Brandeis University Press: 83 books
The German-Jewish Cookbook
Recipes and History of a Cuisine
Language: English
Release Date: September 5, 2017
This cookbook features recipes for German-Jewish cuisine as it existed in Germany prior to World War II, and as refugees later adapted it in the United States and elsewhere. Because these dishes differ from more familiar Jewish food, they will be a discovery for many people. With a focus on fresh,...
Woody on Rye
Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen
Language: English
Release Date: December 3, 2013
Although Woody Allen’s films have received extensive attention from scholars and critics, no book has focused exclusively on Jewishness in his work, particularly that of the late 1990s and beyond. In this anthology, a distinguished group of contributors—whose work is richly contextualized in the...
A Poetics of Trauma
The Work of Dahlia Ravikovitch
Language: English
Release Date: December 8, 2012
The work of the renowned Israeli poet, translator, peace activist, and 1998 Israel Prize laureate Dahlia Ravikovitch (1936–2005) portrays the emotional structure of a traumatized and victimized female character. Ilana Szobel’s book, the first full-length study of Ravikovitch in English, offers...
by Tirsah Levie Bernfeld, Hannah Davidson, Cristina Galasso
Language: English
Release Date: December 14, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: December 14, 2010
This collection of essays examines an important and under-studied topic in early modern Jewish social history”—the family life of Sephardi Jewish families in the Ottoman Empire as well as in communities in Western Europe. At the height of its power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the...
Jewish Legal Theories
Writings on State, Religion, and Morality
Language: English
Release Date: January 2, 2018
Contemporary arguments about Jewish law uniquely reflect both the story of Jewish modernity and a crucial premise of modern conceptions of law generally: the claim of autonomy for the intellectual subject and practical sphere of the law. Jewish Legal Theories collects representative modern Jewish...
Inside the Antisemitic Mind
The Language of Jew-Hatred in Contemporary Germany
Language: English
Release Date: January 3, 2017
Antisemitism never disappeared in Europe. In fact, there is substantial evidence that it is again on the rise, manifest in violent acts against Jews in some quarters, but more commonly noticeable in everyday discourse in mainstream European society. This innovative empirical study examines written...
The Besht
Magician, Mystic, and Leader
Language: English
Release Date: February 14, 2012
Founded in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century, the Hasidic movement and its religious thinking have dramatically transformed modern Judaism. The figure of the Ba’al Shem Tov (known in acronym form as the BeSHT)—the purported founder of the Hasidic movement—has fascinated scholars, Jewish...
Self as Nation
Contemporary Hebrew Autobiography
Language: English
Release Date: August 2, 2016
Theorists of autobiography tend to emphasize the centrality of the individual against the community. By contrast, in her reading of Hebrew autobiography, Tamar Hess identifies the textual presence and function of the collective and its interplay with the Israeli self. What characterizes the ten writers...
The Days Between
Blessings, Poems, and Directions of the Heart for the Jewish High Holiday Season
Language: English
Release Date: August 5, 2014
The Jewish High Holidays—the ten days beginning with the New Year Festival of Rosh Hashanah and culminating with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement—constitute the most sacred period of the Jewish year. During this season, religious as well as nonaffiliated Jews attend synagogue services in unparalleled...
Our Musicals, Ourselves
A Social History of the American Musical Theatre
Language: English
Release Date: April 17, 2011
Our Musicals, Ourselves is the first full-scale social history of the American musical theater from the imported Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas of the late nineteenth century to such recent musicals as The Producers and Urinetown. While many aficionados of the Broadway musical associate it with...
Aesthetic Theology and Its Enemies
Judaism in Christian Painting, Poetry, and Politics
Language: English
Release Date: June 22, 2015
Through most of Western European history, Jews have been a numerically tiny or entirely absent minority, but across that history Europeans have nonetheless worried a great deal about Judaism. Why should that be so? This short but powerfully argued book suggests that Christian anxieties about their...
by Ingrid D. Rowland
Language: English
Release Date: November 20, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: November 20, 2018
Focusing on the figures of Plato, Archimedes, and Caravaggio, The Divine Spark of Syracuse discloses the role that Syracuse, a Greek cultural outpost in Sicily, played in fueling creative energies. Among the topics this book explores are Plato and the allegory of the cave, and the divine spark mentioned...
by G. W. Bowersock
Language: English
Release Date: August 22, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: August 22, 2012
In this book, based on lectures delivered at the Historical Society of Israel, the famed historian G. W. Bowersock presents a searching examination of political developments in the Arabian Peninsula on the eve of the rise of Islam. Recounting the growth of Christian Ethiopia and the conflict with...
The Road to September 1939
Polish Jews, Zionists, and the Yishuv on the Eve of World War II
Language: English
Release Date: January 2, 2018
In European and Holocaust historiography, it is generally believed that neither the Zionist movement nor the Yishuv, acting primarily out of self-interest, energetically attempted to help European Jews escape the Nazi threat. Drawing on the memoirs, letters, and institutional reports of Chaim Weizmann,...