You are here

Home › JS Events › New & Noteworthy ›

New and Noteworthy

Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa

Indiana University Press is pleased to announce the recent publication of:

Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa
Edited by Emily Benichou Gottreich and Daniel J. Schroeter

"Opening new avenues for research on the Jews of the Maghrib, this volume is an important contribution to both Jewish studies and Maghrib studies. . . . [It] raises a whole range of questions about how we might rethink modern Jewish history." —Matthias Lehmann, author of Ladino Rabbinic Literature and Ottoman Sephardic Culture

With only a small remnant of Jews still living in the Maghrib at the beginning of the 21st century, the vast majority of today's inhabitants of North Africa have never met a Jew. Yet as this volume reveals, Jews were an integral part of the North African landscape from antiquity. Scholars from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Israel, and the United States shed new light on Jewish life and Muslim-Jewish relations in North Africa through the lenses of history, anthropology, language, and literature. The history and life stories told in this book illuminate the close cultural affinities and poignant relationships between Muslims and Jews, and the uneasy coexistence that both united and divided them throughout the history of the Maghrib.

Indiana Series in Sephardi and Mizrahi Studies
386 pp., 9 b&w illus.
cloth 978-0-253-35509-6 $80.00
paper 978-0-253-22225-1 $27.95

For more information, visit:
http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/catalog/product_info.php?isbn=978-0-253-2...

For Instructors:
If you are interested in adopting this book for course use, please see our exam copy policy:
http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/pages.php?pID=16&CDpath=10

Robert Alter - The Wisdom Books

New Book just released by faculty member Robert Alter -

Here in Robert Alter's bold new translation are some of the most magnificent works in world literature. The astounding poetry in the Book of Job is restored to its powerful ancient meanings and rhythms. The creation account in its Voice from the Whirlwind is beautiful and incendiary. By contrast, a serene fatalism suffuses Ecclesiastes with a quiet beauty, and the pithy maxims of Proverbs impart a worldly wisdom that is satirically shrewd. Each of these books addresses the universal wisdom that the righteous thrive and the wicked suffer in a rational moral order; together they are essential to the ancient canon that is the Hebrew Bible.

First time in paperback: “One of the most ambitious literary projects of this or any age.”—Adam Kirsch, New Republic

Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award for a poem on the Jewish Experience

Two doctoral program students participate in twenty-fifth annual Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award for a poem on the Jewish Experience

Caption: Dan Bellm, second-prize winner; Yosefa Raz, judge; Anna Elena Torres, third-prize winner; and Jenny Factor, third prize winner.

On Sunday, September 25th, the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize was awarded to four poems on the Jewish experience. The prize was administered this year by the Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union; Paul Hamburg, Judaica Librarian at the Bancroft Library and the Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art; Zeek Magazine; and the Magnes Collection. One of the judges was Yosefa Raz, poetry editor of Zeek and a doctoral student in the JDP, and one of the winners (in a competition where anonymity was closely guarded) was Anna Torres, another doctoral student in the JDP. Judges and winners read from their poetry in the Morrison Room at the Doe Library.

Erich Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity

New Book from faculty member and department director Erich Gruen - Prevalent among classicists today is the notion that Greeks, Romans, and Jews enhanced their own self-perception by contrasting themselves with the so-called Other--Egyptians, Phoenicians, Ethiopians, Gauls, and other foreigners--frequently through hostile stereotypes, distortions, and caricature. In this provocative book, Erich Gruen demonstrates how the ancients found connections rather than contrasts, how they expressed admiration for the achievements and principles of other societies, and how they discerned--and even invented--kinship relations and shared roots with diverse peoples.

Gruen shows how the ancients incorporated the traditions of foreign nations, and imagined blood ties and associations with distant cultures through myth, legend, and fictive histories. He looks at a host of creative tales, including those describing the founding of Thebes by the Phoenician Cadmus, Rome's embrace of Trojan and Arcadian origins, and Abraham as ancestor to the Spartans. Gruen gives in-depth readings of major texts by Aeschylus, Herodotus, Xenophon, Plutarch, Julius Caesar, Tacitus, and others, in addition to portions of the Hebrew Bible, revealing how they offer richly nuanced portraits of the alien that go well beyond stereotypes and caricature.

Providing extraordinary insight into the ancient world, this controversial book explores how ancient attitudes toward the Other often expressed mutuality

Boyarin: The Jewish Gospels - Coming Soon

In July 2008 a front-page story in the New York Times reported on the discovery of an ancient Hebrew tablet, dating from before the birth of Jesus, which predicted a Messiah who would rise from the dead after three days. Commenting on this startling discovery at the time, noted Talmud scholar Daniel Boyarin argued that “some Christians will find it shocking—a challenge to the uniqueness of their theology.”

Guiding us through a rich tapestry of new discoveries and ancient scriptures, The Jewish Gospels makes the powerful case that our conventional understandings of Jesus and of the origins of Christianity are wrong. In Boyarin’s scrupulously illustrated account, the coming of the Messiah was fully imagined in the ancient Jewish texts. Jesus, moreover, was embraced by many Jews as this person, and his core teachings were not at all a break from Jewish beliefs and teachings. Jesus and his followers, Boyarin shows, were simply Jewish. What came to be known as Christianity came much later, as religious and political leaders sought to impose a new religious orthodoxy that was not present at the time of Jesus’s life.

In the vein of Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels, here is a brilliant new work that will break open some of our culture’s most cherished assumptions.

Belser brings interdisciplary scholarship to Harvard

Rabbi Julia Watts Belser (Ph.D. '08) will be Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Jewish Ethics at Harvard Divinity School's Women’s Studies in Religion Program for 2011-12. She earned her Ph.D. in the Joint Doctoral Program in Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union and the University of California, Berkeley.

Belser, who is Assistant Professor of Judaism at Missouri State University, strives to teach classic Jewish texts in ways that speak to contemporary longings. While at HDS, she will set contemporary postcolonial, queer, womanist, and feminist theorists and poets in provocative conversation with the Babylonian Talmud to articulate a critical Jewish feminist ethics that responds to gender and queer violence, poverty, sexual exploitation, and ecological catastrophe. She is currently completing her book, Narrative Dialectics: Theology and Ecology in Bavli Taanit.

She co-authored A Health Handbook for Women with Disabilities, distributed to grassroots groups and health workers around the world. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Midstream: A Journal of Jewish Thought, The Journal of Women and Religion, Kalliope: A Journal of Women's Art and Literature, and Fireweed: A Feminist Quarterly.

more

February

M T W T F S S
 
 
1
 
2
 
3
 
4
 
5
 
6
 
7
 
8
 
9
 
10
 
11
 
12
 
13
 
14
 
15
 
16
 
17
 
18
 
19
 
20
 
21
 
22
 
23
 
24
 
25
 
26
 
27
 
28
 
29
 
 
 
 
 
Website: dmurray@berkeley.edu | UC Berkeley | College of Letters & Sciences | Log In | © 2011 Regents of the University of California