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...

Among scholars of Jewish Studies, the process, history, and literature of exiting one’s native religious community is increasingly recognized as a new area within the field which, ironically, has a history stretching back to antiquity. By presenting scholarship from a diverse range of disciplines—including history, sociology, psychology, and gender studies—this volume deepens and broadens readers’ understanding of the complexity of the topic of taking leave of the Orthodox community in whi...

Hasidism, a kabbalah-inspired movement founded by Israel Ba'al Shem Tov (c1700-1760), transformed Jewish communities across Eastern and East Central Europe. In Men of Silk, Glenn Dynner draws upon newly discovered Polish archival material and neglected Hebrew testimonies to illuminate Hasidism's dramatic ascendancy in the region of Central Poland during the early nineteenth century. Dynner presents Hasidism as a socioreligious phenomenon that was shaped in crucial ways by its Poli...

The Jewish inn (żydowska karczma) was a central pillar of economic and social life in Polish lands before the Second World War. While its primary role was to provide hospitality, it also functioned as a multifaceted hub for business, leisure, and religious festivities, reflecting its vital role in the community.In The Jewish Inn: Between Practice and Phantasm, editors Halina Goldberg and Bożena Shallcross present 11 captivating articles that delve into the inn's s...

Awarded Honorable Mention for the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award In nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, the Jewish-run tavern was often the center of leisure, hospitality, business, and even religious festivities. This unusual situation came about because the nobles who owned taverns throughout the formerly Polish lands believed that only Jews were sober enough to run taverns profitably, a belief so ingrained as to endure even the rise of Hasidism's robust drinking culture. A...

The Light of Learning tells the story of an unexpected Hasidic revival in Poland on the eve of the Holocaust. In the aftermath of World War I, the Jewish mystical movement appeared to be in shambles. Hasidic leaders had dispersed, Hasidic courts lay in ruins, and the youth seemed swept up in secularist trends as a result of mandatory public schooling and new Jewish movements like Zionism and Socialism. Author Glenn Dynner shows that in response to this, Hasidic leaders reinvented ...

The work of Elliot R. Wolfson has profoundly influenced the fields of Jewish studies as well as philosophy and religion more broadly. His radically new approaches have created pioneering ways of analyzing texts and thinking about religion through the lens of gender, sexuality, and feminist theory. The contributors to New Paths in Jewish and Religious Studies: Essays in Honor of Professor Elliot R. Wolfson, many of whom are internationally renowned scholars, hearken from diverse fi...

This first-ever biography on Yiddish is “a charming and highly readable history of the language” that “recreates the sound of a world . . . gone forever” (The Washington Post)For a thousand years Yiddish, was the glue that held a people together. Through the intimacies of daily use, it linked European Jews with their heroic past, their spiritual universe, their increasingly far-flung relations. In it they produced one of the world’s most richly human cultu...

In the nineteenth century, the largest Jewish community the modern world had known lived in hundreds of towns and shtetls in the territory between the Prussian border of Poland and the Ukrainian coast of the Black Sea. The period had started with the partition of Poland and the absorption of its territories into the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires; it would end with the first large-scale outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence and the imposition in Russia of strong anti-Semitic legislation...

Western civilization is facing a critical moment. Foreign enemies sensing its weakness are circling. Internally, the West is being consumed by division, decadence, and demoralization. The October 7 attack on Israel presented it with a choice between civilization and barbarism—a challenge the West has failed. But this damaged society is far from lost if it takes advice from an unexpected source. Western culture is based upon Christianity, whose own foundations in turn lie in Judaism. The un...

**From an award-winning cultural theorist, the classic work on the intricate relationship between longing and belonging“A remarkable book… brilliant.”―New York Times**Can one be nostalgic for the home one never had? Why is it that the age of globalization is accompanied by a no less global epidemic of nostalgia? Can we know what we are nostalgic for? In the seventeenth century, Swiss doctors believed that opium, leeches, and a trek through the Alps would cure nosta...

**Featured in the PBS documentary, "The US and the Holocaust" by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein"Superbly written and researched, synthesizing the classics while digging deep into a vast repository of primary sources." —Josef Joffe, Wall Street Journal**Why? explores one of the most tragic events in human history by addressing eight of the most commonly asked questions about the Holocaust: Why the Jews? Why the Germans? Why murder? Why this swift...