In modern Jewish thought in Eastern Europe, the biblical narratives of the Flood (Mabul) and Noah’s Ark took on new symbolic meanings. Although these narratives had long occupied a place in religious interpretation and storytelling, they gained...
This article analyses the transformative impact of the Documentation of Jewish Records Worldwide (DoJR) project, launched in 2017, on Jewish genealogy. Jewish genealogy, deeply rooted in centuries of tradition and cultural significance, transcends me...
Our discussion of the Algerian Jewish community’s Jewish education during the French period (1830–1939) sheds light on the community’s multiplicity of identities viewed through the prism of the Spanish diaspora and French colonialis...
On 11 March 1899, a group of young Jewish artists organized a commemorative evening in memory of the late Maurycy Gottlieb, an event accompanied by the publication of the festive Jednodniówka, which included contributions by Jewish and Polish...
The field of Jewish thought seeks recognition as a distinct discipline: What is Jewish about “Jewish thought”—its language, canon, contents, or historical affiliations? A prevalent scholarly paradigm presents Jewish thought as arisi...
In this article, I analyze the use of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic texts—and the Kaddish in particular—as esoteric tongues in Jewish–American narratives, including poems, plays, television shows, and films. I suggest that by doing s...
The “second law of ecology”—that all matter remains part of the earthly ecosystem—poses a theological challenge to Jewish monotheisms. Climate change has further underscored the urgency of understanding and acting in light of...
This article offers an English translation of an essay published in 1946 by Jacob Gordin (1896–1947), a Russian-Jewish philosopher of religion, who is considered the founding figure of the postwar Paris School of Jewish Thought (École de...
In many churches nowadays, there has been a standardized approach to premarital counseling for couples involving social, pastoral, and psychological perspectives. In contrast, many rabbis and other Jewish officials still concentrate on legal aspects...
This article addresses the “abyss of responsibility” in the Anthropocene, where accountability for climate change is routinely outsourced to institutions. By analyzing a global consumer society that reduces both humans and nature to mere...
Modern Orthodoxy is a sect of Judaism which aims to combine a high level of commitment to Jewish observance with immersion in modern society. Alumni of Modern Orthodox parochial high schools have varying degrees of commitment towards religion. This s...
Horuni me-hekhan dantuni is a principle that originates in the Babylonian Talmud. It relates to the question of the obligation of dayyanim to explain their rulings and the option of litigants to appeal these rulings to other judicial instances in cer...
Studies of Jewish-Christian relations in the nineteenth century have largely centered on anti-Semitism, missionary endeavors, and processes of Protestantization. In this literature, Jews and Judaism are presented as radically separate from Christians...
This article offers a conceptual framework for understanding the diversity of pedagogies found in Talmud classrooms. It looks at how two different Orthodox Talmud teachers responded to an academic article about constructivist learning practices in th...
This article argues that Edith Stein, a Jewish-born philosopher who was murdered in Auschwitz despite her conversion to Christianity, has much to contribute to Bible interpretation. Rarely discussed in Jewish Studies, Stein’s Philosophy of Empa...
This short essay takes an exploratory approach to redefining Jewish theology. I will offer a brief reflection on both possible philosophical—through the concepts of participation, truth, and textuality—and theological—around the cat...
This article reviews recent books by Jewish thinkers that critique the idea of a Jewish state from the perspective of Jewish exile. It outlines two main approaches. The first, secular approach, rejects the Jewish state in favor of a secular state, se...
The present study will focus on core parallels and nodes of theopolitical exchange between the two most politically and theologically consequential jurist “theosophers” of the twentieth century, the Religious Zionist founding father, the...
The article includes a sample of testimonies and the results of sociological research on the life stories of Jews born in the aftermath of World War II in two countries, Czechoslovakia and Luxembourg. At that time, Czechoslovak Jews were living throu...
In an Eastern Jewish community in 1467, there appeared a book in Judeo-Arabic entitled Kitāb maḥāsin al-ādāb [The Book of Excellent Conduct]. In its introduction, the author states that he is translating an earlier Hebrew wo...
This article presents a new evaluation and analysis of the five censuses undertaken at the initiative of philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore among the Jewish population of Palestine/the Land of Israel between 1839 and 1875. The main purpose of the ce...
Zemun is an old Central European town on the right bank of the Danube River, today one of the boroughs of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. There has been a small Jewish community in Zemun dating back to the mid-18th century. Some of the Jews who live...
Standardized testing in the Israeli education system presents a cavernous achievement gap between the dominant Jewish and Arab student populaces. This paper assesses the role of one major factor contributing to this discrepancy in test scores: budget...
This article offers a fresh reading of Alonso de Oropesa’s Lumen ad revelationem gentium (1465) and of the pro-converso theology of this Hieronymite friar, through a close reading of a specific and largely neglected section of the treatise. Thi...
Ritual has long served as a central axis of religious life, not only structuring practice but also transmitting meaning across generations. This article offers a new perspective on how Hasidic thought reconfigures the medieval Jewish genre of ta&lsqu...
This paper is founded on two philosophical assumptions. The first is that there is a difference between two patterns of recognition: the dialectical and the dialogical. The second assumption is that the origins of the dialogical pattern may be found...
The notion that in previous centuries Jews were considered to be black, or seen as blacks, has gained broad acceptance in scholarly discourse on the Jewish body since the early 1990s. The present article considers the notion analytically and then exa...
The present article sets out to answer the question of the extent to which Naḥman Krochmal’s reappraisal of Philo of Alexandria in the light of his Jewish faith reflects a deep spiritual crisis that was engulfing the Maskilic world: the encroaching e...
Jewish religious life in the Soviet Union is typically the subject of dichotomous depictions that offer only a superficial rendering of this rich and complex environment. This paper aims to complicate this image by pointing out several religious thin...
Looking at short stories by writers as diverse as Brian Glanville, Ruth Fainlight, Clive Sinclair, Jonathan Wilson, James Lasdun, Gabriel Josipovici, Tamar Yellin, Michelene Wandor, and Naomi Alderman, and extending from the center of Jewish British...
This paper explores the Polish Jew journal as a pivotal second-tier record for advancing Holocaust studies and Jewish genealogy. Traditionally underutilized in academic research, this periodical provides a unique repository of names and narratives of...
Tracing the ancestral roots of Polish Jews before the introduction of metrical data in 1808 represents a unique and complex challenge for genealogists and historians alike. Indeed, limited official records, shifting geopolitical boundaries, and the a...
Against the gloomy forecast of “The Vanishing Diaspora”, the end of the second millennium saw the global emergence of a dazzling array of Jewish cultural initiatives, institutional modalities, and individual practices. These “Jewish...
This article presents the study of a Jewish liturgical genre that is performed in main sections of Jewish prayer services. This liturgical genre is called “prayer chanting”. The term refers to the musical performance by the cantor of the prose texts...
This article unpacks Margarete Susman’s political and theological arguments at the core of her reading of the Book of Job. As I show through a reading of her oeuvre, Susman rejects political projects that she takes to be based on eschatology su...
This article examines Jewish ethics as a normative field whose demands are not exhausted by explicit prescriptions of halakhah. It distinguishes morality, understood as duties owed to others by virtue of their humanity; ethics, understood as standard...
Scholars regularly make the mistake of applying critical analysis to religious traditions without a sensibility that they are often describing one ontology through the lens of another. Just as cultural anthropology attempts to understand indigenous t...
This article explores the complex issue of disharmony within religious marriages, focusing on Jewish approaches to divorce. Contrasting Jewish divorce mediation with other religions’ approaches to marital conflict, this article examines two Jud...
Anyone who traces their Jewish ancestors back to the 18th century and even further back in history encounters the challenge of looking for ancestry without the clue that a fixed family name provides. Before the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19...
Discussions of Jewish responses to modernity often focus on what is new or what has adapted or evolved in Judaism in the face of modernity’s challenges. However, contrary to convention, this paper argues that, at least in principle, neither has...
Among the various types of medieval rings, Jewish wedding rings with miniature architecture have a special significance due to their special form, their importance in the Jewish wedding ceremony and their long tradition that extends from the Middle A...
This essay places the Washington Library of Congress Heb. Ms 183, a Hebrew Qur’an translation from eighteenth-century Cochin, in its South Indian context. After pointing out important general differences between early modern European and South...
During the mid- and late 20th century, a small group of Jewish refugee critics changed the way British culture thought about what kind of literature mattered and why. These outsiders went on to have an enormous impact on late 20th-century British lit...
Jews like Adolf Fischhof and Ludwig August Frankl were prominent participants in the revolution of 1848. Their speeches, poems, and portraits circulated in Vienna and throughout the Empire. With the suppression of the revolution, most of these promin...
This article examines three exceptional synagogues designed in Israel in the 1960s and 1970s. It aims to explore the tension between these iconic structures and the artworks integrated into them. The investigation of each case study is comprised of a...
The construction of the Great Synagogue in Stockholm during the 1860s initiated Jewish communal debates on the position and public presence of Jews in the Swedish pre-emancipatory society. An investigation into the construction process not only revea...
In her final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot (1819–1880) repeatedly stages moments in which gentile characters project expectations onto Jewish women, drawing on inherited cultural representations from literature, history, and the pe...
In his seminal book Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982), renowned historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi argues that it is literature and culture, and not historiography, that shaped Jewish collective memory for generations. In Yerushalmi&rsquo...
This article analyzes the contribution of women to the Soviet Union’s Jewish movement. We argue that an assessment of the personal stories of Jewish female activists in the former Soviet Union reveals a uniquely meaningful impact on the exodus...
While Schmitt’s Political Theology paints modern theories of the state as secularized theological concepts, prominent threads of Jewish religious education in 20th century Jerusalem have moved in a different direction, that is, toward the re-sa...
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