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With scrupulous attention to landmark poetic texts and to educational and critical discourse in early 20th-century Palestine, Miryam Segal traces the emergence of a new accent to replace the Ashkenazic or European Hebrew accent in which almost all modern Hebrew poetry had been composed until the 1920s. Segal takes into account the broad historical, ideological, and political context of this shift, including the construction of a national language, culture, and literary canon; the crucial role of schools; the influence of Zionism; and the leading role played by women poets in introducing the new accent. This meticulous and sophisticated yet readable study provides surprising new insights into the emergence of modern Hebrew poetry and the revival of the Hebrew language in the Land of Israel.
The Hasidic leader R. Nachman of Braslav (1772–1810) has held a place in the Jewish popular imagination for more than two centuries. Some see him as the (self-proclaimed) Messiah, others as the forerunner of modern Jewish literature. Existing studies struggle between these dueling readings, largely ignoring questions of aesthetics and politics in his work. A Permanent Beginning lays out a new paradigm for understanding R. Nachman's thought and writing, and, with them, the beginnings of Jewish literary modernity. Yitzhak Lewis examines the connections between imperial modernization processes in Eastern Europe at the turn of the eighteenth century and the emergence of "modern literature" in ...
Dan Miron—widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on modern Jewish literatures—begins this study by surveying and critiquing previous attempts to define a common denominator unifying the various modern Jewish literatures. He argues that these prior efforts have all been trapped by the need to see these literatures as a continuum. Miron seeks to break through this impasse by acknowledging discontinuity as the staple characteristic of modern Jewish writing. These literatures instead form a complex of independent, yet touching, components related through contiguity. From Continuity to Contiguity offers original insights into modern Hebrew, Yiddish, and other Jewish literatures, including a new interpretation of Franz Kafka's place within them and discussions of Sholem Aleichem, Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, Akhad ha'am, M. Y. Berditshevsky, Kh. N. Bialik, and Y. L. Peretz.
To Overcome Oneself offers a novel retelling of the emergence of the Western concept of "modern self," demonstrating how the struggle to forge a self was enmeshed in early modern Catholic missionary expansion. Examining the practices of Catholics in Europe and New Spain from the 1520s through the 1760s, the book treats Jesuit techniques of self-formation, namely spiritual exercises and confessional practices, and the relationships between spiritual directors and their subjects. Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic were folded into a dynamic that shaped new concepts of self and, in the process, fueled the global Catholic missionary movement. Molina historicizes Jesuit meditation and narrat...
The interpretations of 'Song of Songs' in the tannaitic midrashim, the first rabbinic scriptural commentaries, employ a form of allegory known as figural interpretation or typology in order to correlate this work to Israel's ideal national narrative represented by events such as the crossing of the sea and the giving of the Torah. This approach to interpreting 'Song of Songs' helped shape rabbinic conceptions of the character and practice of model Israel as well as of an idealised vision of their beloved, God.
A comprehensive comparative study of Jewish law on contemporary reproductive issues from a gender perspective
Could the best thing about religion be the heresies it spawns? Leading intellectuals in interwar Europe thought so. They believed that they lived in a world made derelict by God's absence and the interruption of his call. In response, they helped resurrect gnosticism and pantheism, the two most potent challenges to the monotheistic tradition. In God Interrupted, Benjamin Lazier tracks the ensuing debates about the divine across confessions and disciplines. He also traces the surprising afterlives of these debates in postwar arguments about the environment, neoconservative politics, and heretical forms of Jewish identity. In lively, elegant prose, the book reorients the intellectual history o...
In From Metaphysics to Midrash, Shaul Magid explores the exegetical tradition of Isaac Luria and his followers within the historical context in 16th-century Safed, a unique community that brought practitioners of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam into close contact with one another. Luria's scripture became a theater in which kabbalists redrew boundaries of difference in areas of ethnicity, gender, and the human relation to the divine. Magid investigates how cultural influences altered scriptural exegesis of Lurianic Kabbala in its philosophical, hermeneutical, and historical perspectives. He suggests that Luria and his followers were far from cloistered. They used their considerable skills to weigh in on important matters of the day, offering, at times, some surprising solutions to perennial theological problems.
Singing the Land: Hebrew Music and Early Zionism in America examines the proliferation and use of popular Hebrew Zionist music amongst American Jewry during the first half of the twentieth century. This music—one part in a greater process of instilling diasporic Zionism in American Jewish communities—represents an early and underexplored means of fostering mainstream American Jewish engagement with the Jewish state and Hebrew national culture as they emerged after Israel declared its independence in 1948. This evolutionary process brought Zionism from being an often-polemical notion in American Judaism at the turn of the twentieth century to a mainstream component of American Jewish life...
In this book the author thoroughly examines the pentateuchal elohistic source, its structural unity and its relationship to the yahwistic source. His conclusions differ considerably from the accepted paradigm in the following ways: 1) In contrast to current scholarly opinions, it is assumed that E is the first basic pentateuchal source and that it predates J. J functions as E’s first supplementary redactor – much as F. M. Cross, among others, conceived of P’s redaction of J. 2) The name “Elohim” is used exclusively by the elohistic source even after Exodus 3 while the verses in Exodus 3 revealing Yahweh’s name can be shown to be later additions. 3) Instead of the fragmentary source described by scholars, this study demonstrates the literary unity of E.