History of Religion Commons^™

P28. Canadian Jewish Women And Girls On The Homefront, 1939-1945, Jennifer Shaw

Western Research Forum

Background: The following presentation explores the roles and experiences of Canadian Jewish women on the Canadian homefront during World War Two. Despite knowing much about the lives of women in this time period in general, we do not know much about the experiences of particular groups, and how they differed from the majority of women.

Methods: Using first-hand accounts gathered from Canadian Jewish women, as well as archival materials, this presentation explores the different ways Jewish women and girls participated in the war effort and experienced the war years.

Results: While acknowledging that some of their experiences …

March 2017, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Purim Down with Haman; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Announcements; Book Group; Paul Goodman Changed my Life; Community Notices

Hebrew Typography: A Modern Progression Of Language Forms, Shayna Tova Blum

Faculty and Staff Publications

Influenced by studies in traditional Ashkenazi and Sephardi scripts. The typeface had been designed for the printing of the Koren Tanakh, a first edition printed Jewish Bible processed through an all-Jewish collaboration for the first time in centuries. Koren’s project was inspired by the revival of Hebrew initiated by Haskalah writers in the 18th century. Haskalah writers utilized the language and scripts of written and printed literary texts. Influenced by philosophical and political ideologies of the European Enlightenment, the Haskalah explored Jewish identity through language by defining the secular context through traditional Jewish symbolism and narratives. The Zionist movement of …

February 2017, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Musical and Mystical Tu B'Shavat; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Book Group; A 3-D View of Jewish History; Announcements; A Bissel of Maine; Community Notices

A Dialogue On Disaster: Antichrists In Jewish And Christian Apocalypses And Their Medieval Recensions, Natalie Latteri

Theology & Religious Studies

This paper examines textual and iconographic representations of antichrist personae in medieval Christian and Jewish manuscripts. Through a common language of polemics, Christians and Jews conflated antichrist personae to represent a more generalized category of apocalyptic antagonist that reflected the most significant temptations and threats to each respective religious community. As will be argued here, the greatest temptation and threat for Christians and Jews alike were those posed by members of the other religious group

Lost & Found: Order In The Court -- The Party Game, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context.

The Lost & Found games project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy.

The second game in the series, Lost & Found: Order in the Court …

Design-Based Research Mobile Gaming For Learning Jewish History, Tikkun Olam, And Civics, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

How can Design-Based Research (DBR) be used in the study of video games, religious literacy, and learning? DBR uses a variety of pragmatically selected mixed methods approaches to design learning interventions. Researchers, working with educators and learners, design and co-design learning artifacts and environments. They analyze those artifacts and environments as they are used by educators and learners, and then iterate based on mixed methods data analysis. DBR is suited for any "rich contextualized setting in which people have agency." (Hoadley 2013) such as formal or informal learning environments.

The case covered in this chapter is a mobile Augmented Reality …

On Saints, Sinners, And Sex In The Apocalypse Of Saint John And The Sefer Zerubbabel, Natalie Latteri

Theology & Religious Studies

The Apocalypse of St. John and the Sefer Zerubbabel [a.k.a Apocalypse of Zerubbabel] are among the most popular apocalypses of the Common Era. While the Johannine Apocalypse was written by a first-century Jewish-Christian author and would later be refracted through a decidedly Christian lens, and the Sefer Zerubbabel was probably composed by a seventh-century Jewish author for a predominantly Jewish audience, the two share much in the way of plot, narrative motifs, and archetypal characters. An examination of these commonalities and, in particular, how they intersect with gender and sexuality, suggests that these texts also may have functioned similarly as …

Who Really Said What? Mobile Historical Situated Documentary As Liminal Learning Space, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This article explores the complexities and affordances of historical representation that arose in the process of designing a mobile augmented reality video game for teaching history. The process suggests opportunities to push the historical documentary form in new ways. Specifically, the article addresses the shifting liminal space between historical fiction narrative, and historical interactive documentary narrative. What happens when primary sources, available for examination are placed inside of a historically inspired narrative, one that hews closely to the events, but creates drama through dialogues between player and historical figure? In this relatively new field of interactive historical situated documentary, how …

Hidden Jews Of The Balkans, Joshua A. Futtersak

Capstones

The history of the Jewish people is one filled with trials, triumphs, and often devastation. Many believe themselves to be educated in Jewish history, but we often have blind spots in our research and schooling. This project aims to look at just one region of Jewish history to tell the stories that are not usually told.

The Balkan region is incredibly diverse in its ethnicities and cultures. The history of the Jews in this region expresses that diversity. This project focuses on the unique stories of the Jewish communities in Bosnia, Serbia, and Greece. These stories of survival and perseverance …

December 2016, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Chanukah Party; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Book Group; Announcements; Community Notices

Eleff On Katz, 'Bringing Zion Home: Israel In American Jewish Culture, 1948-1967', Zev Eleff

Hebrew Theological College Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Review Of Muslims And Jews In France. History Of A Conflict By Maud S. Mandel, Bryan Turner

Publications and Research

The mood of European scholarship with respect to the recognition and integration of Islam is typically pessimistic. The rise of anti-immigrant and anti-Islam political parties – Golden Dawn in Greece, the Northern League in Italy, Marine Le Penn and the National Front in France, and the English defense league in Britain – have exposed a hitherto hidden or ignored under-current of resentment against foreigners. In the context of these developments, Maud Mandel’s study of Muslims and Jews in France is a welcome corrective to the dominant focus on anti-Islam in the academic literature and in the popular media. The historical …

October 2016, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Simchat Torah; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Book Group; Announcements; Community Notices

September 2016, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Selichot Service; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Announcements; Book Group; Women of Achievement Award; Community Notices

Emotions And Business In A Trans-Mediterranean Jewish Household, Francesca Bregoli

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

These five excerpts come from two letter books that belonged to Joseph Franchetti (ca. 1720-ca. 1794), a successful Jewish merchant of Mantuan origins based in Tunis. At the time of the correspondence (1776-1790), Franchetti was a chief partner in the Salomone Enriches & Joseph Franchetti Company, a family-based trading firm with interests in Tunis, Livorno, and Smyrna. In the 1770s and 1780s, the core of Franchetti’s business was the sale of Tunisian chechias. These hats, made in Tunis with European wool acquired from Livorno, were highly sought after in the Ottoman Empire, with Smyrna serving as key distribution …

Fear In The Archive: Police Dossiers And The History Of Emotions In Old Regime France, Jeffrey Freedman

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The following document is a police dossier drawn from the Y series of the Archives Nationales. Compiled by a neighborhood commissioner named Louis- Pierre Regnard, the dossier contains testimony pertaining to the case of François Fromard, a journeyman quarry worker who hanged himself in his apartment in a working-class neighborhood of Paris on 29 May 1750. According to the testimony of his wife and neighbors, Fromard saw police agents everywhere and, before taking his own life, had become convinced that he was going to be arrested and imprisoned. No one, however, gave any indication that the police were really pursuing …

The Quality Of Mercy Strained--Regret And Repentance In Early Modern Law, David Myers

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The following texts come from a trial of Catherine Mundt, tried in 1693, for infanticide, and interrogated under torture. The records are preserved in the Stadt Archiv Braunschweig.

“For We Jews Are Merciful”: Emotions And Communal Identity, Elisheva Carlebach

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

Assigning character traits to national groups was a key pastime in the early modern period, part of a process of consolidation of European national identities. This presentation examines the way emotional characteristics were assigned to emerging national groups. In particular, it focuses on the way in which Jewish communal sources employed language and terms of emotion to characterize Jewish communities. Internally the language often functioned to call notice to an ideal that the community was failing to live up to.

The following texts are excerpts from Jewish communal records, as noted for each excerpt

A Short History Of Horror: Early Modern Jews And Their Monsters, Iris Idelson-Shein

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The following sources offer a short survey of one particularly troubling source of fear—and indeed horror—in the early modern period, namely—the womb. A mysterious, uniquely feminine organ, for centuries the womb has been the stuff of fantasies and nightmares. It has been imagined at one and the same time as a haven and a hell, a nest and a tomb, a source of pleasure and pain, life and illness.

The following excerpts come from different genres, spaces, and languages. The first two excerpts are taken from two medical compendiums written around the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The …

For The Love Of God: Spiritual Purpose And Mastering Emotions In The Pietistic Writings Of Moses Hayim Luzzatt, David Sclar

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

During the early modern period, Jews lived with an assumed religious tenet to love their God. Biblical texts, including verses used in the liturgical Shema, explicitly commanded believers to wholly and actively do so. In the twelfth century, Maimonides had described a love of God driven by rational adoration of the Torah (and God’s works), which, appropriately realized, would result in a sense of intellectual and emotional fulfillment. Early modern kabbalists took the notion further by desiring to commune with the living God (devekut), channeling all of their faculties, including emotions, towards the spiritual. Both conceptions idealized love …

Rebbe Nachman Of Bratslav's Teachings On Melancholy And Joy, Lawrence Fine

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The several texts presented here are from the teachings of Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav (1772-1810), great-grandson of the Ba’al Shem Tov, and one of the very most significant figures in the history of early Hasidism. They are from part two (tinyana) of Nachman’s most important published collection of teachings, Liqqutei Moharan. These passages each address the subject of melancholy—marah shechora in Nahman’s language--as well as its antidote, joy, simchah. While the avoidance of sadness, and the cultivation of joy, are common motifs in classical Hasidism, Rebbe Nachman’s discussion of them deserves special attention in any …

Emotions In The Margins: Reading Toledot Yeshu After The Affective Turn, Sarit Kattan Gribetz

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

In 826 C.E., Agobard, bishop of Lyon, published a treatise entitled De Judaicis superstitionibus, detailing and ridiculing the ‘superstitions’ of the Jews. The details Agobard recounts make clear that the bishop is referring to a medieval Jewish parody of the story of Jesus’ life, known as Toledot Yeshu (Life of Jesus), composed in Aramaic sometime before the second half of the eighth century and later translated into Hebrew. Toledot Yeshu tells the story of Jesus’ life in a biting, vulgar tone. It was a text composed and used by Jews as an anti-Christian polemic, and as an internal document …

Emotions And Preaching, Sara Lipton

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

Jacques de Vitry (b. ca. 1160, d. 1240) was one of the most famous preachers of the high Middle Ages. Born in northern France, he studied at the University of Paris, and in 1210 became a canon regular in the diocese of Liège. Jacques’s most popular collection, the Sermones vulgares vel ad status, contains sermons recorded in Latin but designed to be preached in the vulgar tongue to laypeople, and arranged according the social class and profession of the audience. The sermon transcribed and translated here appears in Jacques’s less popular collection—the Sermones dominicales et festivales. Less popular, because the …

Emw 2016: History Of Emotions/Emotions In History, Fordham University

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The 2016 Early Modern Workshop on “History of Emotions/Emotions in History” was held at Fordham University.

Alongside earlier “turns” such as the linguistic and the cultural, an “emotional turn” has provided historians with a fresh perspective to consider the past. Emotion structures human experience. But emotions are shaped by languages of expression that can have ramifications for human thought and behavior. Historians pursuing research about emotions tend to follow one of two tacks: either to explore emotions as an object of inquiry in its own right (did people in the past “feel” differently than we do today?) or to use …

August 2016, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

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Contents: Kiddush Levana; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Announcements; L-A Jewish Federation; A Bissel of Maine; Community Notices

Eleven Non-Royal Jeremianic Figures Strongly Identified In Authentic, Contemporaneous Inscriptions, Lawrence J. Mykytiuk

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Using established criteria, this article identifies nine persons mentioned in the book of Jeremiah and two high priests in 1 Chronicles, all of whom were contemporaries of Jeremiah. These persons are identified with virtual certainty in inscriptions of known authenticity contemporaneous with that prophet. Some these inscriptions came to light as recently as 2005 and 2008.

Authentic bullae from excavations in the City of David refer to several Hebrew people named in the Bible. These are: Gemaryahu the king’s minister and his father Shaphan the scribe, Yehukal the king’s minister and his father Shelemyahu, Gedalyahu the king’s minister and his …

July 2016, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Maine-ly Jewish Storytelling Festival; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Announcements; Book Group; Community Notices

June 2016, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Shavout; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Book Group; Announcements; Communit Notices

May 2016, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Lag B'Omer, From the Rabbi; President's Message; Announcements; Book Group; Community Notices