Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!

You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.

Sign up

Tastes of Faith
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 172

Tastes of Faith

"Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are," wrote the 18th Century French politician and musician Jean Brillat-Savarin, giving expression to long held assumptions about the role of food, taste, and eating in the construction of cultural identities. Foodways—the cultural, religious, social, economic, and political practices related to food consumption and production—unpack and reveal the meaning of what we eat, our tastes. They explain not just our flavor profiles, but our senses of refinement and judgment. They also reveal quite a bit about the history and culture of how food operates and performs in society. More specifically, Jewish food practices and products expose and ...

Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 358

Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America

How Jews think about and work with objects is the subject of this fascinating study of the interplay between material culture and Jewish thought. Ken Koltun-Fromm draws from philosophy, cultural studies, literature, psychology, film, and photography to portray the vibrancy and richness of Jewish practice in America. His analyses of Mordecai Kaplan's obsession with journal writing, Joseph Soloveitchik's urban religion, Abraham Joshua Heschel's fascination with objects in The Sabbath, and material identity in the works of Anzia Yezierska, Cynthia Ozick, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth, as well as Jewish images on the covers of Lilith magazine and in the Jazz Singer films, offer a groundbreaking approach to an understanding of modern Jewish thought and its relation to American culture.

Mystery of The Night Café
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 137

Mystery of The Night Café

  • Type: Book
  • -
  • Published: 2009-03-20
  • -
  • Publisher: SUNY Press

Written like a detective story, this book explores the spirituality of one of the world's most beloved artists, Vincent van Gogh, through one of Western art's most mysterious paintings, The Night Café. Done in almost garish colors, the work depicts a late night in a café serving a poorer element of society, and Van Gogh himself saw both destructive forces and gaiety in the work. With author Cliff Edwards, we follow a trail of clues from a Yale art gallery to a neighborhood in Arles, from a novel by Émile Zola to a largely forgotten image of Jesus that hung in Van Gogh's bedroom. We enter the imagination of Van Gogh through the books he read, the art he admired, and the people with whom he identified, and arrive at startling conclusions that include a new and deeply spiritual understanding of a café after midnight and the "night prowlers" who inhabit it.

Killing the Buddha
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 308

Killing the Buddha

Religion & beliefs.

Here and Now
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 228

Here and Now

The emergence of Zionism in the late nineteenth-century and the evolution of Zionist society in Palestine were profoundly influenced by the Hebrew literature of the day. As Todd Hasak-Lowy cogently argues in this book, Hebrew authors wrote with the belief that accurately representing Jewish society—including its history—in their texts would both record the past and establish its future course. Hasak-Lowy traces the tensions between the extraliterary—the historical, social, and political—and the literary—the aesthetic, formal, and stylistic—in Hebrew fiction. Focusing on canonical Hebrew texts by S.Y. Abramovitz,Y. H. Brenner, S.Y. Agnon, and S. Yizhar, the author establishes how their works and the works of other Jewish authors served as the intellectual and political leadership to the not yet fully amalgamated nineteenth-century diaspora.

The Legacy of Liberal Judaism
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 246

The Legacy of Liberal Judaism

Comparing the liberal Jewish ethics of the German-Jewish philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt, this book argues that both espoused a diasporic, worldly conception of Jewish identity that was anchored in a pluralist and politically engaged interpretation of Jewish history and an abiding interest in the complex lived reality of modern Jews. Arendt’s indebtedness to liberal Jewish thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn, Abraham Geiger, Hermann Cohen, and Ernst Cassirer has been obscured by her modernist posture and caustic critique of the assimilationism of her German-Jewish forebears. By reorienting our conception of Arendt as a profoundly secular thinker anchored in twentieth century political debates, we are led to rethink the philosophical, political, and ethical legacy of liberal Jewish discourse.

The Language of the Heart
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 376

The Language of the Heart

In The Language of the Heart, Trysh Travis explores the rich cultural history of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and its offshoots and the larger "recovery movement" that has grown out of them. Moving from AA's beginnings in the mid-1930s as a men's fellowship that met in church basements to the thoroughly commercialized addiction treatment centers of today, Travis chronicles the development of recovery and examines its relationship to the broad American tradition of self-help, highlighting the roles that gender, mysticism, and bibliotherapy have played in that development.

A Life of Meaning
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 502

A Life of Meaning

  • Type: Book
  • -
  • Published: 2017-11-28
  • -
  • Publisher: CCAR Press

Reform Judaism is constantly evolving as we continue to seek a faith that is in harmony with our beliefs and experiences. This volume offers readers a thought-provoking collection of essays by rabbis, cantors, and other scholars who differ, sometimes passionately, over religious practice, experience, and belief. Its goal is to situate Judaism in a contemporary context, and it is uniquely suited for community discussion as well as study groups.

Smoothing the Jew
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 158

Smoothing the Jew

The turn of the nineteenth century in the United States saw the substantial influx of immigrants and a corresponding increase in anti-immigration and nativist tendencies among longer-settled Americans. Jewish immigrants were often the object of such animosity, being at once the object of admiration and anxiety for their perceived economic and social successes. One result was their frequent depiction in derogatory caricatures on the stage and in print. Smoothing the Jew investigates how Jewish artists of the time attempted to “smooth over” these demeaning portrayals by focusing on the first Jewish comic strip published in English, Harry Hershfield’s Abie the Agent. Jeffrey Marx demonstrates how Hershfield created a Jewish protagonist who in part reassured nativists of the Jews’ ability to assimilate into American society while also encouraging immigrants and their children that, over time, they would be able to adopt American customs without losing their distinctly Jewish identity.

The Value of the Particular: Lessons from Judaism and the Modern Jewish Experience
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 391

The Value of the Particular: Lessons from Judaism and the Modern Jewish Experience

  • Type: Book
  • -
  • Published: 2015-04-14
  • -
  • Publisher: BRILL

In this tribute to Steven T. Katz on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Michael Zank and Ingrid Anderson present sixteen original essays written by senior and junior scholars in comparative religion, philosophy of religion, modern Judaism, and theology after the Holocaust, fields of inquiry where Steven Katz made major contributions over the course of his distinguished scholarly career. The authors of this volume, specialists in Jewish history, especially the modern experience, and Jewish thought from the Bible to Buber, offer theoretical and practical observations on the value of the particular. Contributions range from Tim Knepper’s reevaluation of the ineffability discourse to the particulars of the Settlement Cookbook, examined by Nora Rubel as an American classic.