Linguistics professor Aviva Goldberg takes on a challenge from her two best friends to seduce thirty men in the next year. She's been spinning her wheels somewhat anyway since her cycling geek squeeze, Alan, left town... This is a hilarious novel and far more edgy and intellectual than chick lit.

Offers advice for achieving lasting erotic passion in marriage by bringing the principles of adultery into the marital relationship without being unfaithful.

In a quiet suburb outside Portland, Oregon a Jewish Community is about to have their world upended! Rabbi Dreidel, a young, charismatic Orthodox rabbi, moves into a quiet suburb to assemble a congregation from scratch. Schmoozing with every Jewish man and woman he can find, his fledgling synagogue quickly grows into a robust community. Underneath a well-rehearsed veneer of righteousness is an unrestrained desire to explore his sexuality with multiple women. Of course, the rabbi can't admit that, so he pretends that he wants to improve his marriage, and the best way to "learn" how to please his wife is to seek out women for some very detailed and explicit sexual advice. At first, the women naively sympathize with their rabbi who appears so forlorn and desperate. But as his questions become graphic, and as forbidden hugs and lingering embraces begin to feel more like foreplay than friendliness, his real intentions emerge. In a patriarchal Orthodox community, it's unusual for women to speak out, yet a few brave whistleblowers begin to share their stories - so the rabbi scrambles to lawyer up, while rallying his supporters in the community. He is prepared to fight and will go to any length to retain his position and prevent his world from crumbling. Members of a shocked congregation choose sides, leading to a community on the brink of being ripped apart. Will the rabbi win out? Will the women's stories be heard and believed? And will the community survive? Find out in The Kissing Rabbi. A novel by Andy Becker.

In The Aroma of Righteousness, Deborah Green explores images of perfume and incense in late Roman and early Byzantine Jewish literature. Using literary methods to illuminate the rabbinic literature, Green demonstrates the ways in which the rabbis’ reading of biblical texts and their intimate experience with aromatics build and deepen their interpretations. The study uncovers the cultural associations that are evoked by perfume and incense in both the Hebrew Bible and midrashic texts and seeks to understand the cultural, theological, and experiential motivations and impulses that lie behind these interpretations. Green accomplishes this by examining the relationship between the textual traditions of the Hebrew Bible and Midrash, the surviving evidence from the material culture of Palestine in the late Roman and early Byzantine periods, and cultural evidence as described by the rabbis and other Roman authors.

The legend of Lilith is undoubtedly the most fantastic of all ancient rabbinic myths. According to lore, God created her from dust alongside Adam. However, Lilith was a failed mate. She was not animated by the breath of God like Adam. Rather she was preemptively animated by a Satanic mist which erupted from the ground. Lilith rebelled against Adam and became the infamous Serpent who deceived Eve and caused Adam to fall. Therefore, God established eternal enmity between the Serpent Lilith and Eve and between their seed. Lilith's seed would bruise the heel of Eve's promised seed, Messiah, but Eve's seed would revive to crush Lilith’s head. This book reveals 23 Biblical evidences that prompted ancient rabbis to conclude the various elements of Lilith's legend. It also explains how her legend is completely consistent with traditional Judaic / Christian teachings on the Bible's redemptive message. Her legend solves many ancient Biblical mysteries, such as why the Serpent bears seed like Eve.

This book suggests several methods with which rabbinic sources can be approached in order to obtain information about women's history. It is the first feminist book about rabbinic literature which treats the latter as a historical source. It contains many examples and discusses for the first time many sources relevant for the issue of women in rabbinics.

It was only when Jewish writers gave up on the lofty Enlightenment ideals of progress and improvement that the Yiddish novel could decisively enter modernity. Animating their fictions were a set of unheroic heroes who struck a precarious balance between sanguinity and irony that author Miriam Udel captures through the phrase “never better.” With this rhetorical homage toward the double-voiced utterances of Sholem Aleichem, Udel gestures at these characters’ insouciant proclamation that things had never been better, and their rueful, even despairing admission that things would probably never get better. The characters defined by this dual consciousness constitute a new kind of protagonist: a distinctively Jewish scapegrace whom Udel denominates the polit or refugee. Cousin to the Golden Age Spanish pícaro, the polit is a socially marginal figure who narrates his own story in discrete episodes, as if stringing beads on a narrative necklace. A deeply unsettled figure, the polit is allergic to sentimentality and even routine domesticity. His sequential misadventures point the way toward the heart of the picaresque, which Jewish authors refashion as a vehicle for modernism—not only in Yiddish, but also in German, Russian, English and Hebrew. Udel draws out the contours of the new Jewish picaresque by contrasting it against the nineteenth-century genre of progress epitomized by the Bildungsroman. While this book is grounded in modern Jewish literature, its implications stretch toward genre studies in connection with modernist fiction more generally. Udel lays out for a diverse readership concepts in the history and theory of the novel while also explicating the relevant particularities of Jewish literary culture. In addressing the literary stylistics of a “minor” modernism, this study illuminates how the adoption of a picaresque sensibility allowed minority authors to write simultaneously within and against the literary traditions of Europe.