Bücher veröffentlicht von Academic Studies Press

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 "e;ordinary people."e; 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.

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.

The work of Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, the Neziv, ranks amongst the most often read rabbinic literature of the nineteenth century. Yet, to date, there has been no comprehensive and systematic attempt to place his intellectual oeuvre into its historical context - until now.

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

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

In this book, a diverse collection of empirical and conceptual studies illuminates particular aspects of the teaching of Bible and rabbinic literature to, and the learning of, children and adults. Providing specific insights into the pedagogy of Jewish texts, these studies serve as models of what the disciplined study of pedagogy can look like.

Examines 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. It examines the dynamics of those relations through the modernisation of Jewish society, and the problem of Jewish Identity vis-a-vis modernity.

Follows the career tracks of Jewish intellectuals who, having fallen in love with Russian culture, were unceremoniously repulsed. Brian Horowitz relays the paradoxes of a synthetic Jewish and Russian self-consciousness in order to correct critics who have always considered Russians and Jews as polar opposites, enemies, and incompatible.

Examines the role that Jewish cultural tradition played in the work of the Russian psychologist Lev.S.Vygotsky and the British sociologist Basil Bernstein by highlighting aspects of their respective lives and theories revealing significant influences of Jewish thoughts and beliefs.

This volume offers a threefold intellectual juncture, analyzing the liberal-republican tension-field in a novel way, juxtaposing early modern political thought with twenty-first century political concerns. It conjoins Israeli political scholarship with its European and American counterparts, mapping differentials and commonalities.

This remarkable study makes a critical intervention in the study of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian culture. It shows us in a new manner what was distinctive about Soviet social and cultural history and in what ways it should be seen as a variety of the common story of modernity. Further, it explores how the cultural life of present day Russia has inherited these structures and patterns.

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 "e;literary vignettes"e; capturing the spirit of its particular time in a nutshell. The voices of this "e;polyphonic"e; 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.

Rank and Style is a collection of essays by Irina Reyfman, a leading scholar of Russian literature and culture. Ranging in topic from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the essays focus on the interaction of life and literature. In the first part, Reyfman examines how obligatory state service and the Table of Ranks shaped Russian writers' view of themselves as professionals, raising questions about whether the existence of the rank system prompted the development of specifically Russian types of literary discourse. The sections that follow bring together articles on Pushkin, writer and man, as seen by himself and others, essays on Leo Tolstoy, and other aspects of Russian literary and cultural history. In addition to examining littlestudied writers and works, Rank and Style offers new approaches to well-studied literary personalities and texts.

Featuring a number of pioneering essays by the internationally known Russian cultural historians Boris Uspenskij and Victor Zhivov, this collection includes a number of essays in English. It focuses on several of the interesting and problematic aspects of Russia's cultural development.

Combining eventful sociology, path dependency and institutional political economy, this book argues that historical political events have been shaped not only by political and economic forces but also by resistance struggles of marginal and weaker social groups: organised workers, Palestinians and Mizrachi Jews.

This groundbreaking book focuses on Alfred Dreyfus the man, with emphasis placed on his own writings, including his recently published prison workbooks and his letters to his wife Lucie. Through close reading of these documents, a much more sensitive, intellectual, and Jewish man is revealed than was previously suspected. He and Lucie, through their family connections and mutual loyalty, were interested in and supported the artistic, scientific, philosophical and historical movements that formed their Parisian milieu. But as an Alsatian Jew, Alfred was also critical of many aspects of technological and ideological developments, making his mentality one of skepticism as well as idealism. Norman Simms addresses the way Dreyfus perceived the world, challenged many of its assumptions and contextualized it in the style of a rabbinical midrash, a process that created what Alfred called a "e;phantasmagoria"e; of the Affair that bears his name, and also interprets the man, his milieu and his mentality in the style of a midrash, a creative, transformative reading.

In every Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] neighbourhood, bookstores overflow with titles written by and for Haredi Jews. This title offers a reading of contemporary Haredi fiction, self-help, history, and theology, explaining how this isolationist religious community constructs its complex and paradoxical relationship with contemporary culture.

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 is imbued with these connections and interrelationships.

An exploration of the richness and diversity of Jewish society in Christian Iberia from 1100-1500. It includes essays which present a portrait that adds greater nuance to our understanding of both medieval Jewish and medieval Spanish history.

The study of Jewish political philosophy is a recently established field in the study of Jewish philosophy. While in older histories of Jewish philosophy there is hardly any discussion of this topic, recent editors of such books have found it useful to add chapters on it. Following the pioneering efforts of Leo Strauss, Ralph Lerner and Daniel Elazar, among others, political philosophy has gained its proper place alongside ethics and metaphysics in the study of the history of Jewish philosophy. This volume is another manifestation of this welcome development. Consisting of selected English-language papers the author published over the last thirty years, it concentrates on the Medieval and Renaissance periods, from Sa'adiah Gaon in the tenth century to Spinoza in the seventeenth. These were the formative periods in the development of Jewish political philosophy, when Jewish scholars versed in the canonical Jewish sources (biblical and rabbinic) encountered Greek political philosophy, as transmitted by Muslim philosophers such as Alfarabi, Ibn Bajja and Averroes, and adapted it to their Jewish terms of reference. The outcome of this effort was Jewish political philosophy.

Examines the major figures, movements and manifestos of the modernist period in Russia. Scholarly attention is given to literature, visual arts, cinema and theatre in an attempt to capture the complex nature of the time. It would be especially relevant for those looking for a comprehensive approach to the various movements and artistic expressions that constitute the Russian avant-garde.

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.

Focuses on the changes undergone by Mapai, Israel's first ruling party, during Israel's first years of Independence, and then analyses the effects of these changes in relation to Israeli political culture.

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.

Although Maimonides did not write a running commentary on any book of the Bible, biblical exegesis occupies a central place in his writings, particularly in his Guide of the Perplexed. In this book, Sara Klein-Braslavy offers a collection of essays on several key biblical interpretations by Maimonides dealing with the creation of the world; the story of the Garden of Eden; Jacob's dream of the ladder; King Solomon as an esoterist philosopher; and the problem of exoteric and esoteric biblical interpretations in the Guide. Special attention is paid to Maimonides' methods of interpretation and to his esoteric way of writing. Some of the articles in this volume were originally published in Hebrew, and appear here for the first time in English.

Winner of the 2012 Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award in Holocaust Literature. A survivor of concentration camps and the Death March, Eli Pfefferkorn looks back on his Holocaust and post-Holocaust experiences to compare patterns of human behavior in extremis with those of ordinary life. What he finds is that the concentration camp Muselmann, who has lost his hunger for life and is thus shunned by his fellow inmates on the soup line, bears an eerie resemblance to an office employee who has fallen from grace and whose coworkers avoid spending time with him at the water cooler. Though the circumstances are unfathomably far apart, the human response to their situations is triggered by self-preservation rather than by calculated evil. By juxtaposing these two separate worlds, Pfefferkorn demonstrates that ultimately the human condition has not changed significantly since Cain slew Abel and the Athenians sentenced Socrates.

Focusing on the concepts of time and the life cycle, this collection of articles examines Jewish life in the Talmudic period through the lens of Jewish law and custom of the time. The essays are the work of Nissan Rubin and come together to present the cultural perspective of the sages and scholars who produced the stepping-stones of Jewish life and custom.