Shofar

University of Chicago Press, 2001. 193 pp. $46.00.Stephen Fredman demonstrates that for Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976), a paradigmatic modernist poet and first-generation Jewish American of Eastern European (Russian) origins, Hellenism represented a site...

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. 307 pp. $25.00.By pushing and expanding the boundaries of language, David Grossman has frequently surprised readers. He walks on the literary edge, experimenting in form and narrative, his novels at once post-modern...

Cambridge:, Cambridge University Press, 2001. 222 pp. $54.95.Sectarianism is a theme that has been assiduously ignored by several generations of Middle Eastern scholars. There are multiple causes for this: on the one hand, scholars who are working to...

Hoboken, NJ: Yeshiva University Press, 2001. 255 pp. $29.50.Jewish survival throughout the nearly 2000-year exile has involved the delicate balance between adherence to G-d's law (the written words of the Bible, together with rabbinic teaching, interpretation,...

London and Portland, OR: Valentine Mitchell, 2002. 265 pp. $59.50 (c), $26.50 (p). ISBN 0-85303-366-8 (c); 0-85303-373-0 (p).Even though they may be long dead, the private lives of public figures retain an abiding fascination. More often than not, the...

What is a Jewish film? Do we classify a movie as Jewish because its director or screen-writer is of Jewish descent? That cannot be the sole criteria, since some fine films about Jewish topics were directed and scripted by Gentiles. For example, Edward...

Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, for the Rabbinical Assembly and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, 2001. 1560 pp. $72.50.For close to sixty years, Joseph Hertz's The Pentateuch and Haftorahs (London: Soncino Press, 1936) was a fixture...

Much as the following rescue films present themselves as reflections of historical events, they seek to articulate a message for the present. Much as they seem to "reflect" historical reality, though they appear to be "about" the Holocaust as the story...

Volume 42 (2001). $40.00.Hebrew Studies is a publication of the National Association of Professors of Hebrews. Befitting "a journal devoted to Hebrew language and literature" (as its subtitle states), its thirteen articles and two review essays all place...

New York: The Modern Library, 2001. 295 pp. $19.95.Robert Wistrich has an impressive track record with his research and writings about antisemitism. Hitler and the Holocaust is part of a new series of "Modern Library Chronicles" that features titles...

Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave, 2002. 322 pp. $65.00.In recent years the response of the democracies to the Holocaust, especially the possibilities for the rescue of Jews from the Nazis, has emerged as one of the most important areas of scholarly debate...

Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 2000. 250 pp. $14.95.I'm frozen with horror. Then, just as suddenly, I'm beyond that: I'm with my mother in our Queens apartment, learning how to rig up a sanitary belt; I'm marrying Paul in the Bronx County courthouse;...

Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. 209 pp. $104.95.Ever since the demise of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, relationships between the successor states of the Middle East have been chronically volatile. Today, too, alliances and alignments continue to shift, in...

Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001. 272 pp. $45.00 (c), $22.50 (p)."All the world's a stage," as Shakespeare put it at the turn of the seventeenth century. It is not too surprising that scholars would eventually co-opt the metaphor to contemporize...

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 258 pp.The growing number of courses in Jewish studies at colleges and universities in the United States brings with it the need for works on Jews that are broader than most scholarly monographs. If one...

Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2000. 269 pp. $39.95.Carole Balin's fascinating study reminds us that not all Jewish women in nineteenth century Russia were traditional shtetl housewives or secularized revolutionaries. Rather, her focus is...

Over the past ten years, Woody Allen has responded to exigency and circumstance -- some, of course, of his own making -- by replenishing and renewing his fundamental commitment to his art. Because he has refused to remain static or complacent in the...