Reading Log

Currently Reading

Richard Serra, Writings and Interviews

Nissim of Gerona, Darashot Ha’Ran

Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic

Book Log:

Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Settler-Colonial State?

George Mitchell (ed.), Temple Towns of Tamil Nadu

Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament

Ittai Weinryb, Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place

2018

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954-1955) 

Mira Balberg, Blood for Thought: The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature

Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, Jewish Spiritual Growth (Heb: Haksharat Ha’Avreikhim)

Samuel Hayyim Brody, Martin Buber’s Theopolitics

Salo Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews, vo. 2 first edition (1937)

Salo Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation”

Patricia Clough, The User Unconscious: On Affect, Media, and Measure

Sergey Dolgopolski, Other Others: The Political After the Talmud

David Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

Georges Didi-Huberman, Images  In Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz

Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes, The Beginnings of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel

Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics

Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, A Student’s Obligation (Heb: Hovat Ha’Talmidim)

Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form

Jacob Neusner, Rabbinic Political Theory: Religion and Politics in the Mishnah

Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategies: Towards A Radical Democratic Society

David Biale, Power and Powerlesness in Jewish History

Aristotle, Politics

Shmuel Trigano, Philosophy of Law: The Political in the Torah

Yisachar Shlomo Teichtal, Em Habanim Semeha

Deborah A. Green, The Aroma of Righteousness: Scent and Seduction in Rabbinic Life and Literature

Thomas Trezise, Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Testimony

Vivian Liska, German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy

Kalonymos Kalmish Shapira, Sacred Fire

Yair Lorberbaum, In God’s Image: Myth, Theology, and Law in Classical Judaism

Leah Hochman, The Ugliness of Moses Mendelssohn: Aesthetics, Religion, and  Morality in the Eighteenth Century

Galit Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature

Amos Oz, Judas

Rachel Wasserfall (ed.), Women and Water: Menstruation in Jewish Life and Law

Ingrid Anderson, Ethics and Suffering since the Holocaust: Making ethics “first philosophy” in Levinas, Wiesel, and Rubenstein

Gideon Grief, We Wept Without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz

Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman (eds.), Women in the Holocaust

John Corrigan (ed.), Feeling Religion

Peto, Hecht, and Krasuka (eds.), Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges

Chaya Halberstam, Law & Truth in Biblical and Rabbinic Literature

Hillel Zeitlin, Hasidic Spirituality for a New Era: The Religious Writings of Hillel Zeitlin

Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israeli: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture

Inbar Raveh, Feminist Rereadings of Rabbinic Literature

2017

Daniel Boyarin, A Travelling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora

Moulie Vidas, Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud

Christine Hayes (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Judaism and Law

Jalal Al-e Ahmad, The Israeli Republic

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

Norman Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times

Sigmund Freud, Future of An Illusion

Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams

Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo

Isaiah Horowitz (the Shelah), The Generations of Adam (intro to Shnei Luchot ha’Brit)

William James, Principles of Psychology, vol.1

Max Weber, Ancient Judaism

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Norman Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book

Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society

Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Morality: Essays in Ethics and Masorah

Sasson Somekh, Baghdad, Yesterday: The Making of An Arab Jew

Orit Bashkin, New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq

Carlin Barton & Daniel Boyarin, Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities

Russell McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse of Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia

Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies

Manuel Vasquez, More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion

Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them

Tova Mirvis: The Book of Separation: A Memoir

Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories

Charles Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion

Jacob Neusner, Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah

Moses Maimonides, Treatise on Resurrection

Sylvester Johnson, African American Religions, 1500-2000: Colonialism, Democracy and Freedom

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I” “The Problem of the Fetish, II” “The Problem of the Fetish III”

Jacob Neusner, A Religion of Pots and Pans? Modes of Philosophical and Theological Discourse in Ancient Judaism

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Judaism and Ecology: The Created World and Revealed Word

David Mevorach Seidenberg, Kabblah and Ecology: God’s Image in the More-Than-Human-World

Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals and Politics

Jacob Neusner, Torah: From Scroll to Symbol in Formative Judaism

Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque

Andre Aciman, Out of Egypt: A Memoir

Dominique Janicaud, et al., Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate

Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction

Martha Himmelfarb, Jewish Messiah in a Christian Empire: A History if The Book of Zerubbabel

Menachem Kellner (ed.), The Pursuit of the Ideal: Jewish Writings of Steven Schwarzschild

Steven Wasserstrom, Religion After Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos

Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism

Lucette Lagnado, The Arrogant Years: One Girl’s Search for Her Lost Youth, from Cairo to Brooklyn

Eve  Kosofsky-Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity

Steven Wasserstrom, Between Muslim and Jew: The Problem of Symbiosis under Early Islam

Lucette Lagnado, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World

Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses

Joseph Klausner, The Messianic Idea in Israel from Its Beginning to the Completion of the Mishnah

Noam Pianko, Jewish Peoplehood: An American Innovation

2016

Solomon Schechter, Aspects of Rabbinic Theology

Marc Saperstein (ed.), Essential Papers on Messianic Movements and Personalities in Jewish History

Sherry Turkle, Simulation and Its Discontents

Nitzan Lebovic and Roy Ben-Shai (eds.), The Politics of Nihilism: From the Nineteenth Century to Contemporary Israel

Jill Bennet, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art

Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents

Aaron Hughes, Jacob Neusner:  An American Jewish Iconoclast

Giorgio Agamben, Pilate and Jesus

Colby Dickinson and Stephane Symons (eds.), Walter Benjamin and Theology

Shahar Arzy and Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: A Neurocognitive Approach to Mystical Experience

Aaron S. Gross, The Question of the Animal and Religion: Theoretical Stakes, Practical Implications

Howard Eiland and Michael W.  Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life

Michael Morgan and Steven Weizman, (ed.), Rethinking the Messianic Idea in Judaism

Boaz Huss,  The Zohar: Reception and Impact

Jacob Neusner, Messiah in Context: Israel’s History and Destiny in Formative Judaism

Tawfik Canaan, Muhameddean Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine (1928)

Joseph Dan, Jewish Mysticism and Jewish Ethics

David Novak, Jewish Social Ethics

Marvin Fox (ed.), Modern Jewish Ethics: Theory and Practice

Laurie Zoloth: Health Care and the Ethics of Encounter: A Jewish Discussion of Social Justice

Louis E. Newman, Past Imperatives: Studies in the History and Theory of Jewish Ethics

Jonathan Wyn Schofer, The Making of a Sage: A Study in Rabbinic Ethics

Obadyah Maimonides, The Treatise of the Pool

Jonathan Wyn Schofer, Confronting Vulnerability: The Body and the Divine in Rabbinic Ethics

Elisha Russ-Fishbane, Judaism, Sufism, and the Pietists of Medieval Egypt: A Study of Abraham Maimonides and His Times

Donovan O. Schaefer, Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power

Christine Hayes, What’s Divine About Divine Law? Early Perspectives

Emmanuel Levinas, “Messianic Texts,” “Beyond Memory,” “The Nations and the Presence of Israel”

Ishay Rosen-Zvi, The Mishnaic Sotah Ritual: Temple, Gender, and Midrash

John D. Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction

Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Demonic Desires: Yetzer Hara and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity

Eugene Borowitz, Exploring Jewish Ethics: Papers on Covenant Responsibility

Elliot Dorff and Louis E. Newman, Contemporary Jewish Ethics and Morality: A Reader

Alan Mittleman, A Short Introduction to Jewish Ethics

Louis E. Newman, An Introduction to Jewish Ethics

Elliot Wolfson, Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophais and Overcoming Theomania

David Goberman, Carved Memories: Heritage in Stone from the Russian Jewish Pale

Marc Michael Epstein, Skies of Parchment/Skies of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts

Henri Atlan, Sparks of Randomness, vol.2, The Atheism of Scripture

Hans Driesch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism

Chayyim of Volozhin, The Soul of Life (Nefesh ha’Hayyim), translated by Eliezer Lipa Moskowitz

Eli Diamond: Mortal Imitations of Divine Life: The Nature of the Soul in Aristotle’s De Anima

Joe Sachs, Aristotle’s Physics: A Guided Study

Joe Sachs, Aristotle’s Metaphysics: A New Translation

Joe Sachs,  On the Soul and on Memory and Recollection

Judith Hauptman, Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman’s Voice

Gwynn Kessler, Conceiving Israel: The Fetus in Rabbinic Narratives

Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory

Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities

Aristotle, De Anima

Simon de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

2015

Zohar, commentary on Leviticus

Oleg Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art (Revised and Enlarged Edition)

Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics

Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming

Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect

Patricia Crone, God’s Rule: Government and Islam

Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

Moshe Chayim Luzzato, The Way of Life (Derekh ha’Shem), translated by Aryeh Kaplan

Diana Coole & Samantha Frost (eds.), New Materialism: Ontology, Agency, and Politics

S. Yizhar, Khirbet Khizeh, translated by Nicholas De Lange and Yaacob Dweck

Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (eds.), Material Feminisms

Sergey Dolgopolski, The Open Past: Subjectivity and Remembering in the Talmud

Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts

Hugh Kennedy, When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World: The Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatst Dynasty

Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return: A Memoir

Maimonides, Medical Writings (Treatise on Poisons and their Antidotes, Treatise on Hemorrhoids, Treatise on Cohabitation)

George Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion

Mark S. Smith, God in Translation: Dieties in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World

Michael D. Coogan and Mark S. Smith, Stories from Ancient Canaan (second edition)

Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (second edition)

Jakob Petuchowski, Theology and Poetry: Studies in Medieval Piyyut

Othmar Keel and Christoph Uehlinger, God, Goddesses, and Images of God in Ancient Israel

Kenneth Seeskin, No Other Gods: The Modern Struggle Against Idolatry

Michael B. Hundley, Gods in Dwellings: Temples and Divine Presence in The Ancient Near East

Max Müller, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion As Illustrated by the Religions of India

Joanne Punzo-Waghorne and Norman Cutler (eds.), Gods of Flesh Gods of Stone: The Embodiment of Divinity in India

Alon Goshen-Gottstein and Eugene Korn (eds.), Jewish Theology and World Religions

Tryggve Mettinger, No Graven Image?: Israelite Aniconism in Its Ancient Near Eastern Contexts

Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art

Oleg Grabar, The Dome of the Rock

Robert Hoyland, In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire

Tirosh-Samuelson & Hughes (eds.) Moshe Idel: Representing God

Josh Ellengbogen and Aaron Tugendhaft (eds.), Idol Anxiety

Alain Besançon, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm

Shai Secunda, The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in Its Sasanian Context

Melila Hellner-Eshed, A River Flows Through from Eden: The Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar

James Kugel, The God of Old: Inside the Lost World of the Bible

Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology

David Greenstein, Roads to Utopia: The Walking Stories of the Zohar

2014

Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism

Diana Eck, Darshan: Seeing the Divine Image in India

Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History

Abraham Ibn Ezra, The Secrets of the Torah: A Translation of Abraham Ibn Ezra’s Sefer Yesod Mora Ve-Sod Ha-Torah

Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man’s Quest for God

Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) (translated by Rojcewicz and Vallega-Neu)

Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting

Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948

Avraham Grossman, Rashi

Bruno Latour, Rejoiciing

Bruno Latour, A Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World

Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (second book)

M. Avrum Ehrlich (ed.), The Jewish-Chinese Nexus: A Meeting of Civilizaions

Gary Shteyngart, Little Failure: A Memoir

Michel Serres, The Five Senses

John Sallis, The Force of Imagination

Shmuel Feiner, Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity

Jose Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Hillel Cohen: 1929: Year-Zero of the Israel Palestine Conflict (Hebrew)

Luce Irigaray, Between East and West: From Singularity to Community

Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman

Hannah Arendt, Antisemitism

Jay Geller, The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity

Gianni Vatimo and Michael Marder, Deconstructing Zionism: A Critique of Political Metaphysics

Randi Rashkover and Martin Kavka (eds.), Judaism, Liberalism, & Political Theology

Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making

Susan Solomon, The Jewish Architecture of Louis I. Kahn: Mikveh Israel and the Midcentury American Synagogue

Craig Martin, Masking Hegemony: A Genealogy of Liberalism, Religion, and the Private Sphere

Mel Scult, The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan

Mordecai Kaplan, Communings of the Spirit: The Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan, vol. 1 1913-1934

Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories

Mordecai Kaplan, The Religion of Ethical Nationhood

Vincent Lloyd, The Problem With Grace: Reconfiguring Political Theology

Vincent Lloyd, Law and Transcendence: On the Unfinished Project of Gillian Rose

2013

Rachel Neis, The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture: Jewish Ways of Seeing in Late Antiquity

Eliyahu Stern, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism

Moses Mendelssohn, Last Works (Morning Hours & To The Friends of Lessing)

Yaron Peleg, Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination

Geoffrey Herman, A Prince without a Kingdom: The Exilarch in the Sasanian Era

Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship

Aaron Hughes, The Invention of Jewish Identity: Bible, Philosophy, and the Art of Translation

Martin D. Yaffe (ed.), Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn

Robert Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture

Mary Bergstein, Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art

Gideon Freudenthal, No Religion without Idolatry: Mendelssohn’s Jewish Enlightenment

Peter Eli Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos

Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History

Claire Elise Katz, Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism

Joel Kramer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds

Benjamin Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy

Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography

Vilem Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography

Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism

Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth

Peter Hallward, Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation

Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being

Deleuze, Foucault

Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology

Elliot Wolfson, A Dream within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination

Asher Biemann, Dreaming of Michelangelo: Jewish Variations on a Modern Theme

Lee Levine, Visual Judaism: Historic Contexts of Jewish Art

Shaul Magid: American Post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society

Kenneth Seeskin, Jewish Messianic Thought in an Age of Despair 

Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars

Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin

Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice

Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution

Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image

Joel ben Simeon, The Washington Haggadh: a Fifteenth Century Manuscript from the Library of Congress

Marc Michael Epstein, The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative, and Religious Imagination

Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the technological Age

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator

N, Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis

Zohar, Pritzker edition vol.5 (commentary to Exodus)

Seth Schwarz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE

N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics

Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

Lewis Mumford, Technics & Civilization

2012

Jerome McGann, Radiant Textualities: Literature after the World Wide Web

Jeremy Stolow (ed.), Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between

Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other

Patrice Flichy, The Internet Imaginaire

Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age

Franz Kafka, Diaries

Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories

Piet van Boxel and Sabine Arndt (eds.), Crossing Borders: Hebrew Manuscripts as a Meeting-place of Cultures

Moshe Idel, Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Jewish Thought

David Kaufman, Shul with a Pool: The “Synagogue-Center” in American Jewish History

Michael Swartz, The Signifying Creator: Nontextual Sources of Meaning in Ancient Judaism 

Andrew Benjamin, Of Jews and Animals

Avi Sagi, Open Canon

Donniel Hartman and Moshe Halbertal, Judaism and the Challgenges of Modern Life

Avi Sagi, Tradition versus Traditionalism: Contemporary Perspectives in Jewish Thought

Berekhia ha-Nakdan, Fox Fables (translated by Moses Hadas as Fables of a Jewish Aesop)

Barbara Johnson, Moses & Multiculturalism

Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern

Michael Walzer, In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible

Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images

Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” and “Situated Knowledges” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

Hent de Vries & Samuel Weber (eds.), Religion and Media

Jay David Bolter & Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media

Zohar, Pritzker edition vol.4 (commentary to Exodus)

Don Ihde, Bodies in Technology

Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media

Philip Roth, The Plot against America

Mark Hansen, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media

Christian Wiese & Martina Urban,  German-Jewish Thought between Religion and Politics

Miryam Kabakov (ed.), Keep Your Wives Away from Them: Orthodox Women Unorthodox Desires: An Anthology

Mark Hansen, Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing

Margaret Olin, Touching Photographs (2012)

Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

Zohar, Pritzker edition vol.3 (completes commentary to Genesis)

Daniel Boyarin, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis

David Chalmers, The Character of Consciousness

Steven Greenberg, Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition