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".