Alan Mintz (1947–2017) was a singular figure in the American Jewish literary landscape. In addition to publishing six authoritative books and numerous journal articles on modern and contemporary Jewish culture, Mintz contributed countless reviews and essays to literary journals, including the New Republic, the New York Times Book Review, and the Jewish Review of Books. Scattered in miscellaneous volumes and publications, these writings reveal aspects of Mintz’s s...

The effort to create a serious Hebrew literature in the United States in the years around World War I is one of the best kept secrets of American Jewish history. Hebrew had been revived as a modern literary language in nineteenth-century Russia and then taken to Palestine as part of the Zionist revolution. But the overwhelming majority of Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe settled in America, and a passionate kernel among them believed that Hebrew provided the vehicle for modernizing the...

Written in pieces over the last fifteen years of his life and published posthumously, S. Y. Agnon's A City in Its Fullness is an ambitious, historically rich sequence of stories memorializing Buczacz, the city of his birth. This town in present-day Ukraine was once home to a vibrant Jewish population that was destroyed twice over—in the First World War and again in the Holocaust. Agnon's epic story cycle, however, focuses not on the particulars of destruction, but instead reimagin...

S.Y. Agnon was the greatest Hebrew writer of the twentieth century, and the only Hebrew writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. He devoted the last years of his life to writing a massive cycle of stories about Buczacz, the Galician town (now in Ukraine) in which he grew up. Yet when these stories were collected and published three years after Agnon's death, few took notice. Years passed before the brilliance and audacity of Agnon's late project could be appreciated.Th...

S.Y. Agnon was the greatest Hebrew writer of the twentieth century, and the only Hebrew writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. He devoted the last years of his life to writing a massive cycle of stories about Buczacz, the Galician town (now in Ukraine) in which he grew up. Yet when these stories were collected and published three years after Agnon's death, few took notice. Years passed before the brilliance and audacity of Agnon's late project could be appreciated.Th...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author shares a "valuable, wise, and quietly moving" meditation on orthodox Judaism ( Chicago Tribune ).Renowned for his sweeping historical novels such as The Cain Mutiny and The Winds of War, Herman Wouk now presents a brilliantly distilled examination of his own religious faith. A miracle of brevity, This Is My God guides readers through the world's oldest practicing...

With the publication of his runaway best seller Kosher Sex (1999), Rabbi Shmuley Boteach gained instant fame as a sage and savvy commentator on public and private life. Now he turns his outspoken energy and vast erudition to the core teachings of Judaism itself. During his eleven years as Rabbi of Oxford University and founder of the university's Jewish outreach organization, the L'Chaim Society, Boteach began to realize how well-matched the foundational beliefs of Judaism are to the broad...

Why are words so important to so many Jews? Novelist Amos Oz and historian Fania Oz-Salzberger roam the gamut of Jewish history to explain the integral relationship of Jews and words. Through a blend of storytelling and scholarship, conversation and argument, father and daughter tell the tales behind Judaism’s most enduring names, adages, disputes, texts, and quips. These words, they argue, compose the chain connecting Abraham...

An essential volume of Judaic thought from the renowned theologian, "a truly great prophet" (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)This first collection of Abraham Joshua Heschel's essays—compiled, edited and with an introduction by his daughter Susannah Heschel, is a stunning reminder of the virtuosity of one of the most well-respected minds in Judaic studies.

In A Passion For Truth, Heschel delves into the exploration of hope and despair in Hasidism. Heschel drew on his own experiences from his study of the Kotzker and the Baal Shem Tov to create this classic work.

From world-renowned public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy comes an incisive and provocative look at the heart of Judaism.“A smart, revealing, and essential book for our times.”—The Washington PostFor more than four decades, Bernard-Henri Lévy has been a singular figure on the world stage—one of the great moral voices of our time. Now Europe's foremost philosopher and activist confronts his spiritual roots and the religion that has...

For all the debate about belief and nonbelief in today’s world—and how everyone becomes pigeonholed by one or the other— Tomá Halík teaches that God requires us to persevere with our doubts, carry them in our hearts, and allow them to lead us to maturity. For Halík, patience is the main difference between faith and atheism. Faith, hope, and love are three aspects of patience in the face of God’s silence, which is interpreted as “the death of God” by atheists and is not taken seriously eno...