The Am Ha-Aretz: The Ancient Hebrew Parliament; A Chapter in the Constitutional History of Ancient Israel [1910] By Mayer Sulzberger

The concern for purity was the cornerstone of the religious culture of ancient Judaism. Purity and Identity in Ancient Judaism explores how this concern shaped the worldview of Jews during the Second Temple period as well as their daily practices and social relations. It examines how different groups offered competing visions and methods for living a life of purity, which embodied a promise for personal and cosmic salvation and at the same time determined the degree of sectarian separation. Purity and Identity in Ancient Judaism offers a comprehensive description of the world of purity among the Jews of the Second Temple period in general and within the tradition of the Pharisees in particular. Yair Furstenberg explores the language of purity that provided Jews in antiquity a powerful tool for organizing legal, social, and ideological boundaries, and its study is therefore pertinent for understanding the powers that shaped the varieties of Second Temple Judaism and their later offshoots: Early Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism. Purity and Identity in Ancient Judaism offers new methods for carefully integrating the New Testament, Qumran literature, and early rabbinic sources into a comprehensive history of purity laws from the world of the Second Temple and the Pharisees to the later rabbinic movement, allowing the reader to trace the emergence of new religious sensibilities within changing social and cultic circumstances.

A historical tour de force, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a groundbreaking account of Jewish and Israeli history. Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In this iconoclastic work, which spent nineteen weeks on the Israeli bestseller list and won the coveted Aujourd'hui Award in France, Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel's future.

In this book, Calvin Roetzel explores the social, political, religious, and intellectual environment of the New Testament writers. Roetzel maps the major features of the first-century landscape so that the student may be able to view the whole, and through the whole gain new perspective on and insight into each part. Now updated with the most current scholarship and with revisions taking into account archeological findings, this is the best available introduction to the subject. Expanded materials include discussion of the social structure of Roman society, political dimensions of Pharisaism, Hellenistic religious expression, the Jewish Diaspora, the influence of the Septuagint on the Gospel writers and Paul, and women in antiquity. Pictures are integrated into the text at relevant points, the end of each chapter contains suggestions for further reading, and there is also a current and comprehensive bibliography of topics and authors.

Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud selects key themes in animal studies - animal intelligence, morality, sexuality, suffering, danger, personhood - and explores their development in the Babylonian Talmud. Beth A. Berkowitz demonstrates that distinctive features of the Talmud - the new literary genre, the convergence of Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian cultures, the Talmud's remove from Temple-centered biblical Israel - led to unprecedented possibilities within Jewish culture for conceptualizing animals and animality. She explores their development in the Babylonian Talmud, showing how it is ripe for reading with a critical animal studies perspective. When we do, we find waiting for us a multi-layered, surprisingly self-aware discourse about animals as well as about the anthropocentrism that infuses human relationships with them. For readers of religion, Judaism, and animal studies, her book offers new perspectives on animals from the vantage point of the ancient rabbis.

Relations between Jews and non-Jews in the Hellenistic-Roman period were marked by suspicion and hate, maintain most studies of that topic. But if such conjectures are true, asks Louis Feldman, how did Jews succeed in winning so many adherents, whether full-fledged proselytes or "sympathizers" who adopted one or more Jewish practices? Systematically evaluating attitudes toward Jews from the time of Alexander the Great to the fifth century A.D., Feldman finds that Judaism elicited strongly positive and not merely unfavorable responses from the non-Jewish population. Jews were a vigorous presence in the ancient world, and Judaism was strengthened substantially by the development of the Talmud. Although Jews in the Diaspora were deeply Hellenized, those who remained in Israel were able to resist the cultural inroads of Hellenism and even to initiate intellectual counterattacks. Feldman draws on a wide variety of material, from Philo, Josephus, and other Graeco-Jewish writers through the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, the Church Councils, Church Fathers, and imperial decrees to Talmudic and Midrashic writings and inscriptions and papyri. What emerges is a rich description of a long era to which conceptions of Jewish history as uninterrupted weakness and suffering do not apply.

In this clear, comprehensive, student-friendly textbook, biblical scholar and teacher Paula Gooder describes and illustrates the range of approaches to interpreting the New Testament, as taught in universities and seminaries throughout the English-speaking world. Top scholars give a short definition of a particular criticism, and then Gooder gives a practical example to demonstrate how that criticism can be applied to a biblical text. A very broad range of methods is introduced, from traditional criticisms such as source criticism and historical criticism to more modern methods such as feminist criticism and liberation criticism. Readers will understand how different meanings and emphases can be drawn from a text depending upon the method of interpretation chosen. They will also be given the skills to start analyzing and examining texts for themselves in a meaningful and insightful way.

The controversial English-language debut of celebrated Israeli novelist Yishai Sarid is a harrowing, ironic parable of how we reckon with human horror, in which a young, present-day historian becomes consumed by the memory of the Holocaust. Written as a report to the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, our unnamed narrator recounts his own undoing. Hired as a promising young historian, he soon becomes a leading expert on Nazi methods of extermination at concentration camps in Poland during World War II and guides tours through the sites for students and visiting dignitaries. He hungrily devours every detail of life and death in the camps and takes pride in being able to recreate for his audience the excruciating last moments of the victims’ lives. The job becomes a mission, and then an obsession. Spending so much time immersed in death, his connections with the living begin to deteriorate. He resents the students lost in their iPhones, singing sentimental songs, not expressing sufficient outrage at the genocide committed by the Nazis. In fact, he even begins to detect, in the students as well as himself, a hint of admiration for the murderers—their efficiency, audacity, and determination. Force is the only way to resist force, he comes to think, and one must be prepared to kill. With the perspicuity of Kafka’s The Trial and the obsessions of Delillo’s White Noise, The Memory Monster confronts difficult questions that are all too relevant to Israel and the world today: How do we process human brutality? What makes us choose sides in conflict? And how do we honor the memory of horror without becoming consumed by it? Praise for The Memory Monster: “Award-winning Israeli novelist Sarid’s latest work is a slim but powerful novel, rendered beautifully in English by translator Greenspan…. Propelled by the narrator’s distinctive voice, the novel is an original variation on one of the most essential themes of post-Holocaust literature: While countless writers have asked the question of where, or if, humanity can be found within the profoundly inhumane, Sarid incisively shows how preoccupation and obsession with the inhumane can take a toll on one’s own humanity…. it is, if not an indictment of Holocaust memorialization, a nuanced and trenchant consideration of its layered politics. Ultimately, Sarid both refuses to apologize for Jewish rage and condemns the nefarious forms it sometimes takes. A bold, masterful exploration of the banality of evil and the nature of revenge, controversial no matter how it is read.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review “[A] record of a breakdown, an impassioned consideration of memory and its risks, and a critique of Israel’s use of the Holocaust to shape national identity…. Sarid’s unrelenting examination of how narratives of the Holocaust are shaped makes for much more than the average confessional tale.” —Publishers Weekly “Reading The Memory Monster, which is written as a report to the director of Yad Vashem, felt like both an extremely intimate experience and an eerily clinical Holocaust history lesson. Perfectly treading the fine line between these two approaches, Sarid creates a haunting exploration of collective memory and an important commentary on humanity. How do we remember the Holocaust? What tolls do we pay to carry on memory? This book hit me viscerally, emotionally, and personally. The Memory Monster is brief, but in its short account Sarid manages to lay bare the tensions between memory and morals, history and nationalism, humanity and victimhood. An absolute must-read.” —Julia DeVarti, Literati Bookstore (Ann Arbor, MI) “In Yishai Sarid’s dark, thoughtful novel The Memory Monster, a Holocaust historian struggles with the weight of his profession…. The Memory Monster is a novel that pulls no punches in its exploration of the responsibility—and the cost—of holding vigil over the past.” —Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews

In Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals, Mira Beth Wasserman undertakes a close reading of Avoda Zara, arguably the Babylonian Talmud's most scandalous tractate. According to Wasserman, Avoda Zara is where this Talmud joins the humanities in questioning what it means to be a human.