Showing 1-10 of 10 items.

Jewish Education

Rutgers University Press

Jewish education has been dominated by two concerns: What ought to be taught? And what is the best way to teach it?  This book upends the conventional approaches by asking a different question: How do people learn to engage in Jewish life?
 

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Judaism

The Genealogy of a Modern Notion

Rutgers University Press

Judaism makes the bold argument that the very concept of a religion of ‘Judaism’ is an invention of the Christian church. The intellectual odyssey of world-renowned Talmud scholar Daniel Boyarin, this book will change the study of Judaism—an essential key word in Jewish Studies—as we understand it today.

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Jew

Rutgers University Press

This book offers a wide-ranging exploration of the key word Jew—charting the past meanings, present usages, and possible futures of a term that lies not only at the heart of Jewish experience, but at the core of how Western civilization has imagined the Other. Tracing the word’s evolution, Cynthia M. Baker also interrogates the contested categories of “ethnicity,” “race,” and “religion,” while providing a glimpse of what Jew is coming to mean in an era of Internet cultures, genetic sequencing, and uncertain identities. 

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Holocaust

An American Understanding

Rutgers University Press

In Holocaust: An American Understanding, Deborah E. Lipstadt reveals how since the end of the war a broad array of Americans have tried to make sense of an inexplicable disaster, and how they came to use the Holocaust as a lens to interpret their own history. Drawing upon extensive research on politics, popular culture, student protests, religious debates and Zionist ideologies, Lipstadt weaves a powerful narrative that ranges from the civil rights movement and Vietnam, to the Rwandan genocide and the bombing of Kosovo.

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Jewish Peoplehood

An American Innovation

Rutgers University Press

Jewish peoplehood has eclipsed religion—as well as ethnicity and nationality—as the prevailing definition of what it means to be a Jew. In Jewish Peoplehood, Noam Pianko examines the history, the current significance, and the future relevance of a term that assumes an increasingly important position in American Jewish and Israeli life.
 

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Shtetl

A Vernacular Intellectual History

Rutgers University Press

By examining the meaning of shtetl, Jeffrey Shandler asks how Jewish life in provincial towns in Eastern Europe has become the subject of extensive creativity, memory, and scholarship. He traces the trajectory of writing about these towns, by Jews and non-Jews, residents and visitors, researchers, novelists, memoirists, journalists, and others, to demonstrate how the Yiddish word for “town” emerged as a key word in Jewish culture and Jewish studies. 

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Jewish Families

Rutgers University Press

Jonathan Boyarin explores a wide range of scholarship in Jewish studies to argue that Jewish family forms and ideologies have varied greatly throughout the times and places where Jewish families have found themselves. He considers a range of family configurations from biblical times to the twenty-first century, including strictly Orthodox communities and new forms of family, including same-sex parents, and suggests productive ways to think about possible futures for Jewish family forms.

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Jewish Studies

A Theoretical Introduction

Rutgers University Press

Jewish Studies, the first volume in a groundbreaking new series, Key Words in Jewish Studies, introduces the basic approach of the series by organizing discussion around key concepts in the field that have emerged over the last two centuries: history and science, race and religion, self and community, identity and memory. The book is oriented by contemporary critical theory, especially feminist and postcolonial studies, and the multidisciplinary approaches of cultural studies.

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Haskalah

The Romantic Movement in Judaism

Rutgers University Press

Conventionally translated as the “Jewish Enlightenment,” the Haskalah propelled Jews into modern life. Based on imaginative and historically grounded readings of primary sources, Olga Litvak presents a compelling case for rethinking the relationship between the Haskalah and the experience of political and social emancipation. Litvak challenges the prevailing view that the Haskalah provided the philosophical mainspring for Jewish liberalism.

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Space and Place in Jewish Studies

Rutgers University Press

Space and Place in Jewish Studies embraces how notions of “Jewish space,” diaspora, and home continue to resonate within contemporary discourse, bringing space to the foreground as a practical and analytical category. Barbara Mann takes us on a journey from medieval Levantine trade routes to the Eastern European shtetl to the streets of contemporary New York, introducing readers to the variety of ways in which Jews have historically formed communities and created a sense of place for themselves. Combining cutting-edge theory with rabbinics, anthropology, and literary analysis, Mann offers a fresh take on the Jewish experience.

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