The Tribe Of Dina

In richly diverse essays, stories, memoirs, poems, and interviews, the contributors to this collection affirm the depth of Jewish women's participation in Jewish life and give strength to feminist struggles in the Jewish community.

An American historians search for her mythical birthplace leads her to an isolated mountaintop utopia and the passionate world of a medieval Jewess. When Professor Henry Henner Marcus receives an urgent plea for help from his cousin and fellow historian Nina Aschauer, he abruptly leaves Chicago and travels to the South of France where Nina has suddenly rematerialized after having disappeared without a trace five years before. While on sabbatical in Toulouse, France, Nina is compelled to search for the mythical place in the Pyrenean Mountains where she was born during her parents flight from Nazi persecution. All she knows is the name, but no Valladine can be found on any map. Her inquiries lead her to an encounter with Alphonse de Sola, a rough-hewn shepherd who offers to take her to the place. What she finds is love, a medieval outpost arrested in time, and a mysterious codex written in Hebrew letters that arouses her scholarly interest. As Henner, Nina, and her best friend, Etoile Assous, conspire to decipher the writing, they enter the passionate world of a fourteenth-century Jewess, who calls herself Dina, whose family was forced to flee France following the expulsion of the Jews from the kingdom in 1306, while she herself had fallen victim to the sexual intrigues of a fiendish priest.

She takes into account plays that reveal their conventional, formulaic views of the Christian feminine ideal as well as those whose variety and flexibility present women subverting their expected roles. By identifying moments of resistance and subversion in the texts the author argues against excessively monolithic interpretations of such discourses of containment.

‘Intensely moving . . . feminist . . . a riveting tale of love’ - Observer Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her fate is merely hinted at in a brief and violent detour within the verses of the Book of Genesis that recount the life of Jacob and his infamous dozen sons. Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent is an extraordinary and engrossing tale of ancient womanhood and family honour. Told in Dinah’s voice, it opens with the story of her mothers – the four wives of Jacob – each of whom embodies unique feminine traits, and concludes with Dinah’s own startling and unforgettable story of betrayal, grief and love. Deeply affecting and intimate, The Red Tent is a feminist classic which combines outstandingly rich storytelling with an original insight into women’s society in a fascinating period of early history. Such is its warmth and candour, it is guaranteed to win the hearts and minds of women across the world.

Names We Call Home is a ground-breaking collection of essays which articulate the dynamics of racial identity in contemporary society. The first volume of its kind, Names We Call Home offers autobiographical essays, poetry, and interviews to highlight the historical, social, and cultural influences that inform racial identity and make possible resistance to myriad forms of injustice.

Judaism, the oldest of the Abrahamic religions, is one of the pillars of modern civilization. A collective of internationally renowned experts cooperated in a singular academic enterprise to portray Judaism from its transformation as a Temple cult to its broad contemporary varieties. In three volumes the long-running book series "Die Religionen der Menschheit" (Religions of Humanity) presents for the first time a complete and compelling view on Jewish life now and then - a fascinating portrait of the Jewish people with its ability to adapt itself to most different cultural settings, always maintaining its strong and unique identity. Volume III completes this ambitious project with profound chapters on Modern Jewish Culture, Halakhah (Jewish Law), Jewish Languages, Jewish Philosophy, Modern Jewish Literature, Feminism and Gender, and on Judaism and inter-faith relations.

Examines how Jewish women have used poetry to challenge their historical limitations while rewriting their potential futures. Jewish women have had a fraught relationship with history, struggling for inclusion while resisting their limited role as (re)producers of the future. In Queer Expectations, Zohar Weiman-Kelman shows how Jewish women writers turned to poetry to write new histories, developing “queer expectancy” as a conceptual tool for understanding how literary texts can both invoke and resist what came before. Bringing together Jewish women’s poetry from the late nineteenth century, the interwar period, and the 1970s and 1980s, Weiman-Kelman takes readers on a boundary-crossing journey through works in English, Yiddish, and Hebrew, setting up encounters between writers of different generations, locations, and languages. Queer Expectationshighlights genealogical lines of continuity drawn by authors as diverse as Emma Lazarus, Kadya Molodowsky, Leah Goldberg, Anna Margolin, Irena Klepfisz, and Adrienne Rich. These poets push back against heteronormative imperatives of biological reproduction and inheritance, opting instead for connections that twist traditional models of gender and history. Looking backward in queer ways enables new histories to emerge, intervenes in a troubled present, and gives hope for unexpected futures. “Queer Expectations is one of the most original books of literary analysis, historiography, biography, and queer theory I have ever read. Its originality and its methodology turn traditional ways of thinking about literary analysis, questions of influence, and what queer can mean upside down. This is a truly brilliant book.” — Evelyn Torton Beck, editor of Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, Revised and Updated Edition