In Jewish Wisdom, Rabbi Telushkin, the author of the highly acclaimed Jewish Literacy, weaves together a tapestry of stories from the Bible and Talmud, and the insights of Jewish commentators and writers from Maimonides, Rashi, and Hillel to Einstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Elie Wiesel. A richer source of crucial life lessons would be hard to imagine.Accompanying this extraordinary compilation is Teluslikins compelling commentary, which reveals how these texts continue to instruct and challenge Jewsand all people concerned with leading ethical livestoday As he discusses these texts, Rabbi Telushkin addresses issues of fundamental interest to modern readers: how to live with honesty and integrity in an often dishonest world; how to care for the sick and dying; how to teach children to respect both themselvesand others, how to understand and confront such great tragedies as antisemitism. and the Holocaust; what God wants from humankind. Within Jewish Wisdom's ninety chapters the reader will find extended sections illuminating Jewish perspectives on sex, romance, and marriage, what kind of belief in God a Jew can have after the Holocaust, how to use language ethically, the conflicting views of the Bible and Talmud on the death penalty, and much, much more.Jewish Wisdom adds a new dimension to the many widely read contemporary books that retell the stones and reveal the essence of classic religious and secular literature. Possibly the most far-ranging volume of stories and quotations from Jewish texts, Jewish Wisdom will itself become a classic, a book that not only has the capacity to transform how you view the world, but one that well might change how you choose to live your life.

    Each volume is the work of a scholar who stands at the pinnacle of his field. Every page contains the complete traditional Hebrew text, with cantillation notes, the JPS translation of the Holy Scriptures, aliyot breaks, Masoretic notes, and commentary by a distinguished Hebrew Bible scholar, integrating classical and modern sources. Each volume also contains supplementary essays that elaborate upon key words and themes, a glossary of commentators and sources, extensive bibliographic notes, and maps.

    To others, his teachings shed light on some of the deepest mysteries. Here, is timeless wisdom, adapted by disciplines living in Jerusalem today, reaches out to us all: Never lose hope. Find joy and cause for happiness in everything that happens to you.

    First-person accounts of fourteen Holocaust survivors who as children were hidden from the Nazis by non-Jews.

    A book of voices from an almost forgotten female heritage, it features eighteen writers who speak powerfully of the events that shaped their lives; the daily fabric of life in Europe, the struggle from which new lives in North America, Palestine and then Israel were forged, the terror and challenge of survival during the Holocaust and its aftermath.

    One of the world's foremost experts on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Qumran community that produced them provides an authoritative new English translation of the two hundred longest and most important nonbiblical Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran, along with an introduction to the history of the discovery and publication of each manuscript and the background necessary for placing each manuscript in its actual historical context.

    He is considered to be a leading Talmudists in the 20th century. Ginsberg believed in Halakha. Halakha is a body of Jewish law including biblical law, Talmudic law, and rabbinic law. Judaism does not distinguish between religious and non-religious law. Legends of the Jews is a multi volume set encompassing hundreds of legends and parables from the Hebrew Bible. Midrash is the retelling of Bible stories where moralistic stories are alongside mythical tales of magic and demons. This reference work is a good source for unanswered Biblical questions and the source of post Biblical stories not contained in the Bible.

    

    It is an indispensable reference on that body of literature known as Midrash, the imaginative retelling and elaboration on Bible stories in which mythological tales about demons and magic coexist with moralistic stories about the piety of the patriarchs. Legends is the first book to which one turns to learn about the postbiblical understanding of the biblical episode, or to discover the source for biblical legends that cannot be traced directly to the Bible. It is also the place to find answers to such questions as the date of Abraham's birth; what was Moses physical appearance; and what was the name of Potiphar's wife.

    Written by his grandson, the book includes material from Emeric Pressburger's diaries and attempts to show what he brought to the Pressburger/Michael Powell films.

    Thru a compilation of ideas found in the Bible, Apocrypha, rabbinic literature, medieval philosophy, medieval Midrash, Kabbalah & Hasidism, readers learn how Judaism conceived of the fate of the individual after death throughout history. In the wake of the deaths of six million Jews in the Holocaust, many turned away from Judaism & shunned a God who had seemingly allowed this senseless act of cruelty to occur. Others turned toward the faith, desperately wanting to believe in the doctrine that those whose lives had ended prematurely had passed on to another a better life. But does an afterlife even exist? What role does it play in Jewish theology? While many affirm a belief in the afterlife, a scarce few are aware of where these teachings can be found in Jewish literature. Among the topics discussed in this fascinating volume are heaven & hell, Olam Ha-Ba (The World to Come), Gan Eden, resurrection of the dead, immortality of the soul & divine judgment prior to death.

    A humorous, irreverent guide to Jewish life and religion in the style of Growing Up Catholic explains the Ten Suggestions, offers Diaspora travel tips, discusses when to tell a date you've had a nose job, and more.

    In novel after novel--The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Humbolt's Gift, Mr. Sammler's Planet, and others--he has tried to restore the integrity of the private life, the value of human feeling, and the primacy of social contract, while proclaiming each individual's perennial access to age-old truths.In this collection of interviews spanning the period from 1953 to 1991, Bellow elaborates further upon his fictional treatment of these ideas. Here the reader finds the wit and urbane commentary that typify this marvelous writer. He speaks with his interviewers of the changing role of fiction, the literary establishment, and the place of literature in modern life. Since no definitive biography of Bellow has yet been written, these interviews provide valuable insights into the writer that many a

    Using phenomenological and critical historical tools, Wolfson examines Jewish mystical texts from late antiquity, pre-kabbalistic sources from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, and twelfth- and thirteenth-century kabbalistic literature. His work demonstrates that the sense of sight assumes an epistemic priority in these writings, reflecting and building upon those scriptural passages that affirm the visual nature of revelatory experience. Moreover, the author reveals an androcentric eroticism in the scopic mentality of Jewish mystics, which placed the externalized and representable form, the phallus, at the center of the visual encounter.In the visionary experience, as Wolfson describes it, imagination serves a primary function, transmuting sensory data and rational concepts into symbols of those things beyond sense and reason. In this view, the experience of a vision is inseparable from the process of interpretation. Fundamentally challenging the conventional distinction between experience and exegesis, revelation and interpretation, Wolfson argues that for the mystics themselves, the study of texts occasioned a visual experience of the divine located in the imagination of the mystical interpreter. Thus he shows how Jewish mystics preserved the invisible transcendence of God without doing away with the visual dimension of belief.

    Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) is widely recognized as one of the greatest Jewish philosophers of the modern period and his Star of Redemption is considered one of the most important twentieth-century contributions to Jewish--and Christian--theology.Rosenzweig's original and brilliant commentaries open a window into the final developments of his own thought: his debates with Protestant theology, his reservations regarding modern science and culture, and his progressive appreciation for the wisdom of the Jewish tradition. They are a testament not only to the profound vision of Judaism embedded in the poetry of Yehuda Halevi, but to the ever vibrant and deepening sagacity of Franz Rosenzweig himself.

    Tamar Fine gold is a happy young bride in one of Brooklyn's insulated ultra-Orthodox enclaves. But this staid, predictable life is violently altered when Tarmer is raped by an intruder as she baby-sits for her nephew. Humiliated and confused, she refuses to risk the unbearable stigma of discovery, but in her attempt to hide her shame, she is sent plummeting into a moral crisis: when she discovers she is pregnant and cannot be sure who the father is. In the end, heartbreaking sacrifices and impossible decisions lead to a surprising triumph of the human spirit.

    Along the way he encounters Ram Dass and Richard Gere, and dialogues with leading rabbis and Jewish thinkers, including Zalman Schacter, Yitz and Blue Greenberg, and a host of religious and disaffected Jews and Jewish Buddhists. This amazing journey through Tibetan Buddhism and Judaism leads Kamenetz to a renewed appreciation of his living Jewish roots.

    The Forbidden Image traces the dual strains of “iconophilia” and iconoclasm, the privileging and prohibition of religious images, over a span of two and a half millennia in the West.Alain Besançon’s work begins with a comprehensive examination of the status of the image in Greek, Judaic, Islamic, and Christian thought. The author then addresses arguments regarding the moral authority of the image in European Christianity from the medieval through the early modern periods. Besançon completes The Forbidden Image with an examination of how iconophilia and iconoclasm have been debated in the modern period.“Even the reader who has heard something of the Byzantine quarrels about images and their theological background will be surprised by a learned and convincing interpretation of the works of Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Malevich in terms of religiously inspired iconoclasm. . . . This is an immensely rich and powerful masterpiece.”—Leszek Kolakowski, Times Literary Supplement

    It's easy to locate words quickly with the Webster's New World Hebrew-English Dictionary, because the Hebrew-to-English section is alphabetized according to the transliterated English spelling. The English version is marked for correct pronunciation and followed immediately by the Hebrew spelling of the word. This breakthrough work of linguistic scholarship is packed with useful features that guarantee rapid progress, even for those with no familiarity with the Hebrew language. It contains:* Extensive grammatical information including parts of speech, variant verb forms, and the formation of feminines and plurals* Listings of idioms and compounds and indications of colloquialisms and slang* Common variations in pronunciations* Geographical, historical and cultural entries

    The author describes the Nazi occupation, recounts the loss of his family, and shares his experiences at the Janowska concentration camp.

    

    Now, for the fist time, we have a comprehensive, objective, and deeply researched account of the brigade's experience in Spain and what happened to the survivors when they returned to the United States. (About one-third of the volunteers died in Spain). The book is largely based on previously unused sources, including the newly opened Russian archives, and more than 100 oral histories.The author charts the volunteers' motivations for enlisting in the fight against Spanish fascism and places their actions in the context of the Depression era. The battleground experiences of the brigade have never before been depicted in such vivid detail, and such battles as Jarama, Belchite, and the Ebro come alive in the participants' words. The author uses the military aspects of the war to illuminate such related issues as the influence of political ideology on military events and the psychology of a volunteer army. He also closely examines the role of the Communist party in the conduct of the war, including the "Orwell question"—allegations of a Communist reign of terror in Spain—and investigates the alleged racial problems within the brigade, the first fully integrated military unit in American history.The book continues the saga of the brigade by relating the problems of the surviving volunteers with the U.S. Army during World War II; their opposition to the Cold War, the Vietnam war, and U.S. intervention in Central America; the persecution during the Red Scare of the 1950s; and their involvement with the civil rights movement.

    The Israelites did not adopt an ancient Canaanite ancestor cult that became the object of biblical scorn. Yet, a variety of mortuary rituals and cults were performed in Levantine society; mourning and funerary rites and longer-term rituals such as the care for the dead and commemoration. Rituals and monuments in or at burial sites, and especially the recitation of the deceased's name, recounted the dead's lived lives for familial survivors. They served broader social functions as well; e.g., to legitimate primogeniture and to reinforce a community's social collectivity.Another ritual complex from the domain of divination, namely necromancy, might have expressed the Israelite dead's beneficent powers. Yet, was this power to reveal knowledge that of the dead or was it a power conveyed through the dead, but that remained attributable to another supranatural being of non-human origin? Contemporary Assyrian necromancers utilized the ghost as a conduit through which divine knowledge was revealed to ascertain the future and so Judah's king Manasseh, a loyal Assyrian vassal, emulated these new Assyrian imperial forms of prognostication. As a de-legitimating rhetorical strategy, necromancy was then integrated into biblical traditions about the more distant past and attributed fictive Canaanite origins (Deut 18). In its final literary setting, necromancy was depicted as the Achille's heel of the nation's first royal dynasty, that of the Saulides (1 Sam 28), and more tellingly, its second, that of the Davidides (2 Kgs 21:6; 23:24).

    A technical study of Malachi 2:10-16 demonstrates that Malachi, along with several other biblical authors, identified marriage as a covenant.

    In the past 25 years, however, they have become more puzzling. How many of them are there? How strongly so they identify themselves as Jews? How do they perceive antisemetism in their countries? Will they leave, where will they go? Theses ate among the questions that have enlivened the discussions of Jews in republics known as the Commonwealth of Independent States. they have sparked debate because they have deep policy implications for Russia, Israel, the United States, and other countries. They are the questions which this book seeks to examine. Too little fact has informed this debate, and even less theory. Until very recently, surveys of the actual intentions, perceptions, motivations, and fears of Jews in the region were out of the question. This is now beginning to change. Here is the first book based on an on site survey of a representative sample of Jews in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). In addition to providing data in the Jews of Moscow, Kiev, and Minsk- who collectively account for 28% of all Jews residing in the three Slavic republics of the CIS- the author places the survey results in their social and historical context. He explains why ethnic distinctiveness persisted and even became accentuated in the Soviet era and also describes the position of Jews in Soviet and post-Soviet society and some of the dilemmas they face. This book will be crucial reading for anyone interested not only in the general situation of the Jews of the former Soviet Union but also in their perceptions, worldviews, and plans for the future.

    Fishbane explores the quest for spiritual perfection in early rabbinic sources and in Jewish philosophy and mysticism. The "kiss of God," a symbol for union with God, and the ritual practices--meditation and performance--connected with it are presented.The book identifies a persistent passion for religious perfection, expressed as the love of God unto death itself. The masters of the tradition cultivated this ideal in all periods, in diverse genres, and in different modes. Rabbinic law and midrash, medieval philosophy and mysticism, public and private ritual all contributed to its development. Rooted in the understanding that the spiritual life requires discipline, the sages set up different ladders of ascension. For some, the Law itself was the means of spiritual growth; for others, more private practices were built upon its foundation. But all agreed that the purification of desire and the perfection of the soul offered the hope of personal salvation. None denied the historical redemption of the nation.

    When Frannie finds a gray striped shirt in the closet, she asks questions which lead her grandparents to tell her about their experience of the Holocaust.

    Far from a conventional narrative history, it is organized around themes and seeks to uncover the essence of Hebraic/Jewish religious thinking while confronting the phenomenon of its division into several 'parties' and traditions. Drawing also on recent studies of Christianity as a 'Judaism', Sacchi provides a stimulating perspective on the nature of ancient Oriental and Occidental thought and the intellectual and spiritual heritage of European civilization.

    Prior to its annexation by Russia, the land of Russia was not a center of rabbinic culture. But in 1772, with its annexation by Tsarist Russia, this remote region was severed from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; its 65,000 Jews were thus cut off from the heartland of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Forced into independence, these Jews set about forging a community with its own religious leadership and institutions. The three great intellectual currents in East European Jewry--Hasidism, Rabbinic Mitnagdism, and Haskalah--all converged on Eastern Belorussia, where they clashed and competed. In the course of a generation, the community of Shklov--the most prominent of the towns in the area--witnessed an explosion of intellectual and cultural activity. Focusing on the social and intellectual odysseys of merchants, maskilim, and rabbis, and their varied attempts to combine Judaism and European culture, David Fishman here chronicles the remarkable story of these first modern Jews of Russia.

    It represents the first serious attempt by a group of eminent scholars of Judaic and Indian studies to take seriously the cross-cultural resonances among the Judaic and Hindu traditions.The essays in the first part of the volume explore the historical connections and influences between the two traditions, including evidence of borrowed elements and the adaptation of Jewish Indian communities to Hindu culture. The essays in the second part focus primarily on resonances between particular conceptual complexes and practices in the two traditions, including comparative analyses of representations of Veda and Torah, legal formulations of dharma and halakhah, and conceptions of union with the Divine in Hindu Tantra and Kabbalah.

    Learn the songs, poems, stories and readings that are part of the celebration of the Feast of Weeks across generations and throughout the Diaspora as well as in Israel. Includes selections both for children and adults.