In "Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam", Jacob Lassner examines the triangular relationship that during the Middle Ages defined – and continues to define today – the political and cultural interaction among the three Abrahamic faiths. Lassner l...

This engaging book offers the first in-depth analysis of the history, philosophy, and social trends that underpin modern welcoming ceremonies for newborn girls in the Jewish community. Sharon R. Siegel traces the arc of these ceremonies from their em...

"The Mahabharata" tells a story of such violence and tragedy that many people in India refuse to keep the full text in their homes, fearing that if they do, they will invite a disastrous fate upon their house. Covering everything from creation to des...

If you told a woman her sex had a shared, long-lived history with weasels, she might deck you. But those familiar with mythology know better: that the connection between women and weasels is an ancient and favorable one, based in the Greek myth of a...

In Dante's "Inferno", the lowest circle of Hell is reserved for traitors, those who betrayed their closest companions. In a wide range of literatures and mythologies such intimate aggression is a source of ultimate terror, and in "Witchcraft, Intimac...

Written by the core faculty of the Hebrew program at Brandeis University, the pilot edition of Brandeis Modern Hebrew, Intermediate to Advanced serves as a sequel to the well-known volume for beginners. It contains the functional and contextual eleme...

The postmodern view that human experience is constructed by language and culture has informed historical narratives for decades. Yet newly emerging information about the biological body now makes it possible to supplement traditional scholarly models...

During the first half of the twentieth century, supporters of the eugenics movement offered an image of a racially transformed America by curtailing the reproduction of "unfit" members of society. Through institutionalization, compulsory sterilizatio...

"A Monastery in Time" is the first book to describe the life of a Mongolian Buddhist monastery – the Mergen Monastery in Inner Mongolia – from inside its walls. From the Qing occupation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the Cultural...

Over a lifetime of studying Cuban Santeria and other religions related to Orisha worship – a practice also found among the Yoruba in West Africa – Stephan Palmie has grown progressively uneasy with the assumptions inherent in the very term Afro-Cuban...