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| BOLDNESS OF AN HALAKHIST : An Analysis of the Writings of Rabbi Yechiel Mechel Halevi Epstein -- The Arukh Hashulhan [Simcha Fishbane] This book analyses the writings of Rabbi Yechiel Mechel Halevi Epstein (1829-1908), author of the Arukh Hashulkhan, a bold and unusual approach to Jewish law. Based primarily on the original text of Rabbi Epstein's legal codes and homilies, this work covers topics such as women, modernity, customs, and secular studies. It analyses the rabbi's approach to Jewish law and Jewish life, designed to promote the spiritual welfare of Jews under the pressures of growing secularisation and russification. Although based upon the principles of the traditional judicial process, the rabbi's rulings demonstrate a profound understanding of the contemporary social and historical reality facing the Jews of Russia at the turn of the century. { 184pp, 160x240mm, February 2008; HB, £36.99, 1934843032:9781934843031 , Academic Studies Press } |
| BRODSKY THROUGH THE EYES OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES : Volume 1 [Valentina Polukhina] Joseph Brodsky's greatness as a poet has to do with his expectation that life measure up to the demands of art and not vice versa. These conversations show that his friendship has an equally heightening and challenging effect upon his gifted contemporaries. Brodsky emerges as a kind of one-man ozone layer, protecting and enhancing the possibility of poetic life in our times. The conversations are really full of life and attest greatly to Joseph's high powers -- to Joseph's high powers. This book is the first of its kind. It is a fascinating record of 20 conversations with poets of various nationalities about Joseph Brodsky, the 1987 Nobel Prize-winner for Literature. It combines biographical details with a new and authoritative interpretation of the poetics, style, and ideas of one of the most influential poets to emerge in post-Stalin Russia. As a poet, essayist, and playwright Brodsky is widely known and read in the English-speaking world: in 1991, he succeeded Mark Strand as Poet Laureate of the United States. This book is a superb guide to further study of Brodsky's work both for specialist scholars and general readers who are intoxicated by poetry. It is highly readable and contains well-researched, reliable source material. It also includes Brodsky's views, some previously unpublished, on poetry and language. Every interviewed poet demonstrates an excellent knowledge of Brodsky's work and gives rich and imaginative interpretations of his major themes. Professor Polukhina sensitively contextualises this wide-ranging account of Brodsky's work. The second edition of this volume has been enlarged with two previously unpublished interviews. { 360pp, 160x240mm, September 2008; HB, £39.99, 1934843156:9781934843154 / HB, £46.99, 1934843164:9781934843161 , Academic Studies Press } |
| BUILDING JEWISH PEOPLEHOOD : Challenges & Possibilities [Ezra Kopelowitz & Menachem Revivi (eds)] At a time when Jewish communities have become increasingly anxious about weakening Jewish identity, one response strategy is to engage with the concept of Jewish Peoplehood as a social phenomenon, in its varied contexts and processes. This volume represents the first in-depth effort to address the concept of Jewish peoplehood since the initial attempts of early 20th century Jewish intellectuals, Mordechai Kaplan and Salo Baron. Indeed, its substance goes far beyond the range of a contemporary academic anthology - constituting, rather, a dynamic think tank on the concept of Jewish peoplehood through bringing together intellectuals from France, Israel, the UK, and the United States. The collection offers both intellectual and practical frameworks for grappling with the policy outcomes of different understandings of the peoplehood concept, and contributors to this volume include noted figures from diverse walks of life: academic disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, a rabbi, a literary figure, and communal leaders. { 300pp, 160x240mm, July 2008; HB, £46.99, 1934843245:9781934843246 , Academic Studies Press } |
| COMPANION TO ANDREI PLATONOV'S THE FOUNDATION PIT [Thomas Seifrid] Written at the height of Stalin's first "five-year plan" for the industrialisation of Soviet Russia and the parallel campaign to collectivise 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 "production" novel, which is widely recognised 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. { 160pp, 160x240mm, December 2008; HB, £26.99, 1934843083:9781934843086 , Academic Studies Press } |
| CONTROVERSY & CRISIS : Studies in the History of the Jews in Modern Britain [Geoffrey Alderman] Professor Geoffrey Alderman is the acknowledged authority on the history of the Jews in modern Britain. During an academic career spanning forty years he has produced some of the most authoritative and controversial studies in this field, lighting up the dark corners of the Jewish existence in Great Britain and revealing secrets the Anglo-Jewish communities would rather have kept from public view. In this book he presents sixteen of these essays, covering fields as disparate as the history of the Jewish vote in the UK, the true story of the British Chief Rabbinate, and the uneasy tenure of Sir Jonathan Sacks in that office. He also considers the role of the historian in Anglo-Jewish life, and the troubled careers of some of its leaders and scholars. { 375pp, 160x240mm, July 2008; HB, £49.99, 1934843229:9781934843222 , Academic Studies Press } |
| HORIZONTAL SOCIETY : Volume I: Understanding the Covenant & Alphabetic Judaism [Jose Faur] "The Horizontal Society" is an exposition of rabbinic thought as exemplified by Maimonides. The thought streams of Greece, Rome, and Christendom serve as a contrast. 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 -- focuses on these core matters. It includes numerous references to orient the reader. The mode is similar to the author's previous work, such as Golden Doves with Silver Dots: Semiotics and Textuality in Rabbinic Tradition, interacting with the latest thought from today's academy. This book illustrates the horizontal organisation of the Jewish people. Other social organisation is based on hierarchy. Two principles made this difference possible for Israel. First, the Hebrew Scriptures alone propose that every human being is created in the image of God. This necessitates the absolute equality of every human being. Second, the Sinai covenant establishes the Law as the supreme authority. Whereas in other societies, might is the source of authority, in Judaism authority is limited by the Law. These principles were summarised by the last Prophet of Israel: "Had not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously..., profaning the covenant of our fathers?" (Mal 2:10). There is a subdivided bibliography of forty pages, including both Jewish and "Western" sources. The scholarly apparatus includes indices of terms, names, and subjects. There are also seventy appendices of interest to a rabbinic readership. { 435pp, 160x240mm, June 2008; HB, £46.99, 193484313X:9781934843130 / HB, £39.99, 1934843180:9781934843185 , Academic Studies Press } |
| IDEA OF MODERN JEWISH CULTURE [Eliezer Schweid. Translated by Amnon Hadari] The vast majority of intellectual, religious, and national developments in modern Judaism revolve around the central idea of "Jewish culture". This book is the first synoptic view of these developments that organises and relates them from this vantage point. The first Jewish modernisation movements perceived culture as the defining trait of the outside alien social environment to which Jewry had to adapt. To be "cultured" was to be modern-European, as opposed to medieval-ghetto-Jewish. In short order, however, the Jewish religious legacy was redefined retrospectively as a historical "culture", with fateful consequences for the conception of Judaism as a human and not only a divinely mandated regime. The conception of Judaism-as-culture took two main forms: an integrative, vernacular Jewish culture that developed in tandem with the integration of Jews into the various nations of western-central Europe and America, and a national Hebrew culture which, though open to the inputs of modern European society, sought to develop a revitalised Jewish national identity that ultimately found expression in the revival of the Jewish homeland and the State of Israel. This is a large, complex story in which the author describes the contributions of Mendelssohn, Wessely, Krochmal, Zunz, the mainstream Zionist thinkers (especially Ahad Ha-Am, Bialik, and A.D. Gordon), Kook, Kaplan, and Dubnow to the formulation of the various versions of the modern Jewish cultural ideal. { 296pp, 155x230mm, June 2008; HB, £39.99, 1934843059:9781934843055 , Academic Studies Press } |
| IN QUEST OF TOLSTOY [Hugh McLean] Lev Tolstoy has held the attention of mankind for well over a century. A supremely talented artist, whose novels and short stories continue to entrance readers all over the world, he was at the same time a fearless moral philosopher who explored and challenged the fundamental bases of human society -- political, economic, legal, and cultural. Hugh McLean, Professor Emeritus of Russian literature at the University of California, Berkeley, has been studying and writing about Tolstoy for many years. In these essays he investigates some of the numerous puzzles and paradoxes in the Tolstoyan heritage, engaging both with Tolstoy the artist, author of those incomparable novels, and Tolstoy the thinker, who, from his impregnable outpost at Yasnaya Polyana, questioned the received ideas and beliefs of the whole civilised world. In two concluding essays, "Tolstoy beyond Tolstoy," McLean deals with the impact of Tolstoy on such diverse figures as Ernest Hemingway and Isaiah Berlin. { 24pp, 160x240mm, February 2008; HB, £49.99, 1934843024:9781934843024 , Academic Studies Press } |
| JEWISH PHILOSOPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES [Raphael Jospe] Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages presents an overview of the formative period of medieval Jewish philosophy, from its beginnings with Saadiah Gaon to its apex in Maimonides, when Jews living in Islamic countries and writing in Arabic were the first to develop a conscious and continuous tradition of philosophy. The book includes a dictionary of selected philosophic terms, and discusses the Greek and Arabic schools of thought that influenced the Jewish thinkers and to which they responded. The discussion covers: the nature of Jewish philosophy, Saadiah Gaon and the Kalam, Jewish Neo-Platonism, Bahya ibn Paqudah, Abraham ibn Ezra's philosophical Bible exegesis, Judah Ha-Levi's critique of philosophy, Abraham ibn Daud and the transition to Aristotelianism, Maimonides, and the controversy over Maimonides and philosophy. { 440pp, December 2008; HB, £59.99, 1934843091:9781934843093 , Academic Studies Press } |
| KEYS TO THE GIFT : A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov's Novel [Yuri Leving] This is a new systematisation of the main available data on Nabokov's most complex Russian novel, The Gift (1934-1939). From notes in Nabokov's private correspondence to scholarly articles accumulated during the seventy years since the novel's first appearance in print, the work draws from a broad spectrum of existing material in a succinct and coherent way, as well as providing innovative analyses. The first part of the monograph, "The Novel", outlines the basic properties of The Gift ( plot, characters, style, and motifs) and reconstructs its internal chronology. The second part, "The Text," describes the creation of the novel and the history of its publication, public and critical reaction, challenges of the English translation, and post-Soviet reception. Along with annotations to all five chapters of The Gift, the commentary provides insight into problems of paleography, featuring unique textological analysis of the novel based on the author's study of the archival copy of the manuscript. { 280pp, November 2008; HB, £29.99, 1934843113:9781934843116 , Academic Studies Press } |
| LANGUAGE & CULTURE IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY RUSSIA [Viktor Zhivov. Translated by Marcus Levitt] Victor Zhivov's Language and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia is one of the most important studies ever published on eighteenth-century Russia. Historians and students of Russian culture agree that the creation of a Russian literary language was key to the formation of a modern secular culture, and Language and Culture traces the growth of a vernacular language from the "hybrid Slavonic" of the late seventeenth century through the debates between "archaists and innovators" of the early nineteenth century. Zhivov's study is an essential work on the genesis of modern Russian culture; the aim of this translation is to make it available to historians and students of Russian culture. { 440pp, 160x240mm, March 2009; HB, £59.99, 1934843121:9781934843123 , Academic Studies Press } |
| MARSH OF GOLD : Pasternak's Writings on Inspiration & Creation [Translated by Angela Livingstone. Edited by Angela Livingstone] Major statements by the celebrated Russian poet Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) about poetry, inspiration, the creative process and the significance of artistic/literary creativity in his own life as well as in human life altogether, are presented here in his own words (in translation) and are discussed in the extensive Commentaries and Introduction. The texts range from 1910 to 1946 and are between two and ninety pages long. There are Commentaries on all the texts, as well as a final Essay on Pasternak's famous novel Doctor Zhivago, which is looked at here in the light of what it says on art and inspiration. Although universally acknowledged as one of the great writers of the twentieth century, Pasternak is not yet sufficiently recognised as the highly original and important thinker that he also was. All his life he thought and wrote about the nature and significance of the experience of inspiration, though avoiding the word "inspiration" where possible as his own views were not the conventional ones. My book's purpose is (a) to make this -- philosophical -- aspect of his work better known, and (b) to communicate to readers without Russian the pleasure and interest of an "inspired" life as Pasternak experienced it. { 320pp, 160x240mm, July 2008; HB, £33.50, 1934843237:9781934843239 , Academic Studies Press } |
| PHILOSOPHY OF THE BIBLE AS FOUNDATION OF JEWISH CULTURE : Philosophy of Biblical Narrative [Eliezer Schweid. Translated by Leonard Levin] The fundamental book of Eliezer Schweid is a modern interpretation of the Bible as narrative and law that can reopen the dialogue of contemporary Jews with the Bible, from which a dynamic Jewish culture can continue to draw its inspiration. The approach draws at the same time from the philosophical modernism of Hermann Cohen, the dialogical philosophy of Buber, the religious phenomenology of Heschel, and the insights of contemporary Biblical scholars, including literary analysts of the Bible. Schweid helps us to appreciate the broader message of the narrative of creation and settlement of the land in its ecumenical and planetary dimensions. The world is God's creation whose resources are to be deployed as necessary for the sustenance and needs -- fulfilment of all peoples and all creatures equally -- a message very much relevant to the ecological crisis facing us all at the present time. { 213pp, 160x240mm, January 2008; HB, £46.99, 1934843008:9781934843000 / HB, £46.99, 1934843016:9781934843017 , Academic Studies Press } |
| REASONS FOR THE COMMANDMENTS IN JEWISH THOUGHT : From the Bible to the Renaissance [Isaac Heinemann. Translated by Leonard Levin] This classic work by early-20th-century Jewish humanist and scholar Isaac Heinemann surveys the crucial phases of Jewish thought concerning correct conduct as codified in the commandments. Heinemann provides his own systematic insights about the intellectual, emotional, pedagogical, and pragmatic reasoning advanced by the major Jewish thinkers. Volume I, translated here for the first time, covers Jewish thinkers from the Bible, rabbis and Hellenistic philosophers through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, including Saadiah, Halevi, Maimonides, Albo and many others. Heinemann addresses such questions as: What were the Biblical, rabbinic, medieval, and modern rationales offered for the commandments in the course of Jewish thought? { 226pp, 160x240mm, May 2008; HB, £33.50, 1934843040:9781934843048 , Academic Studies Press } |
| ROADMAP TO THE HEAVENS : An Anthropological Study of Hegemony Among Priests, Sages & Laymen [Sigalit Ben-Zion] The challenge of this book has been to rethink prevailing ideas about the social map of Jewish society during the rabbinic period in Israel. New insights were made possible by using anthropological theories and tools. The book explores the rich and complex relationships among the sages, priests, and laymen who competed in social, cultural, and political arenas for hegemony. The book explores the rich and complex relationships among the sages, priests, and laymen who competed in social, cultural, and political arenas for hegemony. It demonstrates that this struggle was not a simple case of displacement of the priestly elite by a new scholarly elite. In the process of constituting a counter-hegemony of the sages, there was a complex push-pull process: attraction-rejection, imitation-denial, and co-operation-confrontation. They undermined the old order by using the old hegemonic priestly discourse. Whereas the sages proposed a new order based on intellectual achievement, they nevertheless created on top of the earlier hegemonic order a new order of group nepotism, endogamy, ritual purity, and secret knowledge and education provided only to the proper social classes. Ben-Zion concludes that even in the process of resistance and disengagement from the priestly hegemony, the sages could not free themselves from the bondage of the priestly discourse and praxis. { 320pp, 160x240mm, August 2008; HB, £53.50, 1934843148:9781934843147 , Academic Studies Press } |
| SUPERSTITIOUS MUSE : Mythopoetic Thinking & Russian Literature [David Bethea] For several decades David Bethea has written authoritatively on the "mythopoetic thinking" that lies at the heart of classical Russian literature, especially Russian poetry. His theoretically informed essays and books have made a point of turning back to issues of intentionality and biography at a time when authorial agency seems under threat of "erasure" and the question of how writers, and poets in particular, live their lives through their art is increasingly moot. The lichnost (personhood, psychic totality) of the given writer is all-important, argues Bethea, as it is that which combines the specifically biographical and the capaciously mythical in verbal units that speak simultaneously to different planes of being. Pushkin's Evgeny can be one incarnation of the poet himself and an everyman rising up to challenge Peter's new world order; Brodsky can be, all at once, Dante and Mandelstam and himself, the exile paying an Orphic visit to Florence (and, by ghostly association, Leningrad). It is this sort of metempsychosis, where the stories that constitute the Ur-texts of Russian literature are constantly reworked in the biographical myths shaping individual writers' lives, that is Bethea's primary focus. This collection contains a liberal sampling of Bethea's most memorable previously published essays along with new studies prepared for this occasion. { 320pp, 160x240mm, October 2008; HB, £53.99, 1934843172:9781934843178 , Academic Studies Press } |
| THEOLOGICAL & PHILOSOPHICAL PREMISES OF JUDAISM [Jacob Neusner] Classical Judaism imagined the people Israel's situation in three aspects to be unique among the nations of the earth. The nations lived in unclean lands contaminated by corpses and redolent of death. They themselves are destined to die without hope of renewed life after the grave. They were prisoners of secular time, subject to the movement and laws of history in its inexorable logic. Heaven did not pay attention to what they did and did not care about their conduct, so long as they observed the basic decencies mandated by the commandments that applied to the heirs of Noah, seven fundamental rules in all. That is not how Israel the holy people was conceived. The Israel contemplated by Rabbinic Judaism lives in sacred space and in enchanted time, all the while subject to the constant surveillance of an eye that sees all and an ear that hears all and a sentient being that recalls all. Why the divine obsession with Israel? God yearned for Israel's love and constantly contemplated its conduct. The world imagined by the Rabbis situated Israel in an enchanted kingdom, a never-never-land and conceived of God as omniscient and ubiquitous. Here Neusner shows that in its generative theology Rabbinic Judaism in its formative age invoked the perpetual presence of God overseeing all that Israelites said and did. It conceived of Israel to transcend the movement of history and to live in a perpetual present tense. Israel located itself in a Land like no other. And it organised its social order in a hierarchical structure ascending to the one God situated at the climax and head of all being. { 245pp, 160x240mm, July 2008; HB, £36.99, 1934843199:9781934843192 , Academic Studies Press } |
| TIME & LIFE CYCLE IN TALMUD AND MIDRASH : Socio-Anthropological Perspectives [Nissan Rubin] Focusing on the concept of time and the life cycle, this collection of articles examines Jewish life in the Talmudic period through the lens of Jewish law and custom of the time. The essays are the work of Nissan Rubin (one written in collaboration with Admiel Kosman) and come together to present the cultural perspective of the sages and scholars who produced the stepping-stones of Jewish life and custom. By using a structural approach, Rubin is able to identify processes of long-term change in a society that remains largely traditional and stable. Symbolic analysis supplies an additional dimension to these studies, enabling the reader to experience the cultural subtexts. { 225pp, 160x240mm, April 2008; HB, £46.99, 1934843075:9781934843079 , Academic Studies Press } |
| TRANSLATING A TRADITION : Studies in American Jewish History [Ira Robinson] 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 Jewish community in the United States 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. { 332pp, 160x240mm, June 2008; HB, £46.99, 1934843067:9781934843062 , Academic Studies Press } |
| WORLD APART : A Memoir of Jewish Life in Nineteenth-Century Galicia [Joseph Margoshes. Translated by Rebecca Margoshes & Ira Robinson] In 1936, Joseph Margoshes (1866-1955), a writer for the New York Yiddish daily Morgen Journal, published a memoir of his youth in Austro-Hungarian Galicia entitled Erinerungen fun mayn leben. In it, he evoked a world that had been changed almost beyond recognition as a result of the First World War, and was shortly to be completely obliterated by the Holocaust. In telling his story, Margoshes gives the reader important insights into the many-faceted Jewish life of Austro-Hungarian Galicia. We read of the Orthodox and the Enlightened, urban and rural life, Jews and their gentile neighbours, and much more. This book is an important evocation of an entire Jewish society and civilisation, and bears comparison with Yehiel Yeshaia Trunk's masterful evocation of Jewish life in Poland. { 204pp, 160x240mm, September 2008; HB, £33.50, 1934843105:9781934843109 , Academic Studies Press } |