American Jewish History, 2001

2000

AJS Review, 2021

discussion with the ratification of women's suffrage in 1920. And instead of introducing her post-1945 chapter with reflections on the Holocaust, Nadell opens with the conservative gender dynamics of the 1950s. Such choices usefully blur the boundaries between the overlapping fields of American women's history and the history of American Jewish women.

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Contemporary Jewry, 2023

Editors' introduction to Contemporary Jewry's special issue on the most recent Pew Research Center’s Jewish Americans in 2020 (Pew 2020) study

Epitaphs present a record of cultural identity which researchers can analyze and form interpretations of cultural identity and its evolution. In 2014, Bar-Levav and others published "Death in Jewish Life," a comprehensive analysis of Jewish burial and death rituals, which exposed several cultural similarities that had not been drawn across the diverse Jewish nation. While Liftshitz concludes that Jewish epitaph texts and prayer are shaped by shared national trauma from persecution, Bar-Levav upheld that analysis of Jewish cemetery culture is shaped by community identity and Jewish epitaphs reflect the same communal and spiritual values of Jewish cemeteries. Studies of Western Jewish Antiquity also debate theories of modern Jewish morals and identification, with research of the latter sometimes independent of the formers' field. A lack of cohesion between the two closely related fields exposes a gap in current research, specifically regarding cultural heritage. Following a comparative content analysis of modern Jewish epitaph text and imagery with Williams' and Rutger's conclusions on ancient Jewish epitaph text from Imperial Rome, this study highlights the major differences in Jewish values and identifications between the two eras. The paper concludes that nationalism appears as the most frequent value on modern Jewish epitaphs, and the most apparent distinction between epitaphs from two eras, as "Hebrewized" names and nationalist symbols are now much more common in contrast to the more Hellenized and non-traditionalist values of ancient Roman Jews. The results provide more information regarding Jewish identity that anthropologists and Judaic researchers such as Bar-Levav and Lifshitz can employ as evidence in their search for the evolution and cultural heritage of the Jewish nation and the Western World as a whole.

2023

Death in Jewish Life, 2014

Bar-Levav offers a framework for depicting and understanding the varied Jewish attitudes towards death, particularly in the medieval period. The author differentiates between death as an idea and death as a reality, and between the presence and absence of death. He suggests that, by and large, death is marginal in the framework of Jewish culture. Jewish attitudes towards death can be anchored between time, space and texts. There is a time of mourning and remembrance, there is a place for the dead (the cemetery), and there are distinct texts that are used in the contexts of dying and mourning. The paper describes various axes along which ideas about death may be perceived: death as punishment or desideratum; the amalgamation of the personality during life and its disintegration in death; the relationship between this world and the world to come; the connection of the soul and the body; and the burial society as a social and religious organization. Death offers a moral perspective on life, and this is also connected with the comprehension of dying as a life passage, and with the construction of the idea of the proper death.

I lt is really an honor to speak on this occasion, and to return to the National Foundation. This is my own 30th year as a Jewish academic, having fin ished my doctorate at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1974. I spent close to ten years at the University of Maryland, a large public university. I then was at Yale, and it is wonderful to see all my former colleagues from this institution who are here this evening And then I came to the University of Pennsylvania, where I've had the privilege during the past ten years of directing an institute for advanced study in Jewish civilization, which has already graduat ed-if we can speak of them graduating our programover 250 scholars. They come to study one area of Jewish learning; they hold weekly seminars; and they produce at the end of the year a book as well as a new collective vision of Jewish learning. From the prospective of sitting in the seat of the directorship of this pro gram, I've had the wonderful honor and opportunity of seeing many scholars, young/old from all over the world, and with this 1 bring a certain perspective, I hope, to these personal observations. I would love to begin by recognizing my professional ancestors. If only Leopold Zunz, Morits Steinschneider or David Kaufmann were alive-I could mention many other names-but those are the big three for me of the 19th Century.