This chapter explores the Jewish American literature of Los Angeles by contrasting it with the more prominent Jewish literary traditions of New York and Chicago. Birns delves into the complexities of Jewish life in the city as represented in the works of Harris Newmark, Aben Kandel, Nathanael West, Budd Schulberg, and Eve Babitz. He also addresses the contributions of genre fiction writers like Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, Rochelle Krich, and Walter Mosley, and concludes by considering the differing approaches to history and memory offered in prose by Gina Nahai and Harry Turtledove, and in poetry by Boris Dralyuk. Birns suggests that, while the Jewish literary tradition of Los Angeles may not have commanded a level of attention to match those of other American metropolises, it is a powerfully future-facing tradition, resisting assimilative impulses and engaging consistently with multicultural and diasporic paradigms.

Jews have always participated in popular culture, but positive Jewish images rarely occurred until the 1990s. Jewish insider/outsider status shaped the film industry, radio and television, comic books, and stand-up comedy. A few Jewish characters were prominent in the 1960s–1970s (e.g., Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen). With the rise of the Internet and media industries targeting niche audiences, Jewish imagery now highlights Latinx Jews, Black Jews, Asian American Jews, Indigenous Jews, Sephardic Jews, and LGBTQ+ Jews. For example, Transparent (2014–2019) about a Jewish father who comes out as a transgender woman, routinely incorporates religious rituals. Broad City (2014–2019) celebrates the escapades of sexually fluid twenty-something Jewish friends. Drake and Tiffany Haddish, both Black Jews, repackaged their Bar/Bat Mitzvahs for comic effect. Explicit intra-Jewish diversity within wider American experiences disrupts historical tensions between Jewish presence and erasure in pop culture that were fueled by anti-Semitism.

This chapter asks how two subjects defined in the terms of ‘religion’ – the ‘Muslim’ and the ‘Jewish’ subject – became recognizable as such in the decades prior to the independence of the ‘Islamic Republic’ of Pakistan and the ‘Jewish National Home’ of Israel, which aligned the recognition and formation of the religious minority, the nation, and the state. It addresses the recognition of Israel and Pakistan in the contexts of their colonial pasts and analyses the role of demography, the claim for political representation, and the work of two international commissions that shaped the borders of their statehood. It shows how emerging modes of cultural recognition built on and cemented very particular understandings of ‘religion’ and funnelled certain aspects of social, political, and cultural life into coherent, representable, and recognizable forms of religious difference. By looking in detail at the epistemological politics of religious difference, the chapter illustrates the costs that come with the recognition of ‘religion’ and ‘religious difference’ in the transition from empire to state. The double face of the imperial recognition of the ‘Indian Muslims’ and the ‘Palestinian Jews’, in other words, worked both as a condition for legitimate government and power and as a resource for the future challenge against them.

This chapter situates itself between the untheorizable singularities of specific case studies and the unsustainable generalities that usually result from attempts at broad historical characterization.  By looking at everything from a late fifteenth-century image of Jews making music in a Prague synagogue to armies of wooden klezmer musicians in a twenty-first-century store window, and from a nineteenth-century Jewish musical caricature to a bit of concentration-camp ephemera involving Hebrew words spelled with musical notes, this chapter endeavors to give some of the flavor of the Czech Jewish musical experience.

The goal of preconception counseling is to educate patients about healthy pregnancies, adjust risk factors, and identify and treat any underlying conditions to promote maternal health as well as decrease the risk of maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality. Preconception counseling can be completed at any patient encounter with a patient of reproductive potential and should occur multiple times during a patient’s lifespan. Counseling includes a thorough review of personal and family histories, encouragement of a healthy lifestyle, assessment and completion of preventive care, and education on available genetic testing.

This chapter reviews the ancient Greek, Roman and Jewish evidence to discern the marriage practices the early Christians would have known. It lays the foundation for tracing the antiquity of customs attested in the later Byzantine sources. In addition to ancient texts, this chapter examines Roman artistic depiction of marriage in frescoes and funerary art.

Brennan Breed’s “The Reception History of Isaiah: Unsealing the Book” takes a single theme attested in just a few verses (Isa 8:16; 29:11; and 30:8) and shows how it has been reinterpreted by readers ceaselessly across the centuries, all the way from later biblical authors to modern times, in response to everything from sectarian divisions to African-American slavery to the trauma of the Holocaust. These verses refer to the words of the prophet being sealed, especially to those who are ignorant, until the time comes for their meaning to be revealed. This theme brings into focus the ways in which Isaiah has been used polemically, and it also points to the text’s power as a seemingly inexhaustible well of meaning.

This chapter looks at what the Geniza archives tell us about Cairo’s community’s relationship with the Nile. Since its discovery by scholars in the late nineteenth century, this large and unique corpus of medieval and early modern manuscripts has allowed scholars to access part of the quotidian experience of Cairo’s – and to a wider degree Egypt’s – Jewish communities over centuries. It also documents their integration within transnational and diasporic webs that, just like Egypt’s agricultural surpluses, extended to Palestine and the wider Mediterranean. As is shown, the letters preserved in the Geniza complement, and at times disrupt, literary evidence. They notably do so by evoking a medieval world in which real disaster was perhaps never far away, and where the Nile, its waters, floods and promises or denial of sustenance, were always in view.

Macedonian conqueror, in both Jewish and Christian sources, was a composite and of complicated design. It was constantly created and recreated, using varied techniques and inspirations, which resulted in a number of disparate, fragmentary projections. The dominant features of these projections were selected according to the immediate need and agenda of the text in which the figure of Alexander appeared. There is a certain continuity between the development of Alexander stories and legends in the Jewish milieu and those of the Greek and Roman pagan traditions, but there are significant innovations as well. As for the Christian authors, as much as they were familiar with Classical writings on Alexander, they would also exploit the Jewish corpus of Alexander legends, some of which have no direct parallel in Greco-Roman pagan writings.

1 Introduction

2 Digital Religion: History and Context

3 Digital Religious Practice as Contemporary Lived Religion

4 Challenges of Digital Religion to Offline Religious Practice

 4.1 Shifts in Religious Authority Online and Offline

 4.2 Digital Ritual: Transforming Traditional Religious Practice

5 Religious Community in the Digital Age

6 Future Developments in Digital Religion

This chapter introduces the contents of this volume and provides a critical overview of medieval pharmacology with a focus on the Mediterranean from the ninth/tenth century to the fifteenth. It emphasises the importance of drawing evidence from various cultures (Byzantine, Islamicate, Jewish, Latin) and disciplines (history, art history, manuscript studies, and archaeology) in order to discuss topics of broader significance for the global Middle Ages, such as the transfer of medical and pharmacological knowledge. It also shows how our understanding of medieval pharmacology can be significantly expanded by the study of evidence from other areas, such as alchemy, cooking, diplomacy, magic, religion, and philosophy.

This chapter deals with the idiosyncratic works of two key authors from the Mad magazine generation: Harvey Kurtzman and Jules Feiffer. It addresses more specifically the distinctive satirical styles of both authors, who criticized and reconfigured, from a leftist and Jewish immigrant background, the standard signifiers of American mainstream culture. Although both authors contributed equally to the tradition of American cartooning, their work in the graphic novel field is highly divergent. Kurtzman started at EC in the war comics subgenre, but rapidly turned to humor magazines, before introducing an important stand-alone comics paperback with original material, Harvey Kurtzman’s Jungle Book, whose incongruous humor relied on clever, repetitive panel layouts. Like Kurtzman, Feiffer is adept at transmedial appropriation, but his work, which started under Will Eisner’s tutelage, is less focused on citational humor and both more personal and more political. Instead, Feiffer developed singular forms of graphic narratives targeting conformism. The chapter offers close readings of Kurtzman’s Jungle Book and Feiffer’s noir trilogy: Kill My Mother, Cousin Joseph, and The Ghost Script (all from the 2010s).

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

This chapter focuses on the series of conflicts between the Roman government and the Jewish population of the Roman empire during the first and second centuries CE. Modern theories on this relationship are as elaborate and convoluted as the corpus of primary sources available for it. Both will be analyzed here through the scope of genocide, in an attempt to determine whether there ever existed a Roman intent to destroy the Jewish group or parts of it, and the extent to which actual destruction ultimately occurred.