Search results for ""Hebrew Union College Press,U.S.""

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.

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In the last twenty-five years, the effort to understand the ways of others has reinvigorated religious discussion on many levels. We have entered what has been described as the "Age of Dialogue." But what should be the nature of such dialogue? And what should be its goal? What exactly is the proper relationship between different communities of faith? In this book, Sandra B. Lubarsky offers some new answers to these timely questions. She begins with an affirmation of "veridical pluralism," the position that more than one tradition "speaks truth" - a "blessed fact" that enables us to enlarge our vision of truth through openness to the perceptions of others. Using the concept of "transformative dialogue" (a term borrowed from the theologian John B. Cobb, Jr.), she presents a method for the encounter of traditions in an age of religious pluralism - one which entails neither a loss of particularity nor a descent into relativism. In a Jewish contexts, Lubarsky argues that the Noachide Covenant, the premodern Jewish approach to non-Jews, is an inadequate framework for today's dialogue since it accords no independent value to any non-Jewish tradition. She then gives serious attention to the interreligious views of four seminal modern Jewish thinkers: Leo Baeck, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Mordecai Kaplan. Acknowledging our tremendous intellectual debt to them, she nevertheless calls for a move beyond tolerance and beyond mutual appreciation toward dialogue that may be transformative of our own traditions.

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It was twentieth-century Modernism that introduced bilingualism into the literary arena. Used as a means for the contradictory aims of universalizing or individualizing the literary idiom, this practice was clearly part of the revolt against nineteenth-century Romanticism and nationalism. In contrast, Jewish bilingualism is rooted in the long history of exilic existence; its modern phase, moreover, is intimately related to the national revival of the Jewish people. As such, it fulfilled a unique role: time and again, literary experiments were conducted first in Yiddish, the spoken language, and later transferred to Hebrew, the "romantic classical" language of the national renaissance. The significance these transfers had for the historical poetics of Hebrew cannot be overestimated. They were instrumental in making what was a "scriptural" literature only a century ago into the modernized, lively literature we know today. Yet Hebrew did not give in easily. It was not until the 1950s, for instance, that Israeli poetry caught up with the poetic understatement of Western Modernism. Two decades earlier, however, Hebrew Modernism did make a breakthrough in America. It was Gabriel Preil, a Lithuanian-born resident of New York, who helped modernize Hebrew verse without so much as visiting the Land of Israel. The emergence of his imagistic free verse in the thirties and forties constituted a bold departure from the classical-romantic norms of Hebrew at the time. Thereafter Israeli modernists adopted him as a precursor, naturally attributing his innovations to the influence of Anglo-American imagism. But there is more to it than that. For Preil, who is currently approaching his 75th birthday, is, in fact, the latest link in the Jewish tradition of intracultural transfer. As this study shows, he absorbed his poetic modernism from the New York Yiddish Modernists, thereafter transferring it to Hebrew via his autotranslation and dual compositions. Yael Feldman here sheds light on this particular, and possibly last, instance in the history of Jewish bilingualism. Yet the significance of her work extends beyond the poetics of Hebrew literature. For it offers unique insights into both the mechanism of literary transfer and the constraints operative within it. In addition, it follows Preil's recent "metapoetic" journey to the borders of imagism and back, thereby illuminating the risks of limitation and dehumanization that have always plagued "pure" imagism. Finally, it shows how Preil's life work recapitulates the complex evolution of Western poetic Modernism with all its inherent paradoxes.

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Loss defines the crossbeams and chronicles of Tuvia Ruebner’s life. Born in 1924 into a semi-secular Jewish family in Slovakia, Ruebner was also born into the catastrophe that would follow - the extermination of European Jewry and of his own family in the Holocaust. Hitler became chancellor of Germany on Ruebner’s ninth birthday. Six years later, the race-laws enacted in Slovakia banned all Jewish students from school and Ruebner’s formal education ended with ninth grade. His involvement in the Socialist-Zionist youth movement bought him a ticket out to Palestine and, in 1941, the seventeen-year-old bid his family farewell at the Pressburg-Bratislava train station, unaware that he would never see them again.The disasters of the twentieth century swept Ruebner from Europe to Israel, from German to Hebrew, from the familiar to the strange. Despite his truncated formal education, he became a poet and man of letters in Israel’s fledgling intellectual community alongside other Jewish immigrant-refugee-survivors like Ludwig Strauss, Werner Kraft, Lea Goldberg and Dan Pagis, eventually gaining international esteem as professor of comparative literatures at Haifa University and as translator of Nobel prize winner S.Y.Agnon’s stories into German. Ruebner’s early work in Israel took shape in German, the language he spoke to his lost beloveds and the language of Kafka, Hoelderlin and Rilke, whose work he loved, a language that protected him from the overwhelming strangeness of his new land and life. He began composing poetry in Hebrew in the 1950s, beginning a life-long relationship with the newly-revived ancient tongue. The result: fifteen poetry collections in Hebrew, from The Fire in the Stone in 1957 to Last Ones in 2013, a poetic oeuvre that has received countless awards and accolades in Israel and Europe alike and has established Ruebner as an elder of the tribe.Ruebner’s poetry offers us an exquisite and indispensable voice of the twentieth century. His little sister, murdered in Auschwitz, and his youngest son, who disappeared in South America, wander unceasingly through his poems. Beyond the personal losses, the devastation of the century informs all of his work. Textual rupture and fragmentation echo historical rupture and fragmentation. The wonder of Tuvia Ruebner is that, after a lifetime of loss and tragedies, he remains open to the possibility of happiness. This openheartedness accommodates the many paradoxes and conflicts of life and infuses his poetry with an enduring and encompassing compassion for the lost and for the living alike.Rachel Tzvia Back’s graceful translations of select poems representative of Ruebner’s seven-decade poetic trajectory are ever-faithful and beautifully attuned to the Hebrew originals, even as they work to create a new music in their English incarnations. Her comprehensive introduction and annotations supply the context in which these poems were produced. This first-ever bilingual edition, published as Ruebner marks his 90th birthday, gives readers in both Hebrew and English access to stunning poetry that insists on shared humanity across all border lines and divides.

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The Jewish struggle for survival as a spiritual entity after the cohesiveness of Jewish communal life began to disintegrate in the latter decades of the nineteenth century spawned a new tradition-a modern secular Hebraic cultural tradition. These seventeen essays by Israel's esteemed literary critic, Gershon Shaked, explore the evolution of that new tradition, tracing its major processes and identifying central stages in the development of new canonical texts. After introductory essays in which he defines Israeli secularism, explores the historical consciousness of the Israeli sensibility both in Israel and in the Diaspora, and comments on major trends in the development of Hebrew literature, Shaked describes the mythopoeic creativity of the Hebrew poet laureate Hayyim Nahman Bialik and of the major Hebrew playwright Mattityahu Shoham. He then explores the early literary associations of Yehuda Amichai, who transformed the exalted poetic idiom of the pre-state years into a sober, sensitive, accessible language. Three essays each treat Medele Mosher Seforim and Shmuel Yosef Agnon. As the voice of the limping shlemazels of the shtetl, Mendele foretold the destruction of the eastern European Jewish community but offered no constructive alternative to its dismal prophecy. Agnon's characters seek redemption by immigrating to Eretz Israel. His two works discussed here, "Agunot" (Forsaken Wives) and Shevu'at emunim (The Betrothed) suggest that, while it may be possible to take neurotic Jews out of the Diaspora, taking the Diaspora out of them is another matter. A second set of essays is dedicated to Joseph Hayyim Brenner, an immigrant in the Second Aliyah who also wrote of displaced strangers trying to set down roots in a foreign environment, and Yitzhak Shami, an "Arab-Jew" who wrote about the mentality and lifestyle of the oriental Jewish communities of Palestine and Syria. The last chapter analyzes the work of an outsider, David Vogel. Although Vogel's novel Hayyei nissu'im (Married Life) was written in Hebrew, its plot and characters are strongly reminiscent of the German-Jewish literary tradition. Shaked's analysis of the cultural processes underlying Hebrew literature's major achievements in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries not only sheds important light upon the major concerns of this new and secular literary tradition but also illuminates key aspects of modern Jewish culture.

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The work of a coterie of dynamic women - not the brainchild of Reform Judaism’s male leaders, as is often thought - Women of Reform Judaism has been a force in the shaping of American Jewish life since its founding as the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods in 1913. The synergy of Reform Judaism’s universalist ideas and the women’s emancipation movement in the early twentieth century made the synagogue auxiliary a natural platform for women to assume new leadership roles in their synagogues, in Reform Judaism, and in American society. These “sisterhoods” have stood for the solidarity among synagogue women as well as the commitment of these women to important social action issues. Called Women of Reform Judaism since 1993, this oldest federation of women’s synagogue auxiliaries has grown from 52 temple sisterhoods to 500 and a membership of over 65,000 women, today a vibrant international women’s organization.Women of Reform Judaism, in cooperation with the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives and Hebrew Union College Press, marks its centennial anniversary with this collection of new scholarly essays which looks back at its history in order to understand how the hopes and dreams of its founders have come to fruition. Armed with the rich archival resources of The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, including Proceedings of the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods, 1913-1955, eighteen scholars contributed essays on the spectrum of Women of Reform Judaism’s activities, including their funding of Hebrew Union College during the Great Depression, their support for Jewish education through production of a substantial women’s Torah commentary designed to edify lay people as well as scholars and clergy, their promotion of Jewish foodways and art through publication of cookbooks and support of synagogue gift shops, their invention of the Uniongram as a formidable fundraising tool on a par with the Girl Scout cookie, and their efforts to safeguard Jewish continuity through support of youth activities (NFTY).Sisterhood: A Centennial History of Women of Reform Judaism fills a void in the study of women’s philanthropic organizations, as the contributions of women to the American synagogue has not yet enjoyed sustained attention. Scholars, clergy, and laypeople interested in the history of American Jewish life and the distinctive place of women in American religious history will benefit from the rich insights and perspectives in these essays.

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The 19th century neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen has provided significant underpinnings for understanding Judaism as a religion with a rational and universal character, as a religion of hope for the future. The eight essays selected for Reason and Hope lay out Cohen’s exposition of God as the Uniquely One and explore the universal implications of this idea. The essays are arranged to show how Cohen’s philosophy on monotheism, prophetism, and messianism holds the idea of Israel’s chosenness in tension with its universalism and its goal of creating a community of ethical individuals bearing witness to the unique Oneness of God. Eva Jospe makes Cohen’s thought accessible to readers in English through her translations, notes, and introduction. Her introduction introduces the life of Hermann Cohen, explains key themes and concepts in his work—faith and reason, the “is” and the “ought,” creation and revelation—and summarizes how they relate to the ethical and rational Judaism Cohen espouses. The essays are self-contained, but Jospe traces Cohen’s thought through them in her notes, which identify his roots in Plato and Kant and explore how his ideas interact with those of other Jewish thinkers like Maimoinides and Buber. Her editorial remarks are careful to retain the essence and context of Cohen’s arguments while pointing to the relevance of his thought to contemporary Jewish theology and education. This reprint edition comes more than twenty years after the book’s first publication and remains a valued resource for introducing scholars, students, and lay readers alike to the work of this important Jewish thinker.

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Defining Israel: The Jewish State, Democracy, and the Law is the first book in any language devoted to the controversial passage of Israel's nation-state law. Israel has no constitution, and though it calls itself the Jewish state there is no agreement among Israelis on how that fact should be reflected in the government's laws or by its courts. Since the 1990s a number of civil society groups and legislators have drafted constitutions and proposed Basic Laws with constitutional standing that would clarify what it means for Israel to be a "Jewish and democratic state." Are these bills liberal or chauvinist? Are they a defense of the Knesset or an attack on the independence of the courts? Is their intention democratic or anti-democratic? The fight over the nation-state law-whether to have one and what should be in it-toppled the 19th Knesset's governing coalition and, even after its passage on July 29, 2018, remains a point of contention among Israel's lawmakers and increasingly the Israeli public. Defining Israel brings together influential scholars, journalists, and politicians, observers and participants, opponents and proponents, Jews and Arabs, all debating the merits and meaning of Israel's nation-state law. Together with translations of each draft law, the final law, and other key documents, the essays and sources in Defining Israel are essential to understand the ongoing debate over what it means for Israel to be a Jewish and democratic state.

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Hebrew Union College Annual is the journal of the Hebrew Union College. Published annually, it is an anthology of scholarly articles concerning Jewish history, religion and culture from antiquity to the present. The Annual publishes scholarly treatments of all aspects of Jewish Studies in all eras, from antiquity to the contemporary world. It particularly encourages longer studies and welcomes the publication of primary sources in most European and Semitic languages, as long as they entail commentary and are translated.

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In this volume, students of beloved teacher B. Barry Levy come together to honor his erudition, superb pedagogy, kindness, and verve, with a collection of essays that reflect Levy's wide range of interest and expertise. Levy, sensitive to the meaning of a text for its original and intended audience, but also to how that meaning changes and develops over the course of years of interpretation, gave his students the broadest education in the evolving context of biblical study. This expansive focus is evident in the essays included in this book. From a study of astronomical observations in the ancient Near East, to an exploration of the excesses of obedience and sacrifice as recounted in the stories of Abraham and Isaac and the Buddhist Vessantara Jataka, from Talmud, to modern Bibles for children, to the evolution of the Dead Sea Scrolls from text and artifact to sacred object, To Fix Torah in Their Hearts is a diverse and engaging collection, of value to scholars and general readers alike.

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Twentieth century Hebrew poetry engages the Bible in an ongoing battle. Modern iconoclastic Hebrew poets fight for their independence from biblical traditions, and they do so by practicing a form of subversive midrash. The ancient rabbis enjoyed developing innovative midrashic methods that would show the reader how the conclusions were drawn from the text. But the modern Hebrew poet uses a new midrashic method that seeks to neutralize the Bible's sway over modern Israeli life. Despite Israel's political secularism, the biblical traditions still have a significant impact on Israeli society. The poet is forced to contend with the Bible. The revival of the Hebrew language itself, which took place in less than a one-hundred year span, drew upon textual models of old. First among them was the Bible. A Zionist ideology steered that decision since the Bible provided the deed for ownership of the land. Biblical language and traditions reverberate through modern writers both intentionally and unintentionally because the language provides so much opportunity for contact. The poets address and sometimes subvert the biblical tradition through puns, playing with the Hebrew morphology, and intertextuality. Kartun-Blum employs historical, rhetorical, and feminist approaches to illuminate these techniques.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The clothed and adorned body has been at the forefront of Nili S. Fox's scholarship. In her hallmark approach, she draws on theoretical models from anthropology and archaeology, and locates the text within its native cultural environment in conversation with ancient Near Eastern literary and iconographic sources. This volume is a tribute to her, a collection of essays on dress and the body with original research by Fox's students. With the field of dress now garnering the attention of biblical and Ancient Near Eastern scholars alike, this book adds to the growing literature on the topic, demonstrating ways in which both dress and the body communicate cultural and religious beliefs and practices. The body's lived experience is the topic of section one, the body lived. The body and the social construction of identity is discussed in section two, the body cultured, while section three, the body adorned, analyzes the performative nature of dress in the biblical text.

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The divine command to exterminate Amalek--men, women, children, and even animals who have no free will--is what in contemporary terms has been called genocide. Louis Feldman explores how the earliest systematic commentators on the Bible--the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo in his many essays on biblical themes; the mysterious, still unclassified Pseudo-Philo in his Biblical Antiquities; the premier Jewish historian and polymath Josephus in his Jewish Antiquities; and the Rabbis in the Mishnah, Talmud, and other literature-wrestled with the issues involved in this divine command, especially its provision that an entire people must be eternally punished for the misdeeds of their ancestors. Feldman contextualizes his study of Amalek by considering how these ancient commentators relate to other cases where God commands the destruction of whole groups of people: the flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the plague of the first-born Egyptians, and the command to annihilate the Canaanites. He also studies accounts of mass destruction where there was no specific divine commandment-the annihilation of the Hivites because one of them raped Dinah, the annihilation of the nations of Sihon and Og, the complete destruction of the inhabitants of Jericho, and the extermination of the priests of Nob-as well as the challening issue of why God justifies Phinehas's zealotry, which involved transgressing the law to kill a Jew and a non-Jew for their immorality. All of these biblical passages raise difficult questions and provide no simple answers. Feldman shows us how ancient commentators received and struggled with Amalek and other genocide passages: Psuedo-Philo had the fewest problems and is most insistent on interpreting the divine command literally, while Philo turned to allegory to resolve the tensions these passages raised with the principle that the innocent should not suffer for the sins of the guilty, and Josephus was concerned to counter the impression that Jews hate non-Jews. Feldman's study exposes the deep roots of biblical reception in contemporary political and moral issues.

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In 1953, Freud biographer Ernest Jones revealed that the famous hysteric Anna O. was really Bertha Pappenheim (1859-1936), the prolific author, German-Jewish feminist, pioneering social worker, and activist. Elizabeth Loentz directs attention away from the young woman who arguably invented the talking cure and back to Pappenheim and her post-Anna O. achievements. Her writings, especially, reveal her to be one of the most versatile, productive, influential, and controversial Jewish thinkers and leaders of her time. Pappenheim's oeuvre includes stories, plays, poems, prayers, travel literature, letters, essays, speeches, and aphorisms. She translated Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women as well as the Memoirs of Gluckel of Hamelnand other Old Yiddish texts into German. She was discussed as both writer and newsmaker in German-Jewish newspapers of every religious and political affiliation and in German feminist publications. As founder and leader of the League of Jewish Women in Germany and the international League of Jewish Women, she was at the forefront of the campaign to combat human trafficking and forced prostitution. A pioneer of modern Jewish social work, she founded a home for at-risk girls and unwed mothers and advocated on behalf of Jewish women, children, refugees, and immigrants. Her accomplishments are all the more remarkable because she attained them after struggling to recover from the debilitating mental illness chronicled in Freud and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria(1895). Loentz examines how Pappenheim engaged, in words and deeds, with the key political, social, and cultural issues concerning German Jewry in the early decades of the twentieth century: the status of the Yiddish language, Zionism, the conversion epidemic, responses to the plight of Eastern European Jews, and Jewish spirituality. Pappenheim's unique approach to each of these issues balanced allegiances to feminism, the Jewish religion, and German culture. Loentz also explores how biographers and artists have rediscovered Pappenheim, rewritten her life story, and renegotiated her identity.

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Sifra is the earliest extant rabbinic commentary on the book of Leviticus. On a basic level, Sifra presents and validates rabbinic law, but this was done by creating a link between a proposition, halakhic or not, and a scriptural passage. Scholars in the last few decades-including Neusner and Stemberger-have debated Sifra's relationship to Mishnah-Tosefta. Howard Apothaker demonstrates that the set of rules in Dibbura deSinai on topics shared with Mishnah-Tosefta can be understood as an independent body of law. They share a common ancestor but represent different expressions of a similar worldview and with variant purposes. The framers of Sifra sought as their main objective to validate the essentiality, or non-superfluity, of every word of Scripture. Apothaker's analysis of the exegetical and rhetorical characteristics of Sifra in Sifra, Dibbura de Sinai: Rhetorical Formulae, Literary Structures, and Legal Traditions builds on his translation of and commentary on the section of Dibbura deSinai which covers Leviticus 25-27. Analysis of Sifra's highly formalized rhetoric yields insight concerning the general purpose(s) for which the framers created the work.

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How did Jewish women in sixteenth-century Poland learn all the rules, rituals, and customs pertaining to the sexual life of couples within the context of marriage? As in other areas of ritual life that concerned the household, it would seem that the primary source for the education of Jewish women was other women. But rabbinic law dictates that Jewish women who experience uterine bleeding are prohibited from having physical contact of any kind with their husbands, and the intricate laws of niddah (enforced separation) spell out exactly when and under what circumstances physical marital relations, even simple touching, can be resumed. Particularly difficult issues could be addressed only by rabbis or other learned men, since women rarely, if ever, attained the level of rabbinic scholarship necessary to pare the details of these complicated laws. To educate both men and women, but particularly women, in a more systematic and impersonal manner, the young rabbi Benjamin Slonik (ca. 1550-after 1620), who later became one of the leading rabbinic authorities in eastern Europe, harnessed the relatively new technology of printing and published a how-to book for women in the Yiddish vernacular. Seder mitzvot hanashim (The Order of Women's Commandments) illuminates the history of Yiddish printing and public education. But it is also a rare remnant of a direct interface between a member of the rabbinic elite and the laity, especially women. Slonik's text also sheds light on the history of Jewish law, particularly the reception of the Shulhan Arukh, an important legal code that had just been published. This volume makes available the 1585 edition of the Seder mitzvot hanashim in Yiddish and English. Fram sets Slonik's work in its bibliographical and historical contexts, demonstrating its relationship with the Shulhan Arukh, exploring how rabbis opposed formal education for women, considering how upheavals accompanying geographic shifts in the Ashkenazic community help explain how the women's commandments texts came to be used in Poland, and offering a treasure trove of information on the place and roles of women in Polish-Jewish society. Fram thus creates a composite picture of how Slonik, along with other men of his time, perceived the main audience for his work and sought to connect it to contemporary texts.

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Titles have always been conferred on persons both to identify their functions in society and to assign honorary status. In Egypt even more than in Mesopotamia, function-related and honorary titles were so valued that officials and functionaries of varying stations collected the titles accrued in their lifetime and preserved them in a titulary, the ancient equivalent of a resume. Israelites serving at the royal courts in Jerusalem and Samaria or in local administrations also held title, but the sources suggest far fewer of them than their neighbors. Nili Fox analyzes the titles and roles of civil officials and functionaries in Israel and Judah during the monarchy, including key ministers of the central government, regional administrators, and palace attendants. The nineteen titles fall into three categories: status-related titles, function-related titles, and miscellaneous designations that could be held by a variety of officials. Fox sets these Israelite and Judahite titles in their ancient context through extensive study of Egyptian, Akkadian, and Ugaritic records. She also draws upon the corpus of Hebrew epigraphic material, which allows her to explore economic components of state organization such as royal land grants, supply networks, and systems of accounting, which would be impossible to understand on the basis of the Hebrew Bible alone. Fox also treats the widely debated issue of whether Israelite state organization was influenced by foreign models and, if so, how much. The evidence of non-Hebrew sources offers little concrete material to substantiate theories that Israel modeled its government after a foreign prototype, and Fox offers a more finessed approach. Many features of Israelite administration are best explained as basic elements of any monarchic structure in the ancient Near East that developed to satisfy the needs of an evolving local system. Other seemingly foreign features have a long tradition in Canaan and probably were naturally assimilated. Fox recognizes the interconnections between the cultures in the region but emphasizes the need to closely examine the Israelite system with internal evidence.

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In Ars-Prophetica, Haim O. Rechnitzer uncovers and recovers the theological elements within the poetry of four renowned Hebrew-Israeli poets. First and foremost, Rechnitzer introduces major works of modern Hebrew poetry that are viewed as part of the "secular" heritage of the renewed Hebrew-Israeli culture, demonstrating these works' relevance to general theological discourse and to the canon of Mahshevet Israel (Jewish thought). Rechnitzer's readings illuminate the poems' multiplicity of meanings, contextualizing the works not only within biblical sources—a prevalent practice of modern Hebrew reading-writing—but also within an intricate net of texts that present "theological worldviews," such as Heikhalot literature, kabbalah and Hasidism. Thus, Rechnitzer, as he develops a systematic theological interpretation of Hebrew-Israeli poetry, introduces readers to a "new, vibrant, Hebrew-Jewish-Secular Theology." Rechnitzer's insights, and his method, will illuminate the discussion of all poetry that converses openly, or elusively, with Jewish texts.

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Despite its general absence from the Jewish liturgical cycle and its limited place in Jewish practice, the Book of Job has permeated Jewish culture over the last 2,000 years. Job has not only had to endure the suffering described in the biblical book, but the efforts of countless commentators, interpreters, and creative rewriters whose explanations more often than not challenged the protagonist's righteousness in order to preserve Divine justice. Beginning with five critical essays on the specific efforts of ancient, medieval, and modern Jewish writers to make sense of the biblical book, The Book of Job in Jewish Life and Thought concludes with a detailed survey of the place of Job in the Talmud and Midrashic corpus, in medieval biblical commentary, in ethical, mystical, and philosophical tracts, as well as in poetry and creative writing in a wide variety of Jewish languages from around the world from the second to sixteenth centuries.

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To gain an accurate view of medieval Judaism, one must look through the eyes of Jews and their contemporaries. First published in 1938, Jacob Rader Marcus's classic source book on medieval Judaism provides the documents and historical narratives which let the actors and witnesses of events speak for themselves. The medieval epoch in Jewish history begins around the year 315, when the emperor Constantine began enacting disabling laws against the Jews, rendering them second-class citizens. In the centuries following, Jews enjoyed (or suffered under) legislation, either chosen or forced by the state, which differed from the laws for the Christian and Muslim masses. Most states saw the Jews as simply a tolerated group, even when given favorable privileges. The masses often disliked them. Medieval Jewish history presents a picture wherein large patches are characterized by political and social disabilities. Marcus closes the medieval Jewish age (for Western Jewry) in 1791 with the proclamation of political and civil emancipation in France. The 137 sources included in the anthology include historical narratives, codes, legal opinions, martyrologies, memoirs, polemics, epitaphs, advertisements, folk-tales, ethical and pedagogical writings, book prefaces and colophons, commentaries, and communal statutes. These documents are organized in three sections: The first treats the relation of the State to the Jew and reflects the civil and political status of the Jew in the medieval setting. The second deals with the profound influence exerted by the Catholic and Protestant churches on Jewish life and well-being. The final section presents a study of the Jew "at home," with four sub-divisions with treat the life of the medieval Jew in its various aspects. Marcus presents the texts themselves, introductions, and lucid notes. Marc Saperstein offers a new introduction and updated bibliography.

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In this comprehensive final report David Ilan and 12 other contributing authors present the rich finds from the Iron Age I (circa 1200-950 BCE) levels at Tel Dan, located at the headwaters of the Dan tributary of the Jordan River, in the northeastern Hula Valley in northern Israel. The early Iron Age levels at Tel Dan have particular resonance in the light of their perceived association with the biblical account of the migration of the tribe of Dan, described in Judges 18. Much of what is portrayed in this volume is still visible at Tel Dan, in the national park located in the far north of modern-day Israel. The finds described in this volume were gleaned in the course of Avraham Biran's 1966-1999 excavations at the site. The architecture, ceramics, metal, flint, bone and ground stone objects and ecofacts all contribute to the portrayal of a cosmopolitan society that thrived, initially, under Egyptian imperial rule, subsequently forging its own way following the departure of Egyptian hegemony. The early Iron Age levels at Tel Dan show material evidence for the presence of local peoples, Egyptians, Cypriots, Aegeans, and Syrians, who together, negotiated a new identity, as Danites. Illustrated in colour and black & white throughout, and with five plans folded and within a pocket at the back of the volume.

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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.

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Many scholars have focused on contemporary sources pertaining to the Nazi persecution and mass murder of Jews between 1933 and 1945--citing dated documents, newspapers, diaries, and letters--but the sermons delivered by rabbis describing and protesting against the ever-growing oppression of European Jews have been largely neglected. Agony in the Pulpit is a response to this neglect, and to the accusations made by respected figures that Jewish leaders remained silent in the wake of catastrophe. The passages from sermons reproduced in this volume--delivered by 135 rabbis in fifteen countries, mainly from the United States and England--provide important evidence of how these rabbis communicated the ever-worsening news to their congregants, especially on important religious occasions when they had peak attendance and peak receptivity. A central theme is how the preachers related the contemporary horrors to ancient examples of persecution. Did they present what was occurring under Hitler as a reenactment of the murderous oppressions by Pharaoh, Amalek, Haman, Ahasuerus, the Crusaders, the Spanish Inquisition, the Russian Pogroms? When did they begin to recognize and articulate from their pulpits an awareness that current events were fundamentally unprecedented? Was the developing cataclysm consistent with traditional beliefs about God's control of what happened on earth? No other book-length study has presented such abundant evidence of rabbis in all streams of Jewish religious life seeking to rouse and inspire their congregants to full awareness of the catastrophic realities that were taking shape in the world beyond their synagogues.

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Piyyut is the art of Hebrew or Aramaic poetry composed either in place of or as adornments to Jewish statutory prayers. Laura S. Lieber uses the piyyutim of a single poet, Yannai (ca. sixth century C.E.), to introduce readers to this important but largely unfamiliar body of writings. Yannai, the first Hebrew poet to sign his name to his works (by means of an acrostic), influenced Hebrew sacred poetry for centuries beyond his lifespan. He was the first to consistently use true end rhyme, and he was among the first to have written for the weekly service and festivals rather than just particular holidays. As literary works, his poems are as dazzling as they are complex, rich with sound and play, allusion and linguistic beauty. Lieber presents the Hebrew texts of Yannai's 31 extant piyyutim which embellish the Book of Genesis. She translates, annotates, and analyzes these complex poems, which display the poet's transformative treatments of some of the most familiar biblical narratives. She contextualizes these poems and teaches readers how to read and appreciate piyyut by studying Yannai's poetic language and the formal structures of the poems; his exegetical, cultural, and societal importance; and intriguing motifs in Yannai's worldview such as mysticism, holiness, Jewish-Christian relations, and the role of women. Lieber's groundbreaking study is an invitation to those with interests in areas such as liturgical studies, rabbinic literature and targum studies, the early synagogue and its art, Byzantine Christian culture and society, and the history of biblical interpretation to engage with these beautiful and neglected texts and include them in larger intellectual conversations.

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Solomon Bennett Freehof (1892-1990) was one of America's most distinguished, influential, and beloved rabbis. Ordained at Hebrew Union College in 1915, he was of the generation of rabbis from east European immigrant backgrounds who moved Reform Judaism away from its classical form toward a renewed appreciation of traditional practices. Freehof himself was less interested in restoring discarded rituals than in demonstrating how the Reform approach to Jewish religious practice was rooted in the Jewish legal tradition (halakhah). Opposed to any attempt to create a code of Reform practice, he nevertheless called for Reform Judaism to turn to the halakhah, not in order to adhere to codified law, but to be guided in ritual and in all areas of life by its values and its ethical insights. For Reform Jews, Jewish law was to offer "guidance, not governance," and this guidance was to be provided through the writing of responsa, individual rulings based on legal precedent, written by an organized rabbinic authority in response to questions about real-life situations. After World War II, the earlier consensus about what constituted proper observance in a Reform context vanished as the children of east European immigrants flocked to new Reform synagogues in new suburbs, bringing with them a more traditional sensibility. Even before Freehof was named chairman of the Central Conference of American Rabbis Responsa Committee in 1956, his colleagues began turning to him for guidance, especially in the situations Freehof recognized as inevitably arising from living in an open society where the boundaries between what was Jewish and what was not were ambiguous or blurred. Over nearly five decades, he answered several thousand inquiries regarding Jewish practice, the plurality of which concerned the tensions Jews experienced in navigating this open society-questions concerning mixed marriage, Jewish status, non-Jewish participation in the synagogue, conversion, and so on-and published several hundred of these in eight volumes of Reform responsa. In her pioneering study, Friedman analyzes Freehof's responsa on a select number of crucial issues that illustrate the evolution of American Reform Judaism. She also discusses the deeper issues with which the movement struggled, and continues to struggle, in its attempt to meet the ever-changing challenges of the present while preserving both individual autonomy and faithfulness to the Jewish tradition.

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When the Karaites successfully dissociated themselves from the Rabbanite Russian Jews with the creation of the Karaite Religious Consistory in 1837, the result was a schism within Judaism unprecedented since the rise of Christianity. Philip E. Miller sets this event in the context of the history of the Russian Karaites from their origins to the present, focusing on economic and political concerns that led to the schism. The Karaites' separatism shielded them from the horrific fates suffered by the Rabbanites under the tsars, under Hitler, and under Stalin, but it ultimately led to their nearly complete assimilation and disappearance as a people. The central character in Miller's study is Simchah Babovich, a Crimean Karaite whose wealth and prominence enabled him to curry favor with the imperial Russian government. In 1827, Babovich traveled to St. Petersburg on behalf of the Karaite community and petitioned the tsar for exemption from military conscription legislation that applied to all Jews in the realm. Accompanying him on the journey was Joseph Solomon ben Moses Lutski, the leading Karaite religious scholar of Evpatoriia. Lutski's chronicle of the mission, the Iggeret teshu'at Yisrael (Epistle of Israel's Deliverance), is reprinted here as an annotated Hebrew text with English translation. In colorful detail, the Iggeret records the delegation's travel adventures, their activities as guests and tourists in the imperial capital, the swift granting of Babovich's request, and the Karaites' euphoric reaction when the successful petitioners arrived back home in Evpatoriia.

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Since the period in which the Jewish liturgy was standardized, there has hardly been a time when it was not somehow in a state of flux. Eric L. Friedland explores the countless ways that the Siddur, Mahzor, and Haggadah have been adjusted, amplified, or transformed so as to faithfully mirror modern Jews' understanding of themselves, their place in society, and their sancta. In the tradition of liturgologists such as Elbogen, Idelsohn, and Petuchowski, Friedland focuses on latter-day adaptations of the prayerbook, giving proper recognition to the recent concern for intellectual integrity, cultural congruity, group and individual self-redefinition, and honest speech in Jewish prayer. The prayerbooks themselves are witnesses to innovation in the Jewish liturgy. From David Einhorn's Olath Tamid (Baltimore 1855), to Isaac Mayer Wise's Minhag Amerika (Cincinnati 1857) and Marcus Jastrow's 1873 revision of Benjamin Szold's Abodath Israel (Baltimore 1864), Friedland analyzes evidence of creativity in British and American Reform Jewish liturgy. Various rites for the Days of Awe provide a particularly accurate glimpse of how Jewish communities here and abroad experience the sacred, consider eternal mysteries, and communicate with God. Friedland also sets the Reform Gates of Prayer in historical and denominational perspective by considering it alongside the Reconstructionist Kol Haneshamah, and the Israeli Progressive HaAvodah shebaLev. The state and direction of liturgical change emerges from a survey of commonalities and divergences in nineteenth- and twentieth-century prayerbooks in terms of Sephardic and mystical influences, attitudes toward the messianic hope, and collective sentiments of forgiveness or vengeance toward Israel's enemies. Liturgical approaches to the commemoration of the Ninth of Av suggest that even an ancient fast day can recover relevance, credibility, and authenticity for Liberal Jews in the postmodern era.

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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 kilometers 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..

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From a manuscript that was lost for more than half a century comes new information about one of the greatest Jewish communities of all time. The court diaries of Rabbi Hayyim Gundersheim (d. 1795), a member of the rabbinic court of late eighteenth-century Frankfurt, shed light on daily life in the Judengasse("Jewish lane"), home to over 3,000 people, including Meyer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the famous banking family. Familial quarrels, squabbles between neighbors, legal proceedings over business deals gone sour, real estate transactions, and other disputes brought before the rabbinic court offer a window onto the world of daily life in the Frankfurt Jewish community during the waning years of the city's ghetto. Rabbi Gundersheim's court diaries are more than just a prism through which to view daily life. A Window on Their World provides a transcription of over 200 cases that were brought before the rabbinic court between 1773 and 1794. Readers now have access to records that reveal not just the workings of the Jewish community but also the place of Jewish tradition in the culture. The transcription of each case in the original Hebrew is accompanied by an English language summary. Edward Fram has also prepared comprehensive indices of the names of all individuals mentioned in the court diaries as well as a glossary of non-Hebrew terms. Pertinent documents from the Frankfurt pinqas, or community record book, have also been provided in order to give readers a more complete picture. Fram's introduction to the diary includes a biographical background, an outline of Jewish legal autonomy in the early modern period, and a discussion of the importance of court documents as legal and historical sources. The volume is an indispensible source for anyone interested in European Jewish culture on the eve of the Enlightenment.

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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.

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