“Hasidism”

While not the first, Rubin’s book is among the very few that aim to address the history of the Chabad movement as a whole, placing its major figures in dialogue with one another. Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity does so not in a devotional or ahistorical manner, but by exploring the rebbes’ writings as conscious and strategic efforts to forge a distinct Lubavitch tradition, construct the legitimacy of their leadership, and respond to the complex challenges of modern times.

May 23, 2025

Dynner frames The Light of Learning’s sweeping historical narrative with a crucial theoretical intervention. To think about interwar Polish Hasidism is also to think about the ongoing construction of modern Jewish identity, and the fraught intersections of emancipation, acculturation, assimilation, and colonization.

Oct 14, 2024

Yitzhak Lewis shows how Reb Nachman initiated a new era of Jewish literature that shaped nineteenth- and twentieth-century Yiddish and Hebrew writing.

Mar 30, 2021

In his recent meticulously-researched and sensitively-written work, Ariel Evan Mayse brings to the attention of the contemporary reader a remarkable theology of language to be found in the teachings of Dov Ber Friedman, the Maggid of Mezritsh (1704-1772).

Oct 28, 2020

Roni Masel proposes a "failed watching" of Netflix's new series Unorthodox that sidesteps questions of authenticity in representation and instead "generates what we could call queer pleasure or OTD pleasure."

Jun 29, 2020

Posters like this one for special events, graduations, sales of Hasidic garments, computers, new books, videos and more are still popular in the Hasidic neighborhoods of Brooklyn. However, in recent years the internet has changed the business.

Jan 24, 2020

Feb 27, 2019

1931 newspaper article by the Polish Jewish historian Meir Bałaban concerning the curious Hasidic figure known as Berish Bal-tshuve

Feb 27, 2019

Zionism sought to alter forever the image of the Jewish male. Avi Blitz looks at what happened, and how Yiddish fits in. 

Feb 19, 2019

An introduction from the editors of the special issue of In geveb on Religious Thought in Yiddish.

Jan 20, 2019

This paper aims to complicate the neat chronology that bifurcates modern Jewish literature from its Hasidic roots, using Fishl Schneersohn's novel Khayim Gravitser and Avraham Shlonsky's Hebrew translation of the novel to demonstrate that these authors continued the Hasidic literary tradition of Chabad even as they embraced alternative literary forms in the cause of new aesthetic agendas.

Oct 09, 2018