Bøker utgitt av Academic Studies Press

The Vekhi (Landmarks) symposium (1909) is one of the most famous publications in Russian intellectual and political history. Its fame rests on the critique it offers of the phenomenon of the Russian intelligentsia in the period of crisis that led to the 1917 Russian Revolution. It was published as a polemical response to the revolution of 1905, the failed outcome of which was deemed by all the Vekhi contributors to exemplify and illuminate fatal philosophical, political, and psychological flaws in the revolutionary intelligentsia that had sought it. Landmarks Revisited offers a new and comprehensive assessment of the symposium and its legacy from a variety of disciplinary perspectives by leading scholars in their fields. It will be of compelling interest to all students of Russian history, politics, and culture, and the impact of these on the wider world.

Examines the rabbinic thought as exemplified by Maimonides. This work is in the Hebrew rhetorical tradition of melisa. The main text in five sections - The God of Israel, The Books of Israel, The Governance of Israel, The Memory of Israel, and The Folly of Israel. It includes numerous references to orient the reader.

Written at the height of Stalin's first "e;five-year plan"e; for the industrialization of Soviet Russia and the parallel campaign to collectivize Soviet agriculture, Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit registers a dissonant mixture of utopian longings and despair. Furthermore, it provides essential background to Platonov's parody of the mainstream Soviet "e;production"e; novel, which is widely recognized as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian prose. In addition to an overview of the work's key themes, it discusses their place within Platonov's oeuvre as a whole, his troubled relations with literary officialdom, the work's ideological and political background, and key critical responses since the work's first publication in the West in 1973.

Divided into three sections, this work explains how the concepts and practices of traditional European Judaism were adapted to North American culture beginning in the late nineteenth century. Part I focuses on the ideas and activities of Cyrus Adler (1863-1940), one of the most prominent leaders of the traditionalist United States Jewish community in his era. The issues in these essays include the origins of American Jewish history as a field of study, the Kehilla experiments of the early twentieth century, and the relationship between the Jewish Theological Seminary and Orthodox Judaism. Part II deals with the beginnings of Hasidic Judaism in North America prior to the Second World War. It also includes several studies investigating the shaping of the worldview of Orthodox Judaism in contemporary North America. Part III examines the issue of contemporary American Jewish attitudes toward evolution and intelligent design.

Isaak Babel' (1894-1940) is arguably one of the greatest modern short story writers of the early twentieth century. Yet his life and work are shrouded in the mystery of who Babel' was-an Odessa Jew who wrote in Russian, who came from one of the most vibrant centers of east European Jewish culture, and who all his life loved Yiddish and the stories of Sholom Aleichem This is the first book in English to study the intertextuality of Babel''s work. It looks at Babel''s cultural identity as a case study in the contradictions and tensions of literary influence, personal loyalties, and ideological constraint. The complex and often ambivalent relations between the two cultures inevitably raise controversial issues that touch on the reception of Babel' and other Jewish intellectuals in Russian literature, as well as the "e;Jewishness"e; of their work.

"Using Vladimir Nabokov as its 'case study,' the book approaches translation as a crucial avenue into literary history and theory, philosophy and interpretation. The book attempts to bring together issues in translation and the shift in Nabokov studies from an earlier emphasis on the 'metaliterary' to the more recent 'metaphysical' approach

Based on a series of lectures the author gave in Mexico City in February 2010.

Lives Lived and Lost stands at the intersection of biography, autobiography, memory and history. It narrates a mother's and daughter's separate perspectives of their experiences before, during, and after World War II. The book is also an ethnography of lives of women and children during a transformative period in Eastern Europe and opens a window to the crucial events of that epoch. The challenge of the narratives provides the urgency of the story and the richness of the historical record. It is also an unforgettable story of love, loss, and longing for family engulfed by war. The book will resonate with those interested in the lives of individual women and children; scholars, and students of history, gender, and religion, especially Hasidism, and with mainstream readers in this and future generations unfamiliar with life during the first half of the twentieth century in Europe.

This book offers psychodynamic studies of Holocaust survivors and their families in Israel and the Diaspora. It is a most moving account of the desperate struggles of these survivors to overcome their horrendous experiences in the ghettos and concentration camps and their subsequent attempts to revive their lives after the Second World War. Hillel Klein, the author, was himself one of these Holocaust survivors. Later, as a psychoanalyst, Klein interviewed survivors in Israel and the United States of America and evaluated the consequences of the Holocaust and its aftermath from a psychoanalytic point of view which, together with his own memories contained in this book, gives it a special depth and contributes to making it a most moving account.

Michah Gottlieb explores Jewish approaches to the faith-reason debate through detailed analyses of Jewish thinkers from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries including Judah Halevi, Maimonides, Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, Samson Raphael Hirsch, and Leo Strauss.

This book explores the macro and micro social contexts in which alternative and bio-medicine co-exist in Israel. It includes a history of alternative health care in Israel and analysis of current policies and dilemmas regarding different forms of health care, and provides an in-depth analysis of medical professionals who have added alternative health care to their repertoire of professional skills in their practice settings in hospitals and community clinics. The heterogeneity of patient populations in Israel makes it possible to explore attitudes of different cultural groups toward alternative health care. These include Jewish immigrants from different countries as well as Bedouin and other Arab groups. Since alternative medicine is a growing part of the overall health care system in many countries, the book provides insights gained from the Israeli experience regarding its co-existence along with conventional medicine-to a broad spectrum of health professionals, policy makers and laypersons.

This volume contains fifteen articles, many in Hebrew, by leading scholars. The articles cover a broad range of subjects, from an analysis of biblical narratives as expounded in the midrash and by medieval commentators, through a discussion of Maimonides¿ attitude towards midrash and an analysis of talmudic aggadah as expounded by oriental scholars, to polemics concerning the attitude to aggadah in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, and culminating with an analysis of interpretation of aggadah by latter-day talmudic scholars. There are also articles about the essence of aggadah, its literary conventions and its relation to law, and two articles which deal with a passage in the Passover Haggadah. The participants include: E. Eizenman, N. Ilan, G. Blidstein, Y. Blau, M. Bregman, A. Grossman, H. Davidson, C. Horowitz, O. Viskind-Elper, H. Mak, A. Atzmon, A. Kadari, A. Rozenak, M. Shmidman, and J. Tabory.

Biography and Memory discusses the return of Jews to their places of birth in Poland. A biographical urge to come full circle often leads to symbolic journeys to one's roots, but in the case of Shoah survivors, such journeys are unexpected, defying the generational definition of their biography, which mostly draws a demarcation line between wartime trauma and a new post- Holocaust life. Analyzed biographical stories collected from Israeli survivors indicate that such returns may be considered the last chapters of their wartime experiences. Survivors' biographies are examined in the context of both Jewish and Polish memory. This book will be of interest to sociologists, historians, and to general readers.

Manning examines the formation of nineteenth-century intelligentsia print publics in the former Soviet republic of Georgia both anthropologically and historically. At once somehow part of "e;Europe,"e; at least aspirationally, and yet rarely recognized by others as such, Georgia attempted to forge European style publics as a strong claim to European identity. These attempts also produced a crisis of self-defi nition, as European Georgia sent newspaper correspondents into newly reconquered Oriental Georgia, only to discover that the people of these lands were strangers. In this encounter, the community of "e;strangers"e; of European Georgian publics proved unable to assimilate the people of the "e;strange land"e; of Oriental Georgia. This crisis produced both notions of Georgian public life and European identity which this book explores.

"e;Think of the disaster"e; is the first injunction of thought when faced with the disaster that struck European Jews during the Shoah. Thinking of the disaster means understanding why the Shoah was able to occur in civilized Europe, moulded by humane reason and the values of progress and enlightenment. It means thinking of a possibility for philosophy's future. Walter Benjamin, who wrestled with these problems ahead of time, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Emmanuel Levinas had the courage, the strength and the perception-and sometimes simply the desperation-to think about what had happened. Moved by indignation and the desire to testify, they felt the urgent need to address the cries of agony of Auschwitz's victims in their thinking.

This book examines the four most important projects for Jewish emancipation in eighteenth-century Europe. The essays presented analyze the proposal advanced by the freethinker John Toland in 1714 and three projects of the 1780s, formulated by the state official Christian Wilhelm von Dohm in Frederick the Great's Prussia, the economist Count D'Arco in Mantua under Habsburg rule, and the Abbe Henri Gregoire in France on the eve of the Revolution. Focusing on the combination of humanitarian and utilitarian arguments and objectives in the proposals to redefi ne the legal and social status of the Jews, this book is a particularly useful resource for scholars and students interested in the history of Jewish-Gentile relations and the Age of Enlightenment.

Bo, Jenny and I is a memoir describing the life of a young woman growing up in unusual circumstances, as well as a discussion of political and sociological effects of troubled times upon "e;ordinary people."e; After an early childhood in pre-war Antwerp, the author, her formidable grandmother, and her young, unconventional working mother fled to England in 1940, upon Germany's invasion of Belgium. As refugees, the family adapted to its changed circumstances and to life in World War II England. The political upheavals of the times are reflected in the life of this small family and its remarkable experiences.

Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Buber were giant thinkers of the twentieth century who made significant contributions to the understanding of religious consciousness and of Judaism. They wrote on various subjects, such as the Bible, the commandments, Hasidism, Zionism and Christianity, and had much in common, though they also differed on substantial points. Of special note is the intense and fruitful interaction that took place between them. Until now, scholars have not undertaken a comparative analysis of Buber and Heschel as eminent contemporary interpreters of the Jewish tradition. In this volume, Meir and Even-Chen have taken upon themselves the challenge of monitoring their agreements and disputes.

The work of Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, the Neziv, ranks amongst the most often read rabbinic literature of the nineteenth century. Yet, to date, there has been no comprehensive and systematic attempt to place his intellectual oeuvre into its historical context - until now.

Ever since the first encounter between Judaism and the western world in the second century BCE, Jewish thinkers like Maimonides, Gersonides, R. Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, and Rabbi A. I. Kook have grappled with issues of Jewish faith and modernity. The works they published, which comprise Jewish classical philosophy, were products of the highest intellectual caliber, and no question of faith, no matter how embarrassing or heretical, was overlooked. In this book Raphael Shuchat presents the reader with some of the main and timeless issues of Jewish philosophy over the ages and updates them to twenty-first century thinking, making each issue relevant for the modern reader. This book offers a fresh intellectual outlook on the Jewish faith, and contains a timely message for all religionists and thinkers in the twenty-first century. It will be of great use to both students and laymen.

Justice in the City argues, based on the rabbinic textual tradition, especially the Babylonian Talmud, and utilizing French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas' framework of interpersonal ethics, that a just city should be a community of obligation. That is, in a community thus conceived, the privilege of citizenship is the assumption of the obligations of the city towards Others who are not always in view-workers, the poor, the homeless. These Others form a constitutive part of the city. The second part of the book is a close analysis of homelessness, labor, and restorative justice from within the theory that was developed. This title will be useful for scholars and students in Jewish studies, especially rabbinic literature and Jewish thought, but also for those interested in contemporary urban issues.

In this book, a diverse collection of empirical and conceptual studies illuminates particular aspects of the teaching of Bible and rabbinic literature to, and the learning of, children and adults. Providing specific insights into the pedagogy of Jewish texts, these studies serve as models of what the disciplined study of pedagogy can look like.

Examines the whole complex of relations between the Land of Israel, the Jewish Torah and the People of Israel from the Pre-Zionist Period until the Establishment of the State of Israel. It examines the dynamics of those relations through the modernisation of Jewish society, and the problem of Jewish Identity vis-a-vis modernity.

Follows the career tracks of Jewish intellectuals who, having fallen in love with Russian culture, were unceremoniously repulsed. Brian Horowitz relays the paradoxes of a synthetic Jewish and Russian self-consciousness in order to correct critics who have always considered Russians and Jews as polar opposites, enemies, and incompatible.

This collection of essays honouring John Doyle Klier's life and work, brings together some of the most innovative scholarship in the field. Focusing on the complex, often violent, entanglements between Jews and Russians, historians and literary scholars critically reassess the artifacts of high culture, including Yiddish and Russian prose and poetry, as well as dimensions of daily life.

Examines the role that Jewish cultural tradition played in the work of the Russian psychologist Lev.S.Vygotsky and the British sociologist Basil Bernstein by highlighting aspects of their respective lives and theories revealing significant influences of Jewish thoughts and beliefs.