Against the background of the dramatic upsurge of liberalism, radicalism, and freethought in religion within the United States in the last third of the nineteenth century, American Reform Judaism and Unitarianism made impressive strides. By the 1880s, Reform Judaism had become the preeminent form of Judaism in both institutional growth and organizational cohesiveness; it remained the favored religious pattern of the elite leadership of American Jewry well into the twentieth century. For its part, Unitarianism by the 1880s had spread beyond the confines of New England, featured a revitalized Western branch, the Western Unitarian Conference, and was experiencing an articulate denominational consciousness.

Amongst the most important roles which Isaac Luria (1534–1572), the preeminent kabbalist of sixteenth-century Safed, played in the lives of his disciples was that of physician of the soul. Before they could practice rituals which were intended to enable them to bind their souls to the divine realm, and to “repair” that realm in accordance with the teachings of Lurianic mythology, his disciples had first to mend their own souls, to cleanse and purify them of all imperfection No individual whose own soul had failed to achieve a certain level of perfection could hope to engage successfully in the intricate and elaborate contemplative rituals-such as the Yiḥudim-which Luria devised. A person had to undergo a period during which he cultivated certain spiritual and moral traits and atoned for whatever sins he might have committed. Luria, in fact, provided his followers with highly detailed rituals of atonement by which they were to mend their souls. These penitential acts were known as tikkunei avonot (“amends of sin”) whose purpose, in the words of Hayyim Vital's son Shmuel, was to “mend his soul"”and “cleanse him from the filth of the disease of his sins.” Hayyim Vital (1542–1620), Luria's chief disciple, himself introduces the tikkunei avonot with a discussion of the relationship between one's soul and sin.

After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Rabbi Ya‘akov Landa was one of some 250,000 Russian Jews who had fled, or been forcibly expelled, from their homes in Russia's western provinces to settle in the country's interior. After Landa's exile, he spent several months traveling amid refugee communities in Voronezh, Tambov, Penza, Saratov, and Samara provinces. At the conclusion of his journey, he composed a detailed report about the state of religious observance among the refugees, which he sent to Rabbi Shalom Dov-Ber Schneerson of Lubavitch. Landa's observations during these months shocked his core sensibilities as a rabbi and an observant Jew. He noted that refugees were disregarding such fundamental aspects of Jewish practice as Sabbath observance and were living without the basic institutions that had traditionally defined religious and communal life.

Surprisingly, historians have not yet carefully examined the introductory pages of the unpublished manuscript Divre binah (Understanding Words) by Dov Ber Birkenthal. Although the evidence of a single witness seldom leads to the revision of historical narratives, the material provided in these introductory pages is quite rich and suggests much about a number of topics that will be of particular interest to students of the eighteenth century. Among these themes are Jewish attitudes to Christianity, to the new Austrian regime in Galicia, to the Enlightenment, and to early Hasidism. The author, an elderly successful businessman, wrote the work in question after retiring to his hometown, Bolechów. His book affords us a glimpse into his way of understanding his society and his time.

The article examines the reception and transmission of traditions about the figure of Enoch/Metatron in Sasanian Babylonia, and particularly the emergence of Metatron speculation in the Babylonian Talmud and 3 Enoch, by reading these traditions in light of Zoroastrian and Manichaean reports of the Iranian hero, Yima. The figure of Enoch/Metatron was reimagined and reconfigured by the Babylonian authors so as to resemble local Yima traditions, though the process of translating and repackaging the figure of Enoch in the image of his Iranian counterpart was not merely a conscious act of comparison, in which an analogy is drawn in an attempt to highlight particular aspects common to both figures; it was an expression of a more comprehensive discourse of identification.

Beyond close parallels in the depictions of these figures, the connections between Metatron speculation and the Zoroastrian and Manichaean Yima traditions are supported by an identification of Yima with the son of man implied in two Sogdian fragments of the Manichaean Book of Giants. The syncretic atmosphere that pervaded Sasanian culture in general and the Manichaean identification of Yima with the son of man in particular facilitated, and perhaps reinforced, the refiguring of Enoch/Metatron in the Babylonian Talmud and 3 Enoch in the image of local Yima traditions.

On Sunday, the twelfth of Adar, March 2, 1681, the parnasim, the lay leaders of Altona, recorded an enactment in their communal logbook, the pinkas kehillah, regulating women's use of the local mikva'ot. Designating two privately-owned ritual baths as the only approved immersion locations for most of the women in the community, they decreed that defiance of this decree was to be punished with some of the most severe weapons in the arsenal of the communal leaders. Four years later, the parnasim reversed their policy and, with the permission of the community's rabbinic leadership, required the women to use only the newly built kahalishe, or community, mikveh, banning the use of the two previously approved mikva'ot. This article examines the construction and reconstruction of these policies regulating women's use of mikva'ot, offering insight into how designated communal institutions were developed in the early modern period as well as how these institutions were used both to finance the community and to forge communal identity. Moreover, consideration of the mikveh as a locus for building communal institutions and, in particular, communal identity, offers insight into how the growing bureaucratization of Jewish communal life in the early modern period affected women's lives.

The second Aliyah brought a large number of Hebrew authors to Palestine, some of them among the greatest Hebrew writers of all time.U. N. Gnessin (1907), David Shimoni (1909), S. Y.Agnon (1907), Y. H. Brenner (1909), and Dvora Baron (1911). Those who remained endured the privations of the First World War, which became particularly severe throughout its final year, but few of them wrote about it. In fact, within the large corpus of belletristic writing in Hebrew and Yiddish at the time, there is little devoted to the Jewish experience in the First World War. Many critics and scholars of the period, in addition to later commentators, affirmed (and some lamented) that the output of Jewish war writing was modest in Yiddish as well as Hebrew.See Avner Holtzman, Avigdor Hameiri vesifrut hamilḥamah. Maעarakhot, 1986, p. 33; Ḥanan Ḥever, ed., U.Z Greenberg: taעarukhah bamilءat shemonim. Jerusalem: Beit hasefarim haleءumi vehaءuniversitaءi, 1977, p.17. Nonetheless there exists a substantial body of such work about which little is known to this day. At the time, it seems, Hebrew literature had to serve greater aims than the individual responses of soldiers in a foreign war soon after the Balfour Declaration. The most powerful responses were, with some notable exceptions,Notably, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Tchernichowski, and Hameiri and their works written some time after the events or by writers, such as Y. H. Brenner, who were not combatants but were victimized by the war nonetheless.