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Ruth Calderon has recently electrified the Jewish world with her teachings of talmudic texts. In this volume, her first to appear in English, she offers a fascinating window into some of the liveliest and most colorful stories in the Talmud. Calderon rewrites talmudic tales as richly imagined fictions, drawing us into the lives of such characters as the woman who risks her life for a sister suspected of adultery; a humble schoolteacher who rescues his village from drought; and a wife who dresses as a prostitute to seduce her pious husband in their garden. Breathing new life into an ancient text, A Bride for One Night offers a surprising and provocative read, both for anyone already intimate with the Talmud and for anyone interested in one of the most influential works of Jewish literature.
Rabbi Hanina feels sorry for himself when he becomes wet, cold and muddy from the rain. But when he goes inside his house—where he is warm, dry and happy—he feels selfish, knowing the parched earth needs the rain, and he learns a lesson about his place in the world.
A myth exists that Jews can embrace the cultural components of Judaism without appreciating the legal aspects of the Jewish tradition. This myth suggests that law and culture are independent of one another. In reality, however, much of Jewish culture has a basis in Jewish law. Similarly, Jewish law produces Jewish culture. Roberta Rosenthal Kwall develops and applies a cultural analysis paradigm to the Jewish tradition that departs from the understanding of Jewish law solely as the embodiment of Divine command.
“Extraordinarily rich, lively and illuminating. ... [The editors] have succeeded magnificently in achieving their goal.” —Jewish Journal The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been a period of mass production and proliferation of Jewish ideas, and have witnessed major changes in Jewish life and stimulated major debates. The New Jewish Canon offers a conceptual roadmap to make sense of such rapid change. With over eighty excerpts from key primary source texts and insightful corresponding essays by leading scholars, on topics of history and memory, Jewish politics and the public square, religion and religiosity, and identities and communities, The New Jewish Canon promises to start conversations from the seminar room to the dinner table. The New Jewish Canon is both text and textbook of the Jewish intellectual and communal zeitgeist for the contemporary period and the recent past, canonizing our most important ideas and debates of the past two generations; and just as importantly, stimulating debate and scholarship about what is yet to come.
Tuning Out Blackness fills a glaring omission in U.S. and Latin American television studies by looking at the history of Puerto Rican television. In exploring the political and cultural dynamics that have shaped racial representations in Puerto Rico’s commercial media from the late 1940s to the 1990s, Yeidy M. Rivero advances critical discussions about race, ethnicity, and the media. She shows that televisual representations of race have belied the racial egalitarianism that allegedly pervades Puerto Rico’s national culture. White performers in blackface have often portrayed “blackness” in local television productions, while black actors have been largely excluded. Drawing on intervi...
Jewish organizational life is inundated with publications on organizational change and effective leadership, but from mutually exclusive sources: business and organizational studies, on the one hand; and Jewish studies, on the other. One addresses leadership but not the religious soul. The other speaks from its Jewish soul but is only secondarily engaged in the study of leadership. More Than Managing thoughtfully combines both to be immediately applicable to Jewish organizational life.Inspired by thirty years of pioneering work by retail giant Leslie Wexner’s philanthropic focus on Jewish leadership, More Than Managing brings together diverse and remarkable thinkers to address challenges f...
Freud’s relationship with his Judaism – his by virtue of his self- description as a “fanatical Jew” – was framed by two of his convictions. He was centered both by his passionate cultural affiliation and by his atheism. Within these internal guideposts lay a Jewish life layered by tensions, pleasures, and identifications. His creation – psychoanalysis – has labored to honor its Jewish influences. Recent studies of these insights have contributed to the current interest in listening more carefully to the individual meanings of analysands’ religious life.This lecture series was designed to introduce to the public both the similarities and the differences between the psychoanalytic and the Jewish world views. The contributors are among the thought leaders of our generation who work at the interface of the intrapsychic and religious states of mind. We learn how each has influenced the other and perhaps how each has been enriched by the other.A tour de force delving into the influence of Freud’s Jewish roots on the development of psychoanalysis.
A wide-ranging, razor sharp exploration of the debate between optimism and pessimism throughout the history of philosophy, author Mor Segev's The Value of the World and of Oneself considers the question of existence and recounts what our greatest thinkers--Aristotle, Maimonides, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Camus--have made of the matter.
Who is a Jew in 21st century America? Is membership in “the tribe” defined by shared religious beliefs? Common ethnic backgrounds? Familiar holiday practices? Similar tastes in culture and cuisine? And what do the widely varying answers to those questions mean for the future of the American Jewish community? In 2013, at the suggestion of Jewish Daily Forward editor Jane Eisner, the Pew Research Center completed the most comprehensive and credible survey ever conducted among American Jews. Its findings were nothing short of astounding to communal leaders, demographers and individual Jews alike. In this new e-book, the venerable Forward – the premier source of news, analysis and cultural coverage that matters to the American Jewish community – explains and analyzes the Pew report, with contributions from its own journalists and a diverse selection of other experts. Startling, sobering and sometimes even amusing, this accessible collection of articles and essays will inform and enlarge the critical conversation among American Jews about their communal future. Includes a helpful discussion guide for educators, community and book groups, and leaders of Jewish organizations.
This book provides a timely new transnational lineage of Jewish feminist revolutionary legacies. Using extensive research, deep thinking, and a bold methodology, Marla Brettschneider tousles with a host of anti-colonial, feminist, anti-racist, and queer troublemakers—Jamaica Kincaid, Golda Meir, Hannah Arendt, Frida Kahlo, Gertrude Stein, and Emma Goldman. Brettschneider brings together these feisty women's lives, work, politics, thinking, and art to wrestle with big questions: How can we make our lives, individually and collectively, in our diversity as Jews and in grounded solidarity with others? How do these women bring out otherwise unidentified, unnamed, and underexamined issues in Jewish studies, feminism, politics, and a range of critical theories? Revolutionary Legacies invites Jews, feminists, anti-racists, and all manner of justice seekers to think, and create common cause, with these rabblerousers.