Much has changed for Jewish women since the first edition of Four Centuries of Jewish Women's Spirituality appeared in 1992. Associations of Jewish women – academic, religious, secular – have proliferated, making the women's voices heard. In collecti...

"With simple means, without any 'title', this book should in distant times always be in your memory". An imprisoned bookbinder wrote these words in a small blank book that he had secretly crafted from pilfered materials at the Terezin (Theresienst...

When Mieke Bal reread the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife as an adult, she was struck by differences between her childhood memories of a moral tale and what she read today. In "Loving Yusuf", Bal seeks to resolve this clash between memory and tex...

Why do we read? Based on a series of lectures delivered at the Historical Society of Israel in 2005, Brian Stock presents a model for relating ascetic and aesthetic principles in Western reading practices. He begins by establishing the primacy of the...

"I was probably less than five years old when my father fired a shot at my head". From this first line, Dan Vittorio Segre's memoir moves from one startling turning point to the next. The child of aristocratic parents, Segre fled Fascist Italy and Mu...

University professor and social activist Tova Hartman, discouraged by failed attempts to make her modern Orthodox synagogue in Jerusalem more inclusive of women, together with other worshippers, set about creating their own own, Shira Hadasha ("a new...

The Moscow Yiddish Theater (later called GOSET) was born in 1919 and almost immediately became one of the most remarkable avant-garde theaters in Europe. It flourished in the 1920s but under Bolshevik pressure soon lost much of the originality that h...

Modernity gave rise to a Jewish consciousness that has increasingly distanced itself from the sacred in favor of worldliness and secularity".Judaism Musical and Unmusical" traces the formulation of this secular Jewishness from its Enlightenment roots...