexities, To Worship God Properly adds to our understanding of the history of Jewish liturgy and the general history of rabbinic leadership and law.

Read more less

This is the third volume in the final reports of the Tel Dan excavations, directed by Avraham Biran. It presents the findings from the Late Bronze levels—the Canaanite city of Laish. The entire stratigraphy of this period is discussed, from its roots in the transitional stage from the previous Mioddle Bronze Age, through to its conclusion in the transitional phases of the Early Iron Age.

Read more less

The story of Bar Qamtza is one of the most famous stories in all rabbinic literature. In this tragic tale, a private feud at a Jerusalem banquet triggers a series of events which eventually culminates in the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Until the Holocaust, Jews commonly viewed the razing of the Second Temple as the greatest calamity in all Jewish history, and for many Jews through the ages, the story of Bar Qamtza explained why it had happened. In time, the story also became emblematic of the internal strife and divisive infighting which have troubled Jewish communities time and again across the generations. In A Tragedy of Errors: Bar Qamtza and the Fall of Jerusalem, Amram Tropper enlists this well-known rabbinic tale as a window into the world of its authors and early audiences. Through a close reading and thick description of the story, Tropper illuminates ancient Jewish social ideals and cultural practices, religious beliefs and literary trajectories, historical imaginings and political inclinations, systemic structures and institutional realities. In Tropper's hands, the story of Bar Qamtza serves as a springboard for exploring the interplay of the minutiae of everyday life in antiquity and the overarching architecture of Jewish society under Rome and Persia.

Read more less

Filled with vivid, often dreamlike pictures from the natural world, the poems of Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky, known to her Hebrew readers simply as Zelda, are unlike anything else in Hebrew literature. Zelda was the daughter and granddaughter of prominent Hasidic rabbis from the Habad dynasty. Born in Russia in 1914, she immigrated to Palestine in 1926, studied in religious girls' schools, and became a schoolteacher. She began writing her imagistic, mystical-religious poetry early in life. When her first book was published, in 1967, it was an overwhelming critical and popular success, appealing to the diverse (and predominantly secular) Israeli public. Five more volumes followed, winning the poet numerous literary awards, including the prestigious Bialik and Brenner prizes. Although she lived her entire life within the strictures of ultra-Orthodoxy, Zelda's many admirers came from all corners of Israeli society. As the popularity of her poetry grew, visitors flocked to her doorstep; her photograph appeared often in the newspapers; the words of her poems were set to music and sung. Reserved and daunted by publicity, she was an unlikely candidate for Israeli folk hero; nevertheless, she became a national phenomenon. She died in Jerusalem in 1984, and a posthumous volume of her collected verse was published in Hebrew in 1985. The Spectacular Difference is the first full-length book of her poems to appear in English translation. A close friend and frequent guest in Zelda's home, Marcia Falk was authorized by the poet to be her translator and worked on these translations over the course of three decades. Selected from all six of Zelda's books, the poems are accompanied by the translator's essay introducing the poet and illuminating the highly personal and often startling images in her lyrics. Notes at the back of the book offer a comprehensive guide to Zelda's many references to Jewish sources.

Read more less

Our nation's founding document, the Declaration of Independence, confidently declares, "These truths we hold to be self-evident" And yet, America today seems mired in a truth crisis. Postmodern relativism has cast doubt on the Enlightenment notion of shared, self-evident truths held by all; technologies have made the swift proliferation of untruths commonplace; political sensibilities have become so partisan as to tolerate public personalities who brazenly lie. Many Americans, Jews among them, are understandably concerned for the future of truth as we once knew it. With this book, These Truths We Hold: Judaism in an Age of Truthiness, the editors and HUC-JIR have demonstrated a commitment to full engagement in the contemporary moment as well as to our Jewish heritage as a repository of complex and deep truths. We have assembled an impressive list of contributors who address the subject of truth in Jewish tradition and in contemporary Jewish life from several important perspectives: biblical, talmudic, liturgical, scientific, philosophical, satirical, pluralistic, and poetic. The articles are meant to shore up faith and to serve as a bank of resources to orient readers to Judaism's rich, multi-faceted and morally edifying teachings about truth.

Read more less

Wallace Stevens' "dark rabbi", from his poem "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle", provides a title for this collection of essays on the "lordly study" of modern Jewish poetry in English. Including chapters on such poets as Charles Reznikoff, Allen Grossman, Chana Bloch, and Michael Heller, this volume explores the tensions between religious and secular worldviews in recent Jewish poetry, the often conflicted linguistic and cultural matrix from which this poetry arises, and the complicated ways in which Jewish tradition shapes the sensibilities of not only Jewish, but also non-Jewish, poets. Finkelstein, described as "one of American poetry's indispensable makers" (Lawrence Joseph), whose previous critical work has been called "the exemplary study of the religious aspect of the works of contemporary American poets" (Peter O'Leary), considers large literary and cultural trends while never losing sight of the particular formal powers of individual poems. In Like a Dark Rabbi he offers a passionate argument for the importance of Jewish-American poetry to modern Jewish culture—and to American poetry—as it engages with the contradictions of contemporary life.

Read more less

Nelson Glueck was born in 1900 to a struggling immigrant Jewish family in Cincinnati. By 1950, he had excavated remains of the civilization of the ancient Nabataeans in Transjordan, described a biblical copper-mining industry at the shore of the Red Sea, and shown how the Negev could support a large population if proper irrigation techniques were used. A personal friend of David Ben-Gurion, Abba Eban, Golda Meir, Henrietta Szold, and Judah Magnes, among other notables worldwide, this pioneer in the burgeoning field of biblical archaeology was known affectionately in the nascent state of Israel as "Ha-Professor" (the Professor). By 1950, Glueck was also well into his long tenure (1947-1971) as president of Hebrew Union College, the institution that had ordained him as a Reform rabbi in 1923 and supported his further studies toward the doctorate he earned in 1927 at the University of Jena in Germany. As president, Glueck oversaw the merger of HUC with the Jewish Institute of Religion. He expanded the Cincinnati-based institution to include schools in New York, Los Angeles, and Jerusalem. He encouraged the creation of the Schools of Jewish Communal Service and Jewish Education in California. And he founded and nurtured the School of Biblical and Archaeological Studies in Jerusalem, which now bears his name. Jonathan Brown and Laurence Kutler describe and document Nelson Glueck's many achievements and also record some of the fascinating adventures of this extraordinary charismatic man whose life straddled two distinct Jewish worlds.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

Hebrew Union College Annual is the flagship journal of Hebrew Union College Press and the primary face of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion to the academic world. From its inception in 1924, its goal has been to cultivate Jewish learning and facilitate the dissemination of cutting-edge scholarship across the spectrum of Jewish Studies, including Bible, Rabbinics, Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, and Religion.

Read more less

The first in a series of Yiddish polemical pamphlets (Diskursn) appeared one week before the elections to the second National Assembly in the Republic of the Netherlands on August 1, 1797. Inspired by the expanded freedom of the press and the satirical and often vulgar Spectatorial writings which were popular at the time, a small but energetic group of enlightened Jews in Amsterdam decided the previous summer to publish a periodical. These Yiddish polemical pamphlets would serve as an informative and propagandistic vehicle through which members of the new community could anonymously persuade the Jews of Amsterdam to choose the party of progress and enlightenment. The author or authors inveighed strongly against the alleged abuses in the established community and those they held responsible, the parnosim (board of directors) and their officials. In order to reach the Jewish masses in a city with about 20,000 Ashkenazic Jewish inhabitants, the reformers chose to write the Diskursn in Amsterdam Yiddish. Their efforts were so successful that the established community thought it necessary to enter the fray by publishing its own version of a thirteenth installment shortly before the thirteenth installment of the original series was due to appear. From then on, two series of Diskursn competed for public favor. Using criticism, salacious gossip, slander, and accusations, the same three or four main characters and a few secondary ones railed against the excesses and foibles of the other community. Both series ended after the parnosim of the old community were deposed in the early spring of 1798. By then, 24 Diskursn from the new community and 11 from the established community had appeared, together more than 500 printed pages. Of course we cannot judge the two communities fairly based on the texts of the Diskursn. Both sought to discredit their opponents with stories of whores, sexual scandals, illegitimate children, hypocrisy, religious violations, bankruptcy, and fraud. Nevertheless, the pamphlets describe the environment of Amsterdam Jewry and reveal what interested those Jews and how they responded to revolutionary changes. All of this is depicted by inventive authors who came up time and again with different, often humorous settings for their volleys of curses and torrents of abuse. These Yiddish polemical pamphlets are a rare phenomenon, not just in the history of Jewish communities in the period of emancipation, but in the histories of Yiddish literature and satirical/polemical periodicals as well. This is the first-ever bilingual edition of a major portion of this collection of documents and the first time any of them have been published in English translation. A lengthy introduction and five appendices help the reader understand and appreciate these colorful Dutch Jews and their often impassioned arguments.

Read more less

David Ellenson prefaces this fascinating collection of twenty-three essays with a remarkably candid account of his intellectual journey from boyhood in Virginia to the scholarly immersions in the history, thought, and literature of the Jewish people that have informed his research interests in a long and distinguished academic career. Ellenson, President of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, has been particularly intrigued by the attempts of religious leaders in all denominations of Judaism, from Liberal to Neo-Orthodox, to redefine and reconceptualize themselves and their traditions in the modern period, as both the Jewish community and individual Jews entered radically new realms of possibility and change. The essays are grouped into five sections. In the first, Ellenson reflects upon the expression of Jewish values and Jewish identity in contemporary America, explains his debt to Jacob Katz's socio-religious approach to Jewish history, and shows how the works of non-Jewish social historian Max Weber highlight the tensions between the universalism of western thought and Jewish demands for a particularistic identity. In the second section, "The Challenge of Emancipation," he indicates how Jewish religious leaders in nineteenth-century Europe laboured to demonstrate that the Jewish religion and Jewish culture were worthy of respect by the larger gentile world. In a third section, "Denominational Responses," Ellenson shows how the leaders of Liberal and Orthodox branches of Judaism in Central Europe constructed novel parameters for their communities through prayer books, legal writings, sermons, and journal articles. The fourth section, "Modern Response," takes a close look at twentieth-century Jewish legal decisions on new issues such as the status of women, fertility treatments, and even the obligations of the Israeli government towards its minority populations. Finally, review essays in the last section analyse a few landmark contemporary works of legal and liturgical creativity: the new Israeli Masorti prayer book, David Hartman's works on covenantal theology, and Marcia Falk's Book of Blessings. As Ellenson demonstrates, "The reality of Jewish cultural and social integration into the larger world after Emancipation did not signal the demise of Judaism. Instead, the modern setting has provided a challenging context where the ongoing creativity and adaptability of Jewish religious leaders of all stripes has been tested and displayed."

Read more less

Reprint with new Preface. In the 2002 edition of From Ideology to Liturgy, Eric Caplan examined Reconstructionism's interpretation and adaptation of the traditional Jewish liturgy and its creation of new prayer texts to convey and express the movement's changing ideology. Further insight into Reconstructionist liturgy was gained through comparing these prayerbooks to the contemporaneous liturgies of Reform and Conservative Judaism and to the work of Jewish Renewal. In this new supplemented reprint edition, Caplan offers an expansive study of liberal Jewish prayerbooks published in the decades since From Ideology to Liturgy first appeared and revisits his earlier conclusions in light of more recent expanded access to Mordecai Kaplan's diaries and archives.

Read more less