Recently added articles from Shofar:
Displaced: the memoir of Eliezer Gruenbaum displaced: the memoir of Eliezer Gruenbaum, kapo at Birkenau--translation and commentary.(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... <Pre> Eliezer Gruenbaum, the communist son of Yitzhak Gruenbaum, who was a prominent leader of Polish Jewry between the two world wars and Israel's first interior minister, was a kapo in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Eliezer survived only to die fighting in the war for Israeli ...
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were walking on the way: El caballero andante and the book of radiance (Sefer HaZohar).(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... <Pre> That Miguel de Cervantes was quite likely a converso and that his masterpiece Don Quixote explores quintessential converso concerns is now widely accepted. This article extends the converso hypothesis through an examination of literary and phenomenological similarities ...
"And G-d said": language, translation, and Scripture in two works by Walter Benjamin.(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... <Pre> In the works "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man" and the better-known "The Task of the Translator," Benjamin explores the relationships between languages, and between language and human beings. In this essay, I work first to articulate Benjamin's theory of ...
The making and re-making of Jewish-American literary history.(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... <Pre> Until ten to fifteen years ago, Jewish American literary history was construed and described in overwhelmingly mid-twentieth-century masculine terms. As a corrective to this longstanding trend, this essay undertakes to "remake" Jewish American literary history in feminist ...
Jews dreaming of acceptance: from the Brill Building to suburbia with love.(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... <Pre> The Brill Building sound refers to the music produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s by composers of popular music associated with 1619 and 1650 Broadway. The vast majority of these writers were Jewish. I argue that the romance in the lyrics of these songs can be ...
Reflections on Jesus: review essay.('The Historical Jesus in Context ', 'Jesus in the Talmud', 'The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus')(Book review)
Jan 01, 2009; ... The twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich defined religion as a system of beliefs, rituals, symbols, and myths directed towards an ultimate concern of a society. Religion has meaning in the sense of absolute interpretation of the central values of a society, and it has force as sacred ...
Israelite Religions: An Archaeological and Biblical Survey.(Book review)
Jan 01, 2009; ... Israelite Religions: An Archaeological and Biblical Survey, by Richard S. Hess. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007. 432pp. $34.99. This volume in the reviewer's humble opinion is one of the best studies on the religion(s) of ancient Israel that has appeared in recent years ....
Jewish Babylonia Between Persia and Roman Palestine.(Book review)
Jan 01, 2009; ... Jewish Babylonia Between Persia and Roman Palestine, by Richard Kalmin, Oxford University Press, 2006. 285 pp. $65.00. Richard Kalmin has now given us another collection of his studies of Babylonian rabbinic culture, and while some of the themes are familiar, he also has tackled ...
The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature.(Book review)
Jan 01, 2009; ... The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, edited by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Martin S, Jaffee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 412 pp. $24.99. This important collection of fifteen essays by an international array of major scholars ...
Jews or Christians? The Followers of Jesus in Search of Their Own Identity.(Book review)
Jan 01, 2009; ... Jews or Christians? The Followers of Jesus in Search of Their Own Identity, by Giorgio Jossa, translated from the Italian by Molly Rogers. Wissen-schaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 202. Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006. 175 pp. [euro]69.00. Giorgio Jossa addresses the ...
The Jews of Khazaria.(Book review)
Jan 01, 2009; ... The Jews of Khazaria, by Kevin Alan Brook. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. 317 pp. $44.00. The Khazar khagan was the Prester John of the Jewish diaspora towards the end of the first millennium, above all for the Jewish intelligentsia of Umayyad Spain, one of whom ...
Converts, Heretics, and Lepers: Maimonides and the Outsider.(Book review)
Jan 01, 2009; ... Converts, Heretics, and Lepers: Maimonides and the Outsider, by James A. Diamond. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. 360 pp. $35.00. When University of Notre Dame Press asked me for a blurb for this remarkable book, I responded that it consisted of "a series ...
Jews in the Early Modern World.(Book review)
Jan 01, 2009; ... Jews in the Early Modern World, by Dean Phillip Bell. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008. 301 pp. $79.00 (c); $29.95 (p). Dean Phillip Bell's book is an overview of the history of the Jews in the early modern period, defined, somewhat arbitrarily, as 1400-1700. The ...
Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843-1933.(Book review)
Jan 01, 2009; ... Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843-1933, by Robin Judd. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007. 283 pp. $45.00. When writing about an aspect of the German-Jewish experience that does not have to do with ...
Crime, Jews and News: Vienna 1895-1914.(Book review)
Jan 01, 2009; ... Crime, Jews and News: Vienna 1895-1914, by Daniel Mark Vyleta. Austrian and Habsburg Studies, Vol. 8. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. 254 pp. $80.00. Daniel Vyleta's book is innovative as it looks at perceptions of crime and criminals through the lens of criminal trial ...
Dark Images, Secret Hints: Benjamin, Scholem, Molitor and the Jewish Tradition.(Book review)
Jan 01, 2009; ... Dark Images, Secret Hints: Benjamin, Scholem, Molitor and the Jewish Tradition, by Bram Mertens. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. 278 pp. $67.95. Bram Mertens' Dark Images, Secret Hints: Benjamin, Scholem, Molitor and the Jewish Tradition traces a path readers of Benjamin and Scholem ...
Stefan Zweig Reconsidered: New Perspectives on his Literary and Biographical Writings.(Book review)
Jan 01, 2009; ... Stefan Zweig Reconsidered: New Perspectives on his Literary and Biographical Writings, edited by Mark H. Gelber. Tubingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 2007. 225 pp. [euro]62.00. Mark H. Gelber is to be congratulated for editing this essay collection on Stefan Zweig's relationship to his ...
Shards of Memory: Narratives of Holocaust Survival.(Book review)
Jan 01, 2009; ... Shards of Memory: Narratives of Holocaust Survival, edited by Yehudi Lindeman. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2007. 256 pp. $49.95. The photograph of Rena S. appears to be that of an ordinary teenage girl from the early 1940s. But as we read on, we learn her harrowing story ...
Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father's German Village.(Book review)
Jan 01, 2009; ... Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father's German Village, by Mimi Schwartz. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. 250 pp. $24.95. In Good Neighbors, Bad Times Mimi Schwartz sounds the depths of human relations to open up a depth dimension of human history. She ...
Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust.(Book review)
Jan 01, 2009; ... Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust, edited by Dorota Glowacka and Joanna Zylinska. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. 337 pp. $45.00. Memory of the Holocaust and its influence on Polish-Jewish relations belong to the ...