An intimate and moving portrait of daily life in New York's oldest institution of traditional rabbinic learningNew York City's Lower East Side has witnessed a severe decline in its Jewish population in recent decades, yet every morning in the big room of the city's oldest yeshiva, students still gather to study the Talmud beneath the great arched windows facing out onto East Broadway. Yeshiva Days is Jonathan Boyarin's uniquely personal account of the year...

This story of one of the last remaining synagogues in the historic neighborhood and its congregation is "as absorbing as a good cinema verité documentary" ( Booklist).On New York's Lower East Side, a narrow building, wedged into a lot designed for an old-law tenement, is full of clamorous voices—the generations of the dead, who somehow contrive to make their presence known, and the newer generation, keeping the building and its memories a...

Jewish art has always been with us, but so has a broader canvas of Jewish imaginings: in thought, in emotion, in text, and in ritual practice. Imagining the Jewish God was there in the beginning, as it were, engraved and embedded in the ways Jews lived and responded to their God.This book attempts to give voice to these diverse imaginings of the Jewish God, and offers these collected essays and poems as a living text meant to provoke a substantive and nourishing dialogue. A responsive, liv...

A vivid novelistic account that details a crucial period in the evolution of Polish Hasidism, translated from Yiddish.Half a century after Hasidism blossomed in Eastern Europe, its members were making deep inroads into the institutional structure of Polish Jewish communities, but some devotees believed that the movement had drifted away from its revolutionary ideals. Menashe Unger's A Fire Burns in Kotsk dramatizes this moment of division among Polish Hasi...

A treasure trove of anecdotes that illuminate the lives, humor, and wisdom of Eastern European Jewish communities from the 18th and 19th centuries. A bestseller nearly a century ago in its original Yiddish and now brought to renewed life in translation by Jonathan Boyarin and Jonah Sampson Boyarin, these stories capture the essence of a world where tradition and ingenuity intertwined. From rabbis and scholars to everyday figures, the tales are alternately heartwarming, sharp, and deeply hu...

This book provides the first English translation of Yechiel Hofer's book, Reb Zalmen. Centering on a particular denizen of the Aleksander Hasidim's shtibl (prayer house), it offers a unique and intimate portrait of the lives of those who went inside to pray, eat, study, and argue there in the early 20th century. It is hard to imagine that Reb Zalmen was not an actual figure - someone the young Yechiel Hofer actually knew and loved - although finding any trace of him today would be a daunti...

Theory, as it’s happened across the humanities, has often been coded as “Jewish.” This collection of essays seeks to move past explanations for this understanding that rely on the self-evident (the historical centrality of Jews to the rise of Critical Theory with the Frankfurt School) or stereotypical (psychoanalysis as the “Jewish Science”) in order to show how certain problematics of modern Jewishness enrich theory.In the range of violence and agency that attend the appellation “...