"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 afi...

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, born in 1903 and scion of a preeminent Lithuanian Orthodox family, was one of the most towering intellectual figures of American Orthodoxy in the twentieth century. After receiving rabbinic ordination and completing his...

According to Jewish law, the ritual practice of circumcising male infants signals the male child's entry into the covenant his forefather Abraham made with God. Circumcision, now a common medical procedure for male infants in the United States, has c...

For some, Richard Wagner is infamous as the favorite composer of Hitler, who seems to have admired Wagner as an early exponent of his own racist ideology and worldview. Impressed by this assumption victims of Hitler have also associated Wagner and hi...

Eleven essays on the life and thought of the Jewish philosopher and theologian Franz Rosenzweig.

Told as a series of reflections, this study traces links between cultures as diverse as pre-Vedic India and late 19th-century France. An array of unrelated artists are all in fact linked by the Kabbalah and the correlation between art and this mystic...

The Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 plunged the world into its second global conflict. The Third Reich's attack, mounted without consulting its Italian ally, had other reverberations as well. Chief among them was Mussolini's decision to conduct a "pa...

While most gender-based analyses of rabbinic Judaism concentrate on the status of women in the halakhah (the rabbinic legal tradition), Judith R. Baskin turns her attention to the construction of women in the aggadic midrash, a collection of expansio...

This is a fascinating journey into the world of women in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community of Jerusalem toward the end of Ottoman rule in the Holy Land. Until now, the story of life in the Land of Israel in this period has been told exclusively fro...

It is a fact that the very long-lived Roman Republic has consistently played a surprisingly slight role in political theory and discussions about the nature of democracy, forms of government, and other matters, particularly when compared to the enorm...