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Jewish Culture and Contexts
A broadly interdisciplinary series published in association with the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania.
Series Editors:
Francesca Trivellato
Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study
Shaul Magid
Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College
Steven Weitzman
Abraham M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures
Ella Darivoff Director of the Katz Center of Advanced Judaic Studies
Beth Berkowitz
Professor, Ingeborg Rennert Chair of Jewish Studies
Barnard College
Staff Editorial Contact:
Elisabeth Maselli, Senior Editor emaselli@upenn.edu
Naftali S. Cohn argues that the earliest rabbinic text, the Mishnah, manifests an implicit theory of what doing rituals accomplishes. Correctly performed rituals, according to the Mishnah, orchestrate bodily interaction with the environment, activate cultural values, and instill feelings, thereby shaping individual and collective Jewish bodies.
Historian Yoram Meital interprets Cairo’s synagogues as exquisite storytellers. Meital contends that studying the congregations and the social services provided in synagogues sheds new light on the transformation Egyptian society and its Jewish community underwent from 1875 to the present.
Rabbinic Perspectives on Loopholes and Legal Integrity
Elana Stein Hain
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 9781512829648
Pub Date: January 2026
Format: Paperback
240 Pages
This book traces rabbinic thought on the phenomenon of legal circumventions—finding licit ways to achieve otherwise illegal outcomes. Elana Stein Hain shows how rabbinic literature does not fully reject or accept loopholes, but instead determines their acceptability based on whether their outcomes and processes maintain the integrity of the law.
Edited by Lila Corwin Berman, Deborah Dash Moore and Beth S. Wenger
Price: $59.95
ISBN: 9781512828245
Pub Date: November 2025
Format: Hardcover
264 Pages
What happens when scholars from diverse disciplines connect to explore the American Jewish experience? The Future of American Jewish Pasts shines a penetrating light on some of the most provocative questions of historical interpretation. These essays reconceive traditional approaches to American Jewish life to reimagine American Jewish studies.
The first comprehensive investigation of premodern Jewish travel writing about the Islamic world, Reorienting the East examines Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic travel accounts from the mid-twelfth to the early sixteenth centuries that subvert, or reorient a decidedly Christian vision of the region and reflect changing Jewish self-perceptions.
After Revelation integrates Jewish legal thought in the medieval Islamic world into its larger environment. Traveling from Baghdad to Cairo and bookending with accounts of medieval Jewish luminaries Saadia Gaon and Moses Maimonides, Marc D. Herman underscores that medieval Judaism evolved into the shapes that it did through contact with Islam.
Early Modern Jewish Historians on the Spanish and Ottoman Expansion
Martin Jacobs
Price: $64.95
ISBN: 9781512827699
Pub Date: July 2025
Format: Hardcover
320 Pages
Martin Jacobs considers unexplored perspectives on the Spanish and Ottoman empires by reading three early modern Jewish historians who wrote about great power rivalries while they simultaneously grappled with their own self-conceptions, highlighting the divided allegiances of a Jewish diaspora living in and between competing empires.
Meirav Jones shows how political theory did not develop solely from within a conversation among elites; neither was it conceived as a Godless enterprise. She argues that the foundations of modern politics were laid in conversation with theological politics and in negotiation with Jewish ideas and ideas of the Jews.
Longing and Belonging investigates the histories of Jews living among Muslims from 1900 until 1950. The volume depicts modern Jewish protagonists as active participants in an expansive Islamic civilization, reflecting a mutuality and cross-fertilization in the region that raises new lines of inquiry and which offers enduring lessons for the world today.
Lingua Ex Machina investigates the role communication technologies played in shaping the reemergence of modern Hebrew speech, arguing that technologies such as the phonograph, typewriter, and telegraph—whose development paralleled the revitalization of Hebrew—were an active force in shaping the language as a modern medium of communication.
