Research and Publications

The Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies takes great pride in both the quality and quantity of our faculty and student publications. Faculty members, in addition to their commitment to training men and women as effective teachers and researchers in Jewish studies, are deeply involved in research and scholarship.

Jews in Gotham: New York Jews in a Changing City, 1920-2010

Jews in Gotham: New York Jews in a Changing City, 1920-2010 by Jeffrey S. Gurock, highlights neighborhood life as the city’s distinctive feature. Dr. Gurock shows how New York retained its preeminence as the capital of American Jews because of deep roots in local worlds that that supported vigorous political, religious, and economic diversity. This is the third volume in City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York edited by Deborah Dash Moore. Each volume includes a “visual essay” by art historian Diana Linden interpreting aspects of life for New York’s Jews from their arrival until today.
 

Knowledge of God and the Development of Early Kabbalah by Jonathan Dauber

In Knowledge of God and the Development of Early Kabbalah, Jonathan Dauber offers a fresh consideration of the emergence and early development of Kabbalah against the backdrop of a reevaluation of the relationship between early Kabbalistic and philosophic discourse. He argues that the first Kabbalists adopted a philosophic ethos that was foreign to traditional Rabbinic Judaism but had taken root in Languedoc and Catalonia under the influence of newly available philosophical materials. In this ethos, the act of investigating God was accorded great religious significance, and it was its adoption by the first Kabbalists that helped spur them to engage in their investigations of God and, in so doing, develop Kabbalah. 

Beyond Expulsion by Debra Kaplan

This book represents a study of the Jewish influence in Strasbourg in the Middle Ages and the early modern era.   All Jews were expelled from Strasbourg in 1390, and were only readmitted in 1791. Yet the Jews retained an influence on the city and maintained relationships in the city. Prof.  Kaplan details how this was possible.  Standard belief has it that once Jews were expelled from a community their influence there ceased. However, as Prof. Kaplan points out, the Jews often regrouped in neighboring rural communities and exerted an influence on the city that had banned them through economic, social and legal means.

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Opening the Gates by Mordechai Cohen

Prof. Mordechai Cohen's study of Maimonides' method of biblical interpretation has at its heart an exacting analysis of each passage in Maimonides' Book of the Commandments in which the term peshuto shel mikra appears. According to Prof. Cohen, Maimonides developed a systematic theory relating law and biblical interpretation, in which a mitzvah cannot be counted as one of the 613 biblical commandments without an anchor in peshuto shel mikra.
 

 

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A Biblical Translation by Richard Steiner

R. Saadia Gaon (882-942), one of the greatest Jewish sages of the Middle Ages, composed a translation of the Torah into Arabic, which forms the subject of Prof. Steiner’s new book.  Prof. Steiner notes in his introduction that, in addition to providing a translation much needed by the Jewish public, R. Saadia specifically aimed it “to defend Rabbinic Judaism against two young, aggressive rivals: Islam and Karaism.  A translation ‘that would not be refuted by speculative knowledge’ would undermine the claim of Muslim polemicists.

 

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Palaces of Time by Elisheva Carlebach

In her new book Prof. Elisheva Carlebach focuses on the role manuscript and printed calendars (sifre evronot) played in the life of pre-modern and early modern European Jews. She notes in her introduction that the schedule of workdays and holidays was “as powerful a sign of cultural influence as any badge, language or physical marker.”   Jewish calendars delineated this schedule and differentiated it from that of the surrounding non-Jewish society.

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