In Between Feminism and Orthodox Judaism, Yael Israel-Cohen offers an analysis of the activism and identity of women considered at the forefront of the feminist challenge to Orthodoxy. Through a look at women's battle over synagogue ritual and the ordination of women rabbis, an intricate and complex picture of identity, resistance, and religious change is revealed. Some of the central questions that Yael Israel-Cohen explores are: How do modern Orthodox women strategize to implement feminist changes? How do they deal with what at least on the surface seem to be conflicting allegiances?...

Israel Celebrates is about the intersection where Israeli inventiveness and Jewish tradition meet: the holidays. It employs the anthropological history of four Jewish holidays as celebrated in Israel in order to track the naturalization of Jewish rituals, myths, and symbols in Israeli culture throughout "the long twentieth century" of Zionism and on to the present, and to demonstrate how a new strand of Judaism developed in Israel from the grassroots. But could this grassroots Israeli culture develop into a shared symbolic space for both Jews and Arabs? By probing the political...

The return of Jews to their ancestral land can be seen as an act of imagination. A new country, citizenship, language, and institutions needed to be imagined in order to be created. The arts, too, have contributed to this act of envisioning and shaping the Jewish state. By examining artistic representations of Israel, Imagined Israel(s): Representations of the Jewish State in the Arts explores the ways in which the Israel imagined abroad and the one conjured within the country intersect, offering a space for the co-existence of sociopolitical, cultural, and ideological differences and...