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Ruby Namdar’s The Ruined House received the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award. Now newly translated into English, Namdar’s tale of a man whose comfortable secular life begins to unravel in the face of haunting religious visions cuts to the core of contemporary Jewish-American identity.
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The advent of Islam in the seventh century brought profound economic changes to the Middle East and to the Jews living there. The Talmud, written in and for an agrarian society, was in many ways ill-equipped for the new economy. In the early Islamic period, the Babylonian Geonim made accommodations through their responsa, through occasional taqqanot, and especially by applying the concept that custom can be a source of law. Not previously noticed, in the Mishneh Torah Maimonides made his own efforts to update the halakha through codification. Mark R. Cohen's new book Maimonides and the Merchants suggests that, like the Geonim before him, Maimonides wished to provide Jewish merchants an alternative and comparable forum to the Islamic legal system and thereby shore up an important cornerstone of communal autonomy.
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Francine Klagsbrun's definitive new biography of Golda Meir brings to life a world figure unlike any other. An iron-willed leader, chain-smoking political operative, and tea-and-cake-serving grandmother who became the fourth prime minister of Israel, Meir was one of the most notable women of our time.
Born in czarist Russia in 1898, Meir immigrated to America in 1906 and grew up in Milwaukee, where from her earliest years she displayed the political consciousness and organizational skills that would eventually catapult her into the inner circles of Israel's founding generation. Moving to mandatory Palestine in 1921 with her husband, the passionate socialist joined a kibbutz but soon left and was hired at a public works office by the man who would become the great love of her life.
A series of public service jobs brought her to the attention of David Ben-Gurion, and her political career took off. Fundraising in America in 1948, secretly meeting in Amman with King Abdullah right before Israel's declaration of independence, mobbed by thousands of Jews in a Moscow synagogue in 1948 as Israel's first representative to the USSR, serving as minister of labor and foreign minister in the 1950s and 1960s, Golda brought fiery oratory, plainspoken appeals, and shrewd deal-making to the cause to which she had dedicated her life—the welfare and security of the State of Israel and its inhabitants.
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A discussion with Rabbi Ron Kronish on his new book, The Other Peace Process: Interreligious Dialogue, A View from Jerusalem.
Drawing on personal experiences from his 25-year career as founding director of the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel, Rabbi Ron Kronish describes the theory and practice of interreligious dialogue, education, and action in Israel and Palestine in the context of the political peace process. The Rev. Chloe Breyer and Iman Boukadoum of the Interfaith Center of New York join in brief responses to the author.
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Ilana Sasson, instructor at Sacred Heart University and JTS alumna, discusses her new critical edition of a key Arabic translation and commentary on the book of Proverbs. Working in the 10th century, Yefet ben Ò…li ha-LeviÓ³ commentary attests to his rationalistic and revisionist ideology and egalitarian approach.
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Dinner at the Center of the Earth, a new political thriller from Pulitzer finalist and best-selling author Nathan Englander, unfolds in the highly charged territory of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A prisoner in a secret cell. The guard who has watched over him a dozen years. An American waitress in Paris. A young Palestinian man in Berlin who strikes up an odd friendship with a wealthy Canadian businessman. And the General, Israel's most controversial leader, who lies dying in a hospital, the only man who knows of the prisoner's existence.
From these vastly different lives Englander has woven a powerful, intensely suspenseful portrait of a nation riven by insoluble conflict, even as the lives of its citizens become fatefully and inextricably entwined—a political thriller of the highest order that interrogates the anguished, violent division between Israelis and Palestinians, and dramatizes the immense moral ambiguities haunting both sides. Who is right, who is wrong—who is the guard, who is truly the prisoner?
Dr. Barbara Mann, Simon H. Fabian Chair in Hebrew Literature, JTS, served as moderator.
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Aly Gerber’s young adult novel, Braced, is the story of a 12-year-old soccer player who learns she needs to wear a back brace 23 hours a day for her worsening scoliosis. As she adjusts to life with the brace, her confidence and self-image are shaken. Ultimately she discovers her own voice and learns how to face this challenge—plus all the others associated with being a preteen.Gerber will share the personal experience that inspired Braced. She and Dr. Epstein will discuss how educators, parents, and adults can use contemporary fiction and personal narrative to talk about issues such as body image, confidence, self-advocacy, and expression with kids and teens.
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In his new book, the winner of the 2016 National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship, JTS's Dina and Eli Field Family Chair in Jewish History Dr. Benjamin R. Gampel uses rich new archival data to illuminate one of the major disasters that struck medieval Jewry: the anti-Jewish riots of 1391-92 in the lands of Castile and Aragon.
Offering the most exhaustive and profound record to date of the ten fateful months between June 1391 and March 1392, during which hundreds if not thousands of Jews were killed or forcibly converted to Christianity, the book explores why the famed convivencia of medieval Iberian society—in which Christians, Muslims and Jews seemingly lived together in relative harmony—was conspicuously absent during this period. Taking into account the social, religious, political, and economic tensions at play, Gampel analyzes the evolution of this bloody wave of persecution, provides new perspectives on the riots' origins, and examines responses from the rulers of Aragon.
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In his book Kohelet’s Pursuit of Truth, Rabbi Benjamin J. Segal, former president of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, presents an arresting new translation and commentary on Ecclesiastes that unlocks the ancient wisdom of one of the deepest and most controversial books of the Tanakh. Segal's most striking innovations include the tracing of change within the book, an exploration of the charatcer of the main speaker, an appreciation of the literary structure, and a sensitivity to the varied voices of the main speaker. A persuasive guide to the book Thomas Wolfe called "the greatest single piece of literature I have known," Kohelet’s Pursuit of Truth demonstrates that Ecclesiastes is designed to empower the reader, emphasizing challenges rather than answers.
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Kaplan was a compulsive diarist. His journal of twenty seven volumes is one of the longest on record. Communings of the Spirit, volume 2, edited by Dr. Mel Scult, contains in vivid detail the edited selections from 1934-1941. He reacts passionately to the momentous events of the thirties paying particular attention to the rise of Fascism. We meet a host of Jewish notables including Judah Magnes and Martin Buber. In addition the diary allows us to enter the inner processes of his very creative and radical mind as he continually confronts the problems of Jewish survival in the modern world.
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Named after Solomon Ibn Gabirol’s own sharp self-description, Vulture in a Cage is the most extensive collection of the eleventh-century Hebrew poet’s works ever to be published in English. Here, vital poems of praise, lament, and complaint sit alongÂside devotional poetry, love poetry, descripÂtive meditations on nature, and epigrams. Obsessed with the impediments of the body and the material world, Ibn Gabirol ambitiously dreamed of breaking through corporeal constraints and launching his soul into the realm of the intellect. He hurled unforgivable insults at his contemporaries, yet he resented their refusal to grant him the recognition that he felt was his due and lamented his own inability to find human companionship. In his secular poetry, he bewails the unattainability of true spiritual wisdom; but in his devotional poetry, his voice seems to emerge from a realm of pure spirituality.
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Reading Genesis: Beginnings, edited by Beth Kissileff, gathers intellectuals and thinkers who use their professional knowledge to create an original constellation of modern readings of Genesis: a scientist of appetite on Eve’s eating behavior; law professors on contracts and collective punishment; an anthropologist on the nature of human strife in the Cain and Abel story; political scientists on the nature of Biblical games, Abraham's resistance, and collective action.
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Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food
Roger Horowitz (Columbia University Press, 2016)Kosher USA follows the fascinating journey of kosher food through the modern industrial food system. It recounts how iconic products such as Coca-Cola and Jell-O tried to become kosher; the contentious debates among rabbis over the incorporation of modern science into Jewish law; how Manischewitz wine became the first kosher product to win over non-Jewish consumers (principally African Americans); the techniques used by Orthodox rabbinical organizations to embed kosher requirements into food manufacturing; and the difficulties encountered by kosher meat and other kosher foods that fell outside the American culinary consensus.
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