Given the vast inventory of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals—pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes disseminated for millennia to debase, dehumanize, and justify the persecution of Jews, Bestiarium Judaicum asks: What is at play when Jewish-identified writers tell animal stories?Focusing on the nonhuman-animal constructions of primarily Germanophone authors, including Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, and Gertrud Kolmar, Jay Geller expands his earlier exam...

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 “...

According to Wikipedia, ""The Guide for the Perplexed is one of the major works of Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides or "the Rambam". It was written in the 12th century in the form of a three-volume letter to his student, Rabbi Joseph ben Judah of Ceuta, the son of Rabbi Judah, and is the main source of the Rambam's philosophical views, as opposed to his opinions on Jewish law... Moses Maimonides (March 30, 1135 Cordoba, Spain ? December 13, 1204 Fostat, Egypt), was a rabb...

Bible times and characters from creation to Esther. The introduction begins: "The term Rabbinic was applied to the Jewish Literature of post-Biblical times by those who conceived the Judaism of the later epoch to be something different from the Judaism of the Bible, something actually opposed to it. Such observers held that the Jewish nation ceased to exist with the moment when its political independence was destroyed. For them the Judaism of the later epoch has been a Judaism of the Synag...

How the fate of the Jews has been shaped by the development of capitalismThe unique historical relationship between capitalism and the Jews is crucial to understanding modern European and Jewish history. But the subject has been addressed less often by mainstream historians than by anti-Semites or apologists. In this book Jerry Muller, a leading historian of capitalism, separates myth from reality to explain why the Jewish experience with capitalism has been so imp...

"Framed as a dialog between the king of the Khazars, a Central Asian kingdom, and a Rabbi, the Khazari is an exposition of late medieval Jewish philosophy. Legend has it that the king of the Khazars held a symposium to decide whether his people should convert to Judaism, Christianity or Islam. This book is a fictional account of the Jewish side of this debate. Judah Ha-Levi, the author, was born about 1080 C.E. in Muslim-controlled area of southern Spain."

Indiana Jones meets The Da Vinci Code in an old Egyptian synagoguethe amazing story of one of the most important discoveries in modern religious scholarship.In 1896, Rabbi Solomon Schechter of Cambridge University stepped into the attic of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, Egypt, and there found the largest treasure trove of medieval and early manuscripts ever discovered. He had entered the synagogues genizahits repository for damaged and destroyed Jewish textswhich held nearly 300,...

A comprehensive and accessible account of the life and thought of Judaism's most celebrated philosopherMaimonides was the greatest Jewish philosopher and legal scholar of the medieval period, a towering figure who has had a profound and lasting influence on Jewish law, philosophy, and religious consciousness. This book provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to his life and work, revealing how his philosophical sensibility and outlook informed his inte...

A Physician Under the Nazis are the memoirs of the first forty years (1909-1948) of the life of Henry Glenwick. It focuses on his experiences as a physician in Russian-occupied Ukraine after the outbreak of World War II, his return to the Warsaw ghetto, and his subsequent journey through labor and concentration camps in Poland and Germany. Following a post-war period in Displaced Persons camps in Germany, the book concludes with the writer's cross-Atlantic trip to New York and the...

This is the story of a survivor, what he saw and felt during his Calvary from Antwerp to the Malin distribution camp in France and from there to the extermination camp of Buchenwald.To say that this book contains the scenes of a twentieth-century Inferno may sound commonplace. Yet, every page of this book reminds one of Dante's Inferno, with one exception: The Inferno, the author writes about consumed the lives not of the sinful whom divine justice cast into the immortality of suff...

How the Jewish culture war over Kabbalah beganThe Scandal of Kabbalah is the first book about the origins of a culture war that began in early modern Europe and continues to this day: the debate between kabbalists and their critics on the nature of Judaism and the meaning of religious tradition. From its medieval beginnings as an esoteric form of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah spread throughout the early modern world and became a central feature of Jewish life. Scholar...

Pioneering biblical critic, theorist of democracy, and legendary conflater of God and nature, Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was excommunicated by the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam in 1656 for his "horrible heresies" and "monstrous deeds." Yet, over the past three centuries, Spinoza's rupture with traditional Jewish beliefs and practices has elevated him to a prominent place in genealogies of Jewish modernity. The First Modern Jew provides a riveting look at how Spino...