Book Notes

American Jewish Life

Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America, by Ken Koltun-Fromm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. 342 pp. $70.00. ISBN 978-0-352-22183-4.

How Jews think about and work with objects is the subject of this study of the interplay between material culture and Jewish thought. Ken Koltun-Fromm draws from philosophy, cultural studies, literature, psychology, film, and photography to portray Jewish practice in America.

Art and Music

The Music of Psalms, Proverbs and Job in the Hebrew Bible, by Jeffrey Burns. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2011. 163 pp. + audio CD. €68.00. ISBN 978-3-447-06191-9.

The Music of Psalms, Proverbs and Job in the Hebrew Bible explores the musical organization of the original temple cantilation contained in the three "poetical books" of the Bible, whose Hebrew cantilation signs have been conserved but not understood. The American musician and pianist Jeffrey Burns, 1950-2004, has analyzed these books with the help of a computer program that he developed that can chant the original Hebrew text. His work, written in English, consists of two parts: a 160-page introduction, and a DVD with the complete text.

The Song is Not the Same: Jews and American Popular Music, edited by Bruce Zuckerman, Josh Kun, guest editor. The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual Review, Vol. 8. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2011. 172 pp. $25.00. ISBN 978-1-55753-586-3. ISSN 1934-7529.

This volume of the Casden Institute's The Jewish Role in American Life annual series introduces new scholarship on the long-standing relationship between Jewish-Americans and the worlds of American popular music. Edited by scholar and critic Josh Kun, the essays in the volume blend single-artist investigations with looks at the industry of music making as a whole. They range from Jewish sheet music to the risqué musical comedy of Belle Barth and Pearl Williams, from the role of music in the shaping of Henry Ford's antisemitism to Bob Dylan's Jewishness, from the hybridity of the contemporary "Radical Jewish Culture" scene to the Yiddish experiments of 1930s African-American artists.

The Washington Haggadah: A Fifteenth-Century Manuscript from the Library of Congress, by Joel Ben Simeon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. 161 pp. + facsimile pages. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-674-05117-1.

Joel ben Simeon, the creator of this unusually well-preserved codex, was a gifted and prolific scribe-artist. David Stern's introduction reconstructs his professional biography and situates this masterwork within the historical development of the haggadah. Katrin Kogman-Appel shows how ben Simeon, more than just a copyist, was an active agent of cultural exchange, adding realistic illustrations of day-to-day life that provide a window into the world of late fifteenth-century Europe. This edition preserves the original text, with the Hebrew facsimile appearing in the original right-to-left orientation.

Biblical and Rabbinic Literature

Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship, edited by Teresa J. Hornsby and Ken Stone. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011. 355 pp. $46.95. ISBN 978-1-58983-552-8.

The essays in Bible Trouble all engage queer theories for purposes of biblical interpretation. The title phrase "Bible Trouble" plays on Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, gesturing toward a primary text for contemporary queer theory. The essays consider, among others, the Lazarus story, the Ethiopian eunuch, "gender trouble" in Judges 4 and 5, the Song of Songs, and an unorthodox coupling of the books of Samuel and the film Paris Is Burning. This volume "troubles" not only the boundaries between biblical scholarship and queer theory but also the boundaries between different frameworks currently used in the analysis of biblical literature, including sexuality, gender, race, class, history, and literature.

Constructing the Other in Ancient Israel and the USA, by Johnny Miles. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011. 374 pp. $60.00. ISBN 978-1-907534-05-8.

Constant focus upon Israel in the biblical texts by the interpretative tradition in the modern context has resulted, whether consciously or not, in the eclipse of voices of Israel's Palestinian neighbors. Interpretations...