Jewish Publication Society

God and the First Families offers a novel exploration of God's role as a parent in the book of Genesis. Compellingly, author Stephen Spector introduces Americans' four main perceptions of God and their four most common styles of parenting as lenses through which we can reckon with God's own methods of parenting in the first biblical book. God begins as an authoritarian parent who demands obedience and submission to authority, but shifts in striking ways. Next, God's parenting seems entirely benevolent. Stunningly, God reverts to authoritarianism during the near sacrifice of Isaac—but then invents a new parenting style focused on guiding the characters' moral and emotional growth. Many psychologists consider this the most successful childrearing method. Genesis reached that conclusion two and a half millennia ago!Throughout, Spector engages with familiar stories—sibling rivalries, family ruptures, traumas—from unexpected angles. He dramatizes how parental love in Genesis builds resilience against trauma, another idea validated by modern psychology. Surviving trauma, healing from parental favoritism, repairing broken relationships, earning forgiveness, possibly even reconciling after injury—Genesis offers wisdom on all.

The Road to October 7 examines what paved the way for the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel and its aftermath. Part 1, “The Present,” documents the Hamas invasion, the rise of Hamas, the education of Palestinian Arab children to hate and kill, the diplomatic decisions that helped enable the attack, and the propagation of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish libels. Part 2, “The Past,” analyzes how in both method and ideology, the Hamas assault echoed the pogroms in medieval Europe, Czarist Russia, and Ukraine; the Holocaust; and a century of Palestinian Arab terrorism. It also examines select American universities’ cultivation of friendly relations with Nazi Germany in the 1930s (the same universities that tolerated pro-Hamas protests after October 7) and October 7 as a turning point in the long history of antisemitism. Readers will emerge with important insights on the Hamas attack, antisemitic education in Palestinian Arab society, pro-Hamas groups on U.S. campuses, the responses of women’s and human rights organizations to mass sexual violence, misconceptions and fabrications about Israel’s conduct in the ensuing war, and why October 7 needs to be viewed as one segment of both the century-long Palestinian Arab war and the centuries-old international war against the Jewish people.

Illuminating the contemporary revival of the Jewish marriage contract, Ketubah Renaissance relays the storied history of this beloved document (known in Hebrew as a ketubah) through the present day and showcases sixty of the most innovative and beautiful ketubot of the last half century. Originally created 2,500 years ago as a unilateral marriage contract stating what a groom would provide for his bride, the ketubah evolved from the tenth century onward into a richly decorated expression of love and commitment. Starting in the late 1960s a modern sensibility took root. Influenced by Jewish life and North American society at large, hundreds of artists and calligraphers began to imprint their unique aesthetic onto each ketubah design-a movement Judaica scholar Shalom Sabar calls “a veritable renaissance of the illuminated ketubbah”-while also updating the original Aramaic text to express contemporary values. Couples and families with upcoming weddings as well as officiating clergy, educators, aficionados of Jewish culture, scholars, and others will discover the evolving history of the ketubah in all its facets: its artforms, texts, scripts, iconography, production processes, and technological innovations. A curated, chronological ketubah gallery brings readers up close to sixty influential ketubot and the artists who created them-a colorful cornucopia of breakthroughs that epitomize the ketubah renaissance.