Insights on the holidays and avoda based on the writings of the slonimer rebbe.

In this powerful and timely book, Ayala H. Emmett examines the political roles of women in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Emmett's insights come from numerous trips to the region that included in-depth interviews with many of the participants. Excerpts from the interviews give voice to the women who played vitally important yet often overlooked roles in the political transformations of the contemporary Middle East. Emmett's observations on women's actions in political venues have global implications, transcending the specific political and social contexts of the region and shedding light on both the strengths of female activism and the resistances of male political institutions. Emmett investigates the successes and failures of women in the Israeli political landscape, particularly the harassment experienced during the leadership of Right and ultra-Right groups before the ascension to office of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Her account of women's activism in Israel provides a rich backdrop for viewing the compelling events that have taken place in the Middle East throughout the 1990s and offer insights into the future of women's political activism, both in the ever-changing Israeli political climate and in the broader world of women in politics. "Brilliant in conception and theory, based on superb fieldwork, and clearly written for both specialist and non-specialist reader." --Maurie Sacks, Montclair State University "A groundbreaking study. . . .Ayala Emmett brings an unusual voice of clarity into the muddled politics of the Middle East. Where most studies ignore or marginalize women's role in the peace process, Emmett highlights women as political actors and shows their capacity to bridge the chasm between two hostile peoples." --Cynthia Saltzman, Rutgers University, Camden Ayala Emmett is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Rochester.

Hasidic groups have myriad customs. While ordinary Jewish law (halakhah) denotes the “bar of holiness” mandated for the ordinary Jew, these customs represent the higher threshold expected of Hasidim, intended to justify their title as hasidim (“pious”). How did the hasidic masters perceive the enactment of these new norms at a time in which the halakhah had already been solidified? How did they explain the normative power of these customs over communities and individuals, and how did they justify customs that diverged from the positive halakhah? This book analyzes the answers given by nineteenth-century hasidic authors. It then examines a test case: kedushah (“holiness”), or sexual abstinence among married men, a particularly restrictive norm enacted by several twentieth-century hasidic groups. Through the use of theoretical tools and historical contextualization, the book elucidates the normative circles of hasidic life, their religious and social sources and their interrelations.

Holiness is a challenge for contemporary Jewish thought. The concept of holiness is crucial to religious discourse in general and to Jewish discourse in particular. "Holiness" seems to express an important feature of religious thought and of religious ways of life. Yet the concept is ill defined. This collection explores what concepts of holiness were operative in different periods of Jewish history and bodies of Jewish literature and offers preliminary reflections on their theological and philosophical import today. The contributors illumine some of the major episodes concerning holiness in the development of the Jewish tradition. They are challenged to think about the problems and potential implicit in Judaic concepts of holiness, to make them explicit, and to try to retrieve the concepts for contemporary theological and philosophical reflection. Not all of the contributors push into philosophical and theological territory, but they all provide resources for the reader to do so. Holiness is elusive but it need not be opaque. This volume makes Jewish concepts of holiness lucid, accessible, and intellectually engaging.

This book discusses the predicament of the Israeli peace movement, which, paradoxically, following the launching of the Oslo peace process between Israel and the Palestinians in 1993, experienced a prolonged, fatal decline in membership, activity, political significance, and media visibility. After presenting the regional and national background to the launching of the peace process and a short history of Israeli peace activism, the book focuses on external and internal processes and interactions experienced by the peace movement, after some basic postulates of its agenda were actually, although never explicitly, embraced by the Rabin government. The book concludes that, despite its organizational decline and the zero credit given to it by the policy makers, in retrospect it appears that the movement contributed significantly to the integration of new ideas for possible solutions to the Middle East conflict in the Israeli mainstream political discourse.

When the Israeli prime minister and the PLO chairman shook hands on the White House lawn in 1993, Israeli peace activists had good reason to celebrate this major step on the long road to peace.This book tells the story of the Israeli peace movement and the role it played in that pursuit of peace. It is an eloquent, fascinating account of a remarkably diverse and determined cast of activists: from war-weary soldiers to hard-headed politicians, careful scholars to impassioned artists.Drawing on his experience in the peace movement, Bar-On provides intimate portraits of groups like Peace Now, Yesh Gvul, and the Women in Black, he also provides a sweeping historical synthesis of the course of the Israeli-Arab conflict, especially between 1967 and 1993.

This compelling book takes the reader behind the headlines of the confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians, examining its human dimension and setting it in a balanced historical context. In the last decade of the millennium, the century-long conflict came within a hair's breadth of a solution through the Oslo Accords, only to explode in violence, hatred, and mutual recrimination, following the failed summit at Camp David in the summer of 2000. In his search for understanding, Daniel Gavron talks to Israelis and Palestinians of all backgrounds and shades of opinion. Politicians and economists, entrepreneurs and writers, psychologists and teachers, men and women, veterans and youngsters, fervent militants and pragmatic realists all speak in these pages. We hear the Palestinian fighter and the Israeli soldier, the Jewish settler and the Arab Israeli, the negotiators from the opposite sides of the table, the bereaved parents. These Israeli and Palestinian voices reflect the excruciating agony of both societies, conveying a searing reality that, although seemingly hopeless, emphasizes the basic humanity of both peoples. In a startling final section, the author proposes a daring old-new idea to lead the region out of its tragic morass.