Everything about Sarah Bernhardt is fascinating, from her obscure birth to her glorious career – redefining the very nature of her art – to her amazing (and highly public) romantic life to her indomitable spirit. Well into her seventies, after the am...

What kind of literature is the Talmud? To answer this question, Daniel Boyarin looks to an unlikely source: the dialogues of Plato. In these ancient texts he finds similarities, both in their combination of various genres and topics and in their dial...

First established 150 years ago, Chicago Sinai is one of America's oldest Reform Jewish congregations. Its founders were upwardly mobile and civically committed men and women, founders and partners of banks and landmark businesses like Hart Schaffner...

Modern Jews tend to relate to the past through "history", which relies on empirical demonstration and rational thought, rather than through "memory", which relies on the non-rational architectures of mythology. By now "history" has surpassed "memory"...

The controversy over settlements in the occupied territories is a far more intractable problem for Israel than is widely perceived, Gadi Taub observes in this illuminating book. The clash over settlement is no mere policy disagreement, he maintains,...

Bringing to light a hidden chapter in the history of modern Judaism, "Shamanic Trance in Modern Kabbalah" explores the shamanic dimensions of Jewish mysticism. Jonathan Garb integrates methods and models from the social sciences, comparative religion...

The religious buildings of the Jewish community in Britain have never been explored in print. Lavishly illustrated with previously unpublished images and photographs taken specially by English Heritage, this book traces the architecture of the synago...

This collection of essays examines an important and under-studied topic in early modern Jewish social history" – the family life of Sephardi Jewish families in the Ottoman Empire as well as in communities in Western Europe. At the height of its power...

Using testimonies, Nazi documents, memoirs, and artistic representations, this volume broadens and deepens comprehension of Jewish women's experiences of rape and other forms of sexual violence during the Holocaust. The book goes beyond previous stud...

Fundamentally different from other more prominent, Jewish traditions and experiences, the Sephardic tradition has long served to bind together the various Jewish communities of the Mediterranean basin. In "The Sephardic Legacy", Henry Toledano immers...