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This comparative, mixed-methods study explores various definitions of Israel Studies as a discipline through their manifestations in library and archival collections. A survey and a follow-up interview with collection curators provide a glimpse into library operations and demonstrate their dependency on Jewish Studies across the board. Collection strengths, extensiveness, and uniqueness are shaped not by the presence of an on-campus Israel Studies center, but rather by individual curators guided by their own proactive approach to collection building. The article includes an annotated list of over 120 distinctive collections, among which we uncover several hidden collections. Taken together, our article illustrates the need for better communication between Israel Studies' scholarly and information communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how Jewish American composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, in his musical theatre works, engaged in a distinctly Jewish lyrical style that resembles a Talmudic dialectic. The author argues that Sondheim's argumentative, self-referential, quick-moving, pitter-patter lyrics and music, a writing style that values the performance of ambivalence and repeated questioning, resembles contemporary Jewish discourse as influenced by Talmudic dialogue. The author explores Sondheim's work through a reflection of his experience piloting a new two-week musical theatre specialty programme at Ramah Darom, a Jewish summer camp in Clayton, Georgia, in July 2023. The programme, called Ramah Bamah (bamah is a Hebrew word that translates in this context to 'stage'), aimed to teach campers valuable performance skills from professional theatre-makers, while simultaneously encouraging campers to explore their identities as Jewish artists. Ramah Bamah presented Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods JR. as its premiere production, as programme leaders used Jewish texts, thought and values to help campers connect emotionally and thematically to Sondheim's play-text. This article considers the relationship between Jewish text study, Jewish education, storytelling, youth/amateur theatre-making and Stephen Sondheim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In terms of historiographical potential and literary value, depictions of the lives of others are considered inferior to autobiographies. One finds autobiographies, which promise to provide exclusive insights into the historical inner worlds, epistemically more revealing. While their study has become a very important part of Jewish Studies, investigations into the life stories of others represent a notable research gap. This issue takes this remarkable bias in the perception of the two genres within Jewish Studies as its starting point. The contributions gathered here interrogate historical examples of biographical narrative with the aim of unlocking its historiographical potentials and thus highlighting the relevance of biographical writing for the study of Jewish cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article aims at explaining the unique role the study of folk-narrative played in the Wissenschaft des Judentums (the scholarly study of Judaism) as it emerged in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century and as it was negotiated later. This article engages how the language of Wissenschaft constructed Jewish texts in the language of folk-narrative studies. And how the language of folk-narrative studies constructed Jewish culture in the language of Wissenschaft. Given the status of scholars within this movement – Jews who were citizens of European nations – they demonstrated the affinities between Jewish folk-narrative traditions and Islamic narrative traditions; on the other hand, they used a poetic language that implemented European (mainly German) genres and forms of scholarship that were viewed as objective and scientific in their studies of Jewish texts. The article examines three works by three scholars from three generations of the Wissenschaft movement: Moritz Steinschneider, Ignaz Goldziehr and Bernhard Heller – each corresponding respectively to one genre: legend, myth and folktale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contrast between student-centred and knowledge-centred teaching is explored through a qualitative case study exploration of the pedagogies (Bruner's 'folk pedagogies') of six teachers of Jewish studies. These teachers, based in orthodox Jewish schools in the UK and Australia, discussed their roles as teachers in the context of their responsibility for inducting students into the Jewish community. They appear to overcome (or at least mitigate) the tensions between being student-centred and knowledge-centred through understanding both students and knowledge in communal terms. This communally-focused approach, drawing on the philosophers of 'personal' knowledge such as Polanyi, and of personalist approaches to schooling such as those of Macmurray and Noddings, is then proposed as of value in debates on schooling and the curriculum in general, well beyond the religious context of this particular research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elisa Uusimäki's book, "Lived Wisdom in Jewish Antiquity: Studies in Exercise and Exemplarity," explores the instructional texts of the Second Temple period to understand the concept of "lived wisdom." Uusimäki examines how ancient sages embodied virtuous lives and sought to teach their pupils to do the same. She considers the influence of Hellenistic culture on Jewish sages and compares their teachings to Greek philosophers. The book also explores the performative traits of these sages and how notions of wisdom functioned in Jewish communities. Overall, Uusimäki's work offers a nuanced cultural investigation into the concept of wisdom in Jewish antiquity. [Extracted from the article]

Editorial for the Volume 34, Issue 2

This article reflects on the author's involvement with Canadian Jewish Studies, specifically their research on the history of Jews in Canada. The author was approached to do background research for a rabbi who was writing a book on the topic. They conducted extensive research, including contacting repositories of Canadian Jewish material and interviewing pioneers of Canadian Jewry. Their report became the nucleus of the Canadian Jewish Archives. The author also discusses their experiences with antisemitism in the legal profession and their transition to using their skills in areas other than law, such as restoring heritage buildings. They embarked on a ten-year project to document the history of Jews in Canada, using various sources such as genealogy, land records, and census data. They discovered that there were Jewish individuals present in the territory earlier than previously thought and built a database of over a hundred Jewish individuals who arrived in British North America by 1840. The author hopes that their research will inspire further exploration and understanding of Jewish history in Canada. [Extracted from the article]

The article, titled "On Homes and Hearts: A British Jewish Perspective," discusses the question of whether Canada has offered the best home to Jews. The author acknowledges that Canada has provided a better home for Jews compared to countries like Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, and the Soviet Union. The article argues that understanding a country's treatment of Jews can provide insights into its attitudes towards other minorities. It also highlights the need to focus on Canadian Jewish histories and fill in the gaps left by the dominant focus on other countries in Jewish studies. The author reflects on the differences between the British and Canadian Jewish experiences and questions why British Jewish historians have emphasized stories of discrimination and prejudice more than tales of successful integration. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of exploring lesser-known parts of the Jewish journey, such as the Canadian Jewish experience. [Extracted from the article]

This article draws attention to the distortions and falsehoods that appear in the 1976 Jewish Social Studies article "Political Antisemitism in Minnesota during the Great Depression" by Hyman Berman. It identifies and corrects the many errors on two of its pages. In addition, the role of Berman's article in a student movement at the University of Minnesota to remove names on four campus buildings of administrators who engaged in racist and antisemitic policies is explored. Berman's work was both a catalyst for an exhibition about this period, which inspired the movement, and then when its flagrant errors were brought to light, was used to try to discredit it. The consequences of Berman's misconduct had consequences more than forty years after its publication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past few decades have witnessed significant increases in levels of education among women members of conservative religions. Contrary to the expectations of both researchers and policymakers, this trend has not been accompanied by decreases in levels of piety. The purpose of this article is to explore what it means to educated religious women to belong to conservative religious communities that embody values and practices that do not conform to the values of modernity associated with exposure to higher education. On the basis of a series of group interviews with educated Jewish Haredi women in Israel, we examined this very question. We found that the women we interviewed demonstrated a deep pride in their religious identity and an ongoing and strong commitment to their community. At the same time, they regarded membership in their community as a form of social capital enabling them to secure a wide array of benefits, which provided compensation for the demand to conform to conservative practices. We conclude that through a process of exchange (social capital against the price of conforming), the women challenge existing norms while maintaining strong religious identities, taking part in democratic processes, and, together, forging articulated bonds of membership and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores "Nayn a zeyger inderfri" and "Gelt," two novellas by the Polish- Jewish Yiddish author Yoshue Perle. These novellas feature first-generation Jewish middle-class men who anxiously struggle to perform according to the bourgeois masculine standards that their new class positioning requires. The article argues that Perle creates a narrative where Jewish masculinities come into direct interaction with non-Jewish bourgeois masculinities. While debates about Jewish masculinity often take "Torah study" or "productivity" as primary examples for thinking through appropriate activities for Jewish men, I suggest that a bank or a factory office is also a site for the negotiation of what constitutes ideal, failed, or proper masculine behavior. The article proposes a more nuanced approach to the study of Jewish masculinities, which would not be limited to looking at the intersection of gender and ethnicity, but would include class as another major factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medieval Jewish readings of the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac, remain almost entirely oblivious to the antinomy between ethics and the revealed divine command that many modern interpretations find at the heart of the story. This study explores an exception, the teaching of the fourteenth-century rationalist, Eleazar Ashkenazi ben Nathan Ha-Bavli. In his Revealer of Secrets , Eleazar seeks a remedy for what he takes to be the theological and moral scandals that arise when the Akedah is read according to its plain sense. While Eleazar's treatment of the Akedah builds in many ways on that of Maimonides, it also adds novel layers regarding this most difficult of biblical accounts. For this reason, the study begins with a substantial review of Maimonides' intentionally elusive treatment of the Akedah and its reception among some representative later medieval interlocutors. Turning to its main focus, the article supplies a case study in medieval Jewish rationalism at its limits, in both matter and manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This article includes translation of a 'new' Vision of Daniel as it survived, albeit incomplete. It reflects a 'meeting point' between three monotheistic religions in the ninth and tenth [...]

In response to Isaac Sasson and Sergio DellaPergola's commentaries on our assessment of the validity of the Pew Research Center's 2020 estimate of 7.5 million US Jewish adults and children (Tighe et al. 2022), we address key points of agreement and contention in the validity of the estimate; in particular, how the Jewish population is identified and defined. We argue that Pew's definition of the Jewish population is consistent with major studies of American Jewry, from NJPS 1990 to recent local Jewish community studies. Applying a consistent definition that includes the growing group of "Jews of no religion" with one Jewish parent, as Pew Research Center does, allows for a faithful comparison across national and local studies and a more accurate understanding of levels of Jewish engagement and expressions of Jewish identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subjects of Jewish identity and Jewish communal vitality, and how they may be conceptualized and measured, are the topics of lively debate among scholars of contemporary Jewry (DellaPergola 2015, 2020; Kosmin 2022; Pew Research Center 2021; Phillips 2022). Complicating matters, there appears to be a disconnect between the broadly accepted claim that comparative analysis yields richer understanding of Jewish communities (Cooperman 2016; Weinfeld 2020) and the reality that the preponderance of that research focuses on discrete communities. This paper examines the five largest English-speaking Jewish communities in the diaspora: the United States of America (US) (population 6,000,000–7,600,000), Canada (population 393,500), the United Kingdom (UK) (population 292,000), Australia (population 118,000), and South Africa (population 52,000) (DellaPergola 2022). A comparison of the five communities' levels of Jewish engagement, and the identification of factors shaping these differences, are the main objectives of this paper. The paper first outlines conceptual and methodological issues involved in the study of contemporary Jewry; hierarchical linear modeling is proposed as the suitable statistical approach for this analysis, and ethnocultural and religious capital are promoted as suitable measures for studying Jewish engagement. Secondly, a contextualizing historical and sociodemographic overview of the five communities is presented, highlighting attributes which the communities have in common, and those which differentiate them. Statistical methods are then utilized to develop measures of Jewish capital, and to identify explanatory factors shaping the differences between these five communities in these measures of Jewish capital. To further the research agenda of communal and transnational research, this paper concludes by identifying questions that are unique to the individual communities studied, with a brief exploration of subjects that Jewish communities often neglect to examine and are encouraged to consider. This paper demonstrates the merits of comparative analysis and highlights practical and conceptual implications for future Jewish communal research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at deciphering distinctive theological characteristics attributed to the legendary founder of Hasidism, Israel Baal Shem Tov (the BeShT), as documented by his Grandson, Moshe Haim Ephraim of Sudylkow. To achieve this objective, I will apply a combination of statistical tools of distant reading with textual analysis of close reading; a first attempt of such a kind in the research of Jewish Mysticism. It will reveal singular characteristics of the reported teachings of the BeShT, while distinguishing them from the textual corpus into which they were integrated, Sefer Degel Mahaneh Ephraim. Contrary to the common portrait of the BeSht as an optimistic preacher focusing mainly on joy and positive appraisal of human sinful conditions, fear of sin is a dominant emotional component in his ethos as documented by his Grandson. Fear and awe function as formative catalyzers of personal religious change. Indeed, he does focus on the mental aspects of divine service and the revelatory character of man's thoughts, but a sense of trembling and anxiety of sin stands at the core of these discussions. This study demonstrates how the study of Jewish textual traditions may benefit from applying statistical analysis when intertwined with classical methods of close reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Stanisław Lem's early prose works, which were written shortly after the end of World War II. In light of the institutional state censorship of the time, the traumatic experience of the 1941 Lviv [then Lwów] pogrom and Lem's attempts at survival outside the Lviv ghetto, this article offers a broad historical, biographical, and political context for the interpretation of these early works, revealing political allusions and autobiographical motifs. This research takes the archival turn, which places the archive at the center of the study of power, memory, and politics. Careful study of Lem's biography reveals the violent interference of the directives of the oppressive state as well as its politics of memory, and allows the voice of the victims and the defeated to become audible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Beer's successful 1823 play Der Paria is famous as an early complaint against the status of Jews as second-rate citizens. As such, it is fundamental to the conception of Jews as pariahs, best known through the writings of Hannah Arendt. Its long reception history has overlooked an important source, that is now uncovered for the first time in a hundred years. Beer's play was parodied by Ludwig Robert with Der Pavian. Both authors were scions of Berlin's Jewish elite, and among the first authors of Jewish descent to write in German. Robert's parody shows why he did not share in the general enthusiasm about Der Paria, how the choice of the parodic genre was a self-referential critique, and how form and content of the parody together intervened in Beer's use of the genre of Trauerspiel. Thus, it contributes to our understanding of the diverse strategies and self-perceptions of upper-class Berlin Jews, confronted with the limits of their pioneering the Jewish integration into non-Jewish society, showing the role of theater as a means of negotiating contemporary social problems both in private and publicly, stressing the difficult presence of Jews in the German public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined what led undergraduate Israeli-Arab students to choose to study for a degree in Education at a Jewish academic institution, and the influence of this academic choice on them. The study is based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with 33 students. Findings show that the choice stemmed from a desire to lead social change within their own society; to imitate an educational role-model from their past; to realize a dream of even higher education; and among the female students, also because this field suits the role of women in Arab society. The interviewees claimed that the influence of their studies was that they felt more openness towards others and those who are different from them; they felt pride and self-confidence in their abilities; and the women mentioned that they felt empowered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thee author discusses the relationship of early modern studies and Jewish history and society. He mentions the lack of awareness of early modern Judaism even at the end of his classes, his new approach to teaching topics that have both a contemporary and early modern viewpoint, and the subject of relations between rabbis and the lay community leaders.