Books in the Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society series

Jewishness disrupts categories of identity because it is not genealogical, or even religious, but all of these, in dialectical tension with one another. An exploration of these tensions in the Pauline corpus, argues the author lead us to an appreciation of our own cultural quandaries as male and female, gay and straight, Jew and Palestinian.

Offers an alternative to the Euro-American warrior/patriarch model of masculinity and recovers the Jewish ideal of the gentle, receptive male. Analyzing ancient and modern texts, this book reveals early rabbis - studious, family-oriented - as exemplars of manhood and the prime objects of female desire in traditional Jewish society.

Until the late 19th century, Jews were identified in their own religious and poetic imagination as wanderers, their sacred center - Jerusalem, Zion - fatefully out of reach. This book examines the work of medieval Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi to chart a journey whose end was envisioned as the realignment of the people with their original center.

This history examines fundamental questions of ethnic identity by focusing on the Egyptian Jewish community since 1948. Central to the study is the question of how people handle multiple identities and loyalties that are dislocated and reformed by turbulent political and cultural processes.

The Jews (Falasha) of northwestern Ethiopia are a unique example of a Jewish group living within an ancient, non-Western, predominantly Christian society. This title helps unravel the complex nature of religious coexistence in Ethiopia and provides tools for analyzing and evaluating inter-religious, interethnic, and Jewish-Christian relations.

The nation--particularly in Exodus and Numbers--is not an abstract concept but rather a grand character whose history is fleshed out with remarkable literary power. In her innovative exploration of national imagination in the Bible, Pardes highlights the textual manifestations of the metaphor, the many anthropomorphisms by which a collective character named "e;Israel"e; springs to life. She explores the representation of communal motives, hidden desires, collective anxieties, the drama and suspense embedded in each phase of the nation's life: from birth in exile, to suckling in the wilderness, to a long process of maturation that has no definite end. In the Bible, Pardes suggests, history and literature go hand in hand more explicitly than in modern historiography, which is why the Bible serves as a paradigmatic case for examining the narrative base of national constructions. Pardes calls for a consideration of the Bible's penetrating renditions of national ambivalence. She reads the rebellious conduct of the nation against the grain, probing the murmurings of the people, foregrounding their critique of the official line. The Bible does not provide a homogeneous account of nation formation, according to Pardes, but rather reveals points of tension between different perceptions of the nation's history and destiny. This fresh and beautifully rendered portrayal of the history of ancient Israel will be of vital interest to anyone interested in the Bible, in the interrelations of literature and history, in nationhood, in feminist thought, and in psychoanalysis.