Judaism Books

Between 1920 and 1922, hundreds of members of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement left the defunct Habsburg Monarchy and sailed to Palestine, where a small group of members of the movement established Upper Bitania, one of the communities that laid the...

A Well-Worn Tallis for a New Ceremony is a study of contemporary ultra-Orthodox religiosity in Israel. This book analyzes the ongoing reconstruction of Haredi culture in Israel, a process which has been spurred on by the challenges of modernity, the...

This volume contains fifteen articles, many in Hebrew, by leading scholars. The articles cover a broad range of subjects, from an analysis of biblical narratives as expounded in the midrash and by medieval commentators, through a discussion of...

Jewish custom and ritual, or their Hebrew equivalent, minhag, has intrigued rabbis and scholars for generations. The majority of the rabbinical works devoted to minhag primarily encompass lists of sources and reporting of old and new customs. Some have...

Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Buber were giant thinkers of the twentieth century who made significant contributions to the understanding of religious consciousness and of Judaism. They wrote on various subjects, such as the Bible, the commandments,...

Creating the Chupah assesses the role of Canadian Zionist organizations in the drive for communal unity within Canadian Jewry in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Two strands of Zionism, represented respectively by the Federation of Zionist...

Refusing to accept anything but ever-increasing levels of human responsibility within a religious framework, covenantal thinkers audaciously suggest that the covenant empowers humanity as it binds and inhibits divinity. This is a reformulation of...

Do Not Provoke Providence: Orthodoxy in the Grip of Nationalism deals with the whole complex of relations between the Land of Israel, the Jewish Torah, and the People of Israel from the Pre-Zionist Period until the establishment of the State of Israel...

Rabbi Shimon ben Zemach Duran (1361-1444) was a colorful rabbinic authority in Algiers. In his book, Zohar Harakia, on methods of enumerating the 613 commandments, he summarizes the work of previous authorities on this subject, especially Maimonides and...

Maimonides was one of the greatest Jewish personalities of the Middle Ages: a halakhist par excellence, a great philosopher, a political leader of his community, and a guardian of Jewish rights. In 1180 CE, Maimonides composed his Halakhic magnum opus,...

Both the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud depict a wide range of sorrowful situations tied to every level of society and to the complexities of human behavior and the human condition. The causes and expressions of sorrow amongst the Sages,...

Although Maimonides did not write a running commentary on any book of the Bible, biblical exegesis occupies a central place in his writings, particularly in his Guide of the Perplexed. In this book, Sara Klein-Braslavy offers a collection of essays on...

In Cultures in Collision and Conversation, David Berger addresses three broad themes in Jewish intellectual history: Jewish approaches to cultures external to Judaism and the controversies triggered by this issue in medieval and modern times; the impact...

Democratizing Judaism is a two-part examination of the Reconstructionist philosophy of Mordecai M. Kaplan. Part I is largely devoted to a defense of Kaplan against several serious critics. It also provides new insight into Kaplan's theology through...

Challenging the notion that Jewish mysticism ceased to exist in the Hassidic enclaves of early nineteenth century Europe, Hamutal Bar-Yosef delves into the mystical elements of twentieth-century Israeli literature. Exploring themes such as unity, death,...

Persecution, Polemic, and Dialogue follows the interaction between Jews and Christians through the ages in all its richness, complexity, and diversity. This collection of essays analyzes anti-Semitism, perceptions of the Other, and religious debates in...

A masterful intersection of Bible Studies, Gender Studies, and Rabbinic law, Diane Kriger explores the laws pertaining to female slaves in Jewish law. Comparing Biblical strictures with later Rabbinic interpretations as well as contemporary Greco-Roman...

Over fifty years after the Holocaust, Marion Wyse explores interfaith dialogue between the Jewish and Christian communities and attempts to evaluate what goals these communities have reached and where they now stand. While many painful issues have been...

Founded in 1841, the London-based Jewish Chronicle is the world's oldest continuously circulating Jewish newspaper. Since 2002 its prestigious flagship "Comment" column has been written by Oxford-educated Dr. Geoffrey Alderman, the leading authority on...

This carefully crafted collection of essays, Jewish Thought in Dialogue, offers creative interpretations of major Jewish texts and as well as original treatments of significant issues in Jewish theology and ethics. The collection includes philosophical...

Rituals provide public solutions to some types of life crises. There are crises which beset individuals in modern and post-modern society which are not easily addressed by traditional rituals. However, rites have not disappeared in contemporary society,...

Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra, poet, philosopher, and mathematician, was one of the outstanding personalities produced by medieval Jewry. His chief claim to fame, however, is his commentary on the Bible. The latter is printed in all major editions of the Hebrew...

Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra, poet, philosopher, and mathematician, was one of the outstanding personalities produced by medieval Jewry. His chief claim to fame, however, is his commentary on the Bible. The latter is printed in all major editions of the Hebrew...

The Boldness of a Halakhist analyzes the writings of Rabbi Yechiel Mechel Halevi Epstein (18291908), author of the Arukh Hashulkhan, a bold and unusual approach to Jewish law. Based primarily on the original text of Rabbi Epstein's legal codes and...

Here is a book of spiritual adventure. From the miracle at the Red Sea to the miracle of waking up this morning, this intriguing book introduces young people to a way of spiritual thinking to last a lifetime.Kushner, whose award-winning books have...

Over a career spanning forty years, David G. Dalin has written extensively about the role of American Jews in public life, from the nation's founding, to presidential appointments of Jews, to lobbying for the welfare of Jews abroad, to Jewish prominence...

Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Emmanuel Levinas were amongst the two leading Jewish thinkers to have emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. This book puts in dialogue these two titanic figures, particularly within the framework of their respective...

This book is a collection of two dozen essays published over the past four decades on American Jewish history and culture. They discuss the role that Jews have played in American culture, sports, politics, business, and religion, as well as the nature of...

Isaac's Fear is a wide-ranging study of a Hebrew encyclopedia of Judaism by Isaac Lampronti, a rabbi and physician from eighteenth-century Ferrara, in Italy; this is the first encyclopedia of Judaism, with entries on thought and praxis. The book's eight...

The ayei Adam, an abridged code of Jewish law, was written by Rabbi Avraham Danzig (1748-1820) and was first published in 1810. This code spread quickly throughout Europe, and the demand for it required a second publishing which the author printed in...

This book delves into creative renditions of key aspects of Jewish Mysticism in Latin American literature, film, and art from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. It introduces the work of Latin American authors and artists who have been...

This book illustrates the two clear trends in antisemitism today: "old" antisemitism, based in religious and racist prejudices, which has largely disappeared from public discourse in the West after the defeat of Nazi Germany, but has resurfaced in the...

This is the first study of historical attempts by animal welfare groupsto ban the Jewish method of slaughter (shechita). It details cases from Australia, Canada, England, Scotland, and the United States, many for the first time, in which anti-animal...

Two basic approaches have shaped the identity discourse since antiquity. The essentialist view assumes that a person's identity does exist "somewhere," and the discourse on identity is an attempt to disclose it. People do not create their identity, they...

Publicly or secretly, traditional Jews increasingly doubt the historical reliability of the Torah. Here, Gellman provides an "old-fashioned" Jewish theology for accepting the contemporary critique of Torah and history. Gellman presents an outline of the...

Learning to Read Talmud is the first book-length study of how teachers teach and how students learn to read Talmud.Through a series of studies conducted by scholars of Talmud in classrooms that range from seminaries to secular universities and with...

The widespread view is that prayer is the center of religious existence and that understanding the meaning of prayer requires that we assume God is its sole destination. This book challenges this assumption and, through a phenomenological analysis of the...

How can we characterize the uniqueness of poetic language? How can we describe the evasive enchantment of the paradox that is created by both universal and autobiographical expression? How does ordinary language function aesthetically while motivating...

This book discusses the development of practices associated with customs and artifacts used in Jewish ceremonies when viewed from the vantage of anthropological studies. It can also function as a guide to practical halakhah. The author examines topics...

This book analyzes the exceptional normative impact of R. Meir Simcha Hacohen's Biblical commentary, Meshekh Hokhmah, and his halakhic commentary, Or Sameah. It examines the reliance of the poskim on R. Meir Simcha's innovations and hermeneutic methods...

This volume takes a fresh view of the role representations of the past play in the construction of Jewish identity. Its central theme is that the study of how Jews construct the past can help in interpreting how they understand the nature of their...

Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra's commentary is one of the great biblical exegeses produced by medieval Jewry. His commentary accompanies almost every version of the Rabbinic Bible, and his influence on biblical studies continues to this very day. Ibn Ezra sought...

Conflict and change are fundamental elements of social reality and of the Jewish historical experience. This collection presents the work of a distinguished group of scholars exploring the themes of social, political, religious, intellectual, and...

Religious-Zionism developed in Israel as an attempt to combine halakhic commitment with the values of modernity, two networks of meaning not easily reconciled. This book presents a study of the discourse on the body and sexuality within religious-Zionism...

Eliezer Schweid's career as philosopher, scholar, educator and public intellectual has spanned the history of the State of Israel from the pre-war Yishuv period to the present. In these essays he recalls his formative years in the Zionist youth and the...

This book contains fifteen original papers covering, a broad spectrum of topics in Jewish demography and identity, considering both Diaspora communities and the population of Israel. While most of the papers make use of quantitative data, some base...

In recent generations, the Muslim and Arab world has been suffused with publications on the subject of the People of Israel, its Torah, and this people's affinity to the Land of Israel. Most of these publications are tendentious, written with a hostile...

The Mishna Berura is, without a doubt, Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan's greatest and most complex contribution to the canon of Orthodox Jewish Law; it is a singular work that synthesizes Jewish traditions, laws, and mores into a practical halakhic guide to...