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The return of Jews to their ancestral land can be seen as an act of imagination. A new country, citizenship, language, and institutions needed to be imagined in order to be created. The arts, too, have contributed to this act of envisioning and shaping the Jewish state. By examining artistic representations of Israel, Imagined Israel(s): Representations of the Jewish State in the Arts explores the ways in which the Israel imagined abroad and the one conjured within the country intersect, offering a space for the co-existence of sociopolitical, cultural, and ideological differences and tensions.
Tradition, History, and Practice
The contributions in Jews and Health: Tradition, History, Practice examine the significance of the preservation of physical, mental, and spiritual health in the Jewish tradition and in Jewish societies from ancient to modern times from multiple thematic and methodological perspectives. The authors -- Carmen Caballero Navas, Maria Diemling, William Friedman, Catherine Hezser, Magdaléna Jánošíková, Reuven Kiperwasser, Katherine E. Southwood, Irit Offer Stark, and Nimrod Zinger -- deal with definitions and representations of health in biblical, Jewish Hellenistic, rabbinic, medieval, and (early) modern Jewish texts and investigate practical measures to restore health after public and personal disasters. The focus on health distinguishes this volume from earlier works on Jewish medicine and makes it relevant for contemporary discussions on health maintenance and recuperation.
This quantitative study of Piotrków Trybunalski traces the evolution of the population in the typical early modern semi-agrarian town in which the majority of activity was concentrated in the Jewish suburbs into a provincial capital in Congress Poland. Through the use of longitudinal aggregations and family reconstruction it explores fertility, mortality, and marriage patterns from the early nineteenth century, when civil records were introduced, until the Holocaust, revealing key differences as well as striking similarities between local Jews and non-Jews. The example of Piotrków set in a broader European context highlights variations in the pre-transitional demography of Ashkenazi Jewry and lack of universal model describing the “traditional” or “eastern European” Jewish family.
Editor / Translator:
Writing in the late 19th century, Mózes Salamon, rabbi of a small Hungarian community, hoped to convince his fellow rabbis to recognize women as equally privileged members of the People Israel. The result was his The Path of Moses: A Scholarly Essay on the Case of Women in Religious Faith, a ground-breaking enquiry into the causes of women’s exclusion from most of Judaism’s religious practices. Predating contemporary feminism, it gave early expression to ideas found in today’s religious feminist critique of women’s role in Judaism, thus undermining attempts to dismiss those ideas as shallowly mimicking fashionable secular opinion. The Path of Moses is here published for the first time in English, accompanied by the Hebrew original, an introduction, and commentary.
Author:
This book deals with how, starting in the 1960s, immigrant groups in Israel constructed their ethnic identity by reviving their ethnic festivals and turning them into part of Israeli society. For the immigrants, these festivals serve as a collective “definitional ceremony,” with an intersection of ethnicity, culture, and identity. They also help them to develop cultural and religious syncretism. The discussion of their social and political leaders’ ethnic activism provides important insights about the ways in which immigrant leaders employ their ethnic tradition as a resource for mobilizing cultural, social, and political capital that will facilitate their penetration of the cultural mainstream.
Volume Editors: and
This Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion contributes cases of encounters, diversities and distances to an emerging Jewish-Muslim Studies field. The scholarly essays address both discourses about and lived experiences of minorities in contemporary French, German and UK cities. The authors explore how particular modes of governance and secularism shape individual and collective identities while new technologies re-make interfaith encounters. This volume shows that Middle Eastern and North African pasts and presents weigh on European realities, examines how the pull of Jewish intellectual history is felt by a new generation of Muslim scholars and activists, and uncovers how Orthodox communities negotiate living side by side.
This book is the only comprehensive treatment in any language of a rather “exotic” Balkan Jewish community. It places the Jewish community of Bosnia and Herzegovina into the context of the Jewish world, but also of the world within which it existed for around five hundred years under various empires and regimes. The Bosnian Jews might have remained a mostly unknown community to the rest of the world had it not played a unique role within the Bosnian Wars of the early 1990s, providing humanitarian aid to its neighbor Serbs, Croats, and Muslims.

Watch Francine Friedman's presentation on The Jews of Bosnia and Herzegovina
In Johannine Social Identity Formation after the Fall of the Jerusalem Temple Christopher Porter reads the Fourth Gospel through the lens of social identity theory as means of reconciling the social dislocation and trauma of the destruction of the Jerusalem temple. Analysing the Fourth Gospel in conversation with other temple-removed texts of Qumran, Philo, and Josephus the gospel’s intent to renegotiate cultic life without the temple can be seen. Through this analysis it is argued that the Fourth Gospel primarily functions as an intra-mural Jewish text, attempting to negotiate the formation of a Jesus-follower social identity in direct continuity with earlier Jewish shared social narratives. Finally, this work reviews the Johannine Community as an outcome of the Gospel identity formation.
The Story of an Ethiopian Manuscript Found in Jerusalem (1904)
Around 1900 the small Ethiopian community in Jerusalem found itself in a desperate struggle with the Copts over the Dayr al-Sultan monastery located on the roof of the Holy Sepulchre. Based on a profoundly researched, impassioned and multifaceted exploration of a forgotten manuscript, this book abandons the standard majority discourse and approaches the history of Jerusalem through the lens of a community typically considered marginal. It illuminates the political, religious and diplomatic affairs that exercised the city, and guides the reader on a fascinating journey from the Ethiopian highlands to the Holy Sepulchre, passing through the Ottoman palaces in Istanbul.

Have a look inside the book