With amazing literary sensitivity, Zornberg ingeniously breathes new life into Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac, Jacob and Esau, Rachel, and Joseph. The author's vibrant spirit, charming personality, and infectious enthusiasm for the Bible draw the reader into the search for meaning where real life and the biblical story intersect. The Beginning Of Desire imaginatively interweaves biblical, rabbinic, and literary sources into a colorful tapestry that is both intellectually stimulating and personally uplifting.One of the Jewish biblical scholars scheduled to appear on the Bill Moyers PBS special on Genesis, Avivah Zornberg employs an amazing repertoire of literary sources to engage the audience and illuminate the text. Delivering her erudition in a pleasantly lyrical style, the author shares her experience of God with the world. It is an intimate, personal, and revealing encounter no one should miss.

    Head of the Lubavitcher movement for forty-four years and recognized throughout the world simply as “the Rebbe,” Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who passed away in June 1994, was a sage and a visionary of the highest order.Toward a Meaningful Life gives people of all backgrounds  fresh perspectives on every aspect of their lives—from birth to death, youth to old age; marriage, love, intimacy, and family; the persistent issues of career, health, pain, and suffering; and education, faith, science, and government. We learn to bridge the divisions between accelerated technology and decelerated morality, between unprecedented worldwide unity and unparalleled personal disunity. Although the Rebbe’s teachings are firmly anchored in more than three thousand years of scholarship, the urgent relevance of these old-age truths to contemporary life has never been more manifest.            At the threshold of a new world where matter and spirit converge, the Rebbe proposes spiritual principles that unite people as opposed to the materialism that divides them. In doing so, he continues to lead us toward personal and universal redemption, toward a meaningful life, and toward God.

    His writing exposes and illumines the wounds that Nazi destructiveness left on language. John Felstiner's sensitive and accessible book is the first critical biography of Celan in any language. It offers new translations of well-known and little-known poems—including a chapter on Celan's famous "Deathfugue"—plus his speeches, prose fiction, and letters. The book also presents hitherto unpublished photos of the poet and his circle.Drawing on interviews with Celan's family and friends and his personal library in Normandy and Paris, as well as voluminous German commentary, Felstiner tells the poet's gripping story: his birth in 1920 in Romania, the overnight loss of his parents in a Nazi deportation, his experience of forced labor and Soviet occupation during the war, and then his difficult exile in Paris. The life's work of Paul Celan emerges through readings of his poems within their personal and historical matrix. At the same time, Felstiner finds fresh insights by opening up the very process of translating Celan's poems.To present this poetry and the strain of Jewishness it displays, Felstiner uncovers Celan's sources in the Bible and Judaic mysticism, his affinities with Kafka, Heine, Hölderlin, Rilke, and Nelly Sachs, his fascination with Heidegger and Buber, his piercing translations of Shakespeare, Dickinson, Mandelshtam, and Apollinaire. First and last, Felstiner explores the achievement of a poet surviving in his mother tongue, the German language that had passed, Celan said, "through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech."

    Twenty-five years later, Theo Richmond set out to find what he could about that vanished world. He traveled across the United States, Europe, and Israel, tracing survivors and sifting through archives and the stories of those he interviewed. A project he thought would take six months took seven years. Finally he confronted the Konin of today. Interweaving past and present, Konin tells the story of one community--how it began, how it flourished, and how it ended--and in the process re-creates the precariousness, anguish and necessity of human memory."A fascinating memorial to a lost community and the people who lived there."--The New York Times Book Review"One reads [it] sometimes with a smile...always on the edge of tears--as if it were the most gripping adventure story."--Elie Wiesel, New York Newsday

    Based on his works, Sefer Chofetz Chaim and sefer Shmiras Haloshon includes Vignettes from the life of the Chofetz Chaim.

    Combining quality scholarship and sacred spiritual instruction, Living Judaism is a thought-provoking reference and guide for those already steeped in Jewish life, and a comprehensive introduction for those exploring the richness and grandeur of Judaism.

    Employing the style and idiom of a post-Modernism--of a twentieth-century artist--and filtering it through the prism of his Israeli and Jewish sensibilities, Amichai's words ifs cosmopolitan, muscular, and ironic. Resounding with the exhilarating of the human encounters--it is brought into the sharper contrast by the ever-present precariousness of Israeli existence. The burden and legacy of this history, and its impact upon modern, secular society, places Amichai's work within a uniquely Israeli landscape--arid, verdant, cruel, and beautiful--while simultaneously transcending national and religious borders. Translated from the Hebrew by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, this volume brings Amichai to his rightful place beside the leading poets of the twentieth century.

    He grew up, his father's stories grew within him, and Halevi found himself identifying more and more with the persecution and suffering of his people. Even as a boy, he wanted justice, retribution, and action. By the sixth grade, Halevi was learning how to handle a gun, handing out leaflets, joining right-wing movements. Soon he was swept away by the extremist rabbi Meir Kahane and was on the front lines of every protest, hoping to see his face and raised fist on the television news reports. At the climax of his activism, he led an unprecedented demonstration in Moscow to force the world to free Soviet Jews. But then Halevi began questioning the basic premises of his life, repudiating rage as a worldview, and trying to free himself from the bitter accounts of history. He wished for a life that embraced a world different from his father's. In Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, Halevi looks back on his youth with wry affection, reflecting on who he was - and why - and seeing his hotheaded and passionate fellow activists from the perspective of time.

    That meeting proved a catharsis, enabling Ganor to confront for the first time the catalogue of horrors he experienced during the Second World War. Beginning in prewar Lithuania, Light One Candle tells of the ominous changes that took place once Hitler came to power in 1933, of Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul who wrote thousands of exit visas for Jews fleeing the Nazi onslaught, of the brutal conditions in the Kaunas ghetto where Ganor spent most of the war, and of Stutthoff and Dachau, the concentration camps he was shuttled to and from in the last, desperate days of the war. Unflinching in its depiction of evil but uplifting in its story of the survival of the human spirit, Light One Candle is a gripping memoir that waited fifty years to be told.

    This book traces some of the Torah themes which express the duality of the world: the physical, outer layer, and its inner root.

    It is powerful, shocking, and primitive, with the kind of appeal primary sources often attain without effort.... it is a strong addition to the literature of women's experience on the frontier." --Lillian Schlissel [asking for approval to use quote]In 1894, eighteen-year-old Rachel Bella Kahn travelled from Russia to the United States for an arranged marriage to Abraham Calof, an immigrant homesteader in North Dakota. Rachel Calof's Story combines her memoir of a hard pioneering life on the prairie with scholarly essays that provide historical and cultural background and show her narrative to be both unique and a representative western tale. Her narrative is riveting and candid, laced with humor and irony.The memoir, written by Rachel Bella Calof in 1936, recounts aspects of her childhood and teenage years in a Jewish community, (shtetl) in Russia, but focuses largely on her life between 1894 and 1904, when she and her husband carved out a life as homesteaders. She recalls her horror at the hardships of pioneer life--especially the crowding of many family members into the 12 x 14' dirt-floored shanties that were their first dewllings. "Of all the privations I knew as a homesteader," says Calof, "the lack of privacy was the hardest to bear." Money, food, and fuel were scarce, and during bitter winters, three Calof households--Abraham and Rachel with their growing children, along with his parents and a brother's family--would pool resources and live together (with livestock) in one shanty.Under harsh and primitive conditions, Rachel Bella Calof bore and raised nine children. The family withstood many dangers, including hailstorms that hammered wheat to the ground and flooded their home; droughts that reduced crops to dust; blinding snowstorms of plains winters. Through it all, however, Calof drew on a humor and resolve that is everywhere apparent in her narrative. Always striving to improve her living conditions, she made lamps from dried mud, scraps of rag, and butter; plastered the cracked wood walls of her home with clay; supplemented meagre supplies with prairie forage--wild mushrooms and garlic for a special supper, dry grass for a hot fire to bake bread. Never sentimental, Caolf's memoir is a vital historical and personal record.J. Sanford Rikoon elaborates on the history of Jewish settlement in the rural heartland and the great tide of immigration from the Russian Pale of Settlement and Eastern Europe from 1880-1910. Elizabeth Jameson examines how Calof "writes from the interior spaces of private life, and from that vantage point, reconfigures more familiar versions of the American West." Jameson also discusses how the Calofs adapted Jewish practices to the new contingencies of North Dakota, maintaining customs that represented the core of their Jewish identity, reconstructing their "Jewishness" in new circumstances.

    In this second edition of the Dictionary, thirty entries appear for the first time. More than 100 others have been brought up to date with the latest research. A typical entry contains: -- discussion of each deity named and its meaning; -- the religio-historical background of each deity and the biblical passages in which it is found; -- an up-to-date bibliography and cross-references to related information found in the dictionary.Unique in subject matter and exhaustive in coverage, this volume will be an indispensable resource tool for scholars and students from a broad range of disciplines.

    Wolpe addresses all who seek to enlarge the spiritual side of their lives. For those considering a return to the faith of their forebears, for those drawn to conversion, Why Be Jewish? is a learned, graceful, and welcoming introduction beckoning readers into the heart of this venerable and enduring religion.

    But few are aware of Zandman's incredible personal story: as a teenager he spent a year-and-a-half in Nazi occupied Poland, and that harrowing experience gave him the drive, discipline, and generosity of spirit that made his later success possible.Taught by his grandmother Tema that the only measure of wealth is what you give away, Zandman lost his entire world in 1943 when the ghetto in his native city of Grodno was destroyed. Jammed with four others into a tiny pit beneath the cottage of a poor Polish peasant, he was left with nothing but his inner resources of imagination, intellect, and will to fend off insanity and find a reason to go on living.Lying next to him in the hole, his uncle taught him higher mathematics, lessons he later turned to good use in winning a doctorate in physics from the Sorbonne. In 1966 he came to the United States, where one of his breakthrough discoveries became the basis for a company he named for his grandmother's shtetl. Vishay revolutionized an industry and today employs sixteen thousand people worldwide, among them the grandson of the woman who saved him.

    The resulting true story of one town's fight against bigotry is the subject of this award-winning "fine book for parents and teachers who want to discuss prejudice and hate crimes with their children".--"Booklist". Full-color illustrations.

    With extensive commentary by Rabbi Joseph Elias.

    Ten stories about a clever, endearing beggar who lived by his wits.

    But for some people, there comes a time to rend that fabric, a wrenching time fraught with inner turmoil and conflict, until that fabric is finally sewn anew to form a richer, more pleasing pattern. The painstaking restitching demands great care and endless patience, but the satisfying results justify the effort.

    Rabbi Daniel Gordis, a dynamic new voice on the American Jewish scene, addresses what lies at the heart of modern Jews' frustration with Jewish life--namely, the apparent absence of spirituality in traditional Jewish expression.

    Its principal target was the conversos, descendants of Spanish Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity some three generations earlier. Since thousands of them confessed to charges of practicing Judaism in secret, historians have long understood the Inquisition as an attempt to suppress the Jews of Spain. In this magisterial reexamination of the origins of the Inquisition, Netanyahu argues for a different view: that the conversos were in fact almost all genuine Christians who were persecuted for political ends. The Inquisition's attacks not only on the conversos' religious beliefs but also on their "impure blood" gave birth to an anti-Semitism based on race that would have terrible consequences for centuries to come.This book has become essential reading and an indispensable reference book for both the interested layman and the scholar of history and religion.

    But how did a stereotype like Shylock enter the literature at all, given that there were so few Jews in Shakespeare's England?

    By applying what he calls the panoramic approach, in contrast to the existentialist approach of Buber and the historicist approach of Scholem, Idel has been able to illuminate the phenomenon of Hasidism in all its complexity and diversity. Rather than focusing on any one immediate aspect of Jewish mysticism, Idel proposes to understand Hasidism as the aggregation of multiple streams, including magic, theosophic kabbalah, and ecstatic kabbalah. By applying Idel’s orientation one can appreciate the complex fabric woven by the Hasidic masters from previous mystical sources. His book is provocative and stimulating.” ― Elliot R. Wolfson, New York University“The author succeeds in broadening our understanding of Hasidism through clarifying its relations to phenomenological models that are typical of earlier stages of Jewish mysticism. As a result of Idel’s vast knowledge of mystical and philosophical literature, he is able to demonstrate and clarify the extent that Hasidism is dependent on non-Lurianic schools of Kabbalah. Thus, Hasidism emerges as an important stage in Jewish mysticism, rather than as a mere reaction or result of historical and social forces such as Sabbatianism."Idel focuses on one of the most significant, yet little understood developments in the history of Jewish thought and religion. His close study of ecstasy and magic will be essential for all those who are in any way interested in this area.“The book is full of brilliant insights concerning the meaning of key concepts and practices in early Hasidism." ― Miles Krassen, Oberlin College

    This genuine joy comes from profound spiritual awareness of life and an absolute clarity of direction, living for a purpose. Now with [this book] you too can explore the mystical depths of your soul as well as the universe at large, on the well-traveled path to pure, internal happiness. These lessons are presented in a clear simple language by [a] rabbi [and] lecturer on Chassidic Philosophy"--Book jacket.

    As a founding member of the Peace Now movement, Oz has spent over thirty-five years speaking out on this issue, and these powerful essays and speeches span an important and formative period for understanding today’s tension and crises. Whether he is discoursing on the role of writers in society or recalling his grandmother’s death in the context of the language’s veracity; examining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a tragicomedy or questioning the Zionist dream, Oz remains trenchant and unflinching in this moving portrait of a divided land. “[Oz is] the modern prophet of Israel.” —Sunday Telegraph (UK)

    Selected and adapted from the Talmud and Midrash. All the volumes in this popular series will not fail to inspire and stimulate the reader, while providing vital information on the Parshah.

    Rabbi Kahane wrote: A certain resolution on Zionism has been passed at the United Nations. In reality, it is a resolution on Judaism. It is important that a reply be given. It is important that the world know precisely what Zionism is and what the Jewish people are. It is important that the nations hear our proclamation: â��Listen world, I am a Zionist, I am a Jew!â�� And listen, too, Jew. Listen so that you will understand yourself who you are and what and why. For there is no escape from it even if one should be so foolish as to desire to flee the greatness and majesty of the Jewish destiny. Listen so that you will be able to stand proud and tall and know what to replyâ��with dignity and not hesitant defensiveness. So that you will know from where you came and to where you go, since without the former it is impossible to know the latterâ�¦ â��Our feet are standing within thy gates O Jerusalem,â�� and they will never leave. This is Zionism, and the United Gentiles call it â��Racistâ�� and debate how to take my city away from me. Foolish world; sooner will the sun fail to rise tomorrow. The Jews have come home to their Zion and have welded their city together with a fierce tightness that noneâ��least of all the humor that is the United Nationsâ�� can sunder. A people which patiently bides its time for millennia will not easilyâ��everâ��give up its state and capital.

    Nearly thirty years after the original publication, the interest in Yiddish studies continues to grow, making this definitive collection all the more Significant as a study of influences and developments in Yiddish poetry. Ruth Whitman has skillfully translated the diverse, lyric poetry of fourteen Eastern European-born poets, most of whom came to live in the United States. Of the twenty new poems included in the book, two are by Rachel Korn, three by Kadya Molodowsky, four by Anna Margolin, and four by Celia Dropkin. These additions increase considerably the work of the women poets represented, fulfilling an earlier omission. The anthology also highlights the genius and invention of poets Jacob Glatstein, M.L. Halpern, Moyshe Kulbak, Zisha Landau, H. Leivick, Itzik Manger, Leyb Naydus, Melech Ravitch, Abraham Sutzkever, and Aaron Zeitlin. With a new preface and a revised introduction that provides a short history of the development of Yiddish poetry, the third edition presents seventy-two poems in their original Yiddish and in English translation.These poems reflect the chaos and confusion integral to immigrant culture and the fragmentation of living during two world wars and the Holocaust. In addition the poems reflect the influences of American poetry from the Imagists to Robert Lowell, as well as the influence of German, French, and Russian poetry.

    This work continues to function as a central text for the Reconstructionist movement, whose influence continues to grow in American Jewry.

    With appendices of a variety of charts to assist the reader with the kabbalastic teachings found in the text. Volume 1 contains Reb Noson's introduction to the original work, short biographies of Rebbe Nachman and Reb Noson and a bibliography.

    

    

    Then old Mr. Hoffman comes to his house, selling his colorful ties, and tells a story about a Chanukah miracle that makes this a night Seth will never forget. Full color.

    Discover the many connections between Jewish tradition and the Bible.

    sheer detail and breadth of scale' BBC History MagazineThis newly revised and updated edition of Martin Gilbert's Atlas of Jewish History spans over four thousand years of history in 154 maps, presenting a vivid picture of a fascinating people and the trials and tribulations which have haunted their story.The themes covered include:Prejudice and Violence- from the destruction of Jewish independence between 722 and 586 BC to the flight from German persecution in the 1930s. Also covers the incidence of anti-semitic attacks in the Americas and Europe.Migrations and Movements- from the entry into the promised land to Jewish migration in the twenty- first century, including new maps on recent emigration to Israel from Europe and worldwide.Society, Trade and Culture- from Jewish trade routes between 800 and 900 to the situation of world Jewry in the opening years of the twenty- first century.Politics, Government and War- from the Court Jews of the fifteenth century to the founding and growth of the modern State of Israel. This new edition is also updated to include maps showing Jewish museums in the United States and Canada, and Europe, as well as American conservation efforts abroad. Other topics covered in this revised edition include Jewish educational outreach projects in various parts of the world, and Jews living under Muslim rule. Forty years on from its first publication, this book is still an indispensible guide to Jewish history.

    A translation of the Kabbalah for the layperson includes a compact presentation of each primary text and features a practical analysis and vital historical information that offer insight into the various aspects of Jewish mysticism.

    

    "Rabinowitz continues his conquest of the ancient world with linguistic scholarship and common sense. His inquiries into the roots of religion and poetry carry him across oceans of bullshit to the old planet of polytheist natural psychology" ---Allen Ginsberg.

    It covers many Jewish authors and their writings from the middle of the 16th until the late 18th centuries in Europe. The book's combined approach to the history of science and Jewish thought strongly emphasises analysis of the mentalities that informed some of the prominent figures of Jewish thought in this time period. Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe takes a comprehensive look at the processes taking place in the minds of European Jewish intellectuals in Italy, Amsterdam, Prague, and London. The main purpose of this book is the description of the modalities of reception of the new sciences, complicated by the traditional reticence toward "alien sciences" found in many medieval Jewish writers still influential in the early modern period.

    How can Jewish insights on death and dying teach the living and comfort the grieving? In this new collection, Rabbi Jack Riemer brings together the experiences and insights of people from many walks of life as they encountered the Jewish rituals of mourning and healing. This essential volume introduces and explains the traditional Jewish practices from the moment of death through the week of shiva and the year that follows. Contemporary writers talk about their rediscovery of and appreciation for Jewish customs and rituals at this time. Many explore the thoughts and feelings accompanying the commemorative rites of kaddish, yizkor, and yahrzeit. Some share new rituals created to fill a need, such as a way to mark the end of shiva, a prayer to say on lighting the yahrzeit candle, and a prayer for doctors and nurses to say upon the death of a patient. These personal reflections offer a collective outpouring of hope and support from those who have experienced loss. Jewish teachings are also brought to bear on contemporary problems not addressed directly by the tradition: Do we have the right to hasten the process of dying? How do we mourn the stillborn child? What does the Jewish tradition have to say about an afterlife? How does the knowledge of the certainty of death affect the way we live? A timely chorus of voices on a perennially timely issue, Wrestling with the Angel provides both guidance and solace from the wisdom of a caring community.

    Watch Zundel work his magic and turn his coat into a jacket, his jacket into a vest, his vest into a pocket, as it keeps Zundel company through his long and happy life. With its spirited, folksy illustrations, Bit By Bit is a heart-warming tale about the tradition of storytelling.

    These are the women who created the fields of feminist therapy, feminist psychology, and women's mental health as they exist today. The 48 women share their life stories in the hope that they will inspire and encourage readers to take their own risks and their own journeys to the outer edges of human possibility. Authors write about what led up to their achievements, what their accomplishments were, and how their lives were consequently changed. They describe their personal stages of development in becoming feminists, from unawareness to activism to action. Some women focus on the painful barriers to success, fame, and social change; others focus on the surprise they experience at how well they, and the women's movement, have done. Some well-known feminist foremothers featured include:Phyllis CheslerGloria SteinemKate MillettStarhawkJudy ChicagoZsuszanna Emese BudapestAndrea DworkinJean Baker MillerCarol Gilligan In Feminist Foremothers in Women's Studies, Psychology, and Mental Health, many of the women see in hindsight how prior projects and ideas and even dreams were the forerunners to their most important work. They note the importance of sisterhood and the presence of other women and the loneliness and isolation experienced when they don't exist. They note the validation they have received from grassroots feminists in contrast to disbelief from professionals. Although these women have been and continue to be looked up to as foremothers, they realize how little recognition they've been given from society-at-large and how much better off their male counterparts are. Some foremothers write about the feeling of being different, not meshing with the culture of the time and about challenging the system as an outsider, not an insider. These are women who had few mentors, who had to forge their own way, "hit the ground running." Their stories will challenge readers to press on, to continue the work these foremothers so courageously started.Throughout the pages of Feminist Foremothers in Women's Studies, Psychology, and Mental Health runs a sense of excitement and vibrancy of lives lived well, of being there during the early years of the women's movement, of making sacrifices, of taking risks and living to see enormous changes result. Throughout these pages, too, sounds a call not to take these changes for granted but to recognize that feminists, rather than arguing over picayune issues or splitting politically correct hairs, are battling for the very soul of the world.

    Those rebbes who did choose to put pen to paper tended to write expositions on biblical or rabbinical texts, and in many cases it was their students and followers who copied down their teachings. Thus the modern reader is left with works that tend to be impersonal, esoteric, and often complex. The journal of Rabbi Shapira is unique in its use of first-person narrative to relay the inner thoughts, fears, and struggles of this bold leader as he responds to the pains of life. It offers guidelines for spiritual progress and several meditations based on an active imagination. Rabbi Shapira tells us that the purpose of this work is to bequeath a journal of his personal struggles and triumphs to posterity. Some entries are indeed very revealing; the Rebbe is not afraid to disclose his moments of self-doubt, his anger, his fears, and his fervent hope that his soul will remain strong as his body grows old. The more one reads of Rabbi Shapira's journal, the more insight and inspiration one will glean from its message. Young and old will find personal, spiritual guidance in these pages and be able to reap from the maternal fulfillment.

    A high-spirited woman rabbi assesses contemporary Judaism and breathes new life into classic tradition by drawing on Jewish, feminist, ecological and Native American sources.

    It transcends all sectarian boundaries and brings to the spiritually sensitive reader the choicest creations of the human spirit when it is touched by the encounter with God. Rabbi Ben Zion Bokser Elijah Benamozegh: Israel and Humanity translated, edited and with an introduction by Maxwell Luria preface and appendix on Kabbalah in Elijah Benamozegh's Thought by Moshe Idel For the Jews (apart from the Kabbalah) the single, indivisible divine personality is always infinitely above the material creation. The Gentiles, however, feel the need to humanize the gods, to see an embodiment of the Divine even on the lower stages of the scale of being. The Kabbalah allows us to see how these two impulses--the latter embodied in the plural name of Divinity (Elohim), the first in the incommunicable name of the one God--are joined in the religious synthesis of Hebraism...Authentic Judaism...is connected to a certain extent with the pagan mysteries. The authentic Jewish tradition acknowledges both the immanence and the transcendence of God, and thus links monotheism with the reasonable element in pantheism. Belief in the unity of God, as Israel preserves it, therefore harmonizes the demands of science and the needs of religious faith. One day it will be able also to reconcile the divided churches. From Israel and Humanity, Part One, chapter 1, The Unity of God Elijah ben Abraham Benamozegh (1823-1900), whose family had come to Italy from Morocco, was rabbi of the important Jewish community of Livorno (Leghorn), an intellectual leader of 19th-century Italian Jewry, and its most articulate advocate of Kabbalah. Among his distinguished volumes, Israel and Humanity is perhaps his masterpiece. It has been translated from the original French into Hebrew and Italian, and now, for the first time, into English. Israel and Humanity forms a grand synthesis of Benamozegh's religious thought. It is at once a wide-ranging summa of scriptural, Talmudic, Midrashic, and kabbalistic ideas, and an intensely personal account of Jewish identity. It is also a systematic, meticulously reasoned philosophy of Judaism in its relation to the other religions of mankind, especially its daughter religions, Christianity and Islam. Scrupulously orthodox in his Jewish perspective, Benamozegh was a highly original thinker and wholly at ease in European secular and religious culture. His book breathes the exceptionally tolerant religious atmosphere of 19th-century Italy. +

    Reprinted with new illustrations and format.

    It demonstrates how and why this evolution has been almost invariably in a direction closer to Israel, and how this has caused unintended strains and contradictions that, at times, have confused allies, aided enemies, and left many Americans unsure about U.S. policy. Of great interest to scholars, students, and all those interested in U.S. foreign policy, Fallen Pillars is a well-researched, highly readable, and coherent account of American influence in one of the most complex conflicts of our time.

    In this book, Michael Ragussis explores the phenomenon of Jewish conversion—the subject of popular enthusiasm, public scandal, national debate, and dubbed "the English madness" by its critics—in Protestant England from the 1790s through the 1870s.Moving beyond the familiar catalog of anti-Semitic stereotypes, Ragussis analyzes the rhetoric of conversion as it was reinvented by the English in sermons, stories for the young, histories of the Jews, memoirs by Jewish converts, and popular novels. Alongside these texts and the countertexts produced by English Jews, he situates such writers as Edgeworth, Scott, Disraeli, Arnold, Trollope, and Eliot within the debate over conversion and related issues of race, gender, and nation-formation. His work reveals how a powerful group of emergent cultural projects—including a revisionist tradition of the novel, the new science of ethnology, and the rewriting of European history—redefined English national identity in response to the ideology of conversion, the history of the Jews, and "the Jewish question." Figures of Conversion offers an entirely new way of regarding Jewish identity in nineteenth-century British culture and will be of importance not only to literary scholars but also to scholars of Judaic and religious studies, history, and cultural studies.