Lasting over 120 years, the Arab-Israeli conflict involves divergent narratives about history, national identities, land ownership, injustices and victimhood. Domestic forces and actors as well as international and regional dynamics have ensured the conflict's durability. A distinguished team of authors comprising an Israeli, a Palestinian and an Egyptian present a broader Arab perspective in this innovative textbook that offers a balanced and nuanced introduction to a highly contentious subject. Providing an overview of key developments in the history of the conflict, it explores attempts at resolution, before going on to portray the perspectives of the important parties. It places the events of the conflict within a regional and international context, providing an invaluable insight into the opposing narratives behind the conflict. The much-anticipated second edition of Arabs and Israelis includes: - Up-to-date coverage of key developments since the Arab Awakening, including the shifting pattern in relations from Obama to Trump, the Abraham Accords, the fall of Netanyahu and the resurgence of the war in early 2021. - Brand new 'Key Developments', 'Key Documents' and 'Key Figures' feature boxes to help students zoom in on landmark events, policies and actors throughout history. - Detailed full colour maps, timelines and photos to visually complement the text. - A rich companion website including interactive timelines and maps, discussion questions, chapter summaries and more. A comprehensive and engaging account of the Arab-Israeli conflict, it is the ideal companion for students at undergraduate and postgraduate level taking History, Politics and Middle Eastern Studies degrees.
A path-breaking collaboration between an Israeli arms control expert and a Jordanian policy advisor, this concise book offers a frank assessment of Arab and Israeli perceptions of their security problems. Building on the bilateral and multilateral peace process, the authors propose a set of measures to increase trust between the two sides and break out of the security dilemma in which a move by one side to strengthen itself provokes the other side to do the same.
With its wealth of current, hard-to-find information, The Middle East Military Balance offers an authoritative and indispensable guide to military capabilities in the Middle East. Although Israel and its Arab neighbors have taken many steps toward peace in recent years, the Middle East remains an uncertain and volatile region. Stretching from Morocco to Iran, the area has seen numerous international and internal conflicts in recent decades. Understanding the dynamics of these conflicts requires detailed information on the military capabilities of the region's countries. The Middle East Military Balance is prepared annually by the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv, Israel. It is based on data from many sources, including some that are unavailable to other institutes. With its wealth of current, hard-to-find information, it offers an authoritative and indispensable guide to military capabilities in the Middle East. Governments, the media, and researchers pay close attention to its data and analysis each year. The Jaffee Center's new, reorganized Middle East Military Balance provides the most comprehensive and objective analysis of Middle East military developments available in the open literature. A first-rate product.--Geoffrey Kemp, Director of Regional Strategic Programs, The Nixon Center
This monograph provides the highlights of an international conference held by the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies on March 21-24, 1987, at Neve Ilan, Israel. It looks at the main trends of weapons development in NATO and at the directions of Soviet security thinking.
Lasting over 120 years, the Arab-Israeli conflict involves divergent narratives about history, national identities, land ownership, injustices and victimhood. Domestic forces and actors as well as international and regional dynamics have ensured the conflict's durability. A distinguished team of authors comprising an Israeli, a Palestinian and an Egyptian present a broader Arab perspective in this innovative textbook that offers a balanced and nuanced introduction to a highly contentious subject. Providing an overview of key developments in the history of the conflict, it explores attempts at resolution, before going on to portray the perspectives of the important parties. It places the events of the conflict within a regional and international context, providing an invaluable insight into the opposing narratives behind the conflict. The much-anticipated second edition of Arabs and Israelis includes: - Up-to-date coverage of key developments since the Arab Awakening, including the shifting pattern in relations from Obama to Trump, the Abraham Accords, the fall of Netanyahu and the resurgence of the war in early 2021. - Brand new 'Key Developments', 'Key Documents' and 'Key Figures' feature boxes to help students zoom in on landmark events, policies and actors throughout history. - Detailed full colour maps, timelines and photos to visually complement the text. - A rich companion website including interactive timelines and maps, discussion questions, chapter summaries and more. A comprehensive and engaging account of the Arab-Israeli conflict, it is the ideal companion for students at undergraduate and postgraduate level taking History, Politics and Middle Eastern Studies degrees.
A profound, startling new understanding of Jewish life, illuminating the forgotten heart of Jewish theology and practice: love. A dramatic misinterpretation of the Jewish tradition has shaped the history of the West: Christianity is the religion of love, and Judaism the religion of law. In the face of centuries of this widespread misrepresentation, Rabbi Shai Held—one of the most important Jewish thinkers in America today—recovers the heart of the Jewish tradition, offering the radical and moving argument that love belongs as much to Judaism as it does to Christianity. Blending intellectual rigor, a respect for tradition and the practices of a living Judaism, and a commitment to the full equality of all people, Held seeks to reclaim Judaism as it authentically is. He shows that love is foundational and constitutive of true Jewish faith, animating the singular Jewish perspective on injustice and protest, grace, family life, responsibilities to our neighbors and even our enemies, and chosenness. Ambitious and revelatory, Judaism Is About Love illuminates the true essence of Judaism—an act of restoration from within.
In this book, Lee Shai Weissbach offers the first comprehensive portrait of small-town Jewish life in America. Exploring the history of communities of 100 to 1000 Jews, the book focuses on the years from the mid-nineteenth century to World War II. Weissbach examines the dynamics of 490 communities across the United States and reveals that smaller Jewish centers were not simply miniature versions of larger communities but were instead alternative kinds of communities in many respects. The book investigates topics ranging from migration patterns to occupational choices, from Jewish education and marriage strategies to congregational organization. The story of smaller Jewish communities attests to the richness and complexity of American Jewish history and also serves to remind us of the diversity of small-town society in times past.
The Talmud's Red Fence explores how rituals and beliefs concerning menstruation in the Babylonian Talmud and neighboring Sasanian religious texts were animated by difference and differentiation. It argues that the practice and development of menstrual rituals in Babylonian Judaism was a product of the religious terrain of the Sasanian Empire, where groups like Syriac Christians, Mandaeans, Zoroastrians, and Jews defined themselves in part based on how they approached menstrual impurity. It demonstrates that menstruation was highly charged in Babylonian Judaism and Sasanian Zoroastrian, where menstrual discharge was conceived of as highly productive female seed yet at the same time as stemming from either primordial sin (Eve eating from the tree) or evil (Ahrimen's kiss). It argues that competition between rabbis and Zoroastrians concerning menstrual purity put pressure on the Talmudic system, for instance in the unusual development of an expert diagnostic system of discharges. It shows how Babylonian rabbis seriously considered removing women from the home during the menstrual period, as Mandaeans and Zoroastrians did, yet in the end deemed this possibility too "heretical." Finally, it examines three cases of Babylonian Jewish women initiating menstrual practices that carved out autonomous female space. One of these, the extension of menstrual impurity beyond the biblically mandated seven days, is paralleled in both Zoroastrian Middle Persian and Mandaic texts. Ultimately, Talmudic menstrual purity is shown to be driven by difference in its binary structure of pure and impure; in gendered terms; on a social axis between Jews and Sasanian non-Jewish communities; and textually in the way the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds took shape in late antiquity.
Critics commonly hold that the modern Hebrew canon reveals a shared rhetoric that is crucial for the emergence and formation of modern Jewish nationalism. Yet, does the Hebrew canon indeed demonstrate a shared logic? In Rhetoric and Nation, Ginsburg challenges the common conflation of modern Hebrew rhetoric and modern Jewish nationalism. Considering a wide range of literary, critical, and political works, Ginsburg explores the way each text manifests its own singular logic that cannot be subsumed under any single ideology. Through close readings of key canonical texts, Rhetoric and Nation establishes that the Hebrew discourse of the nation should be conceived of not as a coherent and cohesive entity but rather as an assemblage of singular, disparate moments.
What is critique? How is it used and abused? At a moment when popular discourse is saturated with voices confronting each other about not being critical enough, while academic discourses proclaim to have moved past critique, this provocative book reawakens the foundational question of what 'critique' is in the first place. Roy Ben-Shai inspects critique as an orientation of critical thinking, probing its structures and assumptions, its limits and its risks, its history and its possibilities. The book is a journey through a landscape of ideas, images, and texts from diverse sources—theological, psychological, etymological, and artistic, but mainly across the history of philosophy, from Plato and Saint Augustine, through Kant and Hegel, Marx and Heidegger, up to contemporary critical theory. Along the way, Ben-Shai invites the reader to examine their own orientation of thought, even at the moment of reading the book; to question popular discourse; and to revisit the philosophical canon, revealing affinities among often antagonistic traditions, such as Catholicism and Marxism. Most importantly, Critique of Critique sets the ground for an examination of alternative orientations of critical thinking, other ways of inhabiting and grasping the world.
Coherent Judaism begins by excavating the theologies within the Torah and tracing their careers through the Jewish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Any compelling, contemporary Judaism must cohere as much as possible with traditional Judaism and everything else we believe to be true about our world. The challenge is that over the past two centuries, our understandings of both the Torah and nature have radically changed. Nevertheless, much Jewish wisdom can be translated into a contemporary idiom that both coheres with all that we believe and enriches our lives as individuals and within our communities. Coherent Judaism explains why pre-modern Judaism opted to privilege consensus around Jewish behavior (halakhah) over belief. The stresses of modernity have conspired to reveal the incoherence of that traditional approach. In our post-Darwinian and post-Holocaust world, theology must be able to withstand the challenges of science and history. Traditional Jewish theologies have the resources to meet those challenges. Coherent Judaism concludes by presenting a philosophy of halakhah that is faithful to the covenantal aspiration to live long on the land that the Lord, our God, has given us.
This book provides a highly readable, engaging introduction to Jewish biblical interpretation." - Jewish Book World "Cherry has analyzed the biblical commentary of some of the renowned Jewish scholars of the last 2,000 years. The result is a work of excellent scholarship and imagination." - Booklist ?Cherry shows how the Torah functions as literature that is fluid, compelling, and persistently generative of new meanings.? ? Christian Century Every commentator, from the classical rabbi to the modern-day scholar, has brought his or her own worldview, with all of its assumptions, to bear on the reading of holy text. This relationship between the text itself and the reader's interpretation is the subject of Torah Through Time. Shai Cherry traces the development of Jewish Bible commentary through three pivotal periods in Jewish history: the rabbinic, medieval, and modern periods. The result is a fascinating and accessible guide to how some of the world's leading Jewish commentators read the Bible. Torah Through Time focuses on specific narrative sections of the Torah: the creation of humanity, the rivalry between Cain and Abel, Korah's rebellion, the claim of the daughters of Zelophechad, and legal matters concerning Hebrew slavery. Cherry closely examines several different commentaries for each of these source texts, and in so doing he analyzes how each commentator resolves questions raised by the texts and asks if and how the commentator's own historical frame of reference -- his own time and place -- contributes to the resolution. A chart at the end of each chapter provides a visual summary that helps the reader understand the many different elements at play.
The Iranian Talmud reexamines the Babylonian Talmud—one of Judaism's most central texts—in the light of Persian literature and culture, providing an unprecedented and accessible overview to the vibrant world of pre-Islamic Iran that shaped the Bavli.
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