Name: Gone To Pitchipoi
Brand: Rubin Katz
Price: 109.0 USD
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Rubin Katz

Gone To Pitchipoi

$109.00

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.

Eunice G. Pollack

From Antisemitism to Anti-Zionism

$109.00

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.

Dominic Rubin

Holy Russia, Sacred Israel

$129.00

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.

Jerome Yehuda Gellman

God's Kindness Has Overwhelmed Us

$109.00

Jerome Gellman presents a new theology of the Jews as the Chosen People, addressing self-serving ethnocentric supremacy, cultural isolation, and defamation of religions other than Judaism. This book is traditional in taking chosenness and the truth of Judaism seriously, and in eschewing a theology of multiple covenants. At the same time, it is critical, rejecting previous concepts of chosenness, and innovative, offering for the twenty-first century a fresh way of seeing the Jews’ place in the world. On this foundation, Gellman suggests a new approach to inter-religious understanding from a Jewish point of view, and examines the impact of his proposal on traditional Jewish liturgy.

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.

Nils Roemer

German Jewry

$129.00

German Jewry between Hope and Despair,1871-1933, provides important interpretations of this tumultuous and conflict-ridden period and invites readers to partake in the ongoing debate over modern Jewish identities and cultures. Marked at the outset by emancipation and the emergence of modern anti-Semitism, the period witnessed a profound transformation of Jewish social, political, and religious life culminating in the renaissance of Jewish cultures on the eve of the Holocaust. This textbook unites studies that inform our understanding of this historical epoch to this day as well as important historical revisions. Amongst the many contributions are texts by Michael Brenner, Willi Goetschel, Marion Kaplan, George L. Mosse, Peter Pulzer, and Till van Rahden.

Cover image for German Jewry, isbn: 9781934843871

Barbara Landress

Her Glory All Within

$119.00

Representation of the religious sector is a new phenomenon in modern Israeli literature, emerging from a diversification of Israeli culture that began in the 1970s. Barbara Landress here explores the intricacies of fiction about Orthodox women in contemporary contexts, offering a subtle interpretation of the conflicts in Orthodox women’s lives as they weave their way through daughterhood, motherhood, politics, and personal dilemmas, negotiating between tradition and modernity. Drawing on sociology, anthropology, and feminist theory, this body of Israeli women’s writing is considered in comparative perspective with American feminist fiction of the 1960s and 1970s as well as with contemporary American Jewish women’s writing that engages Orthodoxy.

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.

Michah Gottlieb

Faith, Reason, Politics

$119.00

The past decade has witnessed renewed interest in the faith-reason debate. But all too often the debate is treated in generic terms, without paying attention either to differences between religious traditions or to the historical development of these traditions. Judaism, with its emphasis on religious law, yields insights into the political ramifications of the problem that differ greatly from Christian approaches. In Faith, Reason, Politics, Michah Gottlieb explores Jewish approaches to the faith-reason debate through detailed analyses of Jewish thinkers from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries, including Judah Halevi, Maimonides, Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, Samson Raphael Hirsch, and Leo Strauss. This book will appeal to scholars and students interested in the problem of faith versus reason and in the relationship between religion and politics.

Irwin Weil

From the Cincinnati Reds to the Moscow Reds

$109.00

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

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.

Ofer Nordheimer Nur

Eros and Tragedy

$119.00

Between 1920 and 1922, hundreds of members of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement left the defunct Habsburg Monarchy and sailed to Palestine, where a small group of members of the movement established Upper Bitania, one of the communities that laid the foundation for Israel’s kibbutz movement. Their social experiment lasted only eight months, but it gave birth to a powerful myth among Jewish youth which combined a story about a heroic Zionist deed, based on the trope of tragedy, with a model for a new type of community that promised no less than a total, absolute elimination of all physical and mental barriers between isolated individuals and their fusion into one entity. This entity was named “the erotic community.” In its quest for human regeneration, Upper Bitania embarked on a journey into a highly specific variant of modern life that, at its core, tried to combine the most profound Nietzscheanism with the insights of Sigmund Freud, all in an anti-capitalist quest for an organic community of “new men.” The quest for a “new man” was to compensate for a crisis of manliness and betrays an obsession with masculinity and male bonding, and their effects on the ideal man and woman.

Yuri Leving

The Goalkeeper

$129.00

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.

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.

Sean Martin

For the Good of the Nation

$109.00

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.

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.

Michael Oppenheim

Encounters of Consequence

$139.00

Encounters of Consequence provides an introduction to and deeper analysis of the situation of Jewish philosophy beginning in the last century. It charts Jewish philosophy’s engagement with modernity and post-modernity along two overlapping axes—issues and persons—which often intersect. Key issues in modern Jewish philosophy are raised, including: the nature of Judaism and Jewish identity, the quests for meaning and continuity, the value of remaining a Jew, and the relevance of Jewish law, as well as the challenges of secularism, modern history (including the Holocaust), feminism and religious pluralism. Featured are many philosophers of encounter: Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas, as well as Joseph Soloveitchik, Gershom Scholem, Arthur Cohen, Eliezer Schweid, Emil Fackenheim, and Irving Greenberg.

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)

$109.00

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.

Simcha Fishbane

Dynamics of Continuity and Change in Jewish Religious Life

$129.00

While the oft-quoted saying “the more things change, the more they stay the same” seems to aptly describe the nature of social life, the reverse may be equally accurate: the more things stay the same, the more they change. Indeed, the recognized institutions of human society, of which religion is a primary example, are both sources of stability and continuity as well as innovation and change. The dynamics of Jewish religious continuity and change are presented in this book through a group of distinguished scholars from the fields of sociology, history, medicine, religion, and Jewish studies examining key cases and themes in religious life, emphasizing illustrations of the maintenance of tradition and facing of trends pressing for transformation. This volume demonstrates the importance of case studies and historical, ideological, and philosophical surveys in understanding the actions of individual, organizational or communal actors attempting to create, maintain, or disrupt religious institutions, across geographical boundaries and time frames. This research has the potential not only to positively affect scholarly discussions, but also to generate greater understanding and dialogue among those who study Jewish life and those who work in Jewish organizations and live and function in religious communities. Indeed, the book brings a sophisticated understanding of Jewish law, religious texts, communities and institutions, of the interplay of internal and external social and ideological forces, of the impact of organizations, and of the potential for individuals and groups to shape their religious environments.

Dynamics of Continuity and Change in Jewish Religious Life

Andrii Danylenko

From the Bible to Shakespeare

$109.00

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).

T. Horev

The First to be Destroyed

$149.00

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.

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.

Robin H. Davies

The European Nabokov Web, Classicism and T.S. Eliot

$119.00

Robin Davies here demonstrates that Nabokov’s Pale Fire has a classical unity and represents a direct attack on T.S. Eliot’s philosophical position, particularly as given in The Waste Land and as represented by Eliot’s later tendency for conservatism in literature, politics, and religion. After Nabokov was forced into exile from Germany and then France in the 1930s with his young son and Jewish wife, Eliot’s passivism must have seemed to him the very antithesis of survival. The enigmatic Pale Fire and its surface triviality suggested that there could be self-consistent logic within the obvious commentary of Charles Kinbote and John Shade’s poem. Davies places this work in its vast European context, forming a bridge between Russian and European literature which will be appreciated by scholars of both.

The European Nabokov Web, Classicism and T.S. Eliot

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.

Irene Masing-Delic

Exotic Moscow under Western Eyes

$119.00

This collection of essays on Turgenev, Goncharov, Conrad, Dostoevsky, Blok, Briusov, Gor’kii, Pasternak and Nabokov represents diverse voices but is also unified. One invariant is the recurring distinction between “culture” and “civilization” and the vision of Russia as the bearer of culture because it is “barbaric.” Another stance advocates the synthesis of “sense and sensibility” and the vision of “Apollo” and “Dionysus” creating a “civilized culture” together. Those voices that delight in the artificiality of civilization are complemented by those apprehensive of the dangers inherent in barbarism. This collection thus adds new perspectives to the much-debated opposition of vital Russia and a declining West, offering novel interpretations of classics from Oblomov to Lolita and The Idiot to Doctor Zhivago.

Henrietta Mondry

Exemplary Bodies

$129.00

Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture since 1880s explores the construction of the Jew’s physical and ontological body in Russian culture as represented in literature, film, and non-literary texts from the 1880s to the present. With the rise of the dominance of biological and racialist discourse in the 1880s, the depiction of Jewish characters in Russian literary and cultural productions underwent a significant change, as these cultural practices recast the Jew not only as an archetypal “exotic” and religious or class Other (as in Romanticism and realist writing), but as a biological Other whose acts, deeds, and thoughts were determined by racial differences. This Jew allegedly had physical and psychological characteristics that were genetically determined and that could not be changed by education, acculturation, conversion to Christianity, or change of social status. This stereotype has become a stable archetype that continues to operate in contemporary Russian society and culture.

J.A.E. Curtis

The Englishman from Lebedian

$139.00

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.

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

$119.00

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.

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.

Marcus Levitt

Early Modern Russian Letters

$139.00

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.

Jack J. Cohen

Democratizing Judaism

$129.00

Democratizing Judaism is a two-part examination of the Reconstructionist philosophy of Mordecai M. Kaplan. Part I is largely devoted to a defense of Kaplan against several serious critics. It also provides new insight into Kaplan’s theology through reference to hitherto unknown passages in his diaries. Part II provides a critical analysis of the contemporary Reconstructionist movement and explores how a Kaplan disciple treats problems of democracy in Israel and issues of ethical theological concern.

Eva Jospe

Encounters in Modern Jewish Thought

$109.00

The third of a three-volume series, this book contains Eva Jospe’s Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen, together with two essays examining Cohen’s continuing importance and relevance. As Dov Schwartz suggests in his introduction to the volume, Jospe believed that Cohen’s Jewish Writings had the potential for influence and impact on the American Jewish intellectual, and would enrich the ethical and religious life of the Jewish community in America. Her selection of passages to translate, as well as her decisions regarding what to omit, served these purposes. Volume One of this series contains Jospe’s study of the “Concept of Encounter in the Philosophy of Martin Buber,” and Volume Two her translations of Moses Mendelssohn. Together, these volumes offer a multidimensional view of Jospe’s work and thoughts.

Raphael Jospe

Encounters in Modern Jewish Thought

$109.00

The first of a three-volume series, this book contains Eva Jospe’s previously unpublished study, “The Concept of Encounter in the Philosophy of Martin Buber,” together with several of her published articles on Buber and on modern Jewish thought, as well as a moving sermon she delivered in 1988, on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht. As Ephraim Meir notes in his introduction to the volume, her clear presentation and analysis of Buber’s dialogical philosophy reflects a positive appreciation, but also pointed criticism of her one-time teacher’s thought. Volume Two of this series contains her translations of Moses Mendelssohn, and Volume Three her Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen.

Steven L. Hoch

Essays in Russian Social and Economic History

$129.00

In this wide-ranging collection from Professor Steven L. Hoch of Washington State University, various facets of the life of Russia’s rural population are examined, from banking crises and infectious diseases to peasant rituals and land reform. In contrast to longstanding interpretations of the Russian peasantry, Hoch’s work emphasizes the role of social, epidemiological, and ecological forces in the formation of rural Russian society. Using sources infrequently considered by previous scholars, he assesses the impact of the broad economy on shaping the government polices of emancipation and land reform and the long-term consequences of these policies on peasant material well-being.

Essays in Russian Social and Economic History

Vladimir Khazan

A Double Burden, a Double Cross”

$109.00

If a history of Russian-Jewish literature in the twentieth century (or, at least, a history of its authors and texts) were ever to be written, it would reveal a number of puzzling lacunae. One such lacuna is Andrei Sobol, a truly significant writer who, paradoxically, has not received due scholarly attention. This can easily be demonstrated by the fact that Sobol’s name goes virtually unmentioned in some of the most representative and authoritative studies dealing with the Russian-Jewish literary discourse. It is this scholarly gap that has prompted Vladimir Khazan to write this volume, a comprehensive and exhaustive account of Sobol’s public, literary, and artistic activities as a purely Russian-Jewish phenomenon. Khazan analyzes his biographical subject within the framework of cultural studies.

Henry Felix Srebrnik

Dreams of Nationhood

$129.00

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.

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.

Yosef Salmon

Do Not Provoke Providence

$139.00

Do Not Provoke Providence: Orthodoxy in the Grip of Nationalism deals with the whole complex of relations between the Land of Israel, the Jewish Torah, and the People of Israel from the Pre-Zionist Period until the establishment of the State of Israel. The book examines the dynamics of those relations through the modernization of Jewish society, and the problem of Jewish Identity vis-a-vis modernity. The discussion follows historical events in both philosophy and everyday life. It explores the anti-Zionist sphere and also discusses the attitudes toward the conflict of religion and nationalism in the world of Religious Zionism. The dispute between advocates of a religious concept of the community and proponents of a secular nation revolved primarily around perceptions of the ideal relationship between the religious and national entities. One group sought to make religion a tool of the nation; the other sought to make the nation a tool of religion.

Vladimir Golstein

Dostoevsky Beyond Dostoevsky

$139.00

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.

Eric Levine

Contention, Controversy, and Change

$119.00

Conflict and change are fundamental elements of social reality and of the Jewish historical experience. This collection presents the work of a distinguished group of scholars exploring the themes of social, political, religious, intellectual, and institutional movements and change in Jewish history. These scholars demonstrate that social change throughout Jewish life has assumed many different manifestations, and can occur in revolutionary and dramatic ways as well as in more common gradual and evolutionary processes. In the first volume, the essays revolve around two themes: “Mobilizations and Contentious Politics,” and “Social Trends, Communal and Institutional Change.” The second volume is devoted to “Developments in Philosophy, Ideology, and Religious Practice.” Taken together, these two volumes present scholarship rich with both historical and contemporary relevance, of interest to academics and students in Jewish studies and the social sciences, communal leaders and policy makers, and anyone intrigued by the Jewish experience.

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

$109.00

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-aff ective elements of education. Throughout, Kress grapples with questions such as: How can the balance between community cohesion and group diff erences 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, aff ect, and behavior? How can the “formal” and “informal” off erings of a school coalesce to address these broadly conceived identity outcomes, and what are the challenges in doing so?

Chiara Adorisio

Dialectic of Separation

$119.00

Dialectic of Separation analyzes the complex relationship between Judaism and philosophy in the thought of the nineteenth-century German–Jewish orientalist and philosopher Salomon Munk. Drawing on both published and on unpublished sources, appearing here for the first time, it offers the first-ever comprehensive reconstruction of Salomon Munk’s life and work. Munk, who emigrated from his native Glogau to Paris to pursue his studies, was to exert a major influence on the development of Islamic and Jewish studies in both France and Germany, giving a vital impetus to the debate over the nature of Jewish philosophy at a time when medieval Jewish philosophers (such as Maimonides) and their Arabic and Islamic sources were completely neglected in philosophical historiography.

Katherine Bowers

A Dostoevskii Companion

$149.00

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.

Thomas Seifrid

A Companion to Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit

$109.00

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

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?

Vasilijus Safronovas

The Creation of National Spaces in a Pluricultural Region

$119.00

This book is essential reading on the spatial concepts that two erstwhile neighboring cultures, Lithuanian and German, once associated with one physical space—a Lithuanian region in Prussia. Covering a period of five centuries, the author explores how, when, and, most importantly, why these concepts have been developed and transformed, regulating the spatial imagination of several generations. The study focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, presenting the narratives, representations, and geographic conceptions of the region that existed in these two national cultures. The volume shows how knowledge about “their own” space ended up serving as a tool for both Lithuanian and German political aspirations and how it challenged the spatial concepts about this area in the previous century.

The Creation of National Spaces in a Pluricultural Region

Georgy Ivanov

Disintegration of the Atom and Petersburg Winters

$109.00

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.

Jennifer Stollman

Daughters of Israel, Daughters of the South

$99.95

Daughters of Israel, Daughters of the South examines southern Jewish womanhood during the Antebellum and Civil War eras. In an overwhelmingly Protestant South, Jewish women created and maintained unique American Jewish identities through their efforts in education, writing, religious observance, paid and unpaid labor, and relationships with Christian whites and enslaved African-Americans. This book examines how southern Jewish women fought proselytization through their religious convictions, challenged anti-Semitism using public and private writing, maintained a distinctive southern Judaism, promoted their own status and legitimacy as southerners, and worked diligently as Confederate ambassadors.

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.

David Berger

Cultures in Collision and Conversation

$129.00

In Cultures in Collision and Conversation, David Berger addresses three broad themes in Jewish intellectual history: Jewish approaches to cultures external to Judaism and the controversies triggered by this issue in medieval and modern times; the impact of Christian challenges and differing philosophical orientations on Jewish interpretation of the Bible; and Messianic visions, movements, and debates from antiquity to the present. These essays include a monograph-length study of Jewish attitudes toward general culture in medieval and early modern times, analyses of the thought of Maimonides and Nahmanides, an assessment of the reactions to the most recent messianic movement in Jewish history, and reflections on the value of the academic study of Judaism.

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.

Alfred Kokh

Denial of the Denial, or the Battle of Auschwitz

$129.00

Over the decades, the Holocaust has remained a critical issue both historically and politically. This is due to the modernization of anti-Semitism in the West, where accusations of ritual murder have long been passé and claims that the Holocaust was a hoax are de riguer, and to the government sanctions of anti-Semitism in the East in countries such as Iran. The purely scholarly problem of determining the number of victims, like other aspects of demography related to the Holocaust, have suddenly become closely embroiled in geopolitics and the phenomenon of Holocaust denial, which is now a context that has been forced upon it. This book is imbued with these connections and interrelationships. Avraham, Wolfgang Benz, Sergio Della Pergola, Mark Kupovetsky, Dieter Pohl, Aron Shneer, and the editors contribute their voices to the topic.

Denial of the Denial, or the Battle of Auschwitz

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.

Henry Felix Srebrnik

Creating the Chupah

$119.00

Creating the Chupah assesses the role of Canadian Zionist organizations in the drive for communal unity within Canadian Jewry in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Two strands of Zionism, represented respectively by the Federation of Zionist Societies of Canada and Poale Zion, were often in conflicts that reflected greater disputes. The book also describes Zionist activities within the larger spectrum of Canadian Jewish life. Montreal was at the time the “capital” of Canadian Jewry, but the Jewish communities of Toronto and Winnipeg also played a significant role in these events. Srebrnik here makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of Zionism and twentieth-century Jewish life in Canada.

Albert D. Friedberg

Crafting the 613 Commandments

$139.00

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.

Joanna Kot

Complicating the Female Subject

$109.00

Seven inter-war plays by Polish women writers created a flurry of excitement and condemnation when they appeared, yet today they are almost forgotten. This groundbreaking study interrogates the feminism of these plays and their authors, who dared to question national myths, subvert genre expectations, and reinterpret definitions of subjectivity, anticipating the work of numerous women playwrights in post-1989 Poland. Synthesizing a variety of theoretical perspectives, the author produces a nuanced reading of each work and of the group as a whole. Both texts and the innovative synthetic approach will interest scholars of Polish literature, of drama, and of gender studies.

Vera Proskurina

Creating the Empress

$129.00

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.

Eric Levine

Contention, Controversy, and Change

$119.00

Conflict and change are fundamental elements of social reality and of the Jewish historical experience. This collection presents the work of a distinguished group of scholars exploring the themes of social, political, religious, intellectual, and institutional movements and change in Jewish history. These scholars demonstrate that social change throughout Jewish life has assumed many different manifestations, and can occur in revolutionary and dramatic ways as well as in more common gradual and evolutionary processes. In the first volume, the essays revolve around two themes: “Mobilizations and Contentious Politics,” and “Social Trends, Communal and Institutional Change.” The second volume is devoted to “Developments in Philosophy, Ideology, and Religious Practice.” Taken together, these two volumes present scholarship rich with both historical and contemporary relevance, of interest to academics and students in Jewish studies and the social sciences, communal leaders and policy makers, and anyone intrigued by the Jewish experience.

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.

Simon Cooper

Contemporary Covenantal Thought

$129.00

Refusing to accept anything but ever-increasing levels of human responsibility within a religious framework, covenantal thinkers audaciously suggest that the covenant empowers humanity as it binds and inhibits divinity. This is a reformulation of recurrent issues within the Jewish tradition, and one which pays homage to the modern context from which it emerges. Hartman and Borowitz grew up in the same mid-century American academic and social environment, and the product of that upbringing has a significant impact on the subsequent theories which they promote. Both thinkers have attracted a considerable following, but very few scholars have discussed them together. Cooper here for the first time works toward understanding their work in comparison with each other, and with covenant as the central focus and framework.

Anat Helman

A Coat of Many Colors

$109.00

A Coat of Many Colors investigates Israel's first seven years as a sovereign state through the unusual prism of dress. Clothes worn by Israelis in the 1950s reflected political ideologies, economic conditions, military priorities, social distinctions, and cultural preferences, and all played a part in consolidating a new national identity. Based on a wide range of textual and visual historical documents, the book covers both what Israelis wore in various circumstances and what they said and wrote about clothing and fashion. Written in a clear and accessible style that will appeal to the general reader as well as students and scholars, A Coat of Many Colors introduces the reader both to Israel's history during its formative years and to the rich field of dress culture.

Geoffrey Alderman

Controversy and Crisis

$75.00

Professor Geoffrey Alderman is the acknowledged authority on the history of the Jews in modern Britain. During an academic career spanning forty years he has produced some of the most authoritative and controversial studies in this field, lighting up the dark corners of the Jewish existence in Great Britain and revealing secrets the Anglo-Jewish communities would rather have kept from public view. In Controversy and Crisis, Alderman presents sixteen of these essays, covering fields as disparate as the history of the Jewish vote in the UK, the true story of the British Chief Rabbinate, and the uneasy tenure of Sir Jonathan Sacks in that office. He also considers the role of the historian in Anglo-Jewish life, and the troubled careers of some of its leaders and scholars.

Geoffrey Alderman

The Communal Gadfly

$109.00

Founded in 1841, the London-based Jewish Chronicle is the world’s oldest continuously circulating Jewish newspaper. Since 2002 its prestigious flagship “Comment” column has been written by Oxford-educated Dr. Geoffrey Alderman, the leading authority on the Jews of modern Britain, a prolific and controversial scholar whose views have attracted warm support and sweeping condemnation in equal measure. This anthology brings together over a hundred of his Jewish Chronicle op-eds on subjects as diverse as Jewish Orthodoxy, Ultra-Orthodoxy, Non-Orthodoxy, Islamic Judeophobia, Islamophobia and Jewish approaches to politics and sex. “I have tried to be funny,” Alderman declares, “when occasion has seemed to me to warrant the deployment of a certain humour, which can be a valuable didactic tool and a powerful medium of communication. I have on occasion employed sarcasm and irony. But I have always tried to be scrupulously accurate as to facts, and to locate my comment within that groundwork. Above all, true to my vocation as a rebel who has refused to toe the communal line, I have always presented a point of view that is unashamedly mine.”

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.”

Michael J. Broyde

The Codification of Jewish Law and an Introduction to the Jurisprudence of the Mishna Berura

$129.00

The Mishna Berura is, without a doubt, Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan's greatest and most complex contribution to the canon of Orthodox Jewish Law; it is a singular work that synthesizes Jewish traditions, laws, and mores into a practical halakhic guide to daily religious life. For all of his traditionalism, Rabbi Kagan was an iconoclast, and the Mishna Berura broke from many of the traditional approaches of deciding halakhic directives. Instead, he favored studying, engaging, and asserting decisions in a nuanced, almost natural approach to how ethical people should live their daily lives consistent with Jewish law. Today, the Mishna Berura has gained widespread recognition and is considered authoritative by essentially all of contemporary Orthodox Jewry, a measure of greatness that few works of Halakha have attained. Michael J. Broyde and Ira Bedzow here investigate this seminal text and explore its background and decision-making process.

The Codification of Jewish Law and an Introduction to the Jurisprudence of the Mishna Berura

Walter Jessel

Class of ’31

$109.00

"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.

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.

Robert Louis Jackson

Close Encounters

$129.00

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.

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.

Valentina Polukhina

Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries (Vol 1)

$129.00

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)

David C. Jacobson

The Charm of Wise Hesitancy

$109.00

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.

Meir Persoff

Closed Doors, Open Minds

$109.00

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.

Sharon Marie Carnicke

Checking out Chekhov

$109.00

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.

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.

Mark Lipovetsky

Charms of the Cynical Reason

$129.00

The impetus for Charms of the Cynical Reason is the phenomenal and little-explored popularity of various tricksters flourishing in official and unofficial Soviet culture, as well as in the post-soviet era. Mark Lipovetsky interprets this puzzling phenomenon through analysis of the most remarkable and fascinating literary and cinematic images of soviet and post-soviet tricksters, including such “cultural idioms” as Ostap Bender, Buratino, Vasilii Tyorkin, Shtirlitz, and others. The steadily increasing charisma of Soviet tricksters from the 1920s to the 2000s is indicative of at least two fundamental features of both the soviet and post-soviet societies. First, tricksters reflect the constant presence of irresolvable contradictions and yawning gaps within the soviet (as well as post-soviet) social universe. Secondly, these characters epitomize the realm of cynical culture thus far unrecognized in Russian studies. Soviet tricksters present survival in a cynical, contradictory and inadequate world, not as a necessity, but as a field for creativity, play, and freedom. Through an analysis of the representation of tricksters in soviet and post-soviet culture, Lipovetsky attempts to draw a virtual map of the soviet and post-soviet cynical reason: to identify its symbols, discourses, contradictions, and by these means its historical development from the 1920s to the 2000s.

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.

Angela Brintlinger

Chapaev and his Comrades

$129.00

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.

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)

Ira Robinson

Canada's Jews

$149.00

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.

Alexander Even-Chen

Between Heschel and Buber

$129.00

Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Buber were giant thinkers of the twentieth century who made significant contributions to the understanding of religious consciousness and of Judaism. They wrote on various subjects, such as the Bible, the commandments, Hasidism, Zionism and Christianity, and had much in common, though they also differed on substantial points. Of special note is the intense and fruitful interaction that took place between them. Until now, scholars have not undertaken a comparative analysis of Buber and Heschel as eminent contemporary interpreters of the Jewish tradition. In this volume, Meir and Even-Chen have taken upon themselves the challenge of monitoring their agreements and disputes.

Ber Kotlerman

Broken Heart / Broken Wholeness

$109.00

In the summer of 1947, three years before his death in a labor camp hospital, one of the most significant Soviet Yiddish writers Der Nister (Pinkhas Kahanovitsh, 1884–1950) made a trip from Moscow to Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Russian Far East. He traveled there on a special migrant train, together with a thousand Holocaust survivors. The present study examines this journey as an original protest against the conformism of the majority of Soviet Jewish activists. In his travel notes, Der Nister described the train as the “modern Noah’s ark,” heading “to put an end to the historical silliness.” This rhetoric paraphrasing Nietzsche’s “historical sickness,” challenged the Jewish history in the Diaspora, which “broke” the people's mythical “wholeness.” Der Nister formulated his vision of a post-Holocaust Jewish reconstruction more clearly in his previously unknown notes (“Birobidzhan Manifesto”), the last that have reached us from Der Nister’s creative legacy, which are being discussed for the first time in this book. Without their own territory, he wrote, the Jews were like “a soul without a body or a body without a soul, and in either case, always a cripple.” Records of the fabricated investigation case against the “anti-Soviet nationalist grouping in Birobidzhan” reveal details about Der Nister’s thoughts and real acts. Both the records and the manifesto are being published here for the first time.

Andrei Zorin

By Fables Alone

$139.00

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.”

Valentina Polukhina

Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries (Vol 2)

$139.00

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.

Efraim Sicher

Babel' in Context

$129.00

Isaak Babel' (1894-1940) is arguably one of the greatest modern short story writers of the early twentieth century. Yet his life and work are shrouded in the mystery of who Babel' was—an Odessa Jew who wrote in Russian, who came from one of the most vibrant centers of east European Jewish culture, and who all his life loved Yiddish and the stories of Sholom Aleichem This is the first book in English to study the intertextuality of Babel'’s work. It looks at Babel'’s cultural identity as a case study in the contradictions and tensions of literary influence, personal loyalties, and ideological constraint. The complex and often ambivalent relations between the two cultures inevitably raise controversial issues that touch on the reception of Babel' and other Jewish intellectuals in Russian literature, as well as the “Jewishness” of their work.

Simcha Fishbane

The Boldness of a Halakhist

$109.00

The Boldness of a Halakhist analyzes the writings of Rabbi Yechiel Mechel Halevi Epstein (1829–1908), author of the Arukh Hashulkhan, a bold and unusual approach to Jewish law. Based primarily on the original text of Rabbi Epstein's legal codes and homilies, this work covers topics such as women, modernity, customs, and secular studies. It analyzes the rabbi's approach to Jewish law and Jewish life, designed to promote the spiritual welfare of Jews under the pressures of growing secularization and Russification. Although based upon the principles of the traditional judicial process, the rabbi’s rulings demonstrate a profound understanding of the contemporary social and historical reality facing the Jews of Russia at the turn of the century.