Böcker i Jewish Culture and Contexts-serien

Adopting a comparative historical approach, J. H. Chajes uncovers a strain of Jewish belief to which scant attention has been paid. Between Worlds provides fascinating descriptions of cases of possession as well as analysis of the magical techniques deployed by rabbinic exorcists to expel the ghostly intruders.

How Yiddish changed to express and memorialize the trauma of the HolocaustThe Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanization of the Shoah, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words - Khurbn Yiddish, or "Yiddish of the Holocaust" - puzzled and intrigued the East European Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue in real time. Sensing that Khurbn Yiddish words harbored profound truths about what Jews endured during the Holocaust, some Yiddish speakers threw themselves into compiling dictionaries and glossaries to document and analyze these new words. Others incorporated Khurbn Yiddish into their poetry and prose. In Occupied Words, Hannah Pollin-Galay explores Khurbn Yiddish as a form of Holocaust memory and as a testament to the sensation of speech under genocidal conditions. Occupied Words investigates Khurbn Yiddish through the lenses of cultural history, philology, and literary interpretation. Analyzing fragments of language consciousness left behind from the camps and ghettos alongside the postwar journeys of three intellectuals-Nachman Blumental, Israel Kaplan and Elye Spivak-Pollin-Galay seeks to understand why people chose Yiddish lexicography as a means of witnessing the Holocaust. She then turns to the Khurbn Yiddish words themselves, focusing on terms related to theft, the German-Yiddish encounter and the erotic female body. Here, the author unearths new perspectives on how Jews experienced daily life under Nazi occupation, while raising questions about language and victimhood. Lastly, the book explores how writers turned ghetto and camp slang into art-highlighting the poetry and fiction of K. Tzetnik (Yehiel Di-Nur) and Chava Rosenfarb. Ultimately, Occupied Words speaks to broader debates about cultural genocide, asking how we might rethink the concept of genocide through the framework of language.

If politics is about the state, can a stateless people be political? Until recently, scholars were fiercely divided regarding whether Jews engaged in politics, displayed political wisdom, or penned works of political thought over the two millennia when there was no Jewish state. But over the past few decades, the field of Jewish political thought has begun to examine the ways in which Jewish individuals and communal organizations behaved politically even in diaspora. The King Is in the Field centers writing from leading scholars that serves as an introduction to this exciting field, providing critical resources for anyone interested in thinking about politics both within and beyond the state. From kabbalistic theology to economic philanthropy, from race and nationalism in the U.S. to Israeli legal discourse and feminist activism, this key study of Jewish political thought holds the promise to reorient the field of political thought as a whole by expanding conceptions of what counts as "political." In a world in which statelessness now applies to 100 million individuals, this volume illuminates ways to understand how diaspora Jewish political thought functioned in adopted homelands. This approach allows the book to offer questions and analysis that add depth and breadth to academic studies of Jewish politics while simultaneously offering a blueprint for future volumes interrogating political action through multiple diasporas. Contributors: Samuel Hayim Brody, Lihi Ben Shitrit, Julie E. Cooper, Arye Edrei, Meirav Jones, Rebecca Kobrin, Vincent Lloyd, Menachem Lorberbaum, Shaul Magid, Assaf Tamari, Irene Tucker, Philipp Von Wussow, Michael Walzer.

Presenting a new and accessible history of the Jews of what is now the Czech Republic, Prague and Beyond revises conventional understandings of Central Europe's Jewish past and present and fully captures the diversity and multivalence of life in the Bohemian Lands.

In Maimonides and the Merchants, Mark R. Cohen reveals the extent of pragmatic revisions to the halakha, or body of Jewish law, introduced by Moses Maimonides in his Mishneh Torah, the comprehensive legal code he compiled in the late twelfth century.

"A remarkable achievement. Bartal presents the broad contours of nineteenth-century East European Jewish history even as he reworks them into a nontraditional narrative."-David Engel, New York University

In a polemic against the unexamined foundations and stagnant state of the field, Benjamin Schreier critically analyzes a series of professionally powerful cliches about Jewish American literary history and how they came into being on the way to contesting the foundational ethnological presuppositions of Jewish Studies.

Adopting a comparative approach that explores Jewish interactions with Muslim and Christian learning, Mordechai Z. Cohen sheds new light on the key turns in the vibrant medieval tradition of Jewish Bible interpretation, which yielded a conception of peshat exegesis that remains a gold standard in Jewish hermeneutics to this day.

Based on extensive archival research, this book explores the history of Frankism, a Jewish religious movement that began in Poland and spread into the Habsburg Empire and the German lands in the later eighteenth century.

This Noble House examines the importance of biblical ancestry-especially the claim of descent from King David-for Jews living in the medieval Islamic world.

Next Year in Marienbad draws an engaging portrait of Jewish presence and cultural production in the spa towns of Carlsbad, Marienbad, and Franzensbad, from the last decades of the nineteenth century through the late 1930s.

In The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament, Shaul Magid presents the first-ever English translation of Rabbi Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik's Qol Qore, a rabbinic commentary on the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.

Viewing Jewish history from the perspective of conversion across a broad chronological and conceptual frame, Bastards and Believers highlights how the concepts of the convert and of conversion have histories of their own and speaks to the possibility, or impossibility, of changing one's life.