Arguably, no historical thinker has had as varied and fractious a reception within modern Judaism as Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632-1677), the seventeenth-century philosopher, pioneering biblical critic, and Jewish heretic from Amsterdam. Revered in...

The Strashun Library was among the most important Jewish public institutions in Vilna, and indeed in Eastern Europe, prior to its destruction during World War II. Mattityahu Strashun, descended from a long and distinguished line of rabbis, bequeathed...

He was amazing. "A little man with a Napoleonic penchant for the colossal and magnificent, Billy Rose is the country's No. 1 purveyor of mass entertainment", Life magazine announced in 1936. The Times reported that with 1,400 people on his payroll, R...

In the annals of American Jewish history, synagogue financial records have been largely overlooked. But as Daniel Judson shows in his examination of synagogue ledgers from 1728 to the present, these records provide an array of new insights into the d...

Marc Dollinger charts the transformation of American Jewish political culture from the Cold War liberal consensus of the early postwar years to the rise and influence of Black Power–inspired ethnic nationalism. He shows how, in a period best known fo...

"Modern Jewish thought" is often defined as a German affair, with interventions from Eastern European, American, and Israeli philosophers. The story of France's development of its own schools of thought has not been substantially treated outside the...

Contemporary arguments about Jewish law uniquely reflect both the story of Jewish modernity and a crucial premise of modern conceptions of law generally: the claim of autonomy for the intellectual subject and practical sphere of the law. Jewish Legal...

German-born Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem (1897-1982), the preeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, delved into the historical analysis of kabbalistic literature from late antiquity to the twentieth century. His writings traverse Jewish historiography, Zi...

This absorbing biography chronicles the life and work of one of the most important entertainers of the twentieth century. Eddie Cantor (1892-1964) starred in theater, film, radio, and television. His immense popularity across a variety of media, his...

Nili Gold, who was born in Haifa to German-speaking parents in 1948, the first year of Israeli statehood, here offers a remarkable homage to her native city during its heyday as an international port and cultural center. Spanning the 1920s and '30s,...