Winner, 2010 Association for Jewish Studies Jordan Schnitzer Book Award 2011 Honorable Mention for the American Sociological Association Culture Section's Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book Since 1999 hundreds of thousands of young American Jews have visited Israel on an all-expense-paid 10-day pilgrimage-tour known as Birthright Israel. The most elaborate of the state-supported homeland tours that are cropping up all over the world, this tour seeks to foster in the American Jewish diaspora a lifelong sense of attachment to Israel based on ethnic and political solidarity. Over a half-billion dollars (and counting) has been spent cultivating this attachment, and despite 9/11 and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict the tours are still going strong. Based on over seven years of first-hand observation in modern day Israel, Shaul Kelner provides an on-the-ground look at this hotly debated and widely emulated use of tourism to forge transnational ties. We ride the bus, attend speeches with the Prime Minister, hang out in the hotel bar, and get a fresh feel for young American Jewish identity and contemporary Israel. We see how tourism's dynamism coupled with the vibrant human agency of the individual tourists inevitably complicate tour leaders' efforts to rein tourism in and bring it under control. By looking at the broader meaning of tourism, Kelner brings to light the contradictions inherent in the tours and the ways that people understandtheir relationship to place both materially and symbolically. Rich in detail, engagingly written, and sensitive to the complexities of modern travel and modern diaspora Jewishness, Tours that Bind offers a new way of thinking about tourism as a way through which people develop understandings of place, society, and self.

The remarkable story of Birthright Israel, an intensive ten-day educational program designed to connect Jewish young adults to their heritage

The modern Jew, living in a world of shattered beliefs and competing ideologies, is often confronted with questions of faith. Sacred Fragments is for those who still care enough to continue the struggle. In forthright, nontechnical language the author addresses the most difficult theological questions of our time and shows that there are still viable Jewish answers for even the greatest skeptics.

The origins of the Jewish community of Morocco are buried in history, but they date back to ancient times, and perhaps to the biblical period. The first Jews in the country migrated there from Israel. Over the centuries, their numbers were increased by converts and then by Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal. After the Muslim conquest, Morocco's Jews, as "people of the book," had dhimmi status, which entailed many restrictions but allowed them to exercise their religion freely. In the mellahs (Jewish quarters) of Morocco's cities and towns, and in the mountainous rural areas, a distinct Jewish culture developed and thrived, unquestionably traditional and Orthodox, yet unique because of the many areas in which it assimilated elements of the local culture and lifestyle, making them its own as it did so. Most of Morocco's Jews settled in Israel after 1948, and many others went to other countries. Wherever they went, their rich cultural heritage went with them, as exemplified by the Maimuna festival, just after Passover, which is now a major occasion on the Israeli calender.

Abraham Joshua Heschel was one of the most revered religious leaders of the 20th century, and God in Search of Man and its companion volume, Man Is Not Alone, two of his most important books, are classics of modern Jewish theology. God in Search of Man combines scholarship with lucidity, reverence, and compassion as Dr. Heschel discusses not man's search for God but God's for man--the notion of a Chosen People, an idea which, he writes, "signifies not a quality inherent in the people but a relationship between the people and God." It is an extraordinary description of the nature of Biblical thought, and how that thought becomes faith.

An entertaining ethnographic study of how Jewish summer camps foster Jewish sensibilities and education.

This book examines the Jewish community of Morocco in the late 18th and early 19th centuries through the life of a merchant who was the chief intermediary between the Moroccan sultans and Europe .

The book of Exodus records the pivotal events in the formation of biblical Israel—the deliverance from slavery, the leadership of Moses, the wilderness wanderings, and the giving of the Law at Mount Sinai. Bible scholar Nahum Sarna, whose widely praised Understanding Genesis has become a standard text, examines and illuminates the distinctiveness of the Exodus narrative in light of ancient Near Eastern history and contemporaneous cultures—Egyptian, Assyrian, Canaanite, and Babylonian. In a new foreword to this edition, Sarna takes up the debate over whether the exodus from Egypt really happened, clarifying the arguments on both sides and drawing us back to the uniqueness and enduring significance of biblical text.