Mara H. Benjamin. The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. 155 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 488-490
Author(s):  
Vanessa Ochs
Keyword(s):  
Indiana University ◽  
Maternal Subjectivity ◽  
Jewish Thought

Ken Koltun-Fromm, Imagining Jewish Authenticity: Vision and Text in American Jewish Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. 266 pp.

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Text And Image ◽  
Indiana University ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Modern Era

This chapter reviews the book Imagining Jewish Authenticity: Vision and Text in American Jewish Thought (2015), by Ken Koltun-Fromm. Imagining Jewish Authenticity examines the ways in which texts and images interact in American Jewish culture to promote a vision of Jewish “authenticity,” while also highlighting the deep anxieties harbored by Jews with respect to their own identities. Koltun-Fromm argues that claims of authenticity are most perceptible in both the conscious and unconscious interface between text and image, which provides authors and artists with an outlet to make the contradictory claims at the root of neurotic conflict. He identifies three hotbeds of social and political tensions that have sat at the center of Jewish anxieties in the modern era: Jewish space, the Sabbath, and Jewish food. The book also explores “how Jews deploy language in texts to materialize authenticity in Jewish, gendered, and racial bodies.”

Aaron W. Hughes. The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. x, 273 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-169
Author(s):  
Kalman P. Bland
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Hebrew Text ◽  
Indiana University ◽  
Ibn Sina ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Ibn Tufayl ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Narrative Poem

Three texts are scrutinized in this monograph: Hayy ibn Yaqzan (Alive son of Awake), the Epistle or philosophic “Recital” composed in Arabic prose by the Muslim sage ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980–1037); Hayy ben Meqitz, the closely related Hebrew poem composed by the Andalusian Jewish sage Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164); and Hayy ibn Yaqzan, the more loosely related Arabic treatise composed by the Andalusian Muslim sage Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl (1116–1185). Each of the texts is well known to specialists in medieval intellectual history. Editions and critical discussions abound, almost all of them listed in the bibliography (pp. 245-65). The Arabic texts have long been accessible in reliable English translations. Thanks to Aaron W. Hughes, the same can now be said for ibn Ezra's less familiar narrative poem. In the appendix (pp. 189–207), the poem is rendered into English based on the original Hebrew text published in 1983 by Israel Levin. The translation is enhanced by references to the biblical idioms employed by ibn Ezra who ingeniously transformed ibn Sina's profoundly Islamic original into an equally stunning Hebrew gem.

Vivian Liska, German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2017. 203 pp.

2020 ◽  
pp. 271-274
Keyword(s):  
European Society ◽  
Indiana University ◽  
Personal Freedom ◽  
Secular Culture ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
German Jewish

Through the good offices of the European Enlightenment and its ideals of tolerance and personal freedom, the walls of the ghetto, which had restricted the Jews not only to residential enclosures but also to cultural and spiritual seclusion, were torn down. As the denizens of the ghetto rushed to embrace the opportunities afforded them by their liberation from the degradation of enforced isolation, they adopted European secular culture. Despite the extraordinary exuberance they often displayed for their new culture, they did not enter modern European society, as had their Christian sponsors, “in a long process of ‘endogenous’ gestation and growth, but they rather plunged into it as the ghetto walls were being breached, with a bang, though not without prolonged whimpers.”...

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