Jewish Studies Commons^™

Teddy Levine Scrapbook, Wendy Miller, Sarah Miller Arnon, Julie Miller-Soros

Levine Family of Waterville

Theodore Nathan Levine was born into the family of Sarah Ida and William Levine in 1894 and died on February 9, 1927. The scrapbook contains family memories as handed down, letters, photographs, holograph high school notebooks and a paper on Books and Libraries.

The Prophet Elijah In Jewish And Christian Traditions, The Institute Of Judaeo-Christian Studies

Teshuvah Institute Papers

This publication focuses on the themes of faith and prayer that are linked with Elijah and with the land of Israel and features the following scholalry contributions:

"Elijah in Light of Rabbinc and Early Christian Sources" by Rabbi Asher Finkel

"Elijah Among the Carmelites: Adopting and Honoring the Father" by the Reverend James Boyce

"Elijah the Peacemaker: Jewish and Early Christian Interpretations of Malachi 3:23-24" by the Reverend Lawrence E. Frizzell

A Fourteenth-Century Augustinian Approach To The Jews In Riccoldo Da Monte Croce’S Ad Nationes Orientales, Lydia M. Walker

Comparative Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

Polish Anti-Defamation Committee, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Polish American Congress Anti-Defamation Committee of California (later renamed the Polish American Defense Committee) successfully advocated for the inclusion of the treatment of Poles during World War II in California's model curriculum on Human Rights and Genocide. The group was also vocal in criticizing authors, films, subject, and newspaper articles which they felt presented a biased view of Polish-Jewish relations.

The Port Of Livorno And Its "Nazione Ebrea" In The Eighteenth Century: Economic Utility And Political Reforms, Francesca Bregoli

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Melbourne's Yiddishists, Deborah Gurt

University Faculty and Staff Publications

Carlton, the gritty inner-city section of Melbourne, served as a first point of entry for many new immigrants to Australia, my father among them. It also was a center of intellectual activity emblematic of the emerging Jewish culture in Australia in the 1930s and 40s. Its cheap rents and proximity to public transit and the city center made it a logical place for immigrants to cluster as they strove to secure their footing in Australia. The immigrants stuck together for support, companionship, and common language, as the cultural gap yawned between new Polish and German immigrants and most established Australian …

Isaac Edward Kiev: Early Leader In American Judaica Librarianship, Amy F. Stempler

Publications and Research

Isaac Edward Kiev (1905–1975), former Chief Librarian of New York’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, spent a lifetime facilitating Jewish research. This article, based on the author’s Master’s thesis on Kiev, focuses on his contributions to the founding of Jewish book and library organizations during the American post-war era, including the Association of Jewish Libraries, Jewish Book Council of America, Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc., and numerous Jewish book foundations in the United States and Israel. In addition to providing insight into the creation of these associations, the article illustrates the parallel development of the fields of Judaica librarianship and …

The Legacy Of Abraham Joshua Heschel, Robert Erlewine

Scholarship

Abraham Joshua Heschel was a singular figure in American Jewish history and, indeed, in Jewish thought. Born in 1907 and reared in the world of Polish Hasidim, Heschel studied philosophy and Biblical criticism in Berlin before becoming a pivotal figure in American Jewish and non- Jewish religious life, galvanizing Americans on issues of social justice. The conditions that produced a figure capable of such depth and breadth of traditional Jewish learning and secular studies seem no longer possible in our age, focused as it is on hyper-specialization. Heschel shared a vision of Judaism at once profoundly rooted in tradition and …

Lutheran Christian Hebraism In The Time Of Solomon Glassius (1593-1656), Stephen G. Burnett

Department of Classics and Religious Studies: Faculty Publications

Lutheran Hebrew scholarship in the era of Orthodoxy has suffered the same kind of scholarly neglect as theology from this period. A few Hebraists such as Wilhelm Schickard or Wolfgang Ratke have been the subjects of monographs or collections of articles, while others receive mention in university histories or books related to Jewish-Christian relations in early modern Germany. Only within the past decade have scholars addressed this facet of Reformation-era Christian Hebraism. Johann Anselm Steiger examined the use that Johann Gerhard and Solomon Glassius made of post-biblical Jewish literature, while Kenneth G. Appold has stressed the pivotal role that Hebrew …

The Song Is Not The Same: Jews And American Popular Music, Josh Kun

The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual Review

There has been a long-standing relationship between Jewish Americans and the world of American popular music. The essays in this volume blend surveys of music making as a whole with profiles of single artists. This is volume 8 of the annual publication, The Jewish Role in American Life (ISSN 1934-7529), produced by the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life at the University of Southern California.

Review Of The Book Jewish Responses To Persecution, Vol. I: 1933-1938, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Review of the book Jewish responses to persecution, Vol. I: 1933-1938.

Hermann Cohen, Maimonides, And The Jewish Virtue Of Humility, Robert Erlewine

Scholarship

This paper explores Hermann Cohen’s engagement with, and appropriation of, Maimonides to refute the common assumption that Cohen’s endeavor was to harmonize Judaism with Western culture. Exploring the changes of Cohen’s conception of humility from Ethik des reinen Willens to the Ethics of Maimonides and Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, this paper highlights the centrality of the collective Jewish mission to bear witness against the dominant order of Western civilization and philosophy in Cohen’s Jewish thought. This article was published as part of a special issue of the Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, "Ancients and …

Rites Of Passage: How Today’S Jews Celebrate, Commemorate, And Commiserate, Leonard Greenspoon

Studies in Jewish Civilization

Scholars tend to call them “rites of passage.” Most people prefer to speak of them as life-cycle events or milestones. Jews like to speak of simchas, when there is something (a birth, Bar or Bat Mitzvah, or a wedding) to celebrate. These are key moments for individuals and for the families and communities of which they are a part.

This volume offers new insights into rituals as old as the Hebrew Bible and as recent as the twenty-first century, in contexts as familiar as the American Midwest and as exotic as Karaism. It examines and frequently affirms some of the …

A Rabbi And Twelve-Hundred Missionaries Walk Into A Conference: Philo-Semitism And Anti-Semitism At Edinburgh, 1910, George Faithful

Collected Faculty Scholarship

Had a rabbi attended the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910, that rabbi’s ambivalence may have been equaled only by that of the delegates. This presentation will demonstrate how the conference’s first commission report expressed both philo- and anti-Semitism, affirming the value of the world’s Jewish population while portraying it as a threat. This juxtaposition reveals the conference as ahead of its time, in some regards, and an event rooted in the values of its time, in others.

~Presentation excerpt~

Sobrevivientes Del Holocausto En Argentina: La Importancia De Sus Testimonios = Holocaust Survivors In Argentina: The Importance Of Their Testimonies, Jessica Michelle Katz

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

After World War II ended and Nazi’s prisoners were released from concentration camps, labor camps, and ghettos, many refugees immigrated to Argentina, either to live with a relative who had emigrated before the war or because the language was similar, or because life was easier there, among other reasons. Today there are around 800 Holocaust survivors living in Argentina, 450 of them just in Buenos Aires. Despite the efforts of the testimonial project done by Steven Spielberg and the Shoah Visual History Foundation to record oral histories of survivors around the world, including many in Argentina, there is still a …

Merchants And Rabbis - The Family Of Josko Of Lviv, Jerzy Mazur

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

Josko of Lviv was one of the most important Jewish entrepreneurs in the late medieval Poland, specifically in the eastern provinces of Polish Kingdom, namely the voievodships of Russia and Lublin. Jossko engaged in the number of profitable commercial activities, but achieved real prominence as the leaseholder of royal customs in such important urban centers as Lviv, Lublin, Chelm and Belz. His successful service to Kazimierz Jagiellon, John Olbracht and Alexander Jagiellon became the point of contention during the session of Polish Diet in Lublin in 1505. In this year Polish parliament demanded that Josko would be removed from his …

A Spiritual Community In The Social World: Lurianic Notions Of Identity And Inter-Subjectivity Within The Community, Assaf Tamari

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The importance of Lurianic Kabbalah to the context of early modern Jewish religiosity has been recognized almost unanimously. However, only in recent years scholars acknowledge its highly embodied nature, the specific historical community which lies at the heart of its religious interest, i.e. the Lurianic fellowship. The present presentation will discuss some of the radical notions of identity within the community developed in the writings of Lurianic Kabbalah. Based on its highly complex anthropological theory, and especially its theories of soul transmigration and soul interrelations, Lurianic Kabbalah sees individual action and identity as highly dependent upon the spiritual “soul community” …

Conjugal Disputes At The Jewish Court Of 18th Century Altona, Noa Shashar

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

Disputes between married couples in 18th century were sometimes brought before the Jewish court ( the Beit-Din). Analysis of protocols of session which dealt with such disputes reveals facts about tensions caused by contemporary family structure and marriage customs as well as about the means which the court applied to enforce policy. The texts presented here are excerpts from one of the protocol books of the Jewish court of Altona. Altona, at the time subject to the Danish King, shared institutions with the neighboring Jewish communities in Hamburg and Wandsbeck, a union which produced several kinds of documents covering a …

Layered Networks: Functioning Across Communities, Shuki Ecker

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

A considerable part of Rabbi Abraham Joseph Canette s book includes autobiographical material. It sheds light on the life of an orphaned son who became a travelling rabbi. He describes the circumstances of his life in Safed, Jerusalem, Aleppo, Candia, Venice, Livorno, Algiers and Constantinople, and praises his benefactors and patrons in each. While much of his writing is stylized praise for these individuals, he also portrays his own personal life in great detail. His life story and the networks it reveals offer a view of individuals in communities and between communities. I intend to focus on several overlapping networks …

Communication And Community : Multiplex Networks In The 18th Century Sephardi Diaspora, Evelyne Oliel Grausz

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

In many aspects, the Sephardi diaspora functioned as a combination of overlapping circulations and networks, its many levels of communication and interaction involving family ties, economic partnerships, and official intercommunal links. Whereas the question of intercommunal networks has recently attracted some topical studies, little attention has been paid to the articulation between these various levels of circulation and interaction. I propose to explore this idea of a multiplex diaspora through a selection of documents emanating from the Amsterdam and London Sephardic community, essentially letters, addressed to Bordeaux, Safed, Surinam and Ferrara : these documents describe several paradigmatic situations of interaction …