Frederic Brenner


Book Description

Jewish life in 21st-century Berlin French photographer Frédéric Brenner (born 1959) has spent around 40 years capturing images of Jewish life around the world. In this volume, he portrays Jewish Berliners, from hipsters to seniors and recent immigrants.




Jews, America


Book Description

The Psychoanalytic Society of New York City, Jewish Harley-Davidson enthusiasts in Miami Beach, and the spiritual gathering of Navajos and Jews in Monument Valley are some of the diverse images captured by Frederic Brenner in this documentary book. The French photographer has recorded the amazing diversity of Jewish life in large cities and small communities in 32 states. 801 photos.




Diaspora


Book Description

Volume 1 is a collection o Frederick Brenner's photographs that document the world of Jewish life at the beginning of the 21st century. Volume 2 reproduces 60 photographs as an invitation to explore and interpret the different issues at the core of the photographs.




An Archeology of Fear and Desire


Book Description




Exile at Home


Book Description

Published to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the modern state of Israel, this collection of photographs focuses on Jews who have returned from exile in the Diaspora to their promised land. The French photographer Frederic Brenner travelled for nearly two decades to photograph Jews in more than 40 countries, capturing the diversity of their experiences in different cultures. The 14 immigrant families depicted in Israel in the book were all previously photographed in Ethiopia, Morocco, Yemen, Russia, the USA, England or India.




Jerusalem


Book Description

A captivating journey through the hidden libraries of Jerusalem, where some of the world’s most enduring ideas were put into words In this enthralling book, Merav Mack and Benjamin Balint explore Jerusalem’s libraries to tell the story of this city as a place where some of the world’s most enduring ideas were put into words. The writers of Jerusalem, although renowned the world over, are not usually thought of as a distinct school; their stories as Jerusalemites have never before been woven into a single narrative. Nor have the stories of the custodians, past and present, who safeguard Jerusalem’s literary legacies. By showing how Jerusalem has been imagined by its writers and shelved by its librarians, Mack and Balint tell the untold history of how the peoples of the book have populated the city with texts. In their hands, Jerusalem itself—perched between East and West, antiquity and modernity, violence and piety—comes alive as a kind of labyrinthine library.




Missionaries, Converts, and Rabbis


Book Description

An examination of the life and work of Alexander McCaul and his impact on Jewish-Christian relations In Missionaries, Converts, and Rabbis, David B. Ruderman considers the life and works of prominent evangelical missionary Alexander McCaul (1799-1863), who was sent to Warsaw by the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity Amongst the Jews. He and his family resided there for nearly a decade, which afforded him the opportunity to become a scholar of Hebrew and rabbinic texts. Returning to England, he quickly rose up through the ranks of missionaries to become a leading figure and educator in the organization and eventually a professor of post-biblical studies at Kings College, London. In 1837, McCaul published The Old Paths, a powerful critique of rabbinic Judaism that, once translated into Hebrew and other languages, provoked controversy among Jews and Christians alike. Ruderman first examines McCaul in his complexity as a Hebraist affectionately supportive of Jews while opposing the rabbis. He then focuses his attention on a larger network of his associates, both allies and foes, who interacted with him and his ideas: two converts who came under his influence but eventually broke from him; two evangelical colleagues who challenged his aggressive proselytizing among the Jews; and, lastly, three Jewish thinkers—two well-known scholars from Eastern Europe and a rabbi from Syria—who refuted his charges against the rabbis and constructed their own justifications for Judaism in the mid-nineteenth century. Missionaries, Converts, and Rabbis reconstructs a broad transnational conversation between Christians, Jews, and those in between, opening a new vista for understanding Jewish and Christian thought and the entanglements between the two faith communities that persist in the modern era. Extending the geographical and chronological reach of his previous books, Ruderman continues his exploration of the impact of Jewish-Christian relations on Jewish self-reflection and the phenomenon of mingled identities in early modern and modern Europe.




Great Dames


Book Description

Presents biographical portraits of ten notable twentieth-century women, including Jacqueline Onassis, Clare Boothe Luce, Pamela Harriman, and Kitty Carlisle Hart.




Laish


Book Description

A caravan of Jews wanders through Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century on a heartbreaking quest. Spiritual seekers and the elderly, widows and orphans, the sick and the dying, con artists and adventurers, victims of pogroms who have no place else to go–they are all on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but the journey is filled with unexpected detours and unanticipated disaster. Among them is Laish, a fifteen-year-old orphan, through whose eyes we observe the interactions within this ragtag group of dreamers, holy men, misfits, and thieves as they battle with one another, try to stay one step ahead of the gendarmes, and do what little they can to keep up their flagging spirits. With the death of the rabbi who brought the group together, they are now led by men whom Laish refers to as “the dealers”–black-market traders whose motives are questionable but who periodically infuse the group with the money they need to get to the next town. Years pass, tempers start to fray, and the caravan grows smaller as people die or abandon the venture. A brutal winter and typhoid epidemic further decimate the ranks, and the pilgrims have begun to reach the limits of their endurance. The dream of Jerusalem keeps the remnant going, and against all odds they finally arrive–emotionally and physically exhausted–at the port city of Galacz. They see their ship in the harbor, but whether they will actually make it onto that ship is suddenly and tragically thrown into doubt. This magnificent new novel from Aharon Appelfeld (“One of the greatest writers of the age” —The Guardian) resonates with a universality of experience: the will to survive, the struggle to hold on to hope.




This Place


Book Description

This Place is a monumental art project that explores Israel and the West Bank, as place and metaphor, through the eyes of twelve internationally celebrated photographers. Their photographs question the history, the divisions, and paradoxes of the region and its inhabitants. Marked by the photographers' differing visual vocabularies, nationalities, and cultural backgrounds, the picture that emerges is not a single, monolithic vision, but rather a diverse and fragmented portrait. The images have previously been shown in renowned museums such as DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. Now, the project culminates in this retrospective volume, which contains more than 100 spectacular photographs and views of the exhibition, as well as essays by distinguished curators on the project's histo-ry and its meaning for today's political and cultural discourse.