Selected insights, though-provoking ideas, homilies and explanations.

One of the cornerstones of the religious Jewish experience in all its variations is Torah study, and this learning is considered a central criterion for leadership. Jewish Women’s Torah Study addresses the question of women's integration in the halachic-religious system at this pivotal intersection. The contemporary debate regarding women’s Torah study first emerged in the second half of the 19th century. As women’s status in general society changed, offering increased legal rights and opportunities for education, a debate on the need to change women’s participation in Torah study emerged. Orthodoxy was faced with the question: which parts, if any, of modernity should be integrated into Halacha? Exemplifying the entire array of Orthodox responses to modernity, this book is a valuable addition to the scholarship of Judaism in the modern era and will be of interest to students and scholars of Religion, Gender Studies and Jewish Studies.

In a book that explores the phenomenon of stuttering from its practical and physical aspects to its historical profile to its existential implications, Shell, who has himself struggled with stuttering all his life, plumbs the depths of this murky region between will and flesh, intention and expression, idea and word. Looking into the difficulties encountered by people who stutter--as do fifty million world-wide--Shell shows that stutterers share a kinship with many other speakers, both impeded and fluent. This book takes us back to a time when stuttering was believed to be 'diagnosis-induced, ' then on to the complex mix of physical and psychological causes that were later discovered. Ranging from cartoon characters like Porky Pig to cultural icons like Marilyn Monroe, from Moses to Hamlet, Shell reveals how stuttering in literature plays a role in the formation of tone, narrative progression and character.--From publisher description.