New World Hasidim

New World Hasidim PDF Author: Janet S. Belcove-Shalin
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791496201
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Hasidim has long been the subject of historical, philosophical, and literary accounts, but it is only in recent years that it has begun to attract the close attention of social scientists. This book highlights contemporary ethnographic perspectives that convey the richness and complexity of Hasidic life. Political engagement, gender roles, ritual life, proselytizing activities, and community revitalization are just some of the topics covered in this study that casts light on one of the more enigmatic religious communities of contemporary America.

New World Hasidim

New World Hasidim PDF Author: Janet S. Belcove-Shalin
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791496201
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Hasidim has long been the subject of historical, philosophical, and literary accounts, but it is only in recent years that it has begun to attract the close attention of social scientists. This book highlights contemporary ethnographic perspectives that convey the richness and complexity of Hasidic life. Political engagement, gender roles, ritual life, proselytizing activities, and community revitalization are just some of the topics covered in this study that casts light on one of the more enigmatic religious communities of contemporary America.

Hasidic Studies

Hasidic Studies PDF Author: Ada Rapoport-Albert
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1786949474
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 535

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Book Description
Ada Rapoport-Albert has been a key partner in the profound transformation of the history of hasidism that has taken shape over the past few decades. The essays in this volume show the erudition and creativity of her contribution. Written over a period of forty years, they have been updated with regard to significant detail and to take account of important works of scholarship written after they were originally published.

Studying Hasidism

Studying Hasidism PDF Author: Marcin Wodzinski
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978804237
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Hasidism, a Jewish religious movement that originated in Poland in the eighteenth century, today counts over 700,000 adherents, primarily in the U.S., Israel, and the UK. Popular and scholarly interest in Hasidic Judaism and Hasidic Jews is growing, but there is no textbook dedicated to research methods in the field, nor sources for the history of Hasidism have been properly recognized. Studying Hasidism, edited by Marcin Wodziński, an internationally recognized historian of Hasidism, aims to remedy this gap. The work’s thirteen chapters each draws upon a set of different sources, many of them previously untapped, including folklore, music, big data, and material culture to demonstrate what is still to be achieved in the study of Hasidism. Ultimately, this textbook presents research methods that can decentralize the role community leaders play in the current literature and reclaim the everyday lives of Hasidic Jews.

Hasidism Incarnate

Hasidism Incarnate PDF Author: Shaul Magid
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804793468
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Hasidism Incarnate contends that much of modern Judaism in the West developed in reaction to Christianity and in defense of Judaism as a unique tradition. Ironically enough, this occurred even as modern Judaism increasingly dovetailed with Christianity with regard to its ethos, aesthetics, and attitude toward ritual and faith. Shaul Magid argues that the Hasidic movement in Eastern Europe constitutes an alternative "modernity," one that opens a new window on Jewish theological history. Unlike Judaism in German lands, Hasidism did not develop under a "Christian gaze" and had no need to be apologetic of its positions. Unburdened by an apologetic agenda (at least toward Christianity), it offered a particular reading of medieval Jewish Kabbalah filtered through a focus on the charismatic leader that resulted in a religious worldview that has much in common with Christianity. It is not that Hasidic masters knew about Christianity; rather, the basic tenets of Christianity remained present, albeit often in veiled form, in much kabbalistic teaching that Hasidism took up in its portrayal of the charismatic figure of the zaddik, whom it often described in supernatural terms.

Becoming Un-orthodox

Becoming Un-orthodox PDF Author: Lynn Davidman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199380503
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Lynn Davidman offers an in-depth study of defectors from Orthodox Judaism, showing how they negotiate the difficult passage away from their families and communities and reconstruct their identities in new social contexts.

American Shtetl

American Shtetl PDF Author: Nomi M. Stolzenberg
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691199779
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
A compelling account of how a group of Hasidic Jews established its own local government on American soil Settled in the mid-1970s by a small contingent of Hasidic families, Kiryas Joel is an American town with few parallels in Jewish history—but many precedents among religious communities in the United States. This book tells the story of how this group of pious, Yiddish-speaking Jews has grown to become a thriving insular enclave and a powerful local government in upstate New York. While rejecting the norms of mainstream American society, Kiryas Joel has been stunningly successful in creating a world apart by using the very instruments of secular political and legal power that it disavows. Nomi Stolzenberg and David Myers paint a richly textured portrait of daily life in Kiryas Joel, exploring the community's guiding religious, social, and economic norms. They delve into the roots of Satmar Hasidism and its charismatic founder, Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum, following his journey from nineteenth-century Hungary to post–World War II Brooklyn, where he dreamed of founding an ideal Jewish town modeled on the shtetls of eastern Europe. Stolzenberg and Myers chart the rise of Kiryas Joel as an official municipality with its own elected local government. They show how constant legal and political battles defined and even bolstered the community, whose very success has coincided with the rise of political conservatism and multiculturalism in American society over the past forty years. Timely and accessible, American Shtetl unravels the strands of cultural and legal conflict that gave rise to one of the most vibrant religious communities in America, and reveals a way of life shaped by both self-segregation and unwitting assimilation.

Hasidic Art and the Kabbalah

Hasidic Art and the Kabbalah PDF Author: Batsheva Goldman-Ida
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004290265
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
Hasidic Art and the Kabbalah presents eight case studies of manuscripts, ritual objects, and folk art developed by Hasidic masters in the mid-eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries, whose form and decoration relate to sources in the Zohar, German Pietism, and Safed Kabbalah. Examined at the delicate and difficult to define interface between seemingly simple, folk art and complex ideological and conceptual outlooks which contain deep, abstract symbols, the study touches on aspects of object history, intellectual history, the decorative arts, and the history of religion. Based on original texts, the focus of this volume is on the subjective experience of the user at the moment of ritual, applying tenets of process philosophy and literary theory – Wolfgang Iser, Gaston Bachelard, and Walter Benjamin – to the analysis of objects.

Hasidism

Hasidism PDF Author: David Biale
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691202443
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 890

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Book Description
A must-read book for understanding this vibrant and influential modern Jewish movement Hasidism originated in southeastern Poland, in mystical circles centered on the figure of Israel Ba’al Shem Tov, but it was only after his death in 1760 that a movement began to spread. Today, Hasidism is witnessing a remarkable renaissance around the world. This book provides the first comprehensive history of the pietistic movement that shaped modern Judaism. Written by an international team of scholars, its unique blend of intellectual, religious, and social history demonstrates that, far from being a throwback to the Middle Ages, Hasidism is a product of modernity that forged its identity as a radical alternative to the secular world.

Mitzvah Girls

Mitzvah Girls PDF Author: Ayala Fader
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400830990
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Mitzvah Girls is the first book about bringing up Hasidic Jewish girls in North America, providing an in-depth look into a closed community. Ayala Fader examines language, gender, and the body from infancy to adulthood, showing how Hasidic girls in Brooklyn become women responsible for rearing the next generation of nonliberal Jewish believers. To uncover how girls learn the practices of Hasidic Judaism, Fader looks beyond the synagogue to everyday talk in the context of homes, classrooms, and city streets. Hasidic women complicate stereotypes of nonliberal religious women by collapsing distinctions between the religious and the secular. In this innovative book, Fader demonstrates that contemporary Hasidic femininity requires women and girls to engage with the secular world around them, protecting Hasidic men and boys who study the Torah. Even as Hasidic religious observance has become more stringent, Hasidic girls have unexpectedly become more fluent in secular modernity. They are fluent Yiddish speakers but switch to English as they grow older; they are increasingly modest but also fashionable; they read fiction and play games like those of mainstream American children but theirs have Orthodox Jewish messages; and they attend private Hasidic schools that freely adapt from North American public and parochial models. Investigating how Hasidic women and girls conceptualize the religious, the secular, and the modern, Mitzvah Girls offers exciting new insights into cultural production and change in nonliberal religious communities.

Hasidic Responses to the Holocaust in the Light of Hasidic Thought

Hasidic Responses to the Holocaust in the Light of Hasidic Thought PDF Author: Pesach Schindler
Publisher: KTAV Publishing House, Inc.
ISBN: 9780881253108
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Examines responses to the Holocaust of hasidic leaders and their followers during the war years in Europe. Discovers a correlation between these responses and fundamental hasidic tenets dealing with God's relationship to man and to the Jewish people, redemption and the messianic era, Kiddush Hashem and Kiddush ha-Hayyim, the hasidic fraternal bond, and the relationship between the hasid and the zadik or rebbe. Hasidism offered a system of concepts that could be used to interpret the Holocaust, and provided a social framework and leadership to articulate these concepts. These may have served as shock absorbers for the hasidim facing the trauma of Holocaust events.