Judaism Books

Jewish religious practice has been transformed by the Kabbalists of Safed in the sixteenth century. They brought new meaning and importance to many Biblical and rabbinic commandments and created new rituals that have become central practices for Jews of...

Since World War II, the sub-Carpathian Mountain region once known as Maramarosh has remained "Judenrein" (free of Jews). Jewish Maramarosh lives on, however, through the contributions to scholarship and humanity of Maramarosh Holocaust survivors and...

Representation of the religious sector is a new phenomenon in modern Israeli literature, emerging from a diversification of Israeli culture that began in the 1970s. Barbara Landress here explores the intricacies of fiction about Orthodox women in...

Jerome Gellman presents a new theology of the Jews as the Chosen People, addressing self-serving ethnocentric supremacy, cultural isolation, and defamation of religions other than Judaism. This book is traditional in taking chosenness and the truth of...

Neil Gillman has been a part of the JTS community for over 50 years as a student, administrator and member of the faculty. His most enduring contribution as a scholar and a teacher has been a renewed focus on the importance of theological reflection in...

Are there theoretical grounds for tolerance in the classical Jewish tradition? Is human autonomy endorsed by Judaism? What is the range of attitudes toward pleasure that has found expression in Jewish sources? What does Maimonides have to say about joy,...

Throughout history, Judaism has been under attack by other religions, attacks which strengthened the identification of the group as a whole. Modern challenges, however, are coming from different directions, and are producing different results. Jewish...

Asher Ginsberg (1856-1927), also known as Ahad Ha-Am, was a prominent pre-state Zionist thinker and considered the founder of Cultural Zionism, fighting for what he described as "a Jewish state and not merely a state of Jews." This 1912 collection of...

This groundbreaking book was among the most important of those that presented the teachings of Maimonides, as represented by his many published works, as a unified whole, thus bringing about a renaissance in the study of this seminal scholar. The author,...

The life of meditation is much more than the act of sitting for half an hour or forty-five minutes and looking inward. It is a whole way of life. Through meditation we learn to live in a heightened awareness and walk at all times in the presence of God...

This comprehensive how-to guide to the theory and practice of Jewish wilderness spirituality unravels the mystery of Judaism's connection to the natural world and offers ways for you to enliven and deepen your spiritual life through wilderness experience...

SHARED DREAMS brings to life the impressive, surprising, and long-neglected history of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s efforts in support of the Jewish community. This is a story that sheds new light on the commitment and the relationship between the...

The Hebrew Bible is a philosophical testament. Abraham, the first biblical philosopher, calls out to the world in God's name exactly as Plato calls out in the name of the Forms.Abraham comes forward as a critic of pagan thought about, specifically,...

Faith and History in the Old Testament was first published in 1963. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press...

This book presents a radical new interpretation of Britain's Chief Rabbis from Nathan Adler to Immanuel Jakobovits. It examines the theologies of the Chief Rabbis and seeks to reveal and explain their impact on the religious life of Anglo-Jewry.Elton...

Completed shortly before Hamas carried out its barbaric October massacre,Hate Speech and Academic Freedomtakes up issues that have consequently gained new urgency in the academy worldwide. It is the first book to ask what impact antisemitism has had on...

Drawing from diverse multilingual sources, Krzemie delves into Solomon Dubno's life (17381813), unraveling complexities of the Haskalah movement's ties to Eastern European Jewish culture. Dubno, a devout Polish Jew and adept Hebrew grammarian, played a...

A Winner of the 2024Association for Jewish Studies' Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Awardtestimony to the human spirit and determination.The volume includes eight chapters, each built around one responsumfrom one of the great halakhic authorities...

End of Days is both a meditation on Jewish morality in the age of Israeli Jewish power, and a cri du coeur by an Orthodox Israeli Jew, a former combat officer in the IDF, for Israelis to look into the Jewish religious ethical tradition for an alternative...

In light of the October 7th massacre of fourteen hundred Israeli and American Jews at the hands of the savage terrorists of Hamas, and the brazen tsunami of antisemitism that has been overtaking the media and college campuses, it's now time to fight back...

Emet le-Ya'akov comprises a collection of essays celebrating the career and achievements of Rabbi Dr. Jacob J. Schacter, who has served the American and international Jewish community with distinction in his roles as a synagogue rabbi, university...

Many Jewish groups of late antiquity assumed that they were obligated to observe the Divine Law. This book attempts to study the various rationales offered by these groups to explain the authority that the Divine Law had over them. Second Temple groups...

Nationalism's global resurgence has upended societies. With the rise of the Polish nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party, and American Jewry's swift reaction to its law punishing people who allege Polish complicity in Holocaust crimes, both sides have...

This book demonstrates how the Russian thought and literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries influenced Jewish thought and Hebrew literature. Through a comparative analysis of an extensive corpus of writings by renowned Russian and Jewish...

Jewish Culture and Creativity honors the wide-ranging scholarship of Prof. Michael Fishbane with contributions of his students on subjects that cover the gamut of Jewish studies, from biblical and rabbinic literature to medieval and modern Jewish...

A groundbreaking work on spirituality and creativity.The Place of All Possibility is a paradigm-shifting work that reframes the whole of Torah as a contemporary guidebook for creativity. Drawing from the deep well of Jewish sacred texts and the radical...

InWar Against the Jews: How to End Hamas Barbarism,Alan Dershowitz-#1 New York Timesbestselling author and one of America's most respected legal scholars-explains why the horrific attack of Oct 7 and Israel's just response changes everything. It has...

InWar on Woke: Why the New McCarthyism Is More Dangerous Than the Old,Alan Dershowitz-#1 New York Timesbestselling author and one of America's most respected legal scholars-warns of the danger to the future of civil liberties and equality in America.Alan...

A groundbreaking new account of the writing of the Hebrew BibleWho wrote the Bible? Its books have no bylines. Tradition long identified Moses as the author of the Pentateuch, with Ezra as editor. Ancient readers also suggested that David wrote the...

This book is conceivably the first time that a halachically-informed Jew offers a full picture of his life with the trials, tribulations, and difficulties that he encountered. It also describes the difficulties that rabbis and other Jewish religious...

When we look to the Bible for role models in our daily discipleship, we tend to think of Noah's obedience and David's bravery. Limping With God: Jacob and the Old Testament Guide to Messy Discipleship posits that we can also look to Jacob.Jacob seems to...

Reading the Old Testament can seem like exploring an old, mysterious mansion, packed with of all sorts of strange rooms. The creation room, vast and sublime. The exodus room, with hardhearted pharaohs and dried-up seas. The war room, with bloody swords...

Unveiling Mercy will do just that-unveil how the mercy of God in the Messiah is spoken of from the very opening Hebrew word of the Bible, all the way to the closing chapter of Malachi. By the end of the year, you will have entered the Old Testament...

A timely, progressive collection of essays on the Jewish relationship to Zionism and exile.What is exile? What is diaspora? What is Zionism? Jewish identity today has been shaped by prior generations' answers to these questions, and the future of Jewish...

With the publication of his runaway bestseller Kosher Sex, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach gained instant fame as a sage and savvy commentator on public and private life. Now he turns his outspoken energy and vast erudition to the core teachings of Judaism itself...

Hebrew University Professor Emeritus and Israel Prize recipient Eliezer Schweid (1929-2022) is widely regarded as one of the greatest historians of Jewish thought of our era. In Siddur Hatefillah, he probes the Jewish prayer book as a reflection of...

Robert Eisen attributes the surprising success of Jews in the modern world to a religious culture that, over the centuries, prepared them to flourish.In Jews, Judaism, and Success, Robert Eisen attempts to solve a long-standing mystery that has...

Idolatry, or its Hebrew equivalent Avodah Zarah is a fundamental feature of a Jewish view of other religions. All religions must pass the test of whether they are compliant with a Jewish view of religions as being free from the worship of another God...

Translated for the first time in English, Lev Levanda's brilliant coming-of-age story of Russian Jewish students on the cusp of modernityin their struggle against religious chauvinism and an oppressive government.Despite being Russia's best Jewish writer...

Jewish law forbids carrying objects between private or public areas on the Sabbath. However, rabbinic authorities deemed carrying permissible within a physical enclosure called aneruv. This book explores the rabbinic debates surrounding the creation of...

The 13th volume of the Archive of Jewish History includes selected chapters from the memoirs of Boris Gershun, a prominent lawyer in the early 20th century; memoirs of Anna Shoichet, whose "autobiography" covers the first half of the last century; and...

British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks now Baron Sacks of Aldgate in the City of London launched his tenure of office in 1991 with the aim of an inclusivist Decade of Jewish Renewal. Within a few years, fulfilling his installation prediction that 'I will...

Concealed for two centuries and known only to a select individual in each generation, the Scroll of Secrets is the hidden Messianic vision of R. Nachman of Breslav. Despite its being written in an encoded language, with acronyms and abbreviations, after...

Jewish Religion after Theology ponders one of the most intriguing shifts in modern Jewish thought: from a metaphysical and theological standpoint toward a new manner of philosophizing based primarily on practice. Different chapters study this great shift...

Classical Judaism imagined the situation of the people of Israel to be unique among the nations of the earth in three aspects. The nations lived in unclean lands, contaminated by corpses and redolent of death. They themselves were destined to die without...

The Wisdom of Love strives to challenge the discrepancy between the way source texts relate to love and the way they are perceived to do so, introducing readers to the extensive, profound, and significant treatment of love in the Jewish canon. This is a...

Religious Zionism is a major component of contemporary Israeli society and politics. The author reviews the history of religious Zionism from both a historical and ideological-theological perspective. His basic assumption is that religious Zionism cannot...

The Horizontal Society is an exposition of rabbinic thought as exemplified by Maimonides. The thought streams of Greece, Rome, and Christendom serve as a contrast. This work is in the Hebrew rhetorical tradition of melisa. The main text in five...