That the Jewish people has a distinct political tradition should not at all be surprising. Yet, it has been only about thirty years since the process of its recovery has begun. Major political thinkers, including Leo Strauss, Aaron Wildavsky, and especially Daniel Elazar, have made significant contributions to understanding the major impact that Jewish political thought has had on the Western political tradition. With the increasing secularization of political thought since the seventeenth century, there had been a marked reluctance to understand the Bible as a resource for political discussion. However, it has been demonstrated that the consent/contract basis of authority is derived directly from federalist theology of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries in Western Europe. “Federal,” after all, is derived from the Latin, foedus, which means covenant.1 Protestant churches searching for a basis of polity that was not based on Catholic hierarchical sacramental authority returned to the Hebrew Bible. Their clergy studied Hebrew with rabbinic tutors who most probably emphasized the Jewish mutual concept of covenant over the Christian unilateral covenant theory.

Originally published in Hebrew under the title Shafrir Mitzrayim (Tel Aviv, 1995), this thoroughly researched monograph, based on some 800 documents from the Cairo Genizah, illuminates an obscure and overlooked chapter in the history of the Jewish communities that flourished in the medieval Islamic world. As the author notes in her foreword, previous studies of Jewish leadership in Muslim lands have discounted the importance of local political activity, emphasizing instead the dominant role of the central authorities, that is, the Exilarchate and the yeshivot of Babylonia and Palestine. Bareket takes up the question of local leadership by focusing on the careers of nine individuals who headed the Palestinian and Babylonian congregations in Fustat's Jewish community during the first half of the eleventh century. While these leaders formally recognized the sovereignty of the central authorities, they nevertheless exercised considerable autonomy, establishing in Fustat a local school (midrash) for Torah study, issuing their own responsa, imposing bans, and corresponding with Jewish leaders outside of Egypt.

This book is, without a doubt, a major contribution in the field of Judeo-Persian Studies. Judeo-Persian literature, which extends for about eight centuries, has been severely neglected except for the work of a small number of scholars. There are only four scholars in the United States who have dealt with any aspect of this field, and not many more elsewhere. The existing Judeo-Persian texts are a vast collection of all sorts of material and deserve much more attention. Vera Basch Moreen has made a great step forward by providing translation of a wide variety of literary texts. Especially valuable are her commentaries, explanations, and bibliography.

During the past two decades, many important works have been published—mostly by Israeli scholars—on virtually every aspect of Hasidism. The writings of David Assaf, Rachel Elior, Zeev Gries, Moshe Idel, Gedalia Nigal, Ada Rapaport-Albert, and Moshe Rosman, to name only the most prominent contemporary scholars of Hasidism, range from sweeping critical re-evaluations of earlier Hasidic historiography and theology to close studies of major sects within the Hasidic movement. In the course of this outpouring of Hasidic scholarship, the pioneering work of Scholem and his disciples has been demolished and rehabilitated several times over. Beyond even more detailed studies of later and minor Hasidic sects, it would have seemed, at this late date, that there was little left to add to the discussion of the origins and theology of classical, or “Beshtian,” Hasidism. Thus the appearance, in the year 2000, of a new book by Immanuel Etkes dedicated to the “Founder of Hasidism,” R. Israel Baal Shem Tov, could hardly be greeted without the question with which the author himself begins his introduction: “Why another book on the Besht? What can this book hope to add to all that has already been written and published on this topic?” (p. 9).

When Daniel Swetschinski's dissertation appeared in 1980, it immediately became an indispensable work. It was a wide-ranging, clearly-ordered synthesis of scholarship on the Portuguese—Jewish community of Amsterdam in the seventeenth-century, incorporating some important original research. It surveyed the community's legal, demographic, economic, and institutional history, with a brief chapter on certain aspects of its cultural life. Its most original contribution was a detailed study of demographic data gleaned from the Amsterdam puyboecken, the municipal registers of intended marriages. On the basis of these records, Swetschinski charted in detail the immigration to Amsterdam of ex-conversos with origins in the Iberian Peninsula. His examination of the community's institutional life relied to a considerable extent on existing studies in Dutch, but also incorporated his own archival work, and it raised important questions about the structure of the community. Moreover, at a time when this was the exception rather than the rule, it dealt with the Portuguese Jews in an unsentimental, unromanticized fashion. The dissertation was far from exhaustive—a task beyond the reach of any young scholar—but it was a valuable contribution to Jewish communal history.

This is a fine book, one which constructs its tasks with seriousness and depth. Grossman's book is all about the place of Yiddish in German cultural and intellectual contexts. The shortcomings are more a product of the limitations of the discipline than of the author.

With America, Its Jews, and the Rise of Nazism, Gulie Ne'eman Arad has placed the American Jewish response to the rise of Nazism within its political and social context, thereby making an important contribution to the growing literature that seeks to historicize America's relationship to the Holocaust.

Marc Gopin believes that religion can play an important role in forming a global society committed to peace and moral principles. He bases his belief on the fact that in most religions there is a “commitment to peace and elimination of violence” (p. 30) expressed in a broad range of values. Through the “internal hermeneutic dynamics of the tradition” (p. 60)—that is, through a textual investigation of how traditions have changed—he believes that Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others can contribute to promoting peace.

The post-Zionist perspective is a commonplace in political and social discourse these days, and with this book it seeks to ensconce itself in the literary domain. Sidra Ezrahi, who teaches at the Hebrew University, situates herself here in an existential stance antipodal to Yehuda Halevy's: her heart is in the West even as she sits at the edge of the East. Manifestly Ezrahi, in readings of nine writers and poets, has constructed a literary triptych that seeks to rationalize the post-Zionist moment and narrative. What it boils down to is a book that is essentially a detailed gloss, in literary terms, on one of the seminal articulations of Diasporism as the anodyne to the moral ambiguities of political Zionism: George Steiner's 1985 essay “Our Homeland, the Text.”

Rarely is there such synergy between literary texts and a critic's personal convictions as there is in Yael Feldman's latest book. Strong positions and emotional ties often prove a double-edged sword, especially when ideology dictates the interpretation. In the present case, the deep bond between the fictional narratives and the scholar is mostly beneficial, lending Feldman's writing exceptional verve and drama.

We live in the age of the scholarly monograph and the multi-authored history. The shifting and contentious nature of literary studies provides little encouragement to senior scholars to devote decades of their work to taking the long view and accepting responsibility for rendering a comprehensive account of the development of a whole field over a substantial period of time. Our epistemological uncertainty is such that we suspect that fairness and truth can be approximated only if we break up the whole among divers hands and listen to different viewpoints.

This is a fantastic book, certain to stimulate many debates, and not just about its subject, Franz Rosenzweig. At the heart of Batnitzky's text is an argument about religious truth and the form it takes in the modern world, about “idolatry” and “representation.” As understood by the author, the law against idolatry did not mean for Rosenzweig what it meant for Maimonides and Hermann Cohen; it does not reflect the epistemological conundra that go into the presentation of a God who outstrips all sensual image and mental representation. Instead, Batnitzky takes idolatry to mean the act of fixing upon one single image, thereby limiting God's freedom to appear in different forms. In this light, the term representation gets pulled away from the German Vorstellung (i.e. with the presentation of an abstract truth) and aligned with the verb vertreten (suggesting how one represents that truth through one's very being, one's own physical existence and image).

In Witness from the Pulpit, Marc Saperstein, a leading expert on the art of Jewish preaching in medieval and modern times, took on the personally rewarding and professionally challenging task of assembling, editing, and commenting upon the sermons of a twentieth-century American Reform rabbi, of “mid-level” national leadership stature, who had “a rather extraordinary personal involvement . . . in twentieth-century Jewish history.” The reward was to make available for scholarly consideration the homiletic messages that Harold Saperstein delivered during his forty-seven years (1933–1980) as spiritual leader of Lynbrook, New York's Temple Emanu-El as a source for understanding how a rabbi communicated with, and educated, his community about the great crises that the Jewish people faced in that tumultuous time-span. The challenge was to present and analyze objectively what his own father had done, without an almost understandable degree of filiopietism. Happily, Saperstein fils chose well in documenting how one rabbi attempted to raise worshipper consciousness about the destruction of European Jewry, the rise and perils of the State of Israel and the struggles for Soviet Jewry, as well as central post-war American issues like the battle for Civil Rights, McCarthyism, civil unrest and the tragedy of Vietnam, and more. Harold Saperstein's views are introduced with calm, dispassion, and clarity.

In recent years, there has been an abundance of feminist scholarship in the field of Israel studies. Notably, much of this scholarship has been in the form of articles. Dafna N. Izraeli, et al, in Sex, Gender, Politics: Women in Israel (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1999) (Hebrew), provide a comprehensive bibliography in this regard, both for Hebrew and English publications. Sered and Kahn's book-length studies are welcome and necessary contributions to the field. Both anthropologists demonstrate, in overlapping yet different ways, the daily and material ways in which Zionist practice and ideology manifest in and through women's bodies.

This is a book about the junction of European modernity, Jewish life, and new forms of social knowledge. Illuminating the intellectual history of Jewish social science primarily in Central Europe from 1880, but especially after the turn of the century, to the threshold of catastrophe in the waning moments of Weimar, Social Sciences and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity offers a keenly researched, thoughtful study both of the social consequences of Emancipation and the manner in which these consequences were assessed by Jewish social scientists trained in modern tools of statistics, anthropology, public health, and sociology. Astute in its selection of institutions (including the Verein für jüdische Statistik); key scholars (including Arthur Ruppin, Hugo Hoppe, and Leo Motzkin); and subjects (population, health, physical anthropology, and economic issues), the study invites attention to vexing issues for students of Jewish life and history and, more broadly, the development of the social sciences.

This is a book about “political culture,” a concept which, according to Hadassa Kosak “encapsulates the cultural and social characteristics of a group and the way these traits are demonstrated through political action” (p. 5). Kosak's book describes the political culture developed by Jews who left the small towns (shtetls) of eastern Europe for the United States between 1880 and the Russian Revolution of 1905. Unaccustomed to large-scale wage labor in an urban, industrial economy, these often poorly educated newcomers had to develop new ways of dealing with the difficulties and injustices they encountered in a highly stratified, urban, capitalistic America. Kosak demonstrates how they did this. Her work is especially valuable because it focuses on late-nineteenth-century immigration, while most historians of East European Jewish immigration focus on the larger, more politically sophisticated post-1905 immigration. Her work is also valuable because of the breadth of its definition of what is “political.” It deals with the political life of women as well as men and with political activity in private as well as public spaces, including food riots and parades as well as strikes and unions.

According to Rabbinic sources, the menstrual blood is defied by its color, its source from the womb, and especially its period - the vesset. However, the other sectarian schools - the Qumran sectarians, the Samaritans, and the Sadducees - disagreed with this definition of menstrual blood. The author of the Damascus Document (5:6-7) blames the Pharisees in having sexual relations with menstruating women and in not distinguishing correctly (ka-Torah) between the bloods. He probably supposes that the Pharisees declare impure blood as pure. The view of the Samaritans in antiquity is known only from Rabbinic criticism concerning the Samaritan Halakhah. In m. Nidda 4:1 the Rabbis consider the Samaritan women ritually impure since 'they sit on every blood; namely, in the Samaritan Halakhah every blood that women see is presumably menstrual blood. This broad physiological definition of menstrual blood seems close to the view in the Damascus Document. The details and rationale of the Samaritan view may be illuminated by medieval Halakhaic compositions which unanimously reject the Rabbinic concepts of vesset and claim that every blood is to be considered impure. According to m. Nidda 4:2 the status of the Sadducean women in Rabbinic Halakhah is equal to the status of the Samaritan women. Thus, we may conclude that the Sadducees' attitude was quite similar to that of the Samaritans. Since Pharisees and Sadducees shared the Temple rite, their opposing purity regulations might have caused significant problems concerning the purity of the Temple. In any event, we have demonstrated that while the Rabbis held a restricted (or more "accurate") definition of menstrual blood, the Damascus Document, the Samaritans and probably also the Sadducees held a much broader definition. It may be possible to define the Rabbinic attitude as "nominalistic" while their opponents view may be termed "realistic".