Eros and the Jews
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€31.99
A01=David Biale
american judaism
asceticism
Author_David Biale
book of ruth
Category=JBCC
Category=JBSR
Category=JMU
Category=QRJ
celibacy
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
eroticism
gender
gratification
hasidism
haskalah
jewish
jewish culture
jewish history
jewish life
jewish sexuality
judaica
judaism
kabbalah
lenny bruce
libido
maskilim
nonfiction
pleasure
popular culture
procreation
rabbi
rabbinic authority
religion
sex
sexual abstinence
sexual behavior
sexual desire
sexual drive
sexual neurosis
sexuality
subversion
talmud
woody allen
yiddish literature
zionism
Product details
- ISBN 9780520211346
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 133 x 203mm
- Publication Date: 03 Oct 1997
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Contradictory stereotypes about Jewish sexuality pervade modern culture, from Lenny Bruce's hip eroticism to Woody Allen's little man with the big libido (and even bigger sexual neurosis). Does Judaism in fact liberate or repress sexual desire? David Biale does much more than answers that question as he traces Judaism's evolving position on sexuality, from the Bible and Talmud to Zionism up through American attitudes today. What he finds is a persistent conflict between asceticism and gratification, between procreation and pleasure. From the period of the Talmud onward, Biale says, Jewish culture continually struggled with sexual abstinence, attempting to incorporate the virtues of celibacy, as it absorbed them from Greco-Roman and Christian cultures, within a theology of procreation. He explores both the canonical writings of male authorities and the alternative voices of women, drawing from a fascinating range of sources that includes the "Book of Ruth", "Yiddish literature", the memoirs of the founders of Zionism, and the films of Woody Allen. Biale's historical reconstruction of Jewish sexuality sees the present through the past and the past through the present.
He discovers an erotic tradition that is not dogmatic, but a record of real people struggling with questions that have challenged every human culture, and that have relevance for the dilemmas of both Jews and non-Jews today.
David Biale is Koret Professor of Jewish History and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He is the author of Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (1979) and Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (1986), both of which won the National Jewish Book Award.
