Since the 1960s the relationship between Blacks and Jews has been a contentious one. While others have attempted to explain or repair the break-up of the Jewish alliance on civil rights, Seth Forman here sets out to determine what Jewish thinking on the subject of Black Americans reveals about Jewish identity in the U.S. Why did American Jews get involved in Black causes in the first place? Wha…
Flight during times of persecution has a long and fraught history in early Christianity. In the third century, bishops who fled were cowards or, worse yet, heretics. On the face of it, it meant denial of Christ and thus betrayal of the faith and its community. But, by the fourth century, the terms of persecution changed as Christianity became the favored cult of the Roman Empire. Prominent Chri…
Birth and death are both profound life transitions, revealing deeply existential, social, and spiritual questions in addition to various forms of ritual and ritualizing. While birth and death are often seen as opposites, this edited volume shows that the start and end of life share many ambiguities. They represent a beginning and an end, and lead to ritualizing as well as embodied forms of spir…
Religious change is at its core a material as much as a spiritual process. Beliefs related to intangible spirits, ghosts, or gods were enacted through material relationships between people, places, and objects. The archaeology of mission sites from Tanna and Erromango islands, southern Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides), offer an informative case study for understanding the material dimensions…
Asian American Religions brings together some of the most current research on Asian American religions from a social science perspective. The volume focuses on religion in Asian American communities in New York, Houston, Los Angeles, and the Silicon Valley/Bay Area, and it includes a current demographic overview of the various Asian populations across the United States. It also provides informa…
In this book Kadushin offers a running commentary on sections of Leviticus Rabbah. His goal is not only to explicate individual sections of this Late Antique midrashic work, but also to highlight the basic conceptual framework within which the rabbis worked. Kadushin's commentary highlights the indeterminacy of belief and the genuine emphatic trends that distinguish rabbinic Judaism while also …
This volume presents a translation and exegesis of Mishnah's Tractate Kilayim (Mixed Species) in an effort to discover the original meaning of the tractate. This volume aims to identify the sense which the formulators of the tractate's laws wished their rules to convey.
The collection of essays in this volume offers fresh insights into varied modalities of reception of Epicurean thought among Roman authors of the late Republican and Imperial eras. Its generic purview encompasses prose as well as poetic texts by both minor and major writers in the Latin literary canon, including the anonymous poems, Ciris and Aetna, and an elegy from the Tibullan corpus by the …
This book examines the shifting moral and spiritual lives of white Afrikaners in South Africa after apartheid. The end of South Africa’s apartheid system of racial and spatial segregation sparked wide-reaching social change as social, cultural, spatial and racial boundaries were transgressed and transformed. This book investigates how Afrikaners have mediated the country’s shifting boundari…