Conversion
This short volume considers conversion in a Jewish context as broadly as possible, as an act of socioreligious boundary crossing. It charts how, across the long arc of Jewish history from biblical times to the present, patterns of boundary crossing have developed and shifted, whether of Gentiles entering Jewish life or of Jews exiting from it.
Jewish Education
Jewish education has been dominated by two concerns: What ought to be taught? And what is the best way to teach it? This book upends the conventional approaches by asking a different question: How do people learn to engage in Jewish life?
Zionism
An Emotional State
This volume reconsiders the history of Zionism through the lens of emotion. By highlighting the series of emotional states that are key to any national or social movement, including the Zionist project, Penslar shows how Zionism is distinct for the breadth and depth of feeling of those engaged in it, of outside observers, and of its opponents.
Judaism
The Genealogy of a Modern Notion
Jew
Holocaust
An American Understanding
Jewish Peoplehood
An American Innovation
Shtetl
A Vernacular Intellectual History
By examining the meaning of shtetl, Jeffrey Shandler asks how Jewish life in provincial towns in Eastern Europe has become the subject of extensive creativity, memory, and scholarship. He traces the trajectory of writing about these towns, by Jews and non-Jews, residents and visitors, researchers, novelists, memoirists, journalists, and others, to demonstrate how the Yiddish word for “town” emerged as a key word in Jewish culture and Jewish studies.
Jewish Families
Jonathan Boyarin explores a wide range of scholarship in Jewish studies to argue that Jewish family forms and ideologies have varied greatly throughout the times and places where Jewish families have found themselves. He considers a range of family configurations from biblical times to the twenty-first century, including strictly Orthodox communities and new forms of family, including same-sex parents, and suggests productive ways to think about possible futures for Jewish family forms.
Jewish Studies
A Theoretical Introduction
Haskalah
The Romantic Movement in Judaism
Conventionally translated as the “Jewish Enlightenment,” the Haskalah propelled Jews into modern life. Based on imaginative and historically grounded readings of primary sources, Olga Litvak presents a compelling case for rethinking the relationship between the Haskalah and the experience of political and social emancipation. Litvak challenges the prevailing view that the Haskalah provided the philosophical mainspring for Jewish liberalism.
Space and Place in Jewish Studies
Space and Place in Jewish Studies embraces how notions of “Jewish space,” diaspora, and home continue to resonate within contemporary discourse, bringing space to the foreground as a practical and analytical category. Barbara Mann takes us on a journey from medieval Levantine trade routes to the Eastern European shtetl to the streets of contemporary New York, introducing readers to the variety of ways in which Jews have historically formed communities and created a sense of place for themselves. Combining cutting-edge theory with rabbinics, anthropology, and literary analysis, Mann offers a fresh take on the Jewish experience.