Founded in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century, the Hasidic movement and its religious thinking have dramatically transformed modern Judaism. The figure of the Ba'al Shem Tov (known in acronym form as the BeSHT) – the purported founder of the Ha...

By the end of the twentieth century, a new generation of leaders had begun to assume positions of influence within established organizations. They quickly launched a slew of new initiatives directed at their age peers. Born during the last quarter of...

In this sharply argued volume, Orit Rozin reveals the flaws in the conventional account of Israeli society in the 1950s, which portrayed the Israeli public as committed to a collectivist ideology. In fact, major sectors of Israeli society espoused in...

As the site of several miracles in the Jewish and Christian traditions, the Jordan is one of the world's holiest rivers. It is also the major political and symbolic border contested by Israelis and Palestinians. Combining biblical and folkloric studi...

Since 1921, the Zionist movement, the Hashemites, and Palestinian nationalists have been vying for regional control. In this book, Asher Susser analyzes the evolution of the one- and two-state options and explores why a two-state solution has failed...

Many people think of Jews as victims of a particular sort of racism, not as active participants in the development of racial thinking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet many Jews did take up racial discourse and used it to analyze Judaism...

The nation's thirty-first state emerged early as one of its most diverse as people immigrated to the west. California's indigenous tribes were forced off their lands first by Spanish settlers, then by the arrival of gold miners from every corner of t...

In this illuminating book, Elana Maryles Sztokman investigates a fascinating new sociological phenomenon: Orthodox Jewish men who connect themselves to egalitarian or quasi-egalitarian religious enterprises. She examines the men who have enabled thes...

Before they were both internationally renowned philosophers, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig were young German soldiers fighting in World War I corresponding by letter and forming the foundation of their deep intellectual friendship. Col...

This innovative study examines the responses of early-twentieth-century pioneers to "the Land" of Palestine. Early Zionist historiography portrayed these young settlers as heroic; later, more critical studies by the "new" historians and sociologists...