Jewish Books And Their Readers

Jewish Books and their Readers asks what constituted a ‘Jewish’ book in early modern Europe: how it was presented, disseminated, and understood within Jewish and Christian environments, and what effect this had on views of Jews and their intellectual heritage.

Daniel B. Syme, a rabbi and author, and Cindy Frenkel Kanter, an author and editor, selected books on Jewish topics accessible to the average reader by asking a host of Jewish readers to submit their personal "top 10" lists. Out of these lists, Syme and Kanter have chosen 100 fiction and nonfiction works on every subject of Jewish interest, from popular novels and humor to history, philosophy, and poetry. They provide a summary of the book's contents, its relevance at the time of publication, and its contemporary significance. This book is the basis for building a Jewish library which you can use, enjoy, and share.

Provides an annotated list of children's books, prayer books, Jewish literature, and books about Israel, zionism, the arts, and Jewish history, life, and traditions

Customs, mysticism, Hebrew and Yiddish literature, and Jewish feminism.

From Elie Wiesel's "Night" to Chaim Potok's "The Chosen" to Phillip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" to George Burns' "How to Live to Be 101", the 100 titles profiled in this book comprise the basis for building a Jewish library to be used, enjoyed, and shared. Each entry includes a summary of the book's contents, its relevance at the time of publication, and its contemporary significance.

This collection of eight new essays investigates ways in which significant kinds of 18th-century writings were designed and received by different audiences. Rivers explores the answers to certain crucial questions about the contemporary use of books. This new edition contains the results of important new research by well known specialists in the field of book and publishing history over the last two decades.

In this extraordinary volume, Iris Parush opens up the hitherto unexamined world of literate Jewish women, their reading habits, and their role in the cultural modernization of Eastern European Jewish society in the nineteenth century. Parush makes a paradoxical claim: she argues that because Jewish women were marginalized and neglected by rabbinical authorities who regarded men as the bearers of religious learning, they were free to read secular literature in German, Yiddish, Polish, and Russian. As a result of their exposure to a wealth of literature, these reading women became significant conduits for Haskalah (Enlightenment) ideas and ideals within the Jewish community. This deceptively simple thesis dramatically challenges and revamps both scholarly and popular notions of Jewish life and learning in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. While scholars of European women's history have been transforming and complicating ideas about the historical roles of middle-class women for some time, Parush is among the first scholars to work exclusively in Jewish territory. The book will be a very welcome introduction to many facets of modern Jewish cultural historyÑparticularly the role of womenÑwhich have too long been ignored.

The book sheds light on various chapters in the long history of Protestant-Jewish relations, from the Reformation to the present. Going beyond questions of antisemitism and religious animosity, it aims to disentangle some of the intricate perceptions, interpretations, and emotions that have characterized contacts between Protestantism and Judaism, and between Jews and Protestants. While some papers in the book address Luther’s antisemitism and the NS-Zeit, most papers broaden the scope of the investigation: Protestant-Jewish theological encounters shaped not only antisemitism but also the Jewish Reform movement and Protestant philosemitic post-Holocaust theology; interactions between Jews and Protestants took place not only in the German lands but also in the wider Protestant universe; theology was crucial for the articulation of attitudes toward Jews, but music and philosophy were additional spheres of creativity that enabled the process of thinking through the relations between Judaism and Protestantism. By bringing together various contributions on these and other aspects, the book opens up directions for future research on this intricate topic, which bears both historical significance and evident relevance to our own time.