Name: Miracle Child
Brand: Anita Epstein
Price: 19.0 USD
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Anita Epstein

Miracle Child

$19.00

This memoir is about a Jewish baby born in the Krakow ghetto in November 1942, three years after Hitler conquered Poland, and, remarkably, escaping death—one of a mere one half of one percent of Jewish children in Poland who survived during the Nazi era. Her life was saved because her parents hid her with a Catholic family. Just as remarkably, her mother, still alive after suffering terribly through four of Hitler’s camps, traveled for weeks back to Poland and found her again. The book also depicts the author’s postwar challenges in Germany and America.

Sara Reguer

The Most Tenacious of Minorities

$32.00

Since arriving in Rome more than 2,000 years ago, the Jewish communities of Italy have retained their identity over millennia. This book traces the foundations of their community, focusing on their economic, intellectual, and social lives as they moved between northern and southern Italy. Over the centuries these localized Italian groups were reinforced with the arrival of German, Provencal, Sephardic, and—most recently—Ashkenazi and Middle Eastern Jews. Surviving religious persecution, ghetto-ization, and the Holocaust, the Jews contributed to Italian society when they could. Supplemented by maps, illustrations, sidebars, and primary sources, this book is a scholarly yet popular overview of a minority group that is proud to be Italian and equally proud to be Jewish.

Mark Lipovetsky

Late and Post Soviet Russian Literature

$39.00

The second volume of Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Literature: A Reader treats the literature of the Thaw and Stagnation periods (1954-1986). It includes translations of poetry and prose as well as scholarly texts that provide additional material for discussion. The goal of this volume is to present the range of ideas, creative experiments, and formal innovations that accompanied the social and political changes of the late Soviet era. Together with the introductory essays and biographical notes, the texts collected here will engage all students and interested readers of late Soviet Russian literature.

Ephraim Chamiel

The Middle Way

$35.00

This book in two volumes is devoted to examining the first encounter between traditional Judaism and modern European culture, and the first thinkers who sought to combine the Torah with science, revelation with reason, prophecy with philosophy, Jewish ethics with European culture, worldliness with sanctity, and universalism with the particular redemption of the Jews. These religious thinkers of the nineteenth century struggled with challenges of the modern age that continue to confront the modern Jews to this day. This objective work of scholarship, neither simplistic and isolationist nor destructive and arrogant, will be of interest to the modern thinker and to scholars of the history of religions. It is relevant to comparative study between Judaism and the various denominations of Christianity and other faiths that seek to find a middle way between their traditions and modernity.

Lev Luis Grinberg

Mo(ve)ments of Resistance

$34.00

In Mo(ve)ments of Resistance, Grinberg summarizes both his own work and that of other political economists, providing a coherent historical narrative covering the time from the beginning of Socialist Zionism (1904) to the Oslo Accords and the neoliberalization of the economy (1994–1996). The theoretical approach of the book combines eventful sociology, path dependency, and institutional political economy. Grinberg argues that historical political events have been shaped not only by political and economic forces but also by resistance struggles of marginal and weaker social groups: organized workers, Palestinians, and Mizrachi Jews. Major turning points in history, like the Separation War in 1948, the military occupation in 1967, and the Oslo peace process in 1993, are explained in the context of previous social and economic resistance struggles that affected the political outcomes.

Aviva Halamish

Kibbutz: Utopia and Politics

$45.00

Meir Yaari (1897-1987) was the leader of Hashomer Hatza’ir, a movement which took an active part in shaping the history of the Jewish people in the crucial decades of the twentieth century. Its Kibbutzim had a leading role in matters of aliyah, settlement, and defense in mandatory Palestine and then independent Israel, and its members were among the organizers of Jewish resistance and revolt during the Holocaust. This biography discusses pivotal issues in the history of the Jewish people and the State of Israel, such as the friction between Zionism and socialism, the Arab question, the absorption of new immigrants, and generation gaps and conflicts. The book blends individual and collective perspectives and never loses sight of the tension between ideology and reality.

Mark Lipovetsky

Late and Post-Soviet Russian Literature

$32.00

The first volume of Late and Post-Soviet Russian Literature: A Reader introduces a diverse spectrum of literary works from Perestroika to the present. It includes poetry, prose, drama and scholarly texts, many of which appear in English translation for the first time. The three sections, "Rethinking Identities," "'Little Terror' and Traumatic Writing," and "Writing Politics," address issues of critical relevance to contemporary Russian culture, history and politics. With its selection of texts and introductory essays Late and Post-Soviet Russian Literature: A Reader brings university curricula into the twenty-first century.

Ephraim Chamiel

The Middle Way

$42.00

This book in two volumes is devoted to examining the first encounter between traditional Judaism and modern European culture, and the first thinkers who sought to combine the Torah with science, revelation with reason, prophecy with philosophy, Jewish ethics with European culture, worldliness with sanctity, and universalism with the particular redemption of the Jews. These religious thinkers of the nineteenth century struggled with challenges of the modern age that continue to confront the modern Jews to this day. This objective work of scholarship, neither simplistic and isolationist nor destructive and arrogant, will be of interest to the modern thinker and to scholars of the history of religions. It is relevant to comparative study between Judaism and the various denominations of Christianity and other faiths that seek to find a middle way between their traditions and modernity.

Stefanie Pervos Bregman

Living Jewishly

$19.00

"Engaging young Jewish adults in their 20s and 30s is challenging to say the least, but a new collection of personal essays and memoirs from young American Jews hopes to enlighten and possibly bridge the gap." —eJewishPhilanthropy

In the Jewish communal world, engaging 20- and 30-somethings is a hot button issue: How do we get young Jews to feel connected to Israel? To affiliate with traditional Jewish institutions? To care about Jewish continuity, ritual and tradition? As a member of this exclusive community, Stefanie Bregman set out to tackle these questions and sought out to compile a collection of personal essays and memoirs from Jewish 20- and 30-somethings across the country.

Victor Zhivov

Language and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia

$35.00

Victor Zhivov's Language and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia is one of the most important studies ever published on eighteenth-century Russia. Historians and students of Russian culture agree that the creation of a Russian literary language was key to the formation of a modern secular culture, and this title traces the growth of a vernacular language from the "hybrid Slavonic" of the late seventeenth century through the debates between "archaists and innovators" of the early nineteenth century. Zhivov's study is an essential work on the genesis of modern Russian culture; the aim of this translation is to make it available to historians and students of the field.

Maria G. Rewakowicz

Literature, Exile, Alterity

$29.00

This pioneering book is the first to present the postwar phenomenon of the New York Group of Ukrainian émigré poets as a case study for exploring cultural and aesthetic ramifications of exile. It focuses on the poets’ diasporic and transnational connections both with their country of origin and their adopted homelands, underscoring the group’s role in the shaping of the cultural and literary image of Ukraine abroad. Displacements, forced or voluntary, engender states of alterity, states of living in-between, living in the interstices of different cultures and different linguistic realities. The poetry of the founding members of the New York Group reflects these states admirably. The poets accepted their exilic condition with no grudges and nurtured the link with their homeland via texts written in the mother tongue. This account of the group’s output and legacy will appeal to all those eager to explore the poetry of East European nations and to those interested in larger cultural contexts for the development of European modernisms.

Yaron Harel

Jews and Jewish Identities in Latin America

$45.00

This collection of articles constitutes a major contribution to the growing field of Latin American Jewish studies, offering different perspectives on the rich and complex phenomena in the social, political, and cultural development of Jewish communities in the area. The essays span across a wide range of subjects, from comparisons between Jewish communities from different countries and with different levels of assimilation, the effects of globalization and transnationalism on the field, the interactions between Jews and non-Jews in the area, all the way to literary criticism. Based on an international conference organized by the University of Sao Paulo, the Dahan Center of Bar Ilan University, and the Academic College in Ashkelon, this volume offers a new approach to Latin American Jewish studies: it contributes to demystifying stereotypes and raising awareness of the importance of Latin America in a global context, and it highlights the relevance of the different Jewish communities across the globe in their special relationship to the state of Israel.

Jews and Jewish Identities in Latin America

Jane L. Kanarek

Learning to Read Talmud

$34.00

Learning to Read Talmud is the first book-length study of how teachers teach and how students learn to read Talmud.

Through a series of studies conducted by scholars of Talmud in classrooms that range from seminaries to secular universities and with students from novice to advanced, this book elucidates a broad range of ideas about what it means to learn to read Talmud and tools for how to achieve that goal. Bridging the study of Talmud and the study of pedagogy, this book is an essential resource for scholars, curriculum writers, and classroom teachers of Talmud.

Igor Mel'cuk

Language

$35.00

This volume presents a sketch of the Meaning-Text linguistic approach, richly illustrated by examples borrowed mainly, but not exclusively, from English. Chapter 1 expounds the basic idea that underlies this approach—that a natural language must be described as a correspondence between linguistic meanings and linguistic texts—and explains the organization of the book. Chapter 2 introduces the notion of linguistic functional model, the three postulates of the Meaning-Text approach (a language is a particular meaning-text correspondence, a language must be described by a functional model and linguistic utterances must be treated at the level of the sentence and that of the word) and the perspective “from meaning to text” for linguistic descriptions. Chapter 3 contains a characterization of a particular Meaning-Text model: formal linguistic representations on the semantic, the syntactic and the morphological levels and the modules of a linguistic model that link these representations. Chapter 4 covers two central problems of the Meaning-Text approach: semantic decomposition and restricted lexical cooccurrence (≈ lexical functions); particular attention is paid to the correlation between semantic components in the definition of a lexical unit and the values of its lexical functions. Chapter 5 discusses five select issues: 1) the orientation of a linguistic description must be from meaning to text (using as data Spanish semivowels and Russian binominative constructions); 2) a system of notions and terms for linguistics (linguistic sign and the operation of linguistic union; notion of word; case, voice, and ergative construction); 3) formal description of meaning (strict semantic decomposition, standardization of semantemes, the adequacy of decomposition, the maximal block principle); 4) the Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary (with a sample of complete lexical entries for Russian vocables); 5) dependencies in language, in particular—syntactic dependencies (the criteria for establishing a set of surface-syntactic relations for a language are formulated). Three appendices follow: a phonetic table, an inventory of surface-syntactic relations for English and an overview of all possible combinations of the three types of dependency (semantic, syntactic, and morphological). The book is supplied with a detailed index of notions and terms, which includes a linguistic glossary.

Aryeh Cohen

Justice in the City

$22.00

Justice in the City argues, based on the rabbinic textual tradition, especially the Babylonian Talmud, and utilizing French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’ framework of interpersonal ethics, that a just city should be a community of obligation. That is, in a community thus conceived, the privilege of citizenship is the assumption of the obligations of the city towards Others who are not always in view—workers, the poor, the homeless. These Others form a constitutive part of the city. The second part of the book is a close analysis of homelessness, labor, and restorative justice from within the theory that was developed. This title will be useful for scholars and students in Jewish studies, especially rabbinic literature and Jewish thought, but also for those interested in contemporary urban issues.

Shimon Redlich

Life in Transit

$25.00

Life in Transit is the long-awaited sequel to Shimon Redlich’s widely acclaimed Together and Apart in Brzezany, in which he discussed his childhood during the War and the Holocaust. Life in Transit tells the story of his adolescence in the city of Lodz in postwar Poland. Redlich’s personal memories are placed within the wider historical context of Jewish life in Poland and in Lodz during the immediate postwar years. Lodz in the years 1945-1950 was the second-largest city in the country and the major urban center of the Jewish population. Redlich’s research based on conventional sources and numerous interviews indicates that although the survivors still lived in the shadow of the Holocaust, postwar Jewish Lodz was permeated with a sense of vitality and hope.

Volodymyr Muzychenko

Jewish Ludmir

$28.00

This volume is a brief history of the Jewish community of Volodymyr-Volynsky, going back to its first historical mentions. It explores Jewish settlement in the city, the kahal, and the role of the community in the Va’ad Arba Aratsot, and profiles several important historical figures, including Shelomoh of Karlin and Khane-Rokhl Werbermacher (the Maiden of Ludmir). It also considers the city’s synagogues and Jewish cemetery, and explores the twentieth-century history of the community, especially during the Holocaust. Drawing on survivor eyewitness testimonies, the author pays tribute to the town’s Righteous among the Nations and describes efforts to preserve the memory of its Jewish community, including the creation of the Piatydni memorial, and lists prominent Jews born in Volodymyr-Volynsky and natives of the city living abroad. This book will be of interest to historians of the Jewish communities and the Holocaust in Ukraine, as well as to the general reader

Robin Aizlewood

Landmarks Revisited

$45.00

The Vekhi (Landmarks) symposium (1909) is one of the most famous publications in Russian intellectual and political history. Its fame rests on the critique it offers of the phenomenon of the Russian intelligentsia in the period of crisis that led to the 1917 Russian Revolution. It was published as a polemical response to the revolution of 1905, the failed outcome of which was deemed by all the Vekhi contributors to exemplify and illuminate fatal philosophical, political, and psychological flaws in the revolutionary intelligentsia that had sought it. Landmarks Revisited offers a new and comprehensive assessment of the symposium and its legacy from a variety of disciplinary perspectives by leading scholars in their fields. It will be of compelling interest to all students of Russian history, politics, and culture, and the impact of these on the wider world.

Yuri Leving

Keys to The Gift

$39.00

Yuri Leving's Keys to “The Gift”: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov's Novel is a new systematization of the main available data on Nabokov's most complex Russian novel, The Gift (1934–1939). From notes in Nabokov's private correspondence to scholarly articles accumulated during the seventy years since the novel’s first appearance in print, the work draws from a broad spectrum of existing material in a succinct and coherent way, as well as providing innovative analyses. The first part of the monograph, "The Novel," outlines the basic properties of The Gift ( plot, characters, style, and motifs) and reconstructs its internal chronology. The second part, "The Text," describes the creation of the novel and the history of its publication, public and critical reaction, challenges of the English translation, and post-Soviet reception. Along with annotations to all five chapters of The Gift, the commentary provides insight into problems of paleography, featuring unique textological analysis of the novel based on the author's study of the archival copy of the manuscript.

Ezra Kopelowitz

Jewish Peoplehood

$29.00

At a time when Jewish communities have become increasingly anxious about weakening Jewish identity, one response strategy is to engage with the concept of Jewish peoplehood as a social phenomenon, in its varied contexts and processes. This volume represents the first in-depth effort to address the concept of Jewish peoplehood since the initial attempts of early-20th-century Jewish intellectuals Mordechai Kaplan and Salo Baron. Indeed, its substance goes far beyond the range of a contemporary academic anthology, constituting instead a dynamic think tank on the concept of Jewish peoplehood by bringing together intellectuals from France, Israel, the UK, and the United States. The collection offers both intellectual and practical frameworks for grappling with the policy outcomes of different understandings of the peoplehood concept, and contributors to this volume include noted figures from diverse walks of life: academic disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, a rabbi, a literary figure, and communal leaders.

Raphael Jospe

Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages

$49.00

Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages presents an overview of the formative period of medieval Jewish philosophy, from its beginnings with Saadiah Gaon to its apex in Maimonides, when Jews living in Islamic countries and writing in Arabic were the first to develop a conscious and continuous tradition of philosophy.The book includes a dictionary of selected philosophic terms, and discusses the Greek and Arabic schools of thought that influenced the Jewish thinkers and to which they responded. The discussion covers: the nature of Jewish philosophy, Saadiah Gaon and the Kalam, Jewish Neo-Platonism, Bahya ibn Paqudah, Abraham ibn Ezra's philosophical Bible exegesis, Judah Ha-Levi's critique of philosophy, Abraham ibn Daud and the transition to Aristotelianism, Maimonides, and the controversy over Maimonides and philosophy.

Samuel J. Levine

Jewish Law and American Law, Volume 1

$35.00

This volume contributes to the growing field of comparative Jewish and American law, presenting twenty-six essays characterized by a number of distinct features. The essays will appeal to legal scholars and, at the same time, will be accessible and of interest to a more general audience of intellectually curious readers. These contributions are faithful to Jewish law on its own terms, while applying comparative methods to offer fresh perspectives on complex issues in the Jewish legal system. Through careful comparative analysis, the essays also turn to Jewish law to provide insights into substantive and conceptual areas of the American legal system, particularly areas of American law that are complex, controversial, and unsettled.

Joan Delaney Grossman

Ivan Konevskoi

$35.00

Ivan Konevskoi: “Wise Child” of Russian Symbolism is the first study in any language of Ivan Konevskoi –— poet, thinker, mystic— – for many decades the “lost genius” of Russian modernism. A fresh and compelling figure, Konevskoi plunged deeply into the currents of modern mystical thought and art in the 1890s. A passionate searcher for immortality, he developed his own version of pantheism meant to guard his unique persona from dissolution in the All-One. The poetry of Tiutchev, Vladimir Solov’ev Soloviev and Rossetti, William James’s psychology, paintings of Pre-Raphaelites and Arnold Boecklin, Old Russian historical myth, the Finnish Kalevala: all engaged him during his brief life. His worldview grew more audacious, his confidence in the magical power of the word grew more assured. Drowning in 1901 at 23, Konevskoi left a legacy unfinished, rich, and intriguing.

Avi Sagi

Jewish Religion After Theology

$35.00

Jewish Religion after Theology ponders one of the most intriguing shifts in modern Jewish thought: from a metaphysical and theological standpoint toward a new manner of philosophizing based primarily on practice. Different chapters study this great shift and its various manifestations. The central figure of this new examination is Isaiah Leibowitz, whose thoughts encapsulate more than any other Jewish thinker this stance of religion without metaphysics. Sagi explores corresponding issues such as observance, the possibility of pluralism, the meaning of penance without messianic suppositions, and pragmatic coping with theodicy after the Holocaust, presenting the different possibilities within this great alteration in Jewish thought.

Darren Kleinberg

Hybrid Judaism

$19.95

American Jewish identity has changed significantly over the course of the past half century.

During this time, Irving Greenberg developed a unique theology that anticipated David Hollinger's notion of postethnicity and represents a compelling understanding of contemporary American Jewish identity. Greenberg's covenantal theology and image of God idea combine into what Kleinberg refers to as Hybrid Judaism. Central to Greenberg's theology is recognition of the transformative power of encounter in an open society, heavily influenced by his own encounters across Jewish denominational boundaries and through his participation in the Christian-Jewish dialogue movement. Presented here for the first time, Greenberg’s theology of Hybrid Judaism has great relevance for our understanding of American Jewish identity in the twenty-first century.

Steven Usitalo

The Invention of Mikhail Lomonosov

$35.00

This study explores the evolution of Lomonosov’s imposing stature in Russian thought from the middle of the eighteenth century to the closing years of the Soviet period. It reveals much about the intersection in Russian culture of attitudes towards the meaning and significance of science, as well as about the rise of a Russian national identity, of which Lomonosov became an outstanding symbol. Idealized depictions of Lomonosov were employed by Russian scientists, historians, and poets, among others, in efforts to affirm to their countrymen and to the state the pragmatic advantages of science to a modernizing nation. In setting forth this assumption, Usitalo notes that no sharply drawn division can be upheld between the utilization of the myth of Lomonosov during the Soviet period of Russian history and that which characterized earlier views. The main elements that formed the mythology were laid down in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; Soviet scholars simply added more exaggerated layers to existing representations.

Mikhail Epstein

The Irony of the Ideal

$45.00

This book explores the major paradoxes of Russian literature as a manifestation of both tragic and ironic contradictions of human nature and national character. Russian literature, from Pushkin and Gogol to Chekhov, Nabokov and to postmodernist writers, is studied as a holistic text that plays on the reversal of such opposites as being and nothingness, reality and simulation, and rationality and absurdity. The glorification of Mother Russia exposes her character as a witch; a little man is transformed into a Christ figure; consistent rationality betrays its inherent madness, and extreme verbosity produces the effect of silence. The greatest Russian writers were masters of spiritual self–denial and artistic self–destruction, which explains many paradoxes and unpredictable twists of Russian history up to our time.

Marina Aptekman

Jacob's Ladder

$35.00

Focusing primarily on the close study of literary works presented in the broad cultural and historical context, Jacob’s Ladder discusses the reflection of kabbalistic allegory in Russian literature and provides a detailed analysis of the evolution of the perception of Kabbalah in Russian consciousness. Aptekman investigates the questions of when, how and why Kabbalah has been used in Russian literary texts from Pre-Romanticism to Modernism and what particular role it played in the larger context of the Russian literary tradition. The correct understanding of this liaison helps the reader to clarify many enigmatic images in Russian literary works of the last two centuries and to understand the roots of a particular cultural falsification that played an important role in the anti-Semitic mythology of the twentieth century.

Dominic Rubin

Holy Russia, Sacred Israel

$45.00

Holy Russia, Sacred Israel examines how Russian religious thinkers, both Jewish and Christian, conceived of Judaism, Jewry and the ‘Old Testament’ philosophically, theologically and personally at a time when the Messianic element in Russian consciousness was being stimulated by events ranging from the pogroms of the 1880s, through two Revolutions and World Wars, to exile in Western Europe. An attempt is made to locate the boundaries between the Jewish and Christian, Russian and Western, Gnostic-pagan and Orthodox elements in Russian thought in this period. The author reflects personally on how the heritage of these thinkers – little analyzed or translated in the West – can help Orthodox (and other) Christians respond to Judaism (including ‘Messianic Judaism’), Zionism, and Christian anti-Semitism today.

Raphael Shuchat

Jewish Faith in a Changing World

$29.00

Ever since the first encounter between Judaism and the western world in the second century BCE, Jewish thinkers like Maimonides, Gersonides, R. Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, and Rabbi A. I. Kook have grappled with issues of Jewish faith and modernity. The works they published, which comprise Jewish classical philosophy, were products of the highest intellectual caliber, and no question of faith, no matter how embarrassing or heretical, was overlooked. In this book Raphael Shuchat presents the reader with some of the main and timeless issues of Jewish philosophy over the ages and updates them to twenty-first century thinking, making each issue relevant for the modern reader. This book offers a fresh intellectual outlook on the Jewish faith, and contains a timely message for all religionists and thinkers in the twenty-first century. It will be of great use to both students and laymen.

Vera Schwarcz

In the Crook of the Rock

$34.00

Focusing upon the life of Chaya Walkin—one little girl from a distinguished Torah lineage in Poland—this book illustrates the inner resources of the refugee community that made possible survival with dignity.

Based on a wide variety of sources and languages, this book is crafted around the voice of a child who was five years old when she was forced to flee her home in Poland and start the terrifying journey to Vilna, Kobe, and Shanghai. The Song of Songs is used to provide an unexpected and poetic angle of vision upon strategies for creating meaning in times of historical trauma.

Victoria Khiterer

Jewish City or Inferno of Russian Israel?

$42.00

This book describes the history of Jews in Kiev from the tenth century to the February 1917 Revolution. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Kiev Jewish community was one of the largest and wealthiest in the Russian Empire. This book illuminates the major processes and events in Kievan Jewish history, including the creation of the Jewish community, the expulsions of Jews from the city, government persecution and Jewish pogroms, the Beilis Affair, the participation of Jews in the political, economic, and cultural life of Kiev, and their contribution to the development of the city.

Jewish City or Inferno of Russian Israel?

Eliezer Schweid

The Idea of Modern Jewish Culture

$29.00

The vast majority of intellectual, religious, and national developments in modern Judaism revolve around the central idea of "Jewish culture." This book is the first synoptic view of these developments that organizes and relates them from this vantage point. The first Jewish modernization movements perceived culture as the defining trait of the outside alien social environment to which Jewry had to adapt. To be "cultured" was to be modern-European, as opposed to medieval-ghetto-Jewish. In short order, however, the Jewish religious legacy was redefined retrospectively as a historical "culture," with fateful consequences for the conception of Judaism as a humanly- and not only divinely-mandated regime. The conception of Judaism-as-culture took two main forms: an integrative, vernacular Jewish culture that developed in tandem with the integration of Jews into the various nations of western-central Europe and America, and a national Hebrew culture which, though open to the inputs of modern European society, sought to develop a revitalized Jewish national identity that ultimately found expression in the revival of the Jewish homeland and the State of Israel.

Sara Bender

In Enemy Land

$35.00

This book offers a study of the Jewish community in Kielce and its environs during World War II and the Holocaust. It is the first of its kind in providing a comprehensive account of Kielce’s Jews and their history as victims under the German occupation. The book focuses in particular on Jewish-Polish relations in the Kielce region; the deportation of the Jews of Kielce and its surrounding areas to the Treblinka death camp; the difficulties faced by those attempting to help and save them; and daily life in the Small Ghetto from September 1942 until late May 1943.

Yuri Leving

The Goalkeeper

$45.00

The Goalkeeperis a new scholarly almanac devoted to the art of Vladimir Nabokov. Himself an ardent goalkeeper, the author of Lolita viewed soccer as more than a game: “I was less the keeper of a soccer goal than the keeper of a secret” (Speak, Memory). The inaugural collection features contributions from two dozen leading Nabokov scholars worldwide, including academic articles (Neil Cornwell, Gerard de Vries, Samuel Schuman, and others); roundtable discussions (Brian Boyd, Jeff Edmunds, Priscilla Meyer, David Rampton, Leona Toker); interviews (Dmitri Nabokov, Alvin Toffler); archival materials; the Kyoto Nabokov conference report; and book reviews (Pekka Tammi, Zoran Kuzmanovich, Galya Diment). The Nabokov Almanac, edited by Yuri Leving, is affiliated with the Nabokov Online Journal, published since 2007.

Colleen McQuillen

The Human Reimagined

$49.00

The enmeshment of the human body with various forms of technology is a phenomenon that characterizes lived and imagined experiences in Russian arts of the modernist and postmodernist eras. In contrast to the post-revolutionary fixation on mechanical engineering, industrial progress, and the body as a machine, the postmodern, postindustrial period probes the meaning of being human not only from a physical, bodily perspective, but also from the philosophical perspectives of subjectivity and consciousness. The Human Reimagined examines the ways in which literary and artistic representations of the body, selfhood, subjectivity, and consciousness illuminate late- and post-Soviet ideas about the changing relationships among the individual, the environment, technology, and society.

Contributors include: Alex Anikina, Keti Chukhrov, Jacob Emery, Elana Gomel, Sofya Khagi, Katerina Lakhmitko, Colleen McQuillen, Jonathan Brooks Platt, Kristina Toland, Julia Vaingurt, Diana Kurkovsky West, Trevor Wilson

Jose Faur

The Horizontal Society (Volumes 1 & 2)

$99.95

The Horizontal Society is an exposition of rabbinic thought as exemplified by Maimonides. The thought streams of Greece, Rome, and Christendom serve as a contrast. This work is in the Hebrew rhetorical tradition of melisa. The main text in five sections-—The God of Israel, The Books of Israel, The Governance of Israel, The Memory of Israel, and The Folly of Israel—focuses on these core matters. It includes numerous references to orient the reader. The mode is similar to the author's previous work, such as Golden Doves with Silver Dots: Semiotics and Textuality in Rabbinic Tradition, interacting with the latest thought from today's academy. This book illustrates the horizontal organization of the Jewish people. Other social organization is based on hierarchy. Two principles made this difference possible for Israel. First, the Hebrew Scriptures alone propose that every human being is created in the image of God.This necessitates the absolute equality of every human being. Second, the Sinai covenant establishes the Law as the supreme authority. Whereas in other societies, might is the source of authority, in Judaism authority is limited by the Law. These principles were summarized by the last Prophet of Israel: "Has not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously…, profaning the covenant of our fathers?" (Mal 2:10). There is a subdivided bibliography of forty pages, including both Jewish and "Western" sources. The scholarly apparatus includes indices of terms, names, and subjects. There are also seventy appendices of interest to rabbinic readership.

Hugh McLean

In Quest of Tolstoy

$29.00

Lev Tolstoy has held the attention of mankind for well over a century. A supremely talented artist, whose novels and short stories continue to entrance readers all over the world, he was at the same time a fearless moral philosopher who explored and challenged the fundamental bases of human society—political, economic, legal, and cultural. Hugh McLean, Professor Emeritus of Russian literature at the University of California, Berkeley, has been studying and writing about Tolstoy for many years. In these essays he investigates some of the numerous puzzles and paradoxes in the Tolstoyan heritage, engaging both with Tolstoy the artist, author of those incomparable novels, and Tolstoy the thinker, who, from his impregnable outpost at Yasnaya Polyana, questioned the received ideas and beliefs of the whole civilized world. In two concluding essays, "Tolstoy beyond Tolstoy," McLean deals with the impact of Tolstoy on such diverse figures as Ernest Hemingway and Isaiah Berlin.

Meir Persoff

Hats in the Ring

$34.00

Prior to the latest Chief Rabbinical selection process, seven eminent rabbis were appointed to British Jewry’s highest ecclesiastical post, although only six were installed and saw out their terms of office. The manner of their appointment was invariably coloured by intrigue, in-fighting and a host of other influences, not least an increasingly potent input by the dayanim of the London Beth Din, themselves not immune to strategic self-interest. Meir Persoff’s scholarly yet accessible account of these seven appointments draws on a wealth of hitherto unaccessed and unpublished material, and on the stories of many of the protagonists involved, including in fascinating detail those who, by fair means and foul, failed to gain (or chose to reject) the coveted prize.

Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel

Holiness and Transgression

$42.00

This volume deals with the female dynasty of the House of David and its influence on the Jewish Messianic Myth. It provides a missing link in the chain of research on the topic of messianism and contributes to the understanding of the connection between female transgression and redemption, from the Bible through Rabbinic literature until the Zohar. The discussion of the centrality of the mother image in Judeo-Christian culture and the parallels between the appearance of Mary in the Gospels and the Davidic Mothers in the Hebrew Bible, stresses mutual representations of "the mother of the messiah" in Christian and Jewish imaginaire. Through the prism of gender studies and by stressing questions of femininity, motherhood and sexuality, the subject appears in a new light. This research highlights the importance of intertwining Jewish literary study with comparative religion and gender theories, enabling the process of filling in the ‘mythic gaps’ in classical Jewish sources. The book won the Pines, Lakritz and Warburg awards.

James R. Ross

The Image of Jews in Contemporary China

$32.00

Bookstores in Chinese cities are stocked with dozens of Chinese-language books on how Jews conduct business, manage the world, and raise their children. At least ten universities throughout China offer popular Jewish Studies programs, some with advanced degrees. Yet there are virtually no Jews in China. The Chinese are constructing an identity for a people that the large majority of them will never meet. This edited volume critically examines the image of Jews from the contemporary perspective of ordinary Chinese citizens. It includes chapters on Chinese Jewish Studies programs, popular Chinese books and blogs about Jews, China’s relations with Israel, and innovative examinations of the ancient Jewish community of Kaifeng.

Maxim D. Shrayer

I Saw It

$29.00

In this ground-breaking book, based on archival and field research and previously unknown historical evidence, Maxim D. Shrayer introduces the work of Ilya Selvinsky, the first Jewish-Russian poet to depict the Holocaust (Shoah) in the occupied Soviet territories.

In January 1942, while serving as a military journalist, Selvinsky witnessed the immediate aftermath of the massacre of thousands of Jews outside the Crimean city of Kerch, and thereafter composed and published poems about it.

Shrayer painstakingly reconstructs the details of the Nazi atrocities witnessed by Selvinsky, and shows that in 1943, as Stalin’s regime increasingly refused to report the annihilation of Jews in the occupied territories, Selvinsky paid a high price for his writings and actions. This book features over 60 rare photographs and illustrations and includes translations of Selvinsky’s principal Shoah poems.

Rubin Katz

Gone To Pitchipoi

$27.00

This vivid and moving memoir describes the survival of a Jewish child in the hell of Nazi occupied Poland. Rubin Katz was born in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyskie, Poland, in 1931. This town, located in the picturesque countryside of central Poland 42 miles south of Radom, had in 1931 a population of nearly 30,000, of whom more than a third were Jews. The persistence of traditional ways of life and the importance of the local hasidic rebbe, Yechiel-Meier (Halevi) Halsztok, as well as the introduction of such modernities as bubble gum, are clearly and effectively described here. This memoir is remarkable for the ability of its author to recall so many events in detail and for the way he is able to be fair to all those caught up in the tragic dilemmas of those years. It is a major contribution to our understanding of the fate of Jews in smaller Polish towns during the Second World War and the conditions which made it possible for some of them, like Rubin, to survive.

T. Horev

The First to be Destroyed

$49.00

The Jewish community of the city of Kleczew came into existence in the sixteenth century. It remained large and strong throughout the next four hundred years, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it constituted 40-60% of the total population. The German army entered Kleczew on September 15, 1939, shortly after the outbreak of World War II. The communities of Kleczew and the vicinity were among the first Jewish collectives in Europe to be totally destroyed. The events presented in this book reveal that the organization of deportations and the methods of mass murder conducted in this district, by Kommando Lange, served as a model that would be applied later in the death camps during the mass extermination of Polish and European Jewry. If so, it was in the woods near Kleczew that the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” began.

Irina Astashkevich

Gendered Violence

$35.00

This is a groundbreaking study of an important and neglected topic. Between 1917 and 1921, rape was used as a strategic weapon in the genocidal anti-Jewish violence—the pogroms—that erupted in Ukraine. During this period, at least 100,000 Jews died and unknown numbers of Jewish women were raped. The book is based on the in-depth study of the scores of survivor narratives that have been all but forgotten for almost a century. It analyzes how the victimized Jewish communities experienced trauma, how they expressed it, the motives of the perpetrators, and the part played by rape in furthering the pogroms’ objectives.

Nirit Gradwohl Pisano

Granddaughters of the Holocaust

$22.00

Granddaughters of the Holocaust: Never Forgetting What They Didn’t Experience delves into the intergenerational transmission of trauma to the granddaughters of Holocaust survivors. Although members of this generation did not endure the horrors of the Holocaust directly, they absorbed the experiences of both their parents and grandparents. Ten women participated in psychoanalytic interviews about their inheritance of Holocaust knowledge and memory, and their responses to this legacy. These women provided startling evidence for the embodiment of Holocaust residue in the ways they approached daily tasks of living and being. The resulting narratives revealed that frequently unspoken, unspeakable events are inevitably transmitted to, and imprinted upon, succeeding generations. Granddaughters continue to confront and heal the pain of a trauma they never experienced.

Andrii Danylenko

From the Bible to Shakespeare

$42.00

This is the first comprehensive study of the language program of the prominent Ukrainian writer and ideologue Pantelejmon Kuliš (1819-1897) whose translations of the Bible and Shakespeare proved most innovative in the formation of literary and the national self-identification of Ukrainians. The author looks at Kuliš’s translations from the perspective of cultural and ethnic studies, presenting literary Ukrainian as a process of negotiation among literary traditions, religions (rites), political movements, and personalities.

This book may be used in university courses on the history of Slavic languages and literatures, contemporary theories of nation-building and national identity as well as language contact and (historical) sociolinguistics. The discussion of language policy in the Russian Empire and Austria-Hungary can be included in regular university courses on Slavic civilizations, history of Central and Eastern Europe (Russia, Poland, and Ukraine).

Irwin Weil

From the Cincinnati Reds to the Moscow Reds

$23.00

This book brings together a lifetime of experiences told by a beloved member of the field of Slavic languages and literature - Irwin Weil.

During the Soviet era, Irwin frequently visited and corresponded with outstanding Russian cultural figures, such as Vladimir Nabokov, Korney Chukovsky, and Dmitrii Shostakovich. His deep love of the Russian people and their culture has touched the lives of countless students, in particular at Northwestern University, where he has taught since 1966. It is these stories of an unassuming Jewish American from Cincinnati, Ohio who rubbed shoulders with some of the most prominent thinkers, writers, and musicians in the Soviet Union that are presented for the first time in this volume.

From the Cincinnati Reds to the Moscow Reds

Shirli Brautbar

From Fashion to Politics

$22.00

Not only fashion and politics, but scholarship, gender, religion, discrimination – every hot button issue is examined in the story of the triumphant rise of Hadassah. A fascinating and important book. —Rabbi David Wolpe. Sinai Temple, Los Angeles

Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist organization of America, has wielded power in the halls of American political institutions and in the minds of many Jews in the United States. This book enriches our understanding of both modern Jewish history and American women’s history. Hadassah is important not only for what it tells us about women but also for what it reveals about Jewish history and politics, about Zionism, and about America.

In the post-World War II era, Hadassah played a significant role in shaping Jewish women’s political action and identity. Widely known for its work in Israel, Hadassah played a central role in shaping the way generations of American Jewish women thought about themselves and about their involvement on the American political scene.

Irene Masing-Delic

From Symbolism to Socialist Realism

$49.00

Developed as a reader for upper division undergraduates and beginning graduates, From Symbolism to Socialist Realism offers broad variety of materials contextualizing the literary texts most frequently read in Russian literature courses at this level. These approaches range from critical-theoretical articles, cultural and historical analyses, literary manifestos and declarations of literary aesthetics, memoirs of revolutionary terrorism and arrests by the NKVD, political denunciations, and “literary vignettes” capturing the spirit of its particular time in a nutshell. The voices of this “polyphonic” reader are diverse: Briusov, Savinkov, Ivanov-Razumnik, Kollontai, Tsvetaeva, Shklovsky, Olesha, Zoshchenko, Zhdanov, Grossman, Evtushenko, and others. The range of specialists on Russian culture represented here is equally broad: Clark, Erlich, Grossman, Nilsson, Peace, Poznansky, Siniavskii, and others. Together they evoke and illuminate a complex and tragic era.

Howard Kaminsky

Fundamentals of Jewish Conflict Resolution

$32.00

Fundamentals of Jewish Conflict Resolution offers an in-depth presentation of traditional Jewish approaches to interpersonal conflict resolution. It examines the underlying principles, prescriptive rules, and guidelines that are found in the Jewish tradition for the prevention, amelioration, and resolution of interpersonal conflicts, without the assistance of any type of third-party intermediary. Among the topics discussed are the obligations of pursuing peace and refraining from destructive conflict, Rabbinic perspectives on what constitutes constructive/destructive conflict, judging people favorably and countering negative judgmental biases, resolving conflict through dialogue, asking and granting forgiveness, and anger management. This work also includes detailed summaries of contemporary approaches to interpersonal conflict resolution, theories and research on apologies and forgiveness, and methods of anger management.

Robert P. Hughes

Freedom From Violence and Lies

$45.00

Freedom from Violence and Lies is a collection of forty-one essays by Simon Karlinsky (1924–2009), a prolific and controversial scholar of modern Russian literature, sexual politics, and music who taught in the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures from 1964 to 1991. Among Karlinsky’s full-length works are major studies of Marina Tsvetaeva and Nikolai Gogol, Russian Drama from Its Beginnings to the Age of Pushkin; editions of Anton Chekhov’s letters; writings by Russian émigrés; and correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. Karlinsky also wrote frequently for professional journals and mainstream publications like the New York Times Book Review and the Nation. The present volume is the first collection of such shorter writings, spanning more than three decades. It includes twenty-seven essays on literary topics and fourteen on music, seven of which have been newly translated from the Russian originals.

Lewis Bagby

First Words (ENG)

$27.00

Dostoevsky attached introductions to his most challenging narratives, including Notes from the House of the Dead, Notes from Underground, The Devils, The Brothers Karamazov, and “A Gentle Creature.” Despite his clever attempts to call his readers’ attention to these introductions, they have been neglected as an object of study for over 150 years. That oversight is rectified in First Words, the first systematic study of Dostoevsky’s introductions. Using Genette’s typology of prefaces and Bakhtin’s notion of multiple voices, Lewis Bagby reveals just how important Dostoevsky’s first words are to his fiction. Dostoevsky’s ruses, verbal winks, and backward glances indicate a lively and imaginative author at earnest play in the field of literary discourse.

Katherine Bowers

A Dostoevskii Companion

$49.00

The powerful, impassioned, and often frenetic prose of Fedor Dostoevskii continues to fascinate readers in the twenty-first century, even though we are far removed from Dostoevskii’s Russia. A Dostoevskii Companion: Texts and Contexts aims to help students and readers navigate the writer’s fiction and his world, to better understand the cultural and sociopolitical milieu in which Dostoevskii lived and wrote. Rather than offer a single definitive view of the author, the book contains a collection of documents from Dostoevskii’s own time (excerpts from his letters, his journalism, and what his contemporaries wrote about him), as well as extracts from the major critical studies of Dostoevskii from the contemporary academy. The volume equips readers with a deeper understanding of Dostoevskii’s world and his writing, offering new paths and directions for interpreting his writing.

Eunice G. Pollack

From Antisemitism to Anti-Zionism

$49.00

Leading scholars use the lenses of history, sociology, political science, psychology, philosophy, religion, and literature to examine, disentangle, and remove the disguises of the many forms of antisemitism and anti-Zionism that have inhabited or targeted the English-speaking world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Although in principle one can be anti-Zionist without being antisemitic, authors document and trace the numerous parallels and continuities between the hoary tropes attached for centuries to the Jewish people and the more recent vilifications of the Jewish state. They evaluate—and discredit—many of the central claims anti-Zionists have promoted in their relentless effort to delegitimize the Jewish state. They show how mainstream anti-racist communities, courses and texts have ignored—or denied—the antisemitic hatred that pervades much of the Muslim world.

Sean Martin

For the Good of the Nation

$35.00

Tens of thousands of Jewish children were orphaned during World War I and in the subsequent years of conflict. In response, Jewish leaders in Poland established CENTOS, the Central Union of Associations for Jewish Orphan Care. Through CENTOS, social workers and other professionals cooperated to offer Jewish children the preparation necessary to survive during a turbulent period. They established new organizations that functioned beyond the authority of the recognized Jewish community and with the support of Polish officials. The work of CENTOS exemplifies the community’s goal to build a Jewish future. Translations of sources from CENTOS publications in Yiddish and Polish describe the lives of the orphaned Jewish children and the tireless efforts of adults to better the children’s circumstances.

Georgy Ivanov

Disintegration of the Atom and Petersburg Winters

$32.00

This book presents translations of two celebrated works by Georgy Ivanov. Disintegration of the Atom (1938) is a prose poem depicting Russian émigré despair on the eve of WWII—a cri de coeur that challenges prevailing concepts of time and space, ending in erotically charged wretchedness. Petersburg Winters (1928/1952) is a portrait of Petersburg swept up in the artistic ferment of late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia. The spirit of the city is conveyed through a series of vignettes of Ivanov’s contemporaries, including Blok, Akhmatova, Esenin, and Mandelstam.

Disintegration of the Atom and Petersburg Winters

Frederick T. Griffiths

Epic and the Russian Novel from Gogol to Pasternak

$35.00

Epic and the Russian Novel from Gogol to Pasternak examines the origin of the nineteen- century Russian novel and challenges the Lukács-Bakhtin theory of epic. By removing the Russian novel from its European context, the authors reveal that it developed as a means of reconnecting the narrative form with its origins in classical and Christian epic in a way that expressed the Russian desire to renew and restore ancient spirituality. Through this methodology, Griffiths and Rabinowitz dispute Bakhtin’s classification of epic as a monophonic and dead genre whose time has passed. Due to its grand themes and cultural centrality, the epic is the form most suited to newcomers or cultural outsiders seeking legitimacy through appropriation of the past. Through readings of Gogol’s Dead Souls—a uniquely problematic work, and one which Bakhtin argued was novelistic rather than epic—Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, and Tolstoy’s War and Peace, this book redefines “epic” and how we understand the sweep of Russian literature as a whole.

Magnus Ljunggren

Fifty-Five Years with Russia

$19.00

Professor Magnus Ljunggren looks back over his meetings with leading members of the Russian intelligentsia and their struggle with the totalitarian structures of Soviet and post-Soviet society.

The academic career of internationally recognized Professor of Slavic Studies Magnus Ljunggren spans more than a half century. Here he looks back over his meetings with prominent members of the Russian intelligentsia who from the liberalizing XXII Party Congress in 1961 and down to the present have in various forms struggled with the totalitarian structures of Soviet and post-Soviet society.

As a literary scholar Ljunggren has focused on Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg, Russian Symbolism and Russian Silver Age literature and culture. His memoirs reflect on how his study of Symbolism and his commitment to the Russian civil rights movement over the years have stimulated each other and contributed to a deeper understanding of Russia’s distinctive character. Ljunggren’s gallery of intimate and colorful portraits includes Bulat Okudzhava, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Joseph Brodsky, Viktor Shklovsky, Lidia Chukovskaya, and Nina Berberova.

Vera Proskurina

Creating the Empress

$35.00

In Creating the Empress, Vera Proskurina examines the interaction between power and poetry in creating the imperial image of Catherine the Great, providing a detailed analysis of a wide range of Russian literary works from this period, particularly the main Classical myths associated with Catherine (Amazon, Astraea, Pallas Athena, Felicitas, Fortune, etc.), as well as how these Classical subjects affirmed imperial ideology and the monarch’s power. Each chapter of the book revolves around the major events of Catherine’s reign (and some major literary works) that give a broad framework to discuss the evolution of important recurring motifs and images.

J.A.E. Curtis

The Englishman from Lebedian

$29.00

After Evgeny Zamiatin emigrated from the USSR in 1931, he was systematically airbrushed out of Soviet literary history, despite the central role he had played in the cultural life of Russia’s northern capital for nearly twenty years. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, his writings have gradually been rediscovered in Russia, but with his archives scattered between Russia, France, and the USA, the project of reconstructing the story of his life has been a complex task. This book, the first full biography of Zamiatin in any language, draws upon his extensive correspondence and other documents in order to provide an account of his life which explores his intimate preoccupations, as well as uncovering the political and cultural background to many of his works. It reveals a man of strong will and high principles, who negotiated the political dilemmas of his day—including his relationship with Stalin—with great shrewdness.

Henry Felix Srebrnik

Dreams of Nationhood

$35.00

The American Jewish Communist movement played a major role in the politics of Jewish communities in cities such as Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia, as well as in many other centers, between the 1920s and the 1950s. Making extensive use of Yiddish-language books, newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, and other materials, Dreams of Nationhood traces the ideological and material support provided to the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan, located in the far east of the Soviet Union, by two American Jewish Communist-led organizations, the ICOR and the American Birobidzhan Committee. By providing a detailed historical examination of the political work of these two groups, the book makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of twentieth-century Jewish life in the United States.

Marcus Levitt

Early Modern Russian Letters

$45.00

Early Modern Russian Letters: Texts and Contexts brings together twenty essays by Marcus C. Levitt, a leading scholar of eighteenth-century Russian literature. The essays address a spectrum of works and issues that shaped the development of modern Russian literature, from authorship and philosophy to gender and religion in Russian Enlightenment culture. The first part of the collection explores the career and works of Alexander Sumarokov, who played a formative role in literary life of his day. In the essays of the second part Levitt argues that the Enlightenment’s privileging of vision played an especially important role in eighteenth-century Russian self-image, and that its “occularcentrism” was profoundly shaped by Orthodox religious views. Early Modern Russian Letters offers a series of original and provocative explorations of a vital but little studied period.

Vladimir Golstein

Dostoevsky Beyond Dostoevsky

$45.00

Dostoevsky Beyond Dostoevsky is a collection of essays with a broad interdisciplinary focus. It includes contributions by leading Dostoevsky scholars, social scientists, scholars of religion and philosophy. The volume considers aesthetics, philosophy, theology, and science of the 19th century Russia and the West that might have informed Dostoevsky’s thought and art. Issues such as evolutionary theory and literature, science and society, scientific and theological components of comparative intellectual history, and aesthetic debates of the nineteenth century Russia form the core of the intellectual framework of this book. Dostoevsky’s oeuvre with its wide-ranging interests and engagement with philosophical, religious, political, economic, and scientific discourses of his time emerges as a particularly important case for the study of cross-fertilization among disciplines. The individual chapters explore Dostoevsky’s real or imaginative dialogues with aesthetic, philosophic, and scientific thought of his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors, revealing Dostoevsky’s forward looking thought, as it finds its echoes in modern literary theory, philosophy, theology and science.

Jeffrey Kress

Development, Learning, and Community

$22.00

Development, Learning, and Community uses data drawn from a study of pluralistic Jewish high schools to illustrate the complex and often challenging interplay between the cognitive and socio-affective elements of education.

Throughout, Kress grapples with questions such as: How can the balance between community cohesion and group differences be achieved in diverse settings? What are the educational implications of an approach to identity development rooted in contemporary developmental theories that posit the interaction among cognition, affect, and behavior? How can the “formal” and “informal” offerings of a school coalesce to address these broadly conceived identity outcomes, and what are the challenges in doing so?

Meir Persoff

Closed Doors, Open Minds

$34.00

For some twenty years from the late 1960s, and thereafter following a brief pause, representatives of British Jewry’s religious orientations held closed-door meetings at the Chief Rabbi’s residence in attempts to bridge their communal and halachic differences. So secret were they that barely a word broke through, and until now the details of their often fiery disputations – both verbally and in writing – have never been revealed. In an exclusive glimpse into this shrouded arena, "Closed Doors, Open Minds" presents an important new chapter in Meir Persoff’s acclaimed series on the British Chief Rabbinate, deftly unraveling the manifold theological and ideological strands of its multi-hued tapestry.

Albert D. Friedberg

Crafting the 613 Commandments

$34.00

Rabbinic tradition has it that 613 commandments were given to Moses on Mount Sinai, but it does not specify those included in the enumeration. Maimonides methodically and artfully crafts a list of 613 commandments in a work that serves as a prolegemenon to the Mishneh Torah, his monumental code of law. This book explores the surprising way Maimonides put this tradition to use and his possible rationale for using such a tradition. It also explores many of the philosophical and ethical ideas animating the composition of such a list. In the book's second half, Friedberg examines the manner by which Maimonides formulated positive commandments in the Mishneh Torah, leading him to suggest new dimensions in Maimonides' legal theory.

Sharon Marie Carnicke

Checking out Chekhov

$29.00

This book paints a vivid portrait of Anton Chekhov—a Russian writer whose elusive personality and richly detailed plays have left an indelible imprint upon the world’s theatre. Every page reveals the joys and difficulties of his short life, his comic sensibility, deep compassion, and often puzzling use of dramatic style and genre. Carnicke demystifies Chekhov’s plays—forged from his literary innovations, avid theatergoing, love of vaudeville, and loathing of melodrama. She interweaves biographical and cultural information with insightful case studies and close analysis to leave her reader with a full and fresh perspective on an artist who is as foundational to theatrical traditions as are Shakespeare and Stanislavsky.

Angela Brintlinger

Chapaev and his Comrades

$35.00

Across the twentieth century, the Russian literary hero remained central to Russian fiction and frequently “battled” one enemy or another, whether on the battlefield or on a civilian front. War was the experience of the Russian people, and it became a dominant trope to represent the Soviet experience in literature as well as other areas of cultural life. This book traces those war experiences, memories, tropes, and metaphors in the literature of the Soviet and post-Soviet period, examining the work of Dmitry Furmanov, Fyodor Gladkov, Alexander Tvardovsky, Emmanuil Kazakevich, Vera Panova, Viktor Nekrasov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Voinovich, Sergei Dovlatov, Vladimir Makanin, Viktor Astafiev, Viktor Pelevin, and Vasily Aksyonov. These authors represented official Soviet literature and underground or dissident literature; they fell into and out of favor, were exiled and returned to Russia, died at home and abroad. Most importantly, they were all touched by war, and they reacted to the state of war in their literary works.

Andrei Zorin

By Fables Alone

$35.00

Academic Studies Press is proud to present this translation of Professor Andrei Zorin’s seminal Kormya Dvuglavogo Orla. This collection of essays includes several that have never before appeared in English, including “The People’s War: The Time of Troubles in Russian Literature, 1806-1807” and “Holy Alliances: V. A. Zhukovskii’s Epistle ‘To Emperor Alexander’ and Christian Universalism.”

Thomas Seifrid

A Companion to Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit

$21.00

Written at the height of Stalin's first "five-year plan" for the industrialization of Soviet Russia and the parallel campaign to collectivize Soviet agriculture, Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit registers a dissonant mixture of utopian longings and despair. Furthermore, it provides essential background to Platonov's parody of the mainstream Soviet "production" novel, which is widely recognized as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian prose. In addition to an overview of the work's key themes, it discusses their place within Platonov's oeuvre as a whole, his troubled relations with literary officialdom, the work's ideological and political background, and key critical responses since the work's first publication in the West in 1973.

A Companion to Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit

Robert Louis Jackson

Close Encounters

$45.00

Drawing on the prose, poetry, and criticism of a broad range of Russian writers and critics, including Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bakhtin, Gorky, Nabokov, and Solzhenitsyn, Close Encounters: Essays on Russian Literature explores themes of chance and fate, freedom and responsibility, beauty and disfiguration, and loss and separation, as well as concepts of criticism and the moral purpose of art. Through close textual analysis, the author offers a view of the unity of form and content in Russian writing and of its unique capacity to disclose the universal in the detail of human experience. With an emphasis on Dostoevsky, Close Encounters foregrounds ethical and spiritual concerns of Russian writers and stimulates the reader to pursue his or her own critical exploration of Russian literature. This work will be of interest to academic libraries, university students, and specialists in literature, criticism, philosophy, and esthetics, as well as enthusiastic general readers of Russian literature.

Walter Jessel

Class of ’31

$29.00

Class of ’31 is a beautifully written memoir from Walter Jessel, a German Jew determined to answer the question that haunted him since emigrating to the United States in 1938: “Would the people of other nations, if they were placed in the same position as the German during the Hitler regime, behave in the same manner?”

Born in 1913 in Frankfurt, Jessel led an extraordinary twentieth-century life on three continents. In 1945, Jessel returned to Germany as an American soldier and sought out his former classmates, hoping to understand how they survived, or thrived, in Nazi Germany. Incredibly personal and honest, Class of ‘31 is a valuable primary source for anyone interested in the history of German Jews.

Ira Robinson

Canada's Jews

$49.00

Canada is home to one of the world’s largest and most culturally creative Jewish communities, one of the few in the Diaspora that continues to grow demographically. With its ability to mirror trends found in Jewish communities elsewhere (particularly the United States) while simultaneously functioning as a distinct society, Canada’s Jewish community holds great interest for scholars, exercising a measurable influence on the culture and politics of World Jewry. Consisting of a series of essays written by experts in their respective fields, Canada’s Jews is a topical encyclopaedia, covering a wide variety of topics, from history and religion to the intellectual and cultural contributions of Canada’s Jews. An indispensable reference book for both laypeople and for scholars of Jewish and Canadian studies.

Huguette Herrmann

Bo, Jenny, and I

$25.00

Bo, Jenny and I is a memoir describing the life of a young woman growing up in unusual circumstances, as well as a discussion of political and sociological effects of troubled times upon “ordinary people.” After an early childhood in pre-war Antwerp, the author, her formidable grandmother, and her young, unconventional working mother fled to England in 1940, upon Germany’s invasion of Belgium. As refugees, the family adapted to its changed circumstances and to life in World War II England. The political upheavals of the times are reflected in the life of this small family and its remarkable experiences.

David C. Jacobson

The Charm of Wise Hesitancy

$29.00

In recent decades, there has been a resurgence of interest among both secular and religious Israelis in Talmudic stories. This growing fascination with Talmudic stories has been inspired by contemporary Israeli writers who have sought to make readers aware of the special qualities of these well-crafted narratives that portray universal human situations, including marriages, relationships between parents and children, power struggles between people, and the challenge of trying to live a good life. The Charm of Wise Hesitancy explores the resurgence of interest in Talmudic stories in Israel and presents some of the most popular Talmudic stories in contemporary Israeli culture, as well as creative interpretations of those stories by Israeli writers, thereby providing readers with an opportunity to consider how these stories may be relevant to their own lives.

Valentina Polukhina

Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries (Vol 2)

$49.00

In the new second volume of Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries, the collection of interviews features eye-witness accounts of Joseph Brodsky’s friends and family members, publishers, editors, translators, students, and fellow poets including John Le Carre, Oleg Tselkov, Petr Vail, Bengt Jangfeldt, Susan Sontag, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and others. This collection of 40 interviews illuminates an intriguing contemporary phenomenon and affords a fascinating insight into the American literary scene. Continuing the discussion begun in the first volume, this series of interviews contains important discussions on the style, ideas, and personality of one of the most brilliant and paradoxical poets of our time. Subtle, incisive, and rigorous in its critical evaluation, each discussion significantly advances our understanding of Brodsky's complex poetic world. All discussions are linked by core questions that are carefully and sometimes provocatively formulated. The interviews are published together with many unique photographs from the private archives of the author and the interviewees.

Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries (Vol 2)

Ellendea Proffer Teasley

Brodsky Among Us

$24.00

A searingly personal memoir of the great Russian poet by his American friend and publisher, containing much previously unknown material about how Brodsky left Russia and how he made his way in the new world, and how, during the cold war, Americans played a crucial role in his fate.

Valentina Polukhina

Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries (Vol 1)

$39.00

Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries (Volume 1) offers a fascinating record of conversations with poets of various nationalities about Joseph Brodsky: Czeslaw Milosz, Roy Fisher, Lev Loseff, Bella Akhmadulina, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Tomas Venclova, Viktor Krivulin, Alexander Kushner, and Elena Shvarts. In comparison with the first edition of this volume published in 1992 this new second edition is enlarged with three new interviews and a series of previously unpublished unique photographs from the personal archives of the author and the interviewees. The collection combines biographical details with a new and authoritative interpretation of the poetics, style, and ideas of one of the most influential poets to emerge in post-Stalinist Russia. As a poet, essayist, and playwright, Brodsky is widely known and read in the English-speaking world. This book is a superb guide to further study of Brodsky's work both for specialist scholars and general readers who are intoxicated by poetry.

Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries (Vol 1)

Elizabeth Cheresh Allen

Before They Were Titans

$35.00

Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are the titans of Russian literature. As mature artists, they led very different lives and wrote vastly different works, but their early lives and writings display provocative kinships, while also indicating the divergent paths the two authors would take en route to literary greatness. The ten new critical essays here, written by leading specialists in nineteenth-century, Russian literature, give fresh, sophisticated readings to works from the first decade of the literary life of each Russian author—for Dostoevsky, the 1840s; for Tolstoy, the 1850s. Collectively, these essays yield composite portraits of these two artists as young men finding their literary way. At the same time, they show how the early works merit appreciation for themselves, before their authors were Titans.

Lewis Aron

Answering a Question with a Question (Vol II)

$29.00

Inquiry, questioning, and wonder are defining features of both psychoanalysis and the Jewish tradition. The question invites inquiry, analysis, discussion, debate, multiple meanings, and interpretation that continues across the generations. If questions and inquiry are the mainstay of Jewish scholarship, then it should not be surprising that they would be central to the psychoanalytic method developed by Sigmund Freud. The themes taken up in this book are universal: trauma, traumatic reenactment, intergenerational transmission of trauma, love, loss, mourning, ritual—these subjects are of particular relevance and concern within Jewish thought and the history of the Jewish people, and they raise questions of great relevance to psychoanalysis both theoretically and clinically. In Answering a Question with a Question: Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Jewish Thought: A Tradition of Inquiry, Editors, Aron and Henik, have brought together an international collection of contemporary scholars and clinicians to address the interface and mutual influence of Jewish thought and modern psychoanalysis, two traditions of inquiry.

Answering a Question with a Question (Vol II)

Julie S. Draskoczy

Belomor

$27.00

Containing analyses of everything from prisoner poetry to album covers, Belomor: Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag moves beyond the simplistic good/evil paradigm that often accompanies Gulag scholarship. While acknowledging the normative power of Stalinism—an ethos so hegemonic it wanted to harness the very mechanisms of inspiration—the volume also recognizes the various loopholes offered by artistic expression. Perhaps the most infamous project of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, the Belomor construction was riddled by paradox, above all the fact that it created a major waterway that was too shallow for large crafts. Even more significant, and sinister, is that the project won the backing of famous creative luminaries who enthusiastically professed the doctrine of self-fashioning. Belomor complicates our understanding of the Gulag by looking at both prisoner motivation and official response from multiple angles, thereby offering a more expansive vision of the labor camp and its connection to Stalinism.

Elie Holzer

Attuned Learning

$29.00

Practice-oriented educational philosopher Elie Holzer invites readers to grow as teachers, students, or co-learners through “attuned learning,” a new paradigm of mindfulness. Groundbreaking interpretations of classical rabbinic texts sharpen attention to our own mental, emotional, and physical workings as well as awareness of others within the complexities of learning interactions. Holzer integrates pedagogical pathways with ethical elements of transformative teaching and learning, the repair of educational disruptions, the role of the human visage, and the dynamics of argumentative and collaborative learning. Literary analyses reveal that deliberate self-cultivation not only leads to ethical and spiritual growth, but also offers a corrective for the pitfalls of the contemporary calculative modalities in educational thinking. The author speaks to the existential, humanizing art of learning and of teaching. This book can serve as a companion volume for A Philosophy of Havruta: Understanding and Teaching the Art of Text Study in Pairs, adding a new dimension of its model of joint learning.

Eunice G. Pollack

Anti-Semitism on the Campus

$34.00

Antisemitism on the Campus: Past & Present, edited by Eunice G. Pollack, is the first book of a multidisciplinary series on Antisemitism in America to be published by Academic Studies Press. In this volume, twenty-one leading scholars explore the roots and manifestations of antisemitism and anti- Zionism and the efforts to combat them at American, British, and South African colleges and universities in the 20th and 21st centuries. Topics such as antisemitism and anti-Zionism on individual campuses, in black militant groups, on the Far Left, and in academic organizations; students’ exposure to antisemitism and anti-Zionism through popular culture and the internet; discrimination against Jewish faculty, students and organizations; the anti- Israel boycott/divestment movement, among others, are covered.

Meir Persoff

Another Way, Another Time

$32.00

British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks – now Baron Sacks of Aldgate in the City of London – launched his tenure of office in 1991 with the aim of an inclusivist Decade of Jewish Renewal. Within a few years, fulfilling his installation prediction that ‘I will have failures, but I will try again, another way, another time,’ he was attracting calls, from opponents and supporters, for his resignation and the abolition of his office. Reviewing Sacks’ early writings and pronouncements on the theme of inclusivism, Another Way, Another Time demonstrates how, repeatedly, the Chief Rabbi said ‘irreconcilable things to different audiences’ and how, in the process, he induced his kingmaker and foremost patron, Lord (Stanley) Kalms, to declare of Anglo-Jewry: ‘We are in a time warp, and fast becoming an irrelevance in terms of world Jewry.’ Citing support from a variety of sources, this study contends that the Chief Rabbinate has indeed reached the end of the road and explores other paths to the leadership of a pluralistic – and, ideally, inclusivist – community.

Lewis Aron

Answering a Question with a Question

$29.00

In the Jewish tradition, it is incumbent upon every generation to attempt to find meaning in its history. Meaning is co-created within the context of the inter-subjective field of a meeting of minds. Psychoanalysis, in some respects like the Jewish tradition from which it emerged, represents a body of thought about man’s relation to himself and to others, and places great value on the influence of memory, narrative, and history in creating meaning within the dyadic relationship of analyst and patient. In Answering a Question with a Question: Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Jewish Thought, editors Aron and Henik have brought together an international collection of contemporary scholars and clinicians to address the interface and the mutual influence of Jewish thought and modern psychoanalysis.

Jon A. Levisohn

Advancing the Learning Agenda in Jewish Education

$34.00

Jewish educational projects and programs are thriving, attracting philanthropic support for exciting and creative approaches in every sector and setting. But underneath that energy, we are not as clear as we ought to be about desired outcomes, the kinds of learning needed to achieve these, and how those kinds of learning actually occur. This volume is the first of its kind to bring together scholars from inside Jewish education and from the learning sciences. It offers a set of critical perspectives on learning, sometimes borrowing models from other domains (such as science) and sometimes examining specific domains within Jewish education (such as havruta learning or the learning of Jewish history). Collectively, these contributions help to advance a smarter, sharper conversation about Jewish learning that matters.

Advancing the Learning Agenda in Jewish Education

Dennis Ioffe

A/Z

$65.00

This bilingual collection in honor of the great scholar and writer Alexander Zholkovsky brings together new work from forty-four leading scholars in nine countries. Like Zholkovsky’s oeuvre, this volume covers a broad range of subjects and employs an array of approaches. Topics range from Russian syntax to Peter the Great, literary theory, and Russian film. The articles are rooted in computational analysis, literary memoir, formal analysis, cultural history, and a host of other methodological and discursive modes. This collection provides not only a fitting tribute to one of the most fascinating figures of Russian letters but also a remarkable picture of the shape of Russian literary scholarship today.

Judith P. Saunders

American Classics

$34.00

The inaugural book in ASP's new Evolution, Cognition, and the Arts series, this collection of essays examines selected works in the American literary tradition from an evolutionary perspective. Using an interdisciplinary framework to pose new questions about long admired, much discussed texts, the collection as a whole provides an introduction to Darwinian literary critical methodology. Individual essays feature a variety of figures—Benjamin Franklin to Billy Collins—targeting fitness-related issues ranging from sexual strategies and parental investment to cheating and deception. Attention is paid to the physical and social environments in which fictional characters are placed, including the influence of cultural–historical conditions on resource acquisition, status-building, competition, and reciprocity. Discussion throughout the volume makes connections to existing secondary comment, suggesting how Darwinian scrutiny can generate unexpected insights into long familiar works.

Adele Valeria Messina

American Sociology and Holocaust Studies

$42.00

Filled with new elements that challenge common scholarly theses, this book acquaints the reader with the “Jewish problem” of sociology and provides what this academic discipline urgently needs: a one-volume history of the Sociology of the Holocaust. The story of why and how sociologists as well as the schools of sociological thought came to confront the Holocaust has never been entirely told. The volume offers original insights on the nature of American sociology with implications for the post-Holocaust sociology development.

American Sociology and Holocaust Studies

Valentina Brougher

50 Writers

$49.00

"If you like the short-story genre, don’t pick up this addictive collection unless you are prepared to be lost in its riches for a considerable time. These beautifully translated, haunting Russian tales written from 1901 to 2001, almost all previously unpublished, read so smoothly that they are seductive..." —The Washington Times

The largest, most comprehensive anthology of its kind, this volume brings together significant, representative stories from every decade of the twentieth century. It includes the prose of officially recognized writers and dissidents, both well-known and neglected or forgotten, plus new authors from the end of the century. The selections reflect the various literary trends and approaches to depicting reality in this era: traditional realism, modernism, socialist realism, and post-modernism.

Taken as a whole, the stories capture every major aspect of Russian life, history and culture in the twentieth century. The rich array of themes and styles will be of tremendous interest to students and readers who want to learn about Russia through the engaging genre of the short story.

Jeffrey S. Gurock

Conversations with Colleagues

$35.00

Sixteen senior scholars of American Jewish history—among the men and women whose work and advocacy have moved their discipline into the mainstream of academia—converse on the intellectual and personal roads they have traveled in becoming leaders in their areas of expertise. Through their thoughtful and candid recollections of the challenges they faced in becoming accepted academics, they retell the story of how the study of the Jews and Judaism in the United States rose from being long dismissed as an amateurish enterprise not worthy of serious consideration in the world of ideas to its position today as a respected field in communication with all humanities scholars. They also imagine and chart the direction the writing on American Jews will take in the coming era.

Michael Kunichika

"Our Native Antiquity"

$37.00

“‘Our Native Antiquity’ makes a valuable contribution to the emergent field of interdisciplinary scholarship scrutinizing the object world, in particular the role of artifacts in literary texts (as in the work of Bill Brown), in the Slavic field and beyond. Even such media spectacles as Vladimir Putin’s 2011 scuba dive to ‘recover’ ancient amphorae take on new meaning in light of Kunichika’s book, which makes clear that establishing Russia’s links with antiquity has long had implications for the nation's sense of self-worth. The past is a renewable resource.” —Julia Bekman Chadaga, Slavic Review

Dov Schwartz

The Many Faces of Maimonides

$35.00

This volume offers a new reading of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed. In particular, it explores how Maimonides’ commitment to integrity led him to a critique of the Kalām, to a complex concept of immortality, and to insight into the human yearning for metaphysical knowledge. Maimonides’ search for objective truth is also analyzed in its connection with the scientific writings of his time, which neither the Kalām nor the Jewish philosophical tradition that preceded him had endorsed.

Through a careful analysis of these issues, this book seeks to contribute to the understanding of the modes of thought adopted in The Guide of the Perplexed, including the “philosophical theologian” model of Maimonides’ own design, and to the knowledge of its sources.

Gary L. Browning

A "Labyrinth of Linkages" in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina

$19.00

The renowned Russian writer Leo Tolstoy created a realistic masterpiece in Anna Karenina (1878). In the same work, moreover, he utilized allegory and symbol to an extent and at a level of sophistication unknown in his other works. In Browning’s study, the author identifies and analyzes previously unnoticed or only briefly mentioned “linkages and keystones” found in two highly developed clusters of symbols, arising from Anna’s momentous train ride and peasant nightmares, and of allegories, rooted in Vronsky’s disastrous steeplechase. Within this labyrinth of symbol, allegory and structural patterning lies embedded much of the novel’s most significant meaning. This study will be of particular interest to students and scholars of Russian literature, Tolstoy, symbol, allegory, structuralism, and moral criticism.

A "Labyrinth of Linkages" in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina

John MacKay

Dziga Vertov

$35.00

Largely forgotten during the last 20 years of his life, the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov (1896-1954) has occupied a singular and often controversial position over the past sixty years as a founding figure of documentary, avant-garde, and political-propaganda film practice. Creator of "Man with a Movie Camera" (1929), perhaps the most celebrated non-fiction film ever made, Vertov is equally renowned as the most militant opponent of the canons of mainstream filmmaking in the history of cinema. This book, the first in a three-volume study, addresses Vertov's youth in the largely Jewish city of Bialystok, his education in Petrograd, his formative years of involvement in filmmaking, his experiences during the Russian Civil War, and his interests in music, poetry and technology.

Akram Aylisli

Farewell, Aylis

$21.00

The three novellas of Farewell, Aylis take place over decades of transition in a country that rather resembles modern-day Azerbaijan.

In Yemen, a Soviet traveler takes an afternoon stroll and finds himself suspected of defecting to America. In Stone Dreams, an actor explores the limits of one man’s ability to live a moral life amid conditions of sociopolitical upheaval, ethnic cleansing, and petty professional intrigue. In A Fantastical Traffic Jam, those who serve the aging leader of a corrupt, oil-rich country scheme to stay alive.

Farewell, Aylis, a new essay by the author that reflects on the political firestorm surrounding these novellas and his current situation as a prisoner of conscience in Azerbaijan, was commissioned especially for this Academic Studies Press edition.

Alexander Genis

Russian Cuisine in Exile

$24.95

Russian Cuisine in Exile brings the essays of Pyotr Vail and Alexander Genis, originally written in the mid-1980s, to an English-speaking audience. A must-read for scholars, students and general readers interested in Russian studies, but also for specialists in émigré literature, mobility studies, popular culture, and food studies. These essays—beloved by Russians in the U.S., the Russian diaspora across the world, and in post-Soviet Russia—narrate everyday experiences and re-imagine the identities of immigrants through their engagement with Russian cuisine. Richly illustrated and beautifully produced, the book has been translated “not word for word, but smile for smile,” to use the phrase of Vail and Genis’s fellow émigré writer Sergei Dovlatov. Translators Angela Brintlinger and Thomas Feerick have supplied copious authoritative and occasionally amusing commentaries.

Perry Giuseppe Rizopoulos

100 Conversations You Need to Have (Trilogy)

$34.95

The notebooks included in the three volume set 100 Conversations You Need to Have contain A Philosophy Guide, A Stoic Philosophy Guide, and A Chinese Philosophy Guide.

Each notebook offers an accessible and thought-provoking collection of life’s big questions and corresponding answers from some of history’s greatest philosophers. Readers are provided with the opportunity to answer each question, turn the page and receive a short piece of advice from thinkers on topics that include:

Happiness
Friendship
Discipline
Patience
The meaning of life and death
And other essential topics

The list of philosophers that are featured in each notebook is very multicultural. It includes both men and women and spans across time, including, among others, Aristotle, Seneca, Simone de Beauvoir, Lao Tzu, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Alfarabi, Jean-Paul Sartre and Pema Chodron.

These notebooks duplicate the Socratic dialogue method and embody the idea of philosophy being a pathway to a more fulfilling life by creating 100 meaningful dialogues between the reader and a diverse array of interlocutors who will guide them on their journey to crafting a good life.

100 Conversations You Need to Have (Trilogy)

Maxim D. Shrayer

Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature

$49.95

Edited by Maxim D. Shrayer, a leading specialist in Russia’s Jewish culture, this definitive anthology of major nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, nonfiction and poetry by eighty Jewish-Russian writers explores both timeless themes and specific tribulations of a people’s history. A living record of the rich and vibrant legacy of Russia’s Jews, this reader-friendly and comprehensive anthology features original English translations. In its selection and presentation, the anthology tilts in favor of human interest and readability. It is organized both chronologically and topically (e.g. “Seething Times: 1860s-1880s”; “Revolution and Emigration: 1920s-1930s”; “Late Soviet Empire and Collapse: 1960s-1990s”). A comprehensive headnote introduces each section. Individual selections have short essays containing information about the authors and the works that are relevant to the topic. The editor’s opening essay introduces the topic and relevant contexts at the beginning of the volume; the overview by the leading historian of Russian Jewry John D. Klier appears the end of the volume. Over 500,000 Russian-speaking Jews presently live in America and about 1 million in Israel, while only about 170,000 Jews remain in Russia. The great outflux of Jews from the former USSR and the post-Soviet states has changed the cultural habitat of world Jewry. A formidable force and a new Jewish Diaspora, Russian Jews are transforming the texture of daily life in the US and Canada, and Israel. A living memory, a space of survival and a record of success, Voice of Jewish-Russian Literature ensures the preservation and accessibility of the rich legacy of Russian-speaking Jews.