Sarah Schenirer is one of the unsung heroes of twentieth-century Orthodox Judaism. The Bais Yaakov schools she founded in interwar Poland had an unparalleled impact on a traditional Jewish society threatened by assimilation and modernity, educating a generation of girls to take an active part in their community. The movement grew at an astonishing pace, expanding to include high schools, teacher seminaries, summer programmes, vocational schools, and youth movements, in Poland and beyond; it continues to flourish throughout the Jewish diaspora. Naomi Seidman explores the movement through the tensions that characterized it, capturing its complexity as a revolution in the name of tradition. She presents the context which led to its founding, examining the impact of socialism, feminism, Zionism, and Polish electoral politics on the process, and recounts its history, from its foundation in interwar Kraków to its near-destruction in the Holocaust, and its role in the reconstruction of Orthodoxy in subsequent decades. A vivid portrait of Schenirer shines through. The book includes selections from her writings published in English for the first time. Her pioneering, determined character remains the subject of debate in a culture that still regards innovation, female initiative, and women’s Torah study with suspicion.

Sarah Schenirer is one of the unsung heroes of twentieth-century Orthodox Judaism. The Bais Yaakov schools she founded in interwar Poland had an unparalleled impact on a traditional Jewish society threatened by assimilation and modernity, educating a generation of girls to take an active part in their community. The movement grew at an astonishing pace, expanding to include high schools, teacher seminaries, summer programmes, vocational schools, and youth movements, in Poland and beyond; it continues to flourish throughout the Jewish diaspora. Naomi Seidman explores the movement through the tensions that characterized it, capturing its complexity as a revolution in the name of tradition. She presents the context which led to its founding, examining the impact of socialism, feminism, Zionism, and Polish electoral politics on the process, and recounts its history, from its foundation in interwar Kraków to its near-destruction in the Holocaust, and its role in the reconstruction of Orthodoxy in subsequent decades. A vivid portrait of Schenirer shines through. The book includes selections from her writings published in English for the first time. Her pioneering, determined character remains the subject of debate in a culture that still regards innovation, female initiative, and women’s Torah study with suspicion.

In 1895, Lewis Carroll, the author of the iconic novel Alice in Wonderland and a renowned logician, composed a collection of mathematical problems while he was suffering from sleeplessness. However, Carroll seemed to have overlooked a crucial paradoxical error in his presentation of one of these problems, which is analysed in this book, along with questions such as: Do men have more sisters than women? Why do people find their own coincidences more surprising than those encountered by others? How are life and death expectancies treated probabilistically? Statistics, probability, coincidences, randomness and infinity are explored in this book – a collection of essays written over years of research – through a variety of everyday anecdotes and situations, aimed at students, teachers and readers interested in enriching their knowledge of these subjects.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Jewish communities of Poland and Hungary were the largest in the world and arguably the most culturally vibrant, yet they have rarely been studied comparatively. Despite the obvious similarities, historians have mainly preferred to highlight the differences and emphasize instead the central European character of Hungarian Jewry. Collectively, these essays offer a different perspective. The volume has five sections. The first compares Jewish acculturation and integration in the two countries, analysing the symbiosis of magnates and Jews in each country’s elites and the complexity of integration in multi-ethnic environments. The second considers the similarities and differences in Jewish religious life, discussing the impact of Polish hasidism in Hungary and the nature of ‘progressive’ Judaism in Poland and the Neolog movement in Hungary. Jewish popular culture is the theme of the third section, with accounts of the Jewish involvement in Polish and Hungarian cabaret and film. The fourth examines the deterioration of the situation in both countries in the interwar years, while the final section compares the implementation of the Holocaust and the way it is remembered. The volume concludes with a long interview with the doyen of historians of Hungary, István Deák.

Jewish Studies is published annually by the World Union of Jewish Studies (WUJS) and provides an outlet for the publication of articles, studies, documents and various other contents in Jewish studies. The journal publishes articles in Hebrew and in English, which undergo a review process. It focuses on studies of a methodological-programmatic nature and reviews various areas of Jewish studies. The journal was first published in 1971 under the title 'Newsletter of the World Union of Jewish Studies'. Since 1996 it is published in its current form as Jewish Studies - Journal of the World Union of Jewish Studies. In addition to articles, the journal features a section for recent WUJS news and publications, as well as reviews of new books published in the various fields of Jewish studies. Articles in this volume: ENGLISH SECTION World Union News ABSTRACTS HEBREW SECTION Essays Resulting from the Session “The Research Enterprise of the Late Prof. Ephraim Elimelech Urbach on the One Hundredth Anniversary of his Birth” at the Sixteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies (2013) Moshe David Herr E. E. Urbach: Opening Remarks Avraham Grossman E. E. Urbach’s Studies of Jewish Medieval Literature and Culture Jacob Elbaum E.E. Urbach: Scholar of Aggadah, Midrash and Rabbinic Thought Menahem Kister The Concepts and Beliefs of the Sages: Jewish and Christian Texts and Corpora—Constructions and Contexts: Reflections upon Urbach’s Oeuvre Moshe David Herr E. E. Urbach’s Work on the History of Halakhah, Jewish History, and Jewish Studies in General Moshe David Herr E. E. Urbach: Concluding Remarks Rivka Raviv On the Formation of The Image of Daniel in the Babylonian Talmud Tamar Kadari “Nights Have Come”: Rabbinic Exegesis on the Destruction and Subjugation by Foreign Kingdoms Eli Gurfinkel “Rabbi David Messer Leon and his Scathing Attack Upon Rabbi Isaac Abarbanel Ofer Elior Religion and Science among the Karaites of Istanbul, according to Keter kehunnah by Joseph Beghi Book Review Ruth Lamdan Review of: Abraham David, A Jewish Mediterranean Society in the Late Middle Ages, Jerusalem and New York, 2016 Abraham David Review of: Shmuel Glick, Seride Teshuvot of the Ottoman Empire Sages from the Cairo Genizah in the E. N. Adler Collection of the JTS Library, Vols.1-2, New York, Jerusalem and Ramat Gan, 2016 New Books and Periodicals in Jewish Studies Manuscripts and Annotated Critical Editions Journals Anthologies, Jubilee and Memorial Book Monographs

Jerusalem of People and Places is intended for students at the beginning and intermediate levels of Hebrew study. It is aimed to serve as a complementary and enriching textbook for students interested in reading additional texts of different types than the ones studied in class. The book contains 45 texts, 15 for each level - beginners, advanced beginners and intermediate. Each text is followed by questions and answers for independent work. We chose texts with varied content: biographies, personal memories, historical events, phenomena related to people or nature, places and organizations. Though many of the texts may be related to Judaism and Israel, a considerable number deal with more general multicultural subjects. The word “Jerusalem” appears in each article, whether as the main subject or just as a passing reference, for the simple reason that we were born in Jerusalem, raised in Jerusalem, and love Jerusalem more than any other city in the world. The audio sequences accompanying this book can be purchased separately.

How Jews use media to connect with one another has profound consequences for Jewish identity, community, and culture. This volume explores how the use of media can both create communities and divide them because of how different media shape actions and project anxieties, conflicts, and emotions. Taken together, the essays presented here consider how Jewish use of media at home and in the street, as well as in the synagogue and in school, affects the individual’s sense of ethnic and religious affiliation. They include closely observed case studies, in various national contexts, of the role of popular film, television, records, the Internet, and smartphones, as well as the role of print media, now and historically. They raise fascinating questions about how Jews and Jewish institutions harness, tolerate, or resist media to create their sense of social belonging as Jews within the wider society.

Purchase other products in this kit: Textbook and Workbook for Arabic Speakers / Shuvi: An Audio Program / Audio Portions / Online P resentation / Teacher's Guide The First and Foremost set is designed for students of the Hebrew language at the beginners level. Through this program, students will acquire the ability to read and write, converse in basic Hebrew and identify verbs in different tenses. This book reflects the varied aspects of the Israeli culture and aspires to create a dialogue between the student and the many faces of Israeli culture, enabling a multicultural dialogue. It touches upon subjects that relate to the individual, society, and community.

The present-day traces of the Jewish past in Poland are complex. Jewish life lay in ruins after the Holocaust. Much evidence of ruin remains, but there are also widespread traces that bear witness to the elaborate Jewish culture that once flourished there, even in villages and small towns. One also sees places where Jews were murdered by the Germans in the war: not only in death camps and ghettos, but also in fields, forests, rivers, and cemeteries. After the war forty years of communism suppressed even the memory of the destroyed Jewish heritage. Today, by contrast, the historic Jewish culture of Poland is increasingly being memorialized, by local Poles as well as by foreign Jews. Synagogues and cemeteries are being renovated, monuments and museums are being set up. There are festivals of Jewish culture, hasidic pilgrims, and Jewish tourists; and local people who rescued Jews during the war are being honoured. In rediscovering the traces of memory one also finds clear signs of a local Jewish revival. This extensively revised second edition includes forty-five new photographs and updated explanatory texts. Together they suggest how to make sense of the past and discover its relevance for the present. This innovative, multi-layered book will appeal to everyone concerned with questions of history, memory, and identity.

Though the existence of Jewish regional cultures is widely known, the origins of the most prominent groups, Ashkenaz and Sepharad, are poorly understood, and the rich variety of other regional Jewish identities is often overlooked. Yet all these subcultures emerged in the Middle Ages. Scholars contributing to the present study were invited to consider how such regional identities were fashioned, propagated, reinforced, contested, and reshaped—and to reflect on the developments, events, or encounters that made these identities manifest. They were asked to identify how subcultural identities proved to be useful, and the circumstances in which they were deployed. The resulting volume spans the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, and explores Jewish cultural developments in western Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and Asia Minor. In its own way, each contribution considers factors—demographic, geographical, historical, economic, political, institutional, legal, intellectual, theological, cultural, and even biological—that led medieval Jews to conceive of themselves, or to be perceived by others, as bearers of a discrete Jewish regional identity. Notwithstanding the singularity of each essay, they collectively attest to the inherent dynamism of Jewish regional identities.

Hasidism, a movement of religious awakening and social reform, originated in the mid-eighteenth century. After two and a half centuries of crisis, upheaval, and renewal, it remains a vibrant way of life and a compelling aspect of Jewish experience. This book explores the profound intellectual and religious issues that the hasidic masters raised in their Torah commentary, and brings to the fore the living qualities of their sermons ( derashot ). Ora Wiskind-Elper addresses a spectrum of topics: creation, revelation, and redemption; hermeneutics, epistemology, psychology, Romanticism, poetry and poetics, art history, Hebrew fiction, cultural history, and tropes of Jewish suffering and hope. Fully engaged in the texts and their spirituality, she brings them to bear on postmodernist challenges to traditional spiritual and religious sensibilities. This is a comprehensive study, unique in pedagogy, clarity, and originality. It uses the full range of critical scholarship on hasidism as a social and ideological movement. At the same time, it maintains a strong focus on hasidic Torah commentary as a conveyor of theology and value. Each of its chapters presents a fundamentally new approach. Wiskind-Elper’s translations are in themselves an innovative moment in the tradition and spiritual history of the passages she offers.

The eighteen studies presented here originated in a symposium held at Yale in 2014, attended by scholars from Europe, Israel, and North America. The papers approach the subject of Mishnaic Hebrew from many different angles and directions, including grammar, from morphology to syntax to pragmatics; the relationship between the literary dialect and epigraphic evidence; manuscripts; questions of language contact, lexicography, social history, and medieval traditions; and the problem of translating Mishnaic Hebrew into modern languages. The contributors to this volume are among the leading scholars in the field and the collection represents both the current state of research and the cutting edge of future work. This volume includes the following essays: Chanan Ariel | Deviations from Mishnaic Hebrew Moshe Bar-Asher | Problems in the Description of the Morphology of Mishnaic Hebrew Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal | Towards a Reconsideration of the Tense-Aspect-Mood System of Tannaitic Hebrew Gabriel Birnbaum | Phonological and Morphological Studies in MS Antonin 262 (Mishnah Seder Teharoth) Steven E. Fassberg | The Language of the Bet Amar Papyrus in Light of Other Judean Desert Documents Steven D. Fraade | The Innovation of Nominalized Verbs in Mishnaic Hebrew as Marking an Innovation of Concept Aaron Koller | The Social and Geographic Origins of Mishnaic Hebrew Aharon Maman | Rabbinic Hebrew in the Eyes of Medieval Hebrew Philologists Emmanuel Mastey | Cases of Semantic Variation in Mishnaic Hebrew: The Verbs hillek and qaras Michael Ryzhik | The Language of the Mishnah from the Late Manuscripts to the Printed Editions Bernard Septimus | The Face of Shame: Between Palestinian Blushing and Babylonian Blanching Rivka Shemesh-Raiskin | Towards a Description of Halakhic Give-and-Take Conversations in the Mishnah Nurit ShovalDudai | Identical Lemmata of Greek and Latin Loanwords in the Historical Dictionary of the Hebrew Language: Classes and Criteria Ruth Stern | The Noun haluq and Its Variant Forms in Rabbinic Hebrew Daniel Stokl Ben Ezra | The Mishnah into French: Translation Issues Ofra Tirosh-Becker | The Relative Pronoun Se- Rabbinic Hebrew as Reflected in Karaite Sources Doron Ya'akov | The Relation between Maimonides and the Yemenite Tradition in Mishnaic Hebrew Alexey (Eliyahu) Yuditsky | qosin and qorpayot To view the other volumes please press here