Haskalah and Beyond deals with the Hebrew Haskalah (Enlightenment) - the literary, cultural, and social movement in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe.It represents the emergence of modernism and perhaps the budding of some aspects of secularism in Jewish society, following the efforts of the Hebrew and Jewish enlighteners to introduce changes into Jewish culture and Jewish life, and to revitalize the Hebrew language and literature.The author classifies these acti...

In original and insightful ways, Caribbean writers have turned to Jewish experiences of exodus and reinvention, from the Sephardim expelled from Iberia in the 1490s to the "Calypso Jews" who fled Europe for Trinidad in the 1930s. Examining these historical migrations through the lens of postwar Caribbean fiction and poetry, Sarah Phillips Casteel presents the first major study of representations of Jewishness in Caribbean literature. Bridging the gap between postcolonial and Jewish studies...

How do you grow from grief? How do the Jewish people continue on with strength despite all of the hardships they have faced? Sherri Mandell explores the seven spiritual steps of resilience that teach us how to not only survive grief, but how to thrive in the face of loss and trauma.Resilience is often misunderstood. In Jewish thought, resilience is not bouncing back, but is a process of becoming greater. This book will prepare you to enter the darkness of loss and experience growth,...

How much does our perception of God really matter? Many of us aren't conscious of our image of a "higher power." For some of us, that unspoken image is a Judgmental Parent or an exacting Old Man in the Sky. For others, God is an Imaginary Friend who is there to fix problems after we create them.David Aaron can help you discover a mature, new understanding of God and lead you to discover the wellspring of Divinity within you. By drawing on teachings of Kabbalah that were secret for ...

Bar Kokhba led the Jewish rebellion against Rome in 132–135 A.D., which resulted in massive destruction and dislocation of the Jewish populace of Judea. In early rabbinic literature, Bar Kokhba was remembered in two ways: as an imposter claiming to be the Messiah and as a glorious military leader whose successes led Rabbi Akiba, one of the great rabbinic authorities of Jewish tradition, to acclaim him the Messiah. These two earliest images formed the core of most later perceptions of Bar K...

Deepen your understanding of Shabbat, awaken to the possibilities,and experience the day with an extra measure of holiness.Seventh Heaven delves into the art of consciously observing Shabbat—exploring many of the day’s traditional religious practices within the context of life’s spiritual dynamics. With the help and wisdom of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov—one of the most important of the early Hasidic masters—this guidebook offers insight into the deeper...

"Illuminating . . . 24 academic essays covering Wiesel's interpretations of the Bible, retellings of Talmudic stories . . . his post-Holocaust theology, and more." — Publishers WeeklyNobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel, best known for his writings on the Holocaust, is also the accomplished author of novels, essays, tales, and plays as well as portraits of seminal figures in Jewish life and experience. In this volume, leading scholars in the fields of B...

In Imagining the Kibbutz, Ranen Omer-Sherman explores the literary and cinematic representations of the socialist experiment that became history’s most successfully sustained communal enterprise. Inspired in part by the kibbutz movement’s recent commemoration of its centennial, this study responds to a significant gap in scholarship. Numerous sociological and economic studies have appeared, but no book-length study has ever addressed the tremendous range of critically imaginative ...

This unprecedented collection brings together the major Jewish American writers of the past fifty years as they examine issues of identity and how they’ve made their work respond.E.L. Doctorow questions the very notion of the Jewish American writer, insisting that all great writing is secular and universal. Allegra Goodman embraces the categorization, arguing that it immediately binds her to her readers. Dara Horn, among the youngest of these writers, describes the tendency of Jewi...

Before 1985, depictions of ultra-Orthodox Jews in popular American culture were rare, and if they did appear, in films such as Fiddler on the Roof or within the novels of Chaim Potok, they evoked a nostalgic vision of Old World tradition. Yet the ordination of women into positions of religious leadership and other controversial issues have sparked an increasingly visible and voluble culture war between America's ultra-Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews, one that has found a particular...

The Routledge Handbook to Contemporary Jewish Cultures explores the diversity of Jewish cultures and ways of investigating them, presenting the different methodologies, arguments and challenges within the discipline. Divided into themed sections, this book considers in turn:How the individual terms "Jewish" and "culture" are defined, looking at perspectives from Anthropology, Music, Literary Studies, Sociology, Religious Studies, History, Art History, and Film, Telev...

What has to happen for an old story to become fresh and engaging again? One example of a myth that has been retold and modified is the story of creation and Fall of Man, which appears in the first three chapters of Genesis from the Old Testament. This essay looks into the different methods and tools that writers need to make a retelling of a story fresh and engaging for modern audiences.