In his seminal essay “Jewish-Americans, Go Home” (1964), Leslie Fiedler attacked postwar Jewish writing and its widespread use of what he controversially labeled “crypto-Jewish characters,”

The painted decoration in the Dura-Europos synagogue (Syria, 244–245 CE) is the most extensive surviving example of Jewish pictorial narrative in the ancient world. In its final stage, the decoration consisted of three bands of narrative panels that surrounded all four walls of the synagogue's assembly hall and led up to the Torah shrine at the center of the west wall (Figure 1). Imagery related to the Jerusalem Temple, including a symbolic image of the Temple on the Torah shrine, made up a significant part of the decoration of the Dura synagogue. There is, however, considerable scholarly disagreement as to how this imagery should be interpreted, particularly as part of a “programmatic” structure. Because the Temple image on the Torah shrine was positioned at the liturgical focal point of the synagogue and was created before the other surrounding narrative panels, the function of this image is a key component of the synagogue's decoration as a whole. Two contextualizing factors would have informed the function and meaning of the image: the reception of the image as part of the liturgical activity carried out by the congregation, and the place of the image as the conclusion to the middle level of surrounding narrative panels that depicted the journey of the Ark of the Covenant from Sinai to Zion. This narrative helped to situate the members of the congregation in relation to the Temple image, defining the community's active role as a part of the narrative itself.

After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Rabbi Ya‘akov Landa was one of some 250,000 Russian Jews who had fled, or been forcibly expelled, from their homes in Russia's western provinces to settle in the country's interior. After Landa's exile, he spent several months traveling amid refugee communities in Voronezh, Tambov, Penza, Saratov, and Samara provinces. At the conclusion of his journey, he composed a detailed report about the state of religious observance among the refugees, which he sent to Rabbi Shalom Dov-Ber Schneerson of Lubavitch. Landa's observations during these months shocked his core sensibilities as a rabbi and an observant Jew. He noted that refugees were disregarding such fundamental aspects of Jewish practice as Sabbath observance and were living without the basic institutions that had traditionally defined religious and communal life.

The targums to the Pentateuch have often been called a kind of translation literature. In part, this is due to the lexicography of the term targum, according to which this literature is known. Although this association between targumic literature and the term translation has been long-standing, “translation,” as it has been used in the field of targum studies, is greatly undertheorized. Within recent years, scholars have used the word translation to describe the interlinguistic rendering of specific Hebrew Bible words and phrases. Some discussion has been given to the complexities of this dynamic in the targums, but the meaning of the term translation has yet to be addressed explicitly. In this article, I propose that to use translation as a meaningful descriptive category for targumic literature, it is necessary to unpack it and examine its ambiguities and problematic status even within the context of discussions about translation studies. By exploring the contours of this term, I hope to indicate how a more nuanced understanding of “translation” can help describe the targumic genre, as well as the targums' underlying hermeneutic orientation toward the Hebrew Bible.

Of all the varieties of modern Jewish politics, none has experienced a more curious fate than Diaspora Nationalism. This nonterritorial strain of Jewish nationalism, also known as Autonomism, was once widely regarded as “together with Zionism the most important political expression of the Jewish people in the modern era.” From its fin-de-siècle origins in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, it spread rapidly across Eastern Europe, sprouting various movements for Jewish national-cultural autonomy. After World War II, however, Diaspora Nationalism vanished almost overnight. So too was its intellectual afterlife marked by silence, as postwar historians of Jewish political thought largely ignored its legacy. Recently, however, Diaspora Nationalism has emerged as a growing field of scholarship. The results are impressive: a striking new wave of studies on its intellectual leadership, political parties, cultural projects, and various interwar East European Autonomist experiments. This abundance of fresh research promises to reframe not only the history of Diaspora Nationalism, but also that of Zionism and Jewish nationalism more generally.

This study seeks to explain the origin of the fast of the 13th of Adar. The practice of fasting on this day is puzzling for a number of reasons. Although the Bible describes fasting in the year of the Purim threat, this fast occurred in Nissan and the weeks thereafter. Nor does tannaitic or amoraic literature mention the practice of fasting on the 13th of Adar. To add to the puzzle, Megillat ta‘anit, compiled in the first century ce, includes the 13th of Adar as a day on which Jews were prohibited from fasting.

In the last several decades, the study of reading, writing, and publishing has emerged as a lively field of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. Historians and literary scholars have engaged with a number of questions about the impact of changes in technology on reading practices and particularly on the relationship between new technologies of reading and writing and social, religious, and political change. The new field of the “history of the book,” merging aspects of social and intellectual history with the tools of analytical and descriptive bibliography, came to the fore in the second half of the twentieth century at the same time that the emergence of new forms of electronic media raised many questions for social scientists about the ways that technological change have affected aspects of human communication in our time. Meanwhile, while the field of book history emerged initially among early modernists interested in the impact of printing technology, the issues raised regarding authorship, publication, relations between orality and the written word, dissemination, and reception have enriched the study of earlier periods.

The complicated process whereby the biblical books took shape and were copied and transmitted in biblical times can only be partly reconstructed based on biblical evidence, with the help of ancient Near Eastern parallels. Clearly, the biblical era constitutes the first stage in the history of the Jewish book, or more correctly, the Jewish book par excellence. However, for the period immediately following, the Second Temple period, the level of documentation for creating, editing/redacting, and copying and disseminating Jewish books is now enormous due to the discovery, publication, and analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls. While this information relates directly to the period in which the Scrolls were copied, from the last part of the third century bce through the early first century ce, it also allows us a model with which to supplement our understanding of the biblical period, and much of it is directly relevant to the rabbinic period in which most of the same scribal conventions were in use.

Moritz Steinschneider opened the greatest monument in the study of Hebrew bibliography, his Catalogus Librorum Hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana, with the following statement:

How might one begin to think about the Jewish book in the modern era? The period is defined by unprecedented proliferation—not only of many new books, but also of an array of new kinds of books, as well as a plethora of new print and other communications technologies, new professions and institutions associated one way or another with books, and new text practices. This burgeoning volume of material, as well as the expansive range of possibilities for books and how they figure in Jewish life, demand that those who would study the place of the book in modern Jewish life (up to and including contemporary phenomena) would do well to begin with reconnaissance, casting the net wide and considering which larger issues this wealth of materials and practices suggests for further study. This survey not only yields an impressive roster of potential subjects of inquiry; the information itself suggests possibilities for understanding Jewish books and book practices as a defining feature of modern Jewish life.

The study of memory and its collaborators (history, narrative, and trauma) has been at the center of both the German- and English-language academic worlds for at least the last fifteen years. While many of the “canonical” texts overlap, the anxieties and implications of recent scholarship have often been quite distinct, particularly in discussions of the memory and history of the Holocaust, and more generally, anti-Semitism, Jews, and Judaism. This phenomenon is played out in the debates about Jan Assmann's work, particularly since the publication of Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (1997).

Amira Hass, Haaretz's fearless journalist, recently told the following joke, an allegory of sorts, set during the Turco-Russian war. Moishele is about to depart for the front, and so his mother offers some sensible advice. “Please take care of yourself, my son. Pace yourself. Kill a Turk all right, but then make sure you rest afterwards. Eat something. Sleep a little. Then go back if you must, kill another Turk, and take another break. Drink lots of fluids, and make sure you maintain and replenish your strength.” “But Mamele,” retorts Moishele, “What if while I am eating and resting, there comes a Turk to kill me?” “Oy va voy, my son! Why would anyone do such a thing? What could he possibly have against you?”