Every religious community has been affected by the "sexual revolution". The conflict between contemporary attitudes and traditional practices has led to major divisions and controversies, particularly when focused on issues such as homosexuality. This is the first attempt to take abroad look at both the Jewish pioneers of modern sexual thought and the impact of the revolution on our understanding of past Jewish practices and culture. For the first time the writings of leading scholars in the field from the United States and the United Kingdom have been brought together to explore these topics, and the book is essential reading for those academically or professionally engaged in areas ranging from counseling and pastoral work, to religious and social studies.

"Human Sexuality: Personality and Social Psychological Perspectives presents the topics typically covered in human sexuality courses, rooting the presentation in a strong psychological perspective. Author Craig Hill focuses on personality and social psychological theory to provide students with a conceptual understanding of the psychological factors involved in sexuality, and he encourages students to build upon that foundation by challenging them to think critically about the material in various ways. He also emphasizes the scientific investigation of sexuality, offering a solid review of the research literature."--Publisher's description.

Sexual anti-Semitism and pornotopia: Theodore Dreiser, Ludwig Lewisohn, and the Harrad experiment -- The prestige of dirty words and pictures: Horace Liveright, Henry Roth, and the graphic novel -- Otherfuckers and motherfuckers: reproduction and allegory in Philip Roth and Adele Wiseman -- Seductive modesty: censorship vs. Yiddish and Orthodox tsnies -- Conclusion: Dirty Jews and the Christian right: Larry David and FCC v. Fox.

A pathbreaking study of Jewish marriage and divorce in 19th-century Russia.

An encyclopedic survey of the Jewish body as it has existed and as it has been imagined from biblical times to the present That the human body can be the object not only of biological study but also of historical consideration and cultural criticism is now widely accepted. But why, Robert Jütte asks, should a historian bother with the Jewish body in particular? And is the "Jewish body" as much a concept constructed over the course of centuries by Jews and non-Jews alike as it is a physical reality? To comprehend the notion and existence of a Jewish body, he contends, one needs to look both at the images and traits that have been ascribed to Jews by themselves and others, and to the specific bodily practices that have played an important role in creating the identity of a religious and cultural community. Jütte has written an encyclopedic survey of the Jewish body as it has existed and as it has been imagined from biblical times to the present, often for anti-Jewish purposes. He examines the techniques for caring for the body that Jews acquire in childhood from parents and authority figures and how these have changed over the course of a more than 2000-year history, most of it spent in exile. From consideration of traditional body stereotypes, such as the so-called Jewish nose, to matters of gender and sexuality, sickness and health, and the inevitable end of the body in death, The Jewish Body explores the historical foundations of the human physis in all its aspects.

Talmudic Transgressions is a collection of essays on rabbinic literature and related fields in response to the boundary-pushing scholarship of Daniel Boyarin. This work is an attempt to transgress boundaries in various ways, since boundaries differentiate social identities, literary genres, legal practices, or diasporas and homelands. These essays locate the transgressive not outside the classical traditions but in these traditions themselves, having learned from Boyarin that it is often within the tradition and in its terms that we can find challenges to accepted notions of knowledge, text, and ethnic or gender identity. The sections of this volume attempt to mirror this diverse set of topics. Contributors include Julia Watts Belser, Jonathan Boyarin, Shamma Boyarin, Virginia Burrus, Sergey Dolgopolski, Charlotte E. Fonrobert, Simon Goldhill, Erich S. Gruen, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Christine Hayes, Adi Ophir, James Redfield, Elchanan Reiner, Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Lena Salaymeh, Zvi Septimus, Aharon Shemesh, Dina Stein, Eliyahu Stern, Moulie Vidas, Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, Elliot R. Wolfson, Azzan Yadin-Israel, Israel Yuval, and Froma Zeitlin.

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This acclaimed work surveys the varied course of religious life in modern America. Beginning with the close of the Victorian Age, it moves through the shifting power of Protestantism and American Catholicism and into the intense period of immigration and pluralism that has characterized our nation's religious experience.

A Space of Anxiety engages with a body of German-Jewish literature that, from the beginning of the century onwards, explores notions of identity and kinship in the context of migration, exile and persecution. The study offers an engaging analysis of how Freud, Kafka, Roth, Drach and Hilsenrath employ, to varying degrees, the travel paradigm to question those borders and boundaries that define the space between the self and the other. A Space of Anxiety argues that from Freud to Hilsenrath, German-Jewish literature emerges from an ambivalent space of enunciation which challenges the great narrative of an historical identity authenticated by an originary past. Inspired by postcolonial and psychoanalytic theories, the author shows that modern German-Jewish writers inhabit a Third Space which poses an alternative to an understanding of culture as a homogeneous tradition based on (national) unity. By endeavouring to explore this third space in examples of modern German-Jewish literature, the volume also aims to contribute to recent efforts to rewriting literary history. In retracing the inherent ambivalence in how German-Jewish literature situates itself in cultural discourse, this study focuses on how this literature subverts received notions of identity and racial boundaries. The study is of interest to students of German literature, German-Jewish literature and Cultural Studies.

In this book, Marta T. Topel utilizes anthropological research to analyze both macro and micro social processes among secular and Orthodox Jews in Israel. Topel approaches religious dissidence within the Jewish Israeli Orthodoxy through the lens of the inverse phenomenon: reli...