"This is the story of the contrasting Judaisms that Wendy Doniger's two parents brought from their very different homes in Europe during World War I; of their paths to a shared but sharply bifurcated life in America during World War II, her father a publisher, her mother a political activist; and of the ways in which their attitudes to religion in general, and Judaism in particular, influenced the author's development as a Jewish woman and a scholar of religion"--

Twenty-two-year-old Wendy Doniger arrived in Calcutta in August 1963 on a scholarship to study Sanskrit and Bengali. It was her first visit to the country. Over the coming year—a lot of it spent in Tagore’s Shantiniketan—she would fall completely in love with the place she had, until then, known only through books. The India she describes in her letters back home to her parents is young, like her, still finding its feet and learning to come to terms with the violence of Partition. But it is also a mature civilization that allows Vishnu to be depicted on the walls in a temple to Shiva; a culture of contradictions where extreme eroticism is tied to extreme chastity; and a land of the absurd where sociable station masters don’t let train schedules stand in the way of hospitality. The country comes alive though her vivid prose—introspective and yet playful—and her excitement is on full display whether she is telling of the paradoxes of Indian life, the picturesque countryside, the peculiarities of Indian languages, or simply the mechanics of a temple ritual that she doesn’t understand. Those who have read and admired Wendy Doniger will be delighted to find much of her later work anticipated in these letters, and the few who haven't will get to see, through her keen eyes and able pen, India as they have never seen it before.

Part I of each volume will feature 5-7 major review chapters, including 2-3 long chapters reviewing topics of major concern to the American Jewish community written by top experts on each topic, review chapters on "National Affairs" and "Jewish Communal Affairs" and articles on the Jewish population of the United States and the World Jewish Population. Future major review chapters will include such topics as Jewish Education in America, American Jewish Philanthropy, Israel/Diaspora Relations, American Jewish Demography, American Jewish History, LGBT Issues in American Jewry, American Jews and National Elections, Orthodox Judaism in the US, Conservative Judaism in the US, Reform Judaism in the US, Jewish Involvement in the Labor Movement, Perspectives in American Jewish Sociology, Recent Trends in American Judaism, Impact of Feminism on American Jewish Life, American Jewish Museums, Anti-Semitism in America, and Inter-Religious Dialogue in America. Part II-V of each volume will continue the tradition of listing Jewish Federations, national Jewish organizations, Jewish periodicals, and obituaries. But to this list are added lists of Jewish Community Centers, Jewish Camps, Jewish Museums, Holocaust Museums, and Jewish honorees (both those honored through awards by Jewish organizations and by receiving honors, such as Presidential Medals of Freedom and Academy Awards, from the secular world). We expand the Year Book tradition of bringing academic research to the Jewish communal world by adding lists of academic journals, articles in academic journals on Jewish topics, Jewish websites, and books on American and Canadian Jews. Finally, we add a list of major events in the North American Jewish Community.

Religion and Outer Space examines religion in and on the final frontier. This book offers a first-of-its-kind roadmap for thinking about complex encounters of religion and outer space. A multidisciplinary group of scholarly experts takes up some of the most intriguing scientific, spiritual, trade/commercial, and even military dimensions of the complex entanglements of religion and outer space. Attending to the historical reality that the interconnections between religion and the heavens are as old as religions themselves, the volume starts with an examination of "outer space" elements in the most sacred writings of the world’s religions. It then explores some of the religious questions inevitable in this encounter, analyzing cultural constructions (both literary and actual) of religion and outer space. It ends with examinations of the role of religion in the very real and very present business of space exploration. What might motivate the spread of religion (or at least fantasies of religion in its myriad possibilities) into new interior and exterior dimensions of the cosmos? Only the future will tell. Religion and Outer Space is essential reading for students and academics with an interest in religion and space, religion and science, space exploration, religion and science fiction, popular culture, and religion in America.

"The book opens with a discussion of the pandemic, then investigates the modern origins of the separation between "natural" and "human" histories, and what may be at stake in that separation. Does having different worlds make it difficult for humans to deal with a planet that is one?"--

"Langston focuses on three ghost species in the Great Lakes watershed-woodland caribou, common loons, and lake sturgeon. Their traces are still present in DNA, small fragmented populations, or in lone individuals. We can still restore them, if we make the hard choices necessary for them to survive"--

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, a graceful depiction of middle-class Calcutta, seen through the lives of two interlinked families living in the city during the 1990s. Freedom Song is a novel about family life and city life at an uneasy moment in time. Set in Calcutta in 1993, the book begins by introducing us to Khuku, whose husband Shib is a retired executive and whose son has gone to live in America. Khuku’s old friend Mini, a teacher suffering from a bad case of arthritis, is paying a visit, which gives the two women a chance to gossip and reminisce and see the town. Khuku’s brother, Bhola, lives nearby with his wife and two grown children. Everyone is concerned about his son, Bhaskar, who has recently joined the Communist Party. He sells the party newspaper on the streets. He engages in street theater, and while no longer in his first youth, he remains unmarried. Freedom Song circles around this small upper-middle-class world, with its customs, memories, pleasures, and worries, but also ventures out into the wider world, in which the destruction of the venerable Babri Masjid by Hindu fundamentalists has started a cycle of sectarian violence. A novel of ordinary life, of work and love, shadowed by larger uncertainty, Freedom Song is a transfixing performance, deeply humane and winningly humorous, by one of the subtlest and sharpest writers of our time. A world of insight and feeling emerges from Amit Chaudhuri’s wonderfully expansive sentences, and style is revealed as nothing less than a form of knowledge.

Contemporary discussions of China tend to focus on politics and economics, giving Chinese culture little if any attention. Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China offers a corrective, revealing the crucial role that fiction plays in helping contemporary Chinese citizens understand themselves and their nation. Where history fails to address the consequences of man-made and natural atrocities, David Der-Wei Wang argues, fiction arises to bear witness to the immemorial and unforeseeable. Beginning by examining President Xi Jinping’s call in 2013 to “tell the good China story,” Wang illuminates how contemporary Chinese cultural politics have taken a “fictional turn,” which can trace its genealogy to early modern times. He does so by addressing a series of discourses by critics within China, including Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, and Shen Congwen, as well as critics from the West such as Arendt, Benjamin, and Deleuze. Wang highlights the variety and vitality of fictional works from China as well as the larger Sinophone world, ranging from science fiction to political allegory, erotic escapade to utopia and dystopia. The result is an insightful account of contemporary China, one that affords countless new insights and avenues for understanding.

Renunciation is a core value in the Buddhist tradition, but Buddhism is not necessarily austere. Jewels—along with heavenly flowers, rays of rainbow light, and dazzling deities—shape the literature and the material reality of the tradition. They decorate temples, fill reliquaries, are used as metaphors, and sprout out of imagined Buddha fields. Moreover, jewels reflect a particular type of currency often used to make the Buddhist world go round: merit in exchange for wealth. Regardless of whether the Buddhist community has theoretically transcended the need for them or not, jewels—and the paradox they represent—are everywhere. Scholarship has often looked past this splendor, favoring the theory of renunciation instead, but in this volume, scholars from a wide range of disciplines consider the role jewels play in the Buddhist imaginary, putting them front and center for the first time. Following an introduction that relates the colorful story of the Emerald Buddha, one of the most famous jewels in the world, chapters explore the function of jewels as personal identifiers in Buddhist and other Indian religious traditions; Buddhaghosa’s commentary on the Jewel Sutta; the paradox of the Buddha’s bejeweled status before and after renunciation; and the connection in early Buddhism between jewels, magnificence, and virtue. The Newars of Nepal are the focus of a chapter that looks at their gemology and associations between gems and celestial deities. Contributors analyze the Fifth Dalai Lama’s reliquary, known as the “sole ornament of the world”; the transformation of relic jewels into precious substances and their connection to the Piprahwa stupa in Northern India and the Nanjing Porcelain Pagoda. Final chapters offer detailed studies of ritual engagement with the deity known as Wish-Fulfilling Jewel Avalokiteśvara and its role in the new Japanese lay Buddhist religious movement Shinnyo-en. Engaging and accessible, Jewels, Jewelry, and Other Shiny Things in the Buddhist Imaginary will provide readers with an opportunity to look beyond a common misconception about Buddhism and bring its lived tradition into wider discussion.

Making the desi scene in New York.