Bücher veröffentlicht von Academic Studies Press

Darwin famously proposed that sexual competition and courtship is (or at least was) the driving force of "e;art"e; production not only in animals, but also in humans. The present book is the first to reveal that Darwin's hypothesis, rather than amounting to a full-blown antidote to the humanist tradition, is actually strongly informed both by classical rhetoric and by English and German philosophical aesthetics, thereby Darwin's theory far richer and more interesting for the understanding of poetry and song.The book also discusses how the three most discussed hypothetical functions of the human arts--competition for attention and (loving) acceptance, social cooperation, and self-enhancement--are not mutually exclusive, but can well be conceived of as different aspects of the same processes of producing and responding to the arts.Finally, reviewing the current state of archeological findings, the book advocates a new hypothesis on the multiple origins of the human arts, posing that they arose as new variants of human behavior, when three ancient and largely independent adaptions--sensory and sexual selection-driven biases regarding visual and auditory beauty, play behavior, and technology--joined forces with, and were transformed by, the human capacities for symbolic cognition and language.

This book implements a multidisciplinary approach in describing language both in its ontogenetic development and in its close interrelationship with other human subsystems such as thought, memory, and activity, with a focus on the semantic component of the evolutionary-synthetic theory.

Explores fundamental questions of how human concepts arise in a child, why concepts appear in a child before words, the genesis of language, and why there are so many languages.

The past two decades have witnessed a remarkable renaissance in the academic study of the history of the Jews in Great Britain and of their impact upon British history. This title presents essays that reflect the richness of this renaissance.

This book is dedicated to an analysis of the writings of modern religious Jewish thinkers who adopted a neo-fundamentalist, illusionary, apologetic approach, opposing the notion that there may sometimes be a contradiction between reason and revelation. The book deals with the thought of Eliezer Goldman, Norman Lamm, David Hartman, Aharon Lichtenstein, Jonathan Sacks, and Michael Abraham. According to these thinkers, it is possible to resolve all of the difficulties that arise from the encounter between religion and science, between reason and revelation, between the morality of halakhah and Western morality, between academic scholarship and tradition, and between scientific discoveries and statements found in the Torah. This position runs counter to the stance of other Jewish thinkers who espouse a different, more daring approach. According to the latter view, irresolvable contradictions between reason and faith sometimes face the modern Jewish believer, who must reconcile himself to these two conflicting truths and learn to live with them. This dialectic position was discussed in Between Religion and Reason, Part I (Academic Studies Press, 2020). The present volume, Part II, completes the discussion of this topic. This book concludes a trilogy of works by the author dealing with modern Jewish thought that attempts to integrate tradition and modernity. The first in the series was The Middle Way (Academic Studies Press, 2014), followed by The Dual Truth (Academic Studies Press, 2018).

The Jewish intellectual tradition has a long and complex history that has resulted in significant and influential works of scholarship. This book suggests that there is a series of common principles that can be extracted from the Jewish intellectual tradition that have broad, even life-changing, implications for individual and societal achievement.

This literary guide leads students with advanced knowledge of Russian as well as experienced scholars through the text of Nikolai Gogol's absurdist masterpiece The Nose. The book focuses on numerous instances of the writer's wordplay, and presents an overview of major critical approaches to the story in Gogol scholarship.

This literary guide leads students with advanced knowledge of Russian as well as experienced scholars through the text of Nikolai Gogol's absurdist masterpiece The Nose. The book focuses on numerous instances of the writer's wordplay, and presents an overview of major critical approaches to the story in Gogol scholarship.

Provides a wide-ranging picture of Jewish life in medieval Egypt as depicted by most recent scholarship. Starting from the last phases of the Byzantine era and ending with the Mamluk period, the book presents a scholarly yet vivid description of Jewish communal organization, judiciary, economic frameworks, family life, and lingual practices.

From Darkness to Light is a compilation of personal testimonies of six Holocaust survivors, written in a short story format. The book walks readers through their life experiences before and during the Holocaust, their liberation, and their new life in Israel. Each story is told in their own words, culled from hours of personal interviews with them and their children, so the world can have first-hand knowledge of what happened during that darkest time of our history. These survivors came from different parts of Europe, and not one story is like the other. Now in their eighties and nineties, they still recall in detail their darkest memories. Amid immense pain and suffering, they managed to overcome every hurdle they encountered under the Nazi regime. When these stalwart individuals were liberated, no matter what further anguish and obstacles they faced, they realized their dream to make aliya to Israel. They settled in the Holy Land as visionaries and pioneers to build the Jewish state, which itself was undergoing conflict and difficult economic times. Their love for the Jewish homeland and their creation of families with children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren exemplify how Hitler's aim to annihilate the Jews was nullified.

When the Holocaust broke out, Hansi and Joel Brand and Israel (Rezs) Kasztner launched an organised effort to save thousands of human lives. Their efforts helped to end the Auschwitz extermination. Their success put them at odds with the political machine of the young state of Israel, and led to Israel's first politically-motivated homicide.

A book of reportage originally published in Poland in 1933 by Ksawery Pruszyski, a young reporter who went to Mandate Palestine to see for himself whether the Zionist dream of returning to Eretz Yisrael had a chance of turning into reality. This book is a unique firsthand account of the early stages in formation of the state and nation of Israel.

Much post-Holocaust Jewish thought published in North America has assumed that the Holocaust shattered traditional religious categories that had been used by Jews to account for historical catastrophes. But most traditional Jewish thinkers during the war saw no such overwhelming of tradition in the death and suffering delivered to Jews by Nazis. Through a comparative reading of postwar North American and wartime Orthodox Jewish texts about the Holocaust, Barbara Krawcowicz shows that these sources differ in the paradigms-modern and historicist for North American thinkers, traditional and covenantal for Orthodox thinkers-in which they emplot historical events.

Covers the entire sweep of the history of the largest Jewish community of all time. The book provides an introduction to many facets of that history. Each chapter is written by an expert in the field, and includes a bibliography for further reading.

This book analyzes the ways in which literary works and cultural discourses employ the construct of the Jew's body in relation to the material world in order either to establish and reinforce, or to subvert and challenge, dominant cultural norms and stereotypes. It examines the use of physical characteristics, embodied practices, tacit knowledge and senses to define the body taxonomically as normative, different, abject or mimetically desired. Starting from the works of Gogol and Dostoevsky through to contemporary Russian-Jewish women's writing, broadening the scope to examining the role of objects, museum displays and the politics of heritage food, the book argues that materiality can embody fictional constructions that should be approached on a culture-specific basis.

Gerald K. Stone has collected books about Canadian Jewry since the early 1980s. This volume is a descriptive catalogue of his Judaica collection, comprising nearly 6,000 paper or electronic documentary resources in English, French, Yiddish, and Hebrew.

Tiberian Hasidism provides a model of an intensive contemplative life that is particularly appealing to contemporary spiritual seekers for many reasons, including its deep focus on mystical theology; devotional practice; and the ecstasy of deep friendship rather than allegiance to an institutionalized religion.

Deals with the spatial concepts of Lithuania and other geo-images that either "competed" in the nineteenth century with the term Lithuania or were of a different taxonomic level (Samogitia, Prussia's Lithuania, Lithuania Minor, Poland, etc.). The Russian, Lithuanian, Polish, Belarusian, Jewish, and German geo-images of this territory are analyzed in separate chapters of this volume.

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.

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.

Two major dividing lines have formed the megastructure of Eurasia, determining the historical epochs of the continent's peoples. With the swift development of horse domestication and horseback riding, the nomads moved to the forefront of Eurasian history. This book focuses on the tangle of problems of these nomadic peoples' history.

How did medieval Jewish scholars, from Saadia Gaon to Rabbi Isaac Abarbanel, imagine a world that has experienced salvation? Is the Messianic reality identical to our current world, or is it a new world entirely? This work explores how a rationalist can remain calm in light of the seductive promises of the various apocalyptic teachings of Antiquity regarding the Messianic world.

This book explores how the Italian commedia dell'arte has profoundly affected the Russian artistic imagination for over three hundred years, providing a source of inspiration for leading artists as diverse as Nikolai Gogol, Evgenii Vakhtangov, Vladimir Nabokov and the pop star Alla Pugacheva.

The book deals with identity in general and with Jewish identity in particular. The book rejects rigid and one-sided notions of Jewish identity and offers a historical-cultural analysis of the identity discourse.

The book examines the Soviet Yiddish writer Der Nister's (Pinkhas Kahanovitsh, 1884-1950) vision of a post-Holocaust Jewish reconstruction, challenging the Jewish "homelessness" in the Diaspora.

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.

Argues that Jews were not a people apart but were culturally integrated in Russian society. In their diasporic cultural creations Russia's Jews employed the general themes of artists under tsars and Soviets, but they modified these themes to fit their own needs. The result was a hybrid, Russian-Jewish culture, unique and dynamic.