Includes list of members.

Includes list of members.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jewish historian Zosa Szajkowski gathered up tens of thousands of documents from Nazi buildings in Berlin, and later, public archives and private synagogues in France, and moved them all, illicitly, to New York. In The Archive Thief, Lisa Moses Leff reconstructs Szajkowski's story in all its ambiguity. Born into poverty in Russian Poland, Szajkowski first made his name in Paris as a communist journalist. In the late 1930s, as he saw the threats to Jewish safety rising in Europe, he broke with the party and committed himself to defending his people in a new way, as a scholar associated with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Following a harrowing 1941 escape from France and U.S. army service, Szajkowski struggled to remake his life as a historian, eking out a living as a YIVO archivist in postwar New York. His scholarly output was tremendous nevertheless; he published scores of studies on French Jewish history that opened up new ways of thinking about Jewish emancipation, modernization, and the rise of modern antisemitism. But underlying Szajkowski's scholarly accomplishments were the documents he stole, moved, and eventually sold to American and Israeli research libraries, where they remain today. Part detective story, part analysis of the construction of history, The Archive Thief offers a window into the debates over the rightful ownership of contested Jewish archives and the powerful ideological, economic, and psychological forces that have made Jewish scholars care so deeply about preserving the remnants of their past.

Discusses the problems Maimonides encountered, showing the depth and breadth of his philosophical thought.

These investigations illuminate the entangled experiences of Jews who sought to balance the pull of communal, religious, and linguistic traditions with the demands and allure of full participation in European life.

What is philosophy and who is the philosopher? What should be the relationship between the philosopher and the city? And what should be the attitude that the philosopher must have with respect to tradition, religion and politics? These questions, which have spanned the entire history of Western philosophical thought, from ancient Greece onwards, found original answers in one of the greatest figures of twentieth-century culture, Leo Strauss. Philosophy as Stranger Wisdom, thanks to a scrupulous study of his entire bibliography, represents the first truly comprehensive and complete intellectual biography of Strauss. The reader will find in these pages a Strauss who is not an American neoconservative theorist nor an orthodox Jew, but rather an original reader and interpreter of classical authors: from Thucydides and Plato to Machiavelli and Hobbes. Carlo Altini presents us with a philosopher who escapes any attempt at classification, who lived constantly in exile between theory and practice, philosophy and politics, immanence and transcendence, and who considered philosophy the most important critical exercise of human reason, always "out of date" and always "out of place."

Much of what we know about life in the medieval Islamic Middle East comes from texts written to impart religious ideals or to chronicle the movements of great men. How did women participate in the societies these texts describe? What about non-Muslims, whose own religious traditions descended partly from pre-Islamic late antiquity? Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt approaches these questions through Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). Using hundreds of everyday papers preserved in the Cairo Geniza, Eve Krakowski follows the lives of girls from different social classes—rich and poor, secluded and physically mobile—as they prepared to marry and become social adults. She argues that the families on whom these girls depended were more varied, fragmented, and fluid than has been thought. Krakowski also suggests a new approach to religious identity in premodern Islamic societies—and to the history of rabbinic Judaism. Through the lens of women’s coming-of-age, she demonstrates that even Jews who faithfully observed rabbinic law did not always understand the world in rabbinic terms. By tracing the fault lines between rabbinic legal practice and its practitioners’ lives, Krakowski explains how rabbinic Judaism adapted to the Islamic Middle Ages. Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt offers a new way to understand how women took part in premodern Middle Eastern societies, and how families and religious law worked in the medieval Islamic world.