Books published by Academic Studies Press

This book delves into creative renditions of key aspects of Jewish Mysticism in Latin American literature, film, and art from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. This book introduces the work of Latin American authors and artists who have been inspired by Jewish Mysticism from the 1960s to the present.

This monograph is nothing less than a bold attempt at solving the riddle of Gogol's novel Dead Souls that even inspired a staging of Dead Souls at Schauspiel Stuttgart. Heftrich gives a comprehensive, coherent answer to the question of the novel's meaning by meticulously laying bare its structure. The first part of the monograph is dedicated to one section of Gogol's novel that has been neglected by virtually all critics - a clue that leads to a strictly ethical reading of Gogol's epic. Gogol, as it emerges, constructed Dead Souls strictly according to a moral pattern. It is amazing to discover how flawlessly Dead Souls is built in this regard. The novel thus proves to be a true descendant of medieval romance with its inseparable interrelation between ethics and epics.

Amid ethnic violence, political corruption, and petty professionalintrigue, an artist tries to live free of lies.Set during the last years of the Soviet Union, StoneDreams tells the story of Azerbaijani actor Sadai Sadygly, who landsin a Baku hospital while trying to protect an elderly Armenian man from a gangof young Azerbaijanis. Something of a modern-day Don Quixote, Sadai has longbattled the hatred and corruption he observes in contemporary Azerbaijanisociety. Wandering in and out of consciousness, he revisits his hometown, theancient village of Aylis, where Christian Armenians and Muslim Azeris oncelived peacefully together, and dreams of making a pilgrimage of atonement toArmenia. Stone Dreams is a searing, painful meditation onthe ability of art and artists-of individual human beings-to make change in theworld.

The book presents a broad-scope analysis of piezoelectric electromechanical transducers and the related aspects of practical transducer design for underwater applications. It uses an energy method for analyzing transducer problems that provides the physical insight important for the understanding of electromechanical devices. Application of the method is first illustrated with transducer examples that can be modeled as systems with a single degree of freedom, (such as spheres, short cylinders, bars and flexural disks and plates made of piezoelectric ceramics). Thereupon, transducers are modeled as devices with multiple degrees of freedom. In all these cases, results of modeling are presented in the form of equivalent electromechanical circuits convenient for the calculation of the transducers' operational characteristics. Special focus is made on the effects of coupled vibrations in mechanical systems on transducer performance. The book also provides extensive coverage of acoustic radiation including acoustic interaction between the transducers.The book is inherently multidisciplinary. It provides essential background regarding the vibration of elastic passive and piezoelectric bodies, piezoelectricity, acoustic radiation, and transducer characterization. Scientists and engineers working in the field of electroacoustics and those involved in education in the field will find this material useful not only for underwater acoustics, but also for electromechanics, energy conversion and medical ultrasonics.Part II contains general information on vibration of mechanical systems, electromechanical conversion in the deformed piezoceramic bodies, and acoustic radiation that can be used independently for treatment transducers of different type.

The first detailed study of string quartets in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Europe through the work of nine scholars who explore little-studied aspects of this multi-faceted genre.

A Centennial, writes Hebrew College President Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, is an opportunity "to ask ourselves what has changed and what has endured...to articulate our aspirations for the next one hundred years." Gathering incisive essays in Jewish studies alongside powerful personal stories, ¿iddushim celebrates a community connected to its source and brimming with spiritual and intellectual creativity as it looks toward the future.

It is human nature to want to fit in. The lengths people have gone to do so have provided creative minds with material for centuries. This book explores the consequences of being marked an outsider in the Russian-speaking world through a close study of several seminal works of Russian literature. The author combines the fields of literary studies, linguistics, and sociology to illuminate what prompted Christof Ruhl, an economist at the World Bank, to comment, about Russia, "e;On a very broad scale, it's a country where people care about their family and friends. Their clan. But not their society."e;

Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed addressed Jews of his day who felt challenged by apparent contradictions between Torah and science. We Are Not Alone: A Maimonidean Theology of the Other uses Maimonides' writings to address Jews of today who are perplexed by apparent contradictions between the morality of the Torah and their conviction that all human beings are created in the image of God and are the object of divine concern, that other religions have value, that genocide is never justified, and that slavery is evil. Individuals who choose to emphasize the moral and universalist elements of Jewish tradition can often find support in positions explicitly held by Maimonides or implied by his teachings. We Are Not Alone offers an ethical and universalist vision of traditionalist Judaism.

Isaac's Fear is a wide-ranging study of a Hebrew encyclopedia of Judaism by Isaac Lampronti, a rabbi and physician from eighteenth-century Ferrara, in Italy; this is the first encyclopedia of Judaism, with entries on thought and praxis. The book's eight chapters are previously published studies. Isaac's Fear represents the attempt to synthesize modern science and religious tradition, a fundamental issue then and in our own day. Encyclopedia entries illuminate the society and culture of early modern Italy, its Jewish community and the intellectual life of the author and his contemporaries.

Companion to Victor Pelevin, a collaborative undertaking by a group of emerging Russianist scholars, focuses on the work of one of the most important and hotly debated post-Soviet writers. The contributors offer new readings of Pelevin texts that cover a broad time span and pay due attention to the philosophical and aesthetic complexities of Pelevin¿s oeuvre in its development from the early post-Soviet years to the second decade of the present millennium.

This book explores three schools of fascinating, talented, and gifted scholars who absorbed into their thought the Jewish and secular cultures of their respective homelands.

The Hayei Adam, an abridged code of Jewish law, was written by Rabbi Avraham Danzig (1748-1820) and was first published in 1810. This code spread quickly throughout Europe, and the demand for it required a second publishing which the author printed in 1818. Beyond a Code of Jewish Law attempts to understand the implicit message of its author and discuss various approaches of its writer to both Judaism and Jewish law. While the Hayei Adam without any doubt unveils Rabbi Danzig to be a brilliant rabbinic scholar, with a comprehensive knowledge of Jewish law as well as a coherent and concise system of presentation, it also expresses his great concern for the Jewish community and each individual Jew. Aspects of this concern such as Hasidism, musar, kabbalah, are explored.

This book examines major Russian TV series focusing on three major issues: Russian television's transition to digital post-broadcast visual economy, Russian television's integration into global television markets and their genre systems, and major shifts in representation of gender and sexuality on television.

This book examines major Russian TV series focusing on three major issues: Russian television's transition to digital post-broadcast visual economy, Russian television's integration into global television markets and their genre systems, and major shifts in representation of gender and sexuality on television.

Drawing on a wide range of sources and historiographical material, Between East and West provides a comprehensive analysis of the efforts of the Moscow princes to form a centralized Russian state. According to the author, the unification of Russia around Moscow was not historically inevitable. Tver, Novgorod, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania also claimed this role, and if they had been victorious, a less authoritarian, less autocratic and less despotic Russian state could have emerged. Professor Shaikhutdinov rejects the concept of the "e;Mongol-Tatar yoke"e; and claims that relations between Moscow and Ulus Jochi (Golden Horde) were more complicated and interdependent. The influence of Ulus Jochi on Moscow was especially strong in the political, economic and military spheres, while the religious field was dominated by the influence from Byzantium. The volume discusses in detail the geopolitical aspirations of Russia and the "e;Moscow-Third Rome"e; theory. In sum, the formation of the Moscow state was directly influenced by both internal and external factors, countries of the East and the West.

Martin Vop¿nkäs novel, The Back of Beyond¿Travels with Benjamin, is the story of a middle-aged man, who¿despite his professional success and affluence¿lacks fulfillment. After the tragic death of his wife, he is left alone with his eight-year-old son and quickly realizes that if he wants to succeed in the role of single parent that has suddenly been thrust upon him, he has to change fundamentally. So, he takes his son and sets out on a journey to what he dubs the Back of Beyond. With its unique blend of sensitive and suggestive language this book is a stylistic gem, rendered in seamless translation and appearing here for the first time in English.

Baiba Bi¿ole belongs to the postwar generation of Latvian poets living in exile who reached artistic maturity outside their native country and broke with the older exile generation¿s traditional, nationalistic poetry. In To Taste the River, Bi¿ole's poems are lyrical and personal, often with intense emotion and startling imagery. This is Bi¿ole's first collection of poems in English translation.