There is a general understanding within religious and academic circles that the incarnate Christ of Christian belief lived and died a faithful Jew. This volume addresses Jesus in the context of Judaism. By emphasizing his Jewishness, the authors challenge today’s Jews to reclaim the Nazarene as a proto-rebel rabbi and invite Christians to discover or rediscover the Church’s Jewish heritage. The essays in this volume cover historical, literary, liturgical, philosophical, religious, theological, and contemporary issues related to the Jewish Jesus. Several of them were originally presented at a three-day symposium on “Jesus in the Context of Judaism and the Challenge to the Church,” hosted by the Samuel Rosenthal Center for Judaic Studies at Case Western Reserve University in 2009. In the context of pluralism, in the temper of growing interreligious dialogue, and in the spirit of reconciliation, encountering Jesus as living history for Christians and Jews is both necessary and proper. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of the New Testament and Early Church who are seeking new ways of understanding Jesus in his religious and cultural milieu, as well Jewish and Christian theologians and thinkers who are concerned with contemporary Jewish and Christian relationships.

Can one love destroy the world? The evil Djinn has been banished, but Marielle’s supposedly happy days are still filled with fear. She feigns a settled appearance but is continually on edge because of Akeelah’s threats of painful revenge. When Akeelah does reappear, Marielle’s notions of the creature’s cruelty are surpassed. The Djinn is worse than Marielle ever imagined. Akeelah is crazed, ready to cause deadly chaos, and willing to do whatever it takes to unveil the secrets which will give her power over human souls. During her quest, Akeelah captures Faris, Marielle’s one and only love. They are torn asunder, leaving Marielle on her knees, broken-hearted. Without him, she is not whole. Anger brews slowly within her. The situation is personal now, and she’s not about to sit idle and let her grief win. She will do whatever it takes to get her one love back—even if it means putting the entire human race at risk.

This insightful volume represents the “hands-on” experience in the world of academia of two Jewish scholars, one of Orthodox background and the other a convert to the Jewish faith. As a series of separate but interrelated essays, it approaches multiple issues touching both the historical Jesus (himself a pious Jew) and the modern phenomenon of Messianic Judaism. It bridges the gap between the typically isolated disciplines of Jewish and Christian scholarship and forges a fresh level of understanding across religious boundaries. It delves into such issues as the nature and essence of Jesus’ message (pietistic, militant or something of a hybrid), and whether Messianic Jews should be welcome in the larger Jewish community. Its ultimate challenge is to view sound scholarship as a means of bringing together disparate faith traditions around a common academic table. Serious research of the “great Nazarene” becomes interfaith discourse.

The next anthology in George R. R. Martin's ongoing Wild Cards alternate-history series, Three Kings. In the aftermath of World War II, the Earth’s population was devastated by an alien virus. Those who survived were changed forever. Some, known as jokers, were cursed with bizarre mental and physical mutations; others, granted superhuman abilities, became the lucky few known as aces. Queen Margaret, who came to the English throne after the death of her sister Elizabeth, now lies on her death-bed. Summoning the joker ace Alan Turing, she urges him to seek the true heir: Elizabeth's lost son. He was rumored to have died as a baby but, having been born a joker, was sent into hiding. Margaret dies and her elder son Henry becomes king and at once declares he wants to make England an "Anglo-Saxon country" and suggests jokers be sent "to the moon." Dangerous tensions begin to tear the country apart. The Twisted Fists—an organization of jokers led by the Green Man—are becoming more militant. And Babh, goddess of war, sees opportunities to sow strife and reap blood... At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

This Festschrift dedicated to S. Scott Bartchy comes on the occasion of his retirement from the Department of History at the University of California at Los Angeles. This volume contains seventeen essays contributed by Professor Bartchy's esteemed colleagues, associates, friends, and former graduate students. Beginning with his groundbreaking work on Greco-Roman slavery, Bartchy's teaching and research have been marked both by his use of social-scientific methods for studying the New Testament and by an interest in the social history of early Christianity, including the role of women in the early Christian assemblies, the Christian critique of traditional views of male honor, and the practice of table fellowship and its implications for Christian social relations. To honor Bartchy's legacy, the editors thought it appropriate to organize this collection according to the relational categories suggested by Galatians 3:28. Each essay pertains, therefore, to the social dynamics between Jews and Gentiles, slaves and freeborn, or males and females in the early church and beyond. The volume's subtitle reflects Scott's many accomplishments as a jazz musician and sounds a note of unity in diversity that characterizes the diverse perspectives and themes found in the essays of this volume.

What ancient graffiti reveals about the everyday lives of Jews in the Greek and Roman world Few direct clues exist to the everyday lives and beliefs of ordinary Jews in antiquity. Prevailing perspectives on ancient Jewish life have been shaped largely by the voices of intellectual and social elites, preserved in the writings of Philo and Josephus and the rabbinic texts of the Mishnah and Talmud. Commissioned art, architecture, and formal inscriptions displayed on tombs and synagogues equally reflect the sensibilities of their influential patrons. The perspectives and sentiments of nonelite Jews, by contrast, have mostly disappeared from the historical record. Focusing on these forgotten Jews of antiquity, Writing on the Wall takes an unprecedented look at the vernacular inscriptions and drawings they left behind and sheds new light on the richness of their quotidian lives. Just like their neighbors throughout the eastern and southern Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Egypt, ancient Jews scribbled and drew graffiti everyplace--in and around markets, hippodromes, theaters, pagan temples, open cliffs, sanctuaries, and even inside burial caves and synagogues. Karen Stern reveals what these markings tell us about the men and women who made them, people whose lives, beliefs, and behaviors eluded commemoration in grand literary and architectural works. Making compelling analogies with modern graffiti practices, she documents the overlooked connections between Jews and their neighbors, showing how popular Jewish practices of prayer, mortuary commemoration, commerce, and civic engagement regularly crossed ethnic and religious boundaries. Illustrated throughout with examples of ancient graffiti, Writing on the Wall provides a tantalizingly intimate glimpse into the cultural worlds of forgotten populations living at the crossroads of Judaism, Christianity, paganism, and earliest Islam.

Haskalah and Beyond deals with the Hebrew Haskalah (Enlightenment) — the literary, cultural, and social movement in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe. It represents the emergence of modernism and perhaps the budding of some aspects of secularism in Jewish society, following the efforts of the Hebrew and Jewish enlighteners to introduce changes into Jewish culture and Jewish life, and to revitalize the Hebrew language and literature. The author classifies these activities as a 'cultural revolution.' In effect, the Haskalah was a counter-culture intended to modify or replace some of the contemporary rabbinic cultural framework, institutions, and practices and adopt them for its own envisioned 'Judaism of the Haskalah.' The pioneering work of the 'founding fathers' of the early Haskalah had greatly impacted the later developments of the Haskalah in the 19th century. Its reception in that century is studied as is the reception of one of the major figures of the early Haskalah, Isaac Euchel, and of one of the important German Enlightenment poets and philosophers, Johann Gottfried Herder, in the 19th-century Haskalah. The study of reception continues on the language of the sublime and the poetic imagery used in Haskalah, melitzah, as well as on the three major journals of Haskalah as instruments of change and of disseminating the Haskalah ideology. Finally, the aftermath of the Haskalah is addressed.

An international array of twenty-six scholars contributes twenty-one essays to honor Ziony Zevit (American Jewish University), one of the foremost biblical scholars of his generation. The breadth of the honoree is indicated by the breadth of coverage in these twenty-one articles, with seven each in the categories of history and archaeology, Bible, and Hebrew (and Aramaic) language.

A surprise–filled shellfish survey dishes up “ample oyster facts, figures and literary lore” (Publishers Weekly). When award–winning Texas food writer Robb Walsh discovers that the local Galveston Bay oysters are being passed off as Blue Points and Chincoteagues in other parts of the country, he decides to look into the matter. Thus begins a five–year journey into the culture of one of the world’s oldest delicacies. Walsh’s through–the–looking–glass adventure takes him from oyster reefs to oyster bars and from corporate boardrooms to hotel bedrooms in a quest for the truth about the world’s most profitable aphrodisiac. On the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Gulf coasts of the US, as well as the Canadian Maritimes, Ireland, England, and France, the author ingests thousands of oysters—raw, roasted, barbecued, and baked—all for the sake of making a fair comparison. He also considers the merits of a wide variety of accompanying libations, including tart white wines in Paris, Guinness in Galway, martinis in London, microbrews in the Pacific Northwest, and tequila in Texas. Sex, Death and Oysters is a record of a gastronomic adventure with illustrations and recipes—a fascinating collection of the most exciting, instructive, poignant, and just plain weird experiences on a trip into the world of the most beloved and feared of all seafoods.

Fizzle is a compilation, a journal if you will, of events and snippets from my experience in the film industry for over forty years. There was no place to log the bumpy ride that led to the demise of the American Independent film movement, an industry that once sizzled. You might say this book is about the Fizzle of the Sizzle. It is wishful thinking on my behalf to believe this book will explain how the sharks got away with fleecing filmmakers, and why they will continue to do so. Indie filmmakers, unlike the dinosaurs, will reinvent themselves. The hope is that this journal might save a few schmucks who are as naive as I was when I made my first two films. The nightmare is that it might attract a new generation of scumbags who can learn how to screw filmmakers. Both scenarios will undoubtedly play out. To paraphrase Shaw in my sole disclaimer: I often quote myself, in order to spice things up a bit. Norman Gerards tome is full of sound and fury. Hes got an impassioned viewpoint about why it all went wrong. The time has come for someone to offer a bruising critique, to speak truths about the indie world that the media has largely either chosen to ignore, or missed while they fell in love with the colorful young characters and the so-called spirit of American indie cinema. Gerard would argue that spirit is more like a disease, that the so-called honesty of the American indie film movement masked essential business deceptions that would inevitably lead to the current disastrous landscape... Prepare for a rollicking ride through good times and bad, high art and low-lifes, auteurs and con artists. Gerard has them all in the pages of this book. If there were any money left for indie film productions, it might make a great film and it clearly won't be a studio-backed picture. Its got corrosive honesty, hard-hitting political implications, sleazy characters no major star would want to play, all topped off by a downbeat ending. Theres one word for the spirit of this tome: Its truly INDEPENDENT. -- Steven Gaydos Variety, Executive Editor