One hundred twenty-nine contemporary Jewish women retell and glean new meaning from the stories of sixty-nine women in the Talmud as they honor them with over sixty-nine vegan or plant-based recipes.
Author, Kenden Alfond has created a menu for every Jewish holiday that provides the peace of mind and confidence that comes from serving healthy foods while creating cherished memories. The Jewish Food Hero Cookbook is Alfond's contribution to the Jewish community's efforts to increase the amount healthy foods found on our tables. All the recipes in this cookbook use completely plant based food (no animal products) and everyday kosher parve ingredients. Cooking healthy holiday meals can be a form of creative expression, self-care, and love. Beautifully photographed and filled with endearing stories of the author's inspiration behind each holiday menu, The Jewish Food Hero Cookbook is not just about the food and the final presentation. It's also about how you feel leading up to the holiday, and the ambiance one wants to create from day one of preparation. It's about experiencing the holiday itself and creating beloved memories with your family. Pairing both traditional and modern, healthy food, the goal of this book is to prove that together we can create a new and healthy food future for the Jewish people, one that is connected to the most beautiful of Jewish traditions while being grounded in the present.
**WINNER of the 2018 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the 2018 Sophie Brody Medal for achievement in Jewish literature** **2018 Natan Book Award Finalist** **Finalist for the 2017 National Jewish Book Award in Women's Studies ** The Wall Street Journal: "There is humor and heartbreak in these pages...Ms. Kurshan immerses herself in the demands of daily Talmud study and allows the words of ancient scholars to transform the patterns of her own life." The Jewish Standard:“Brilliant, beautifully written, sensitive, original." The Jerusalem Post:"A beautiful and inspiring book. Both religious and secular readers will find themselves immensely moved by [Kurshan's] personal story.” American Jewish World: “So engrossing I hardly could put it down.” At the age of twenty-seven, alone in Jerusalem in the wake of a painful divorce,Ilana Kurshan joined the world’s largest book club, learning daf yomi, Hebrew for“daily page” of the Talmud, a book of rabbinic teachings spanning about six hundredyears. Her story is a tale of heartache and humor, of love and loss, of marriageand motherhood, and of learning to put one foot in front of the other by turningpage after page. Kurshan takes us on a deeply accessible and personal guided tourof the Talmud. For people of the book—both Jewish and non-Jewish—If All theSeas Were Ink is a celebration of learning, through literature, how to fall in loveonce again.
The author culls stories of extraordinary women from the Talmud and Midrash and skillfully weaves dialogue and detail to bring these inspiring figures to life. Sixteen true Jewish heroines and their unforgettable contributions to our legacy of faith.
This volume sheds light on the early rabbis as the shapers of religion and uncovers for the modern reader the early Sages' fundamental beliefs concerning God, the world and the human condition.
In this unique volume Judith Abrams, author of the highly regarded series The Talmud for Beginners, examines the episodes recorded in rabbinic literature that suggest the actions of the women of those times. By overlooking what the sages thought about women, or what they believed women ought to do in theory, and by focusing upon the situational and behavioral patterns of these women, Abrams has constructed a credible and feasible account of what women belonging to the rabbinic era were actually like and the manner in which they conducted themselves on a daily basis. Upon looking at the materials presented, the reader will find that women were every bit as varied a group then as women are today; some were pious and respectful of the sages and some disregarded them; some were poor and others rich; some longed to be married while others yearned for divorce. Perhaps the greatest surprise to the reader will be discovering the large amount of power and control women had over their own lives. Far from passive, these women were not the powerless figures the reader may have thought them to be.
This book offers a new perspective on the extensive rabbinic discussions of menstrual impurity, female physiology, and anatomy, and on the social and religious institutions those discussions engendered. It analyzes the functions of these discussions within the larger textual world of rabbinic literature and in the context of Jewish and Christian culture in late antiquity.
The Babylonian Talmud, a postbiblical Jewish text that is part scripture and part commentary, is an unlikely bestseller. Written in a hybrid of Hebrew and Aramaic, it is often ambiguous to the point of incomprehension, and its subject matter reflects a narrow scholasticism that should hardly have broad appeal. Yet the Talmud has remained in print for centuries and is more popular today than ever. Barry Scott Wimpfheimer tells the remarkable story of this ancient Jewish book and explains why it has endured for almost two millennia.0Providing a concise biography of this quintessential work of rabbinic Judaism, Wimpfheimer takes readers from the Talmud's prehistory in biblical and second-temple Judaism to its present-day use as a source of religious ideology, a model of different modes of rationality, and a totem of cultural identity. He describes the book's origins and structure, its centrality to Jewish law, its mixed reception history, and its golden renaissance in modernity. He explains why reading the Talmud can feel like being swept up in a river or lost in a maze, and why the Talmud has come to be venerated--but also excoriated and maligned-in the centuries since it first appeared.0An incomparable introduction to a work of literature that has lived a full and varied life, this accessible book shows why the Talmud is at once a received source of traditional teachings, a touchstone of cultural authority, and a powerful symbol of Jewishness for both supporters and critics.
This book discusses the interaction between history, rabbinic literature and feminist studies. Recent approaches to rabbinic literature have overturned the traditional view of these writings and new literary methods were suggested, mostly denying them all historical value. But rabbinic literature constitutes the main source for the lives of Jews in Palestine and Babylonia during the late Roman period, and thus should not be totally rejected. This study suggests a new post-literary approach, i.e. it discusses the residue of the texts after these have been analyzed and dissected by literary critics. But mainly this is a book about women's history, adopting many assumptions of feminist criticism about the androcentric nature of all ancient texts, and approaches them with due suspicion. The Rabbis treated women differently from the way they treated men. This resulted in the former's marginalization and manipulation by the texts. On the other hand, however, it created an ironic situation whereby principles useful for the recovery of historical information on women, are useless when applied to men. This study describes such principles and demonstrates them with the help of many examples.