Modernism valorizes the marginal, the exile, the "other"--yet we tend to use writing from the most commonly read European languages (English, French, German) as examples of this marginality. Chana Kronfeld counters these dominant models of marginality by looking instead at modernist poetry written in two decentered languages, Hebrew and Yiddish. What results is a bold new model of literary dynamics, one less tied to canonical norms, less limited geographically, and less in danger of universalizing the experience of minority writers.

Kronfeld examines the interpenetrations of modernist...

This book goes farther than any previous work in uncovering the historical Israel ben Eliezer--known as the Ba'al Shem Tov, or the Besht--the eighteenth-century Polish-Jewish mystic who profoundly influenced the shape of modern Judaism. As the progenitor of Hasidism, the Ba'al Shem Tov is one of the key figures in Jewish history; to understand him is to understand an essential element of modern Jewish life and religion.

Because evidence about his life is scanty and equivocal, the Besht has long eluded historians and biographers. Much of what is believed about him is based on stories...

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's sweeping study of modern Jewish writing is in many ways a long meditation on the thematics of geography in Jewish culture, what she calls the "poetics of exile and return."

Until the late nineteenth century, Jews were identified in their own religious and poetic imagination as wanderers and exiles, their sacred center-Jerusalem, Zion-fatefully out of reach. Opening the book with "Jewish Journeys," Ezrahi begins by examining the work of medieval Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi to chart a journey whose end was envisioned as the sublime realignment of the people with their...

Miriam Peskowitz offers a dramatic revision to our understanding of early rabbinic Judaism. Using a wide range of sources--archaeology, legal texts, grave goods, technology, art, and writings in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin--she challenges traditional assumptions regarding Judaism's historical development.

Following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by Roman armies in 70 C.E., new incarnations of Judaism emerged. Of these, rabbinic Judaism was the most successful, becoming the classical form of the religion. Through ancient stories involving Jewish spinners and weavers,...

In a book that will both enlighten and provoke, Daniel Boyarin offers an alternative to the prevailing Euroamerican warrior/patriarch model of masculinity and recovers the Jewish ideal of the gentle, receptive male. The Western notion of the aggressive, sexually dominant male and the passive female reaches back through Freud to Roman times, but as Boyarin makes clear, such gender roles are not universal. Analyzing ancient and modern texts, he reveals early rabbis--studious, family-oriented--as exemplars of manhood and the prime objects of female desire in traditional Jewish society....

The Jews (Falasha) of northwestern Ethiopia are a unique example of a Jewish group living within an ancient, non-Western, predominantly Christian society. Hagar Salamon presents the first in-depth study of this group, called the "Hyena people" by their non-Jewish neighbors. Based on more than 100 interviews with Ethiopian immigrants now living in Israel, Salamon's book explores the Ethiopia within as seen through the lens of individual memories and expressed through ongoing dialogues. It is an ethnography of the fantasies and fears that divide groups and, in particular, Jews and non-Jews....

This book examines how the social and cultural paradigms of contemporary Israel are articulated through the body. To construct a panoramic view of how the Israeli body is chosen, regulated, cared for, and ultimately made perfect, the author draws upon some twenty years of ethnographic research in Israel in a range of subjects. These include premarital and prenatal screening, the regulation of the body and its imagery among appearance-impaired children and their families, the screening and sanctifying of the body as part of the bereavement and commemoration of fallen soldiers, and the...

Independence Park, Tel Aviv, is the best-known meeting place for gay men in Israel; Independence Park, Jerusalem, is perhaps the second-best-known; and the hope for independence is the dominant theme of this wide-ranging collection of personal narratives told in the voices of twelve gay men representing a cross-section of contemporary Israeli society. The speakers are Jew and Arab, ranging in age from 22 to 72. They include students and teachers, a waiter, a prostitute, a journalist, and a janitor. Some are married to women, some are "married" to men, some are single; their families come from...