The Drama of Slavuta


Book Description

Available for the first time in English, The Drama of Slavuta draws on Jewish sources and official Tsarist government archives in providing insight into the shutdown of a major nineteenth-century Jewish printing establishment during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I (1825-1855), when the persecution of Jews and suppression of Jewish culture reached unprecedented heights in Russia. The eminent historian Saul M. Ginsburg, who authored the original manuscript, successfully weaves an account of the persecution of the printing establishment's Hasidic owners, the Brothers Shapiro, into the larger scheme of official persecution of all Jews and thereby provides chilling insight into contemporary Russian attitudes towards Jews and Jewish culture. Contents: Volhynia Gubernia; Accusations Continue; The War Against Hasidism; "Yore-Deah"; Yakob Lipps; Forced Testimonies; The Imperial Decree; The Ushitza Story; The Military Commission's Verdict; "So Shall It Be"; "Araktsh Stones"; Moral Victors.




The Drama of Slavuta


Book Description




Essays on the Making of the Early Hebrew Book


Book Description

Articles on early Hebrew printing encompassing title-page motifs and entitling books; authors and places of publication including books opposed to gambling, on philology, and the massacres of tah-ve-tat (1648-48); small diverse places of printing; and on Christian-Hebraism.




Studying Hasidism


Book Description

Hasidism, a Jewish religious movement that originated in Poland in the eighteenth century, today counts over 700,000 adherents, primarily in the U.S., Israel, and the UK. Popular and scholarly interest in Hasidic Judaism and Hasidic Jews is growing, but there is no textbook dedicated to research methods in the field, nor sources for the history of Hasidism have been properly recognized. Studying Hasidism, edited by Marcin Wodziński, an internationally recognized historian of Hasidism, aims to remedy this gap. The work’s thirteen chapters each draws upon a set of different sources, many of them previously untapped, including folklore, music, big data, and material culture to demonstrate what is still to be achieved in the study of Hasidism. Ultimately, this textbook presents research methods that can decentralize the role community leaders play in the current literature and reclaim the everyday lives of Hasidic Jews.




The Talmud


Book Description

The Babylonian Talmud, a postbiblical Jewish text that is part scripture and part commentary, is an unlikely bestseller. Written in a hybrid of Hebrew and Aramaic, it is often ambiguous to the point of incomprehension, and its subject matter reflects a narrow scholasticism that should hardly have broad appeal. Yet the Talmud has remained in print for centuries and is more popular today than ever. Barry Scott Wimpfheimer tells the remarkable story of this ancient Jewish book and explains why it has endured for almost two millennia.0Providing a concise biography of this quintessential work of rabbinic Judaism, Wimpfheimer takes readers from the Talmud's prehistory in biblical and second-temple Judaism to its present-day use as a source of religious ideology, a model of different modes of rationality, and a totem of cultural identity. He describes the book's origins and structure, its centrality to Jewish law, its mixed reception history, and its golden renaissance in modernity. He explains why reading the Talmud can feel like being swept up in a river or lost in a maze, and why the Talmud has come to be venerated--but also excoriated and maligned-in the centuries since it first appeared.0An incomparable introduction to a work of literature that has lived a full and varied life, this accessible book shows why the Talmud is at once a received source of traditional teachings, a touchstone of cultural authority, and a powerful symbol of Jewishness for both supporters and critics.




The Golden Age Shtetl


Book Description

Neither a comprehensive history of Eastern European Jewish life or the shtetl, Petrovsky-Shtern, professor of Jewish Studies at Northwestern University, focuses on three provinces Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev of the then Russian Empire during what he deems the golden age period, 1790 - 1840, when the shtetl was "the unique habitat of some 80 percent of East European Jews."




The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 7


Book Description

Volume 7 of the Posen Library captures unprecedented transformations of Jewish culture amid mass migration, global capitalism, nationalism, revolution, and the birth of the secular self Between 1880 and 1918, traditions and regimes collapsed around the world, migration and imperialism remade the lives of millions, nationalism and secularization transformed selves and collectives, utopias beckoned, and new kinds of social conflict threatened as never before. Few communities experienced the pressures and possibilities of the era more profoundly than the world's Jews. This volume, seventh in The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, recaptures the vibrant Jewish cultural creativity, political striving, social experimentation, and fractious religious and secular thought that burst forth in the face of these challenges. Editors Israel Bartal and Kenneth B. Moss capture the full range of Jewish expression in a centrifugal age--from mystical visions to unabashedly antitraditional Jewish political thought, from cookbooks to literary criticism, from modernist poetry to vaudeville. They also highlight the most remarkable dimension of the 1880-1918 era: an audacious effort by newly secular Jews to replace Judaism itself with a new kind of Jewish culture centering on this-worldly, aesthetic creativity by a posited "Jewish nation" and the secular, modern, and "free" individuals who composed it. This volume is an essential starting point for anyone who wishes to understand the divided Jewish present.




"To Tread on New Ground"


Book Description

Hava Shapiro is among the nearly forgotten Jewish women writers who sought acceptance in Jewish literary circles of the last century. Born in Slavuta (modern-day Ukraine) in 1878, she published works of fiction, memoir, literary criticism, and journalism, including a volume of short fiction and a scholarly monograph on the Czech leader Masaryk. Her handwritten diary—the first known diary to be kept by a woman in Hebrew—evokes not only the momentous events of her day but also the experiences of women like herself who failed to follow the dictates of Jewish tradition and aspired to roles beyond those of wife and mother. In “To Tread New Ground”: Selected Writings of Hava Shapiro, editors and translators Carole B. Balin and Wendy I. Zierler present an English anthology of Shapiro’s late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Hebrew writings. The selection culls from her short fiction, feminist literary criticism, reportage and literary essays, as well as her diary and hundreds of letters. Shapiro chronicled, publicly and privately, such cataclysmic events as the Russian Revolution and both World Wars in addition to critical episodes in the Jewish past, including pogroms, mass migration, ruptures in traditional Jewish life, and the development of Zionism. A list of Shapiro’s intimates, whom she describes in both her diary and published reminiscences, reads like a “who’s who” of the Russian Haskalah, including Y. L. Peretz, Reuven Brainin, David Frischmann, Nahum Sokolov, Micha Yosef Berdischevsky, and Hayim Nahman Bialik. To further contextualize Shapiro’s writings, Balin and Zierler include a thorough introduction and translations of critical essays about Shapiro. Balin and Zierler’s Hebrew edition of Shapiro’s writing, Behikansi atah, which was published in Israel in 2008, brought the first broad attention and readership to Shapiro’s remarkable biography and writings. The translations in “To Tread New Ground,” which include previously uncollected materials, will be welcomed by English-speaking readers interested in Hebrew literature, East European Jewish history, and gender studies.




From Maimonides to Microsoft


Book Description

Jewish copyright law is a rich body of jurisprudence that developed in parallel with modern copyright laws and the book privileges that preceded them. Jewish copyright law owes its origins to a reprinting ban that the Rome rabbinic court issued for three books of Hebrew grammar in 1518. It continues to be applied today, notably in a rabbinic ruling outlawing pirated software, issued at Microsoft's request. In From Maimonides to Microsoft, Professor Netanel traces the historical development of Jewish copyright law by comparing rabbinic reprinting bans with secular and papal book privileges and by relaying the stories of dramatic disputes among publishers of books of Jewish learning and liturgy.. He describes each dispute in its historical context and examines the rabbinic rulings that sought to resolve it. Remarkably, the rabbinic reprinting bans and copyright rulings address some of the same issues that animate copyright jurisprudence today: Is copyright a property right or just a right to receive fair compensation? How long should copyrights last? What purposes does copyright serve? While Jewish copyright law has borrowed from its secular law counterpart at key junctures, it fashions strikingly different answers to those key questions. The story of Jewish copyright law also intertwines with the history of the Jewish book trade and with steadfast efforts of rabbinic leaders to maintain their authority to regulate that trade in the face of the dramatic erosion of Jewish communal autonomy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This book will thus be of considerable interest to students of Jewish law and history as well as copyright scholars and practitioners.




The Oaken Crucible


Book Description

It is the late seventh century, and the world is a violent place, steeped in blood and legend as Viking merchants traverse the Black Sea and war against neighboring tribes. Near the turbulent waters of the ancient Slavuta River, a boy named Azurr is born to a powerful jarl and a sorceress mother. Still an infant, his prophecy arrives in the middle of a storm, beneath the light of a burning tree. The innocence of his youth is short-lived, however, as the gods play a trick on him that leaves blood on his hands and lies behind his eyes. Thus initiated into the world of men secretly and unexpectedly, Azurr learns the ways of war, ever-seeking to impress his powerful father; however, he also remains curious about the powers of the gods, haunted by surreal dreams and befriending a mysterious merchant woman whose powers mirror those of his mother. As the ship of his life navigates him into foretold but unforeseen greatness, Azurr must travel over both land and sea, testing the limits of his mind, while spurning his berserker’s rage, and shaping his legacy within the dual realms of myth and steel. The Oaken Crucible, the first book in Ilya d’Angre’s The Zhertva Trilogy, is a spellbinding epic that will delight fans of mystery, fantasy, and Norse history and mythology. Through the mind and eyes of Azurr, our thoughtful and fierce protagonist, readers get a unique glimpse of a long-past era that influenced the shape of the Western world.




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