Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages.
by Raphael Jospe
ISBN 978-1-934843-09-3
440 pp. cloth
$65.00
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Publication Date: June, 2009

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.

Series: Emunot: Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah

Variations on the Messianic Theme. A Case Study of Interfaith Dialogue.
by Marion Wyse
ISBN 978-1-934843-47-5
250 pp. cloth
$49.00
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Publication Date: June, 2009

Over fifty years after the Holocaust, Marion Wyse explores interfaith dialogue between the Jewish and Christian communities and attempts to evaluate what goals these communities have reached and where they now stand. While many painful issues have been addressed and Jewish-Christian dialogue have achieved a solid respect for each other, the but basic disagreement over the Christian designation of Jesus as the Jewish messiah still stands. Theologians have suggested varying approaches but none convince both partners, so this work employs William James’ radical empirical method to show that the original Jewish messianic concept, the Christian shift, and the Jewish repudiation of the shift, can each be seen as valid faith variants.

Series: Judaism and Jewish Life

The Mind Behind the Gospels: A Commentary to Matthew Chapters 1–14.
by Herbert Basser
ISBN 978-1-934843-33-8
550 pp. cloth
$69.00
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Publication Date: June, 2009

This work offers a new translation of Matthew, graciously offered by Peter Zaas (with some minor revisions by David Malone and Herbert Basser). Basser gives us a verse-by-verse commentary to the first half of the Gospel in his study of Matthew through the lens of Jewish texts. These texts, skillfully interpreted by Basser, illuminate the powerful poetry and mystery behind much of Matthew’s genius in reworking evangelist’s sources. These Jewish materials provide a creative, cultural way of thinking about what God expects from human beings that is infused with the words and images of Matthew. Basser shows how Jewish idioms and artistry move the speeches, story, and figure of Jesus, through various layers of Church tradition, from a Jewish preacher to a Gentile savior. Each chapter of commentary is preceded by a preliminary discussion and the book is introduced by a scholarly yet accessible preface and introduction discussing the methodological issues of the commentary as a whole. In many ways, this book deepens Basser’s initial views of the New Testament in his Studies in Exegesis, Leiden and Boston, E.J. Brill, 2000. The present book will appeal to a broad audience of knowledgeable readers of any or no faith. Basser is presently completing his annotations to the Epistle of James for The Jewish Annotated New Testament to be published by Oxford University Press. 29

Series: Reference Library of Jewish Intellectual History

The Communal Gadfly. Jews, British Jews and the Jewish State: Asking the Subversive Questions.
by Geoffrey Alderman
ISBN 978-1-934843-46-8
240 pp. cloth
$35.00
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Publication Date: July, 2009

Founded in 1841, the London-based Jewish Chronicle is the world’s oldest continuously circulating Jewish newspaper. Since 2002 its prestigious flagship “Comment” column has been written by Oxford-educated Dr Geoffrey Alderman, the leading authority on the Jews of modern Britain, a prolific and controversial scholar whose views have attracted warm support and sweeping condemnation in equal measure. This anthology brings together over a hundred of his Jewish Chronicle op-eds, on subjects as diverse as Jewish Orthodoxy, Ultra-Orthodoxy, Non-Orthodoxy, Islamic Judeophobia, Islamophobia and Jewish approaches to politics and sex. “I have tried to be funny,” Alderman declares, “when occasion has seemed to me to warrant the deployment of a certain humour, which can be a valuable didactic tool and a powerful medium of communication. I have on occasion employed sarcasm and irony. But I have always tried to be scrupulously accurate as to facts, and to locate my comment within that groundwork. Above all, true to my vocation as a rebel who has refused to toe the communal line, I have always presented a point of view that is unashamedly mine.”

Series: Out of the Series

Science in the Bet Midrash: Studies in Maimonides.
by Menachem Kellner
ISBN 978-1-934843-21-5
300 pp. cloth
$69.00
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Publication Date: April, 2009

This book explores the religious thought of Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), one of the most influential Jews of the last thousand years. While covering many aspects of his religious philosophy, the central focus of these essays is the way Maimonides elucidated and expressed the universalistic thrust of the Jewish tradition. Maimonides construed the election of Israel as a challenge, not an endowment. This challenge is ultimately addressed to all human beings, not just to Jews.

Series: Emunot: Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah

Jewish Religion After Theology.
by Avi Sagi
ISBN 978-1-934843-20-8
264 pp. cloth
$59.00
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Publication Date: April, 2009

Avi Sagi's book ponders one of the most intriguing shifts in modern Jewish thought: from a metaphysical and theological standpoint toward a new manner of philosophizing based primarily on practice. Different chapters study this great shift and its various manifestations. The central figure of this new examination is Isaiah Leibowitz, whose thoughts encapsulate more than any other Jewish thinker this stance of religion without metaphysics. Sagi explores corresponding issues such as observance, the possibility of pluralism, the meaning of penance without messianic suppositions, and pragmatic coping with theodicy after the Holocaust, presenting the different possibilities within this great alteration in Jewish thought.

Series: Emunot: Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah

Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra’s Commentary on the First Book of Psalms:.
translated by H. Norman Strickman
ISBN 978-1-934843-30-7
324 pp. cloth
$48.00
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Publication Date: March, 2009



Series: Reference Library of Jewish Intellectual History

Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra’s Commentary on the Second Book of Psalms.
translated by H. Norman Strickman
ISBN 978-1-934843-31-4
216 pp. cloth
$48.00
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Publication Date: March, 2009

Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra, poet, philosopher, mathematician, was one of the outstanding personalities produced by medieval Jewry. His chief claim to fame, however, is his commentary on the Bible. The latter is printed in all major editions of the Hebrew Scriptures and influenced other luminaries such as Maimonides, Rabbi David Kimchi, Nahmanides, Ralbag, Abarvanel, and all serious students of the Hebrew Bible, for whom his works are essential. Ibn Ezra’s commentary on the first two Books of Psalms are now available in English for the first time, accompanied by a thorough annotation. Students of Scripture at all levels will find this a valuable asset to their studies of Scripture and Jewish thought.

Series: Reference Library of Jewish Intellectual History

Language and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia.
by Viktor Zhivov
ISBN 978-1-934843-12-3
440 pp. cloth
$78.00
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Publication Date: May, 2009

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.

Series: Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History

Exotic Moscow under Western Eyes: Essays on Culture, Civilization and Barbarism.
by Irene Masing-Delic
ISBN 978-1-934843-40-6
270 pp. cloth
$59.00
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Publication Date: February, 2009

This collection of essays on Turgenev, Goncharov, Conrad, Dostoevsky, Blok, Briusov, Gor’kii, Pasternak and Nabokov represents diverse voices but is also unified. One invariant is the recurring distinction between “culture” and “civilization” and the vision of Russia as the bearer of culture because it is “barbaric.” Another stance advocates the synthesis of “sense and sensibility” and the vision of “Apollo” and “Dionysus” creating a “civilized culture” together. Those voices that delight in the artificiality of civilization are complemented by those apprehensive of the dangers in barbarism. This collection thus adds new perspectives to the much-debated opposition of vital Russia and a declining West, offering novel interpretations of classics from Oblomov to Lolita and The Idiot to Doctor Zhivago.

Series: Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the Twentieth Century

A Companion to Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit.
by Thomas Seifrid
ISBN 978-1-934843-08-6
160 pp. cloth
$40.00
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Publication Date: March, 2009

Written at the height of Stalin's first "five-year plan" 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 "production" 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.

Series: Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History

The Jew's Body in Russian Culture, 1880s to the Present.
by Henrietta Mondry
ISBN 978-1-934843-39-0
270 pp. cloth
$58.00
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Publication Date: July, 2009

This book explores the construction of the Jew’s physical and ontological body in Russian culture as represented in literature, film, and non-literary texts from the 1880s to the present. With the rise of the dominance of biological and racialist discourse in the 1880s, the depiction of Jewish characters in Russian literary and cultural productions underwent a significant change, as these cultural practices recast the Jew not only as an archetypal “exotic” and religious or class Other (as in Romanticism and realist writing), but as a biological Other whose acts, deeds, and thoughts were determined by racial differences. This Jew allegedly had physical and psychological characteristics that were genetically determined and that could not be changed by education, acculturation, conversion to Christianity, or change of social status. This stereotype has become a stable archetype that continues to operate in contemporary Russian society and culture.

Series: Borderlines: Russian and East European - Jewish Studies

Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries, Vol. I.
by Valentina Polukhina
ISBN 978-1-934843-15-4
360 pp. cloth
$60.00
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Publication Date: October, 2008

This book is a fascinating record of conversations with poets of various nationalities about Joseph Brodsky: Czeslaw Milosz, Roy Fisher, Lev Loseff, Bella Akhmadulina, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Tomas Venclova, Viktor Krivulin, Alexander Kushner, and Elena Shvarts. In comparison with the first edition of this volume (1992) this new, second edition is enlarged with three new interviews and a series of previously unpublished unique photographs from the personal archives of the author and the interviewees.





The collection 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-Stalinist Russia. As a poet, essayist, and playwright, Brodsky is widely known and read in the English-speaking world. 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.

Series: Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History

Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries, Vol. II.
by Valentina Polukhina
ISBN 978-1-934843-16-1
604 pp. cloth
$70.00
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Publication Date: October, 2008

 

The new volume of interviews draws on eye-witness accounts of Joseph Brodsky’s friends and family members, publishers, editors, translators, students, and fellow poets: John Le Carre, Oleg Tselkov, Petr Vail, Bengt Jangfeldt, Susan Sontag, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and others.


This collection of 40 interviews illuminates an intriguing contemporary phenomenon and affords a fascinating insight into the American literary scene. Continuing the discussion begun in Vol. 1, this series of interviews contains important discussions on the style, ideas, and personality of one of the most brilliant and paradoxical poets of our time. Subtle, incisive, and rigorous in its critical evaluation, each discussion significantly advances our understanding of Brodsky's complex poetic world. All discussions are linked by core questions that are carefully and sometimes provocatively formulated. The interviews are published together with many unique photographs from the private archives of the author and the interviewees.

Series: Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History