Steven Weitzman

Part of what distinguishes positive psychology's approach to religion from that of other kinds of scholarship is the way it is affecting religious life today. The research it has inspired does not merely measure or explain the impact of religious belief and practice; it has begun to change that belief and practice, precipitating what one might describe as a kind of psychologized religion that fuses the characteristics of traditional religious tradition with theories and prescriptions that are drawn from positive psychology. An example of this effect is a new kind of gospel that has emerged in the wake of positive psychology. Examples include Christopher Kaczor's The Gospel of Happiness and David Murray's The Happy Christian: Ten Ways to Be a Joyful Believer in a Gloomy World, works that draw on positive psychology as an argument for embracing Christian values and religious practices. The religious effects of positive psychology are not limited to Christianity: there are similar kinds of books, articles, and websites that do the same for Buddhism, Judaism, and other traditions. 1 Positive psychology has provided new evidence that religion is good for people's sense of well-being, good for their health, and good for how they operate as part of groups or organizations, and many religious communities have been drawing on that evidence to make a twenty-first century case for themselves. Positive psychology and its view of religion and spirituality are having consequences that go well beyond academia to shape the development of religious life in America and other cultures, and that is all the more reason for a dialogue with academic religious studies, a field interested not just in religion but in how scholars think about and affect religion.

The Haggadah’s insistence that God, without an intermediary, saved the Israelites from Egypt is a veiled retort to the Christian belief that God relied on Jesus as an agent of redemption. Moreover, the midrash replaces the Arma Christi tradition of recounting the weapons Jesus used to save humanity during the Crucifixion with its own distinctively Jewish arsenal of redemption: pestilence, a sword, the Shechinah, the staff, and blood.

In the final centuries of the Second Temple period, Jews had come to believe that there was a connection between their own ritual behavior and the behavior of their biblical ancestors. The purpose of this essay is to identify some of the ways in which Jews at this time linked ...

An exploration of how the biblical interpretation of Aviva Zornberg addresses the problem of interpreting other minds. Focusing on her reading of an encounter between Joseph and Judah, the essay excavates Zornberg's underlying intellectual orientation and how she uses biblical interpretation to overcome the barriers that prevent one person from. understanding another.

Launched from an essay published by Robert Alter in 1995, this essay introduces a forum that aims to bring new perspectives to bear on the "Jewish voice" as represented by American Jewish writers. Alter defines the Jewish voice as a cluster of characteristic speech habits that could be traced back to the culture of Yiddishkeit. Is the use of this voice by American writers, transmuted into English, evidence that an essential quality of Eastern European Jewish culture has persisted as a part of American Jewish life even in the face of all the social, cultural, and linguistic changes of the last century: the end of immigration as a formative experience for most Jews, the decline of Yiddish as a living language, and the integration of Jews into mainstream linguistic culture? The essays featured here suggest new ways to think about this question, as they focus in different ways on how the Jewish voices

As part of a larger exploration of the role of Protestant biblical scholarship in the history of Anti-Semitism, Philo-Semitism and Jewish-Christian relations, this essay focuses on William Foxwell Albright and his enlistment of critical biblical scholarship and scholarly relationships as a way of allying Jews and Christians in the post-war struggle against Anti-Semitism in the United States.

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

Seeking to re-situate early Jewish angelology in a Hellenistic-Roman context, this essay proposes a new understanding of why angelic names and ranks became so important in how Jews conceived the angels. It also suggests a new way to contextualize the emergence of the idea of an angelic rebellion.

In the wake of increased mental health issues resulting from combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, psychologists affiliated with the field of positive psychology developed a resiliency training program for the US Army that included strengthening “spirituality fitness” as one of its goals. The initiative represents what may be the largest single effort to use spirituality to intervene in people’s mental health, but it also represents an intervention in the semantics of spirituality, an attempt to make it signify in new ways. This study treats this intervention as an exercise in “strategic ambiguity,” the use of unclear language to balance between contradictory goals, and draws from this approach some inferences about what it is that those working in the field of positive psychology import into the spirituality they have promoted within American military culture.

The table of contents for the most recent edition of the Jews, co-authored by John Efron, Matthias Lehmann and Steve Weitzman. The volume is a comprehensive one volume survey of Jewish history from its beginnings into the present and is meant for classroom use and for general readers. The volume is meant to be accessible but also incorporates the most recent scholarship and encompasses politics, culture, religion, gender and other dimensions of historical experience.

https://www.routledge.com/The-Jews-A-History-3rd-Edition/Efron-Weitzman-Lehmann/p/book/9781138298446

a chapter from the newly published volume on Tel Beth Shemesh, Tel Beth Shemesh: a Border Community in Judah, vol 1, edited by Zvi Lederman and Shlomo Bunimovitz. The volume takes a highly innovative approach to the archaeological field report, encompassing a range of different methodological perspectives.

Bill Clinton was not the only comeback kid of the 1990s. King David enjoyed a remarkable revival as well. In 1993 he, or rather his name, made an unexpected reappearance with the discovery of the famous``House of David''inscription at Tel Dan, the earliest reference to ...

While noticing that the tactics and weapons prescribed in the War Scroll resemble those used by Greek and Roman armies, previous scholarship has been dubious of the idea that the scroll actually guided real-life military practice because its battle-plan seems so impractical, assuming a conflict that unfolds in a highly scripted way and relying on ritual and supernatural assistance. This essay aims to rethink the role that the War Scroll played in early Jewish military practice by reading it in light of Greco-Roman theories of how to deploy emotion in battle. Military thinkers like Xenophon and Julius Caesar recognized troop psychology as an important tactical variable that could be manipulated through ritual and supernatural portents. The War Scroll mirrors these practices in a way that supports reading it as a similar effort to manipulate troop psychology arising under the influence of—and perhaps in reaction against—Greco-Roman military practice.

The first major history of the scholarly quest to answer the question of Jewish origins

The Jews have one of the longest continuously recorded histories of any people in the world, but what do we actually know about their origins? While many think the answer to this question can be found in the Bible, others look to archaeology or genetics. Some skeptics have even sought to debunk the very idea that the Jews have a common origin. In this book, Steven Weitzman takes a learned and lively look at what we know—or think we know—about where the Jews came from, when they arose, and how they came to be.

Scholars have written hundreds of books on the topic and have come up with scores of explanations, theories, and historical reconstructions, but this is the first book to trace the history of the different approaches that have been applied to the question, including genealogy, linguistics, archaeology, psychology, sociology, and genetics. Weitzman shows how this quest has been fraught since its inception with religious and political agendas, how anti-Semitism cast its long shadow over generations of learning, and how recent claims about Jewish origins have been difficult to disentangle from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He does not offer neatly packaged conclusions but invites readers on an intellectual adventure, shedding new light on the assumptions and biases of those seeking answers—and the challenges that have made finding answers so elusive.

Spanning more than two centuries and drawing on the latest findings, The Origin of the Jews brings needed clarity and historical context to this enduring and often divisive topic.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has had a long and tortuous relationship with religion over almost the entirety of its existence. As early as 1917, the Bureau began to target religious communities and groups it believed were hotbeds of anti-American politics. Whether these religious communities were pacifist groups that opposed American wars, or religious groups that advocated for white supremacy or direct conflict with the FBI, the Bureau has infiltrated and surveilled religious communities that run the gamut of American religious life.

The FBI and Religion recounts this fraught and fascinating history, focusing on key moments in the Bureau’s history. Starting from the beginnings of the FBI before World War I, moving through the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War, up to 9/11 and today, this book tackles questions essential to understanding not only the history of law enforcement and religion, but also the future of religious liberty in America.

Over the centuries, the messianic tradition has provided the language through which modern Jewish philosophers, socialists, and Zionists envisioned a utopian future. Michael L. Morgan, Steven Weitzman, and an international group of leading scholars ask new questions and provide new ways of thinking about this enduring Jewish idea. Using the writings of Gershom Scholem, which ranged over the history of messianic belief and its conflicted role in the Jewish imagination, these essays put aside the boundaries that divide history from philosophy and religion to offer new perspectives on the role and relevance of messianism today.

Many recent studies have argued that the self is a modern invention, a concept developed in the last three centuries. Religion and the Self in Antiquity challenges that idea by presenting a series of studies that explore the origins, formation, and limits of the self within the religions of the ancient Mediterranean world. Drawing on recent work on the body, gender, sexuality, the anthropology of the senses, and power, contributors make a strong case that the history of the self does indeed begin in antiquity, developing as Western religion itself developed.

This book examines a literary form within the Bible that has slipped through the cracks of modern scholarship: the mixing of song and story in biblical narrative. Journeying from ancient Egyptian battle accounts to Aramaic wisdom texts to early retellings of biblical tales in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jewish-Hellenistic literature, and rabbinic midrash, Steven Weitzman follows the history of this form from its origins as a congeries of different literary behaviors to its emergence as a self-conscious literary convention.

The Jews: A History, 2/e, explores the religious, cultural, social, and economic diversity of the Jewish people and their faith. The latest edition incorporates new research and includes a broader spectrum of people — mothers, children, workers, students, artists, and radicals — whose perspectives greatly expand the story of Jewish life.

Tradition has it that King Solomon knew everything there was to know—the mysteries of nature, of love, of God himself—but what do we know of Solomon himself? Steven Weitzman reintroduces readers to Solomon's story and its surprising influence in shaping Western culture, and he also examines what Solomon's life, wisdom, and writings have come to mean for Jews, Christians, and Muslims over the past two thousand years.

In a world of relentless and often violent change, what does it take for a culture to survive? Steven Weitzman addresses this question by exploring the "arts of cultural persistence"--the tactics that cultures employ to sustain themselves in the face of intractable realities. Surviving Sacrilege focuses on a famously resilient culture caught between two disruptive acts of sacrilege: ancient Judaism between the destruction of the First Temple (by the Babylonians) in 586 B.C. and the destruction of the Second Temple (by the Romans) in 70 C.E..

Throughout this period Jews faced the challenge of preserving their religious traditions in a world largely out of their control--a world ruled first by the Persians, then by the Hellenistic Seleucid Kingdom, and finally by the Roman Empire. Their struggle to answer this challenge yields insight into the ingenuity, resourcefulness, and creativity of a distinctive period in Jewish history, but one with broad implications for the study of religious and cultural survival.

Detecting something tenaciously self-preserving at the core of the imagination, Weitzman argues that its expression in storytelling, fantasy, imitation, metaphor, and magic allows a culture's survival instinct to maneuver within, beyond, and even against the limits of reality.

Special issue of the journal Prooftexts devoted to new research on the reception history of biblical poetry, featuring articles that illumine the concepts of biblical poetry at work in the thinking and literary or scholarly output of figures ranging from Robert Lowth to Emma Lazarus.

Seeking to advance and understand trends in the genetics of Jewish populations, this special issue focuses on Jewish population genetics, setting new developments in relation not only to past population genetic studies but also in the broader context of Jewish studies SCHOLARSHIP. The special issue builds upon a course of the same name that we held jointly in the biology and Jewish studies programs at Stanford University in the autumn of 2012, featuring the issue’s contributors as guest lecturers. Human population genetics is, in part, a form of historical endeavor, potentially illuminating the effects of social practices such as endogamy and conversion, the history of population relationships, and the magnitude, direction, and timing of migration events. At the same time, the field can be viewed as historically situated, with its underlying assumptions, its expression in language, and its cultural reverberations and social implications subject to research in their own right. As a collection of articles spanning multiple forms of inquiry, this special issue aims to both present and contextualize current research, discussing its cultural environment and the challenges that lie ahead.

What has become of the so-called literary approach to the Bible since Robert Alter published "The Art of Biblical Narrative" in 1981? What gave rise to this approach in the first place? How has it been influenced by recent trends in BIBLICAL STUDIES and literary scholarship? And what is its future, both in general and as part of the particular project that Prooftexts represents? The essay addresses these questions as a way of introducing what is at stake in the present volume.

The purpose of this workshop is to support the professional development of early career scholars in Jewish Studies and to help foster connections among scholars across the boundaries of specialization. The workshop will offer guidance on publishing, teaching, functioning as a "public scholar," and other kinds of professional skills, and will include opportunities to think together about power, gender, and sexuality in the profession, and conceptions of work-life balance.

The Jews have one of the longest continuously recorded histories of any people in the world, but what do we actually know about their origins? This multidisciplinary symposium aims to bring together new research on the question of Jewish origin from a range of fields, including historical studies, archaeology, and genetics.

For Studies colleagues, please help spread the word about a new initiative to provide microgrants of up to $1000 to support scholars in Ukraine seeking continue their work in very difficult circumstances.

People can submit applications in Ukrainian or Russian, and those eligible include scholars, graduate students, and those whose work supports Jewish Studies or Holocaust related museums and archives.

The Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, in partnership with Jewish Studies programs in the USA and Canada, invites applications for small grants to support research in Jewish Studies in Ukraine. Jewish studies scholars, including graduate students, faculty, and independent researchers are encouraged to apply. The field within Jewish Studies is open and includes any area in the humanities and social sciences. Applicants should submit a short application form, consisting of a description of their project (up to 250 words), their most recent CV, and contact information for two referees (email or phone number). The application can be submitted in English, Russian, or Ukrainian. The amount of the grant ranges between $500 and $1000 USD, and is determined by merit and need.

Заявку можна подати англійською, українською або російською мовами.
Заявку можно подать по-английски, украински и по-русски.

For the application. see

https://mfjc.org/assistance-to-jewish-studies-scholars.../

WITH THE GLOBE REELING from the current pandemic, the 2022 Summer School will focus on the experience and consequences of crises-how traumatic, overpowering events have transformed Jewish life, and what continuities, changes, and innovations have followed these experiences. Over a week of intensive learning with a cohort of leading scholars from different subfields and disciplines, graduate students will explore the ways Jews, as individuals and as communities, contended with different sorts of crises over the course of history, ranging from public health emergencies to pogroms, from social and political breakdowns to psychological trauma. The week will also give participants a chance to reflect together on the current pandemic and its impact on scholarship and teaching, and will include sessions devoted to professional development. We are delighted that the resumption of the summer school in 2022 brings with it a new partner, the Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp. The addition of a European partner advances the program's goal of promoting a sense of intellectual community with scholars and fellow graduate students from around the world. Graduate students at any institution worldwide, in any subfield of Jewish studies, past or present, are eligible to apply. This is an in-person experience, and participation is contingent on a student being able to travel safely to Israel within public health requirements in place at the time. The program will take place the week before the World Congress of Jewish Studies, and participants are encouraged to plan to stay in Jerusalem for the Congress as well. Fellowships are available for students accepted into the program who do not have applicable funding from their home institutions.

This is a draft of a syllabus for a course designed to prepare graduate students in Religious Studies and affiliated fields to teach about religion in higher education settings. Though I have offered it before, I am keen to get new and better ideas for topics, approaches and/or readings, and also thought it might be interest to colleagues and grad students in the field.

For the sake of our discussion today, I want to put on the table an idea that I could not have imagined myself advocating for when I attended my first AJS conference in the 1990s, an argument that I did not think I would make even as little as a year or two ago. I have long sought to see biblical studies more fully integrated into Jewish Studies, studies, pursuing that goal by trying to become actively involved in the Jewish Studies programs to which I have belonged and by once serving as division chair of biblical studies at the AJS for about five years. I still certainly believe that biblical studies has much to contribute to the field of Jewish Studies, but I have nonetheless come to the conclusion that " the Bible " is not the optimal way to organize our collective efforts at the AJS. This session as I understand it is about the relationship between biblical studies and Jewish Studies, and how to better bridge between them. I want to argue that we should no longer be trying to integrate biblical studies into Jewish Studies; in fact, I am going to try to make a case that it is in our collective interest to discard the Bible division altogether. This is not the idea I was intending to advance when I first agreed to be part of this panel, but as I began to formulate my remarked, I asked the two organizers, Mark and Jacqueline, if they would share with me what motivated them to initiate this session, and their responses changed my perspective, forcing me to acknowledge something to myself. I should leave it to them to describe their own motivations, but as I read their remarks, both were acting in one way or another on the feeling of being marginalized, on the feeling that biblical studies at the AJS had been boxed into narrow parameters in a way that was too constrictive. These were feelings that I recall having when I first began attending the AJS; indeed, they were what moved me to volunteer to serve as division chair. But despite that experience, and despite many changes in biblical studies more broadly in the intervening period, the fact that Jacqueline and Mark felt moved to