This thesis analyzes how Joan Rivers’ comedy content and style changed during the first 30 years of her career and how these changes impacted Rivers’ presentation of her identity as a Jewish female comedian. This project focuses on Joan Rivers’ career in two sections: her early …
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This study examines various notions of divine presence as integral to the depiction of Israel's apostasy at Mount Sinai within the redacted Pentateuch as well as to interpretations of that composite text by ancient Jews and Christians. The concepts of presence articulated by anc…
Jewish migration from Romania began in mid-1900, and, owing to its particular political and temporal context, from its outset until early 1903 this migration commanded significant attention and interventions from the governments of the United States and Canada and from the organ…
A small-scale ethnographic case study of young children's learning from television in southern Illinois provides understanding about the frameworks used for interpreting media use in family life. The research consisted of in-home interviews about patterns of using the media, obs…
My dissertation is a critical edition, translation and analysis of the opening chapter of Sefer Milhamot Hashem (1170), Jacob ben Reuben's philosophical polemic against Christianity. This groundbreaking text, possibly the first of its kind in Europe, emerged seemingly out of the…
Although heritage language teachers' processes of identity formation have been studied in recent years (e.g., Milner, 2007), much of the work on heritage languages has explored foreign language teachers' beliefs (e.g., Nespor, 1987; Pajares, 1992; Williams & Burden, 1997) and pe…
This dissertation argues that, contrary to popular conceptions and the current scholarly consensus, rabbinic Jewry did not become a people of the book, or even the people of the Book, until the high middle ages. For in the classical rabbinic period, many rabbinic authorities app…
This study explores the help-seeking process of English-speaking Orthodox Jews living in Jerusalem, Israel. There is a belief, backed by some research coming out of public mental health facilities in Jerusalem, that the religious community underutilizes traditional mental health…
Identifying as a Jewish transgender woman can come with a plethora of stigma and challenges. Compounded by the ongoing existence of microaggressions and violence, a 2009 survey found individuals who identify as transgender are 40 times more likely to have attempted suicide than …
ABSTRACT During the Middle Ages, Jews, Christians and Muslims coexisted (often uneasily) on the Iberian Peninsula. These three religious groups were in a constant process of defining and preserving their identities, which were often constructed in terms of the relationships with…
As the first composer to forge a Jewish idiom for the pipe organ, and the only composer to produce a major body of Hebraic concert works for the instrument, Herman Berlinski is a composer of exceptional creativity. The document begins with the fascinating story of the composer's…
The study narrated here involves an interdisciplinary inquiry which attempts to understand identity in terms of the intersection of multiple discourses. Using a reflexive stance, several theoretical frameworks guide the author's search for a personal meaning of Jewish identity. …
Pseudo-Philo's Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum is a revisionary rewriting of Biblical narrative (Genesis through 1 Samuel), distinguished by its imaginative weaving of 'secondary' scripture into the primary narrative sequence. This study examines the exegetical and hermeneutical f…
On January 9, 1991, the German government adopted a policy which allowed for the immigration and permanent resettlement of Soviet Jews to Germany as allowed in the 1991 Quota Law (Kontigentfluchtlingsgesetz). The law was adopted initially in June 1980, as part of the United Nati…
The concept of Jewish art music appeared in Russia in the last decades of the nineteenth-century. It was influenced by modernist notions of purity and had strong political overtones, reflecting the clash between Eastern and Western European concepts of Judaism, Yiddish and Hebre…
This thesis examines the development and articulation of ideas about modern political Zionism and the Palestine question by the Labour Party and the wider Labour Movement in Britain during the 1920's and 1930's. This study also explores the Party and the Movement's understanding…
This is a dissertation on Jewish-Christian dialogue and concerns the ways in which that dialogue can take place in a post-Holocaust, post-Christendom world. The argument assumes that any attempt at such dialogue requires that the religious convictions of both Jews and Christians…
Judaism has traditionally embraced text study as a communal endeavor of dialogic interpretation. Yet, synagogue schools have largely ignored this social practice, framing literacy instead as a set of skills to “inoculate” Jewish students from assimilation into secular culture. T…
This dissertation explores representations of Jewish women in the sixteenth-century academic drama, interlude, and public theater. The two main archetypal figures of the Jewish I identify, the authoritative matriarch and the alluring virgin daughter, draw on Old Testament figure…