Founded in 1956, Penn State University Press publishes rigorously reviewed, high-quality works of scholarship and books of regional and contemporary interest, with a focus on the humanities and social sciences. The publishing arm of the Pennsylvania State University and a division of the Penn State University Libraries, the Press promotes the advance of scholarship by disseminating knowledge—new information, interpretations, methods of analysis—widely in books, journals, and digital publications.
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Mizrahi-Arab-Ashkenazi Relations Since the Dawn of Zionism
Originally published in Hebrew in 2021, Hillel Cohen's Enemies, A Love Story argues that to understand the ongoing conflict in Palestine/Israel we need to examine the interactions among three identity groups: Mizrahim, Ashkenazim, and Arabs. Refusing to treat Jewish society as a monolith, Cohen shows how the ethnic divide between Ashkenazim (Jews ......
While critiquing existing approaches to the Pentateuch’s composition is valuable, this volume emphasizes formulating positive proposals grounded in verifiable data and logical argumentation.
How Nazi Persecution Shaped the Struggle for LGBTQ+ Rights
The Third Reich subjected some 100,000 individuals to a pernicious anti-homosexual campaign that included censorship, surveillance, medical experimentation, and death. Credible scholarship suggests that as many as 15,000 were interned in concentration camps, though the actual names and numbers of all those who suffered and died will never be ......
Examines a series of powerful artifacts traditionally associated with King Solomon, largely via extra-canonical textual sources--Solomon’s ring, bottles to contain evil forces, the so-called Solomon’s knot, a shamir, and a flying carpet--and traces their varying cultural resonances.
Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions
This book is an in-depth, comparative study of two of the most popular and influential intellectual and spiritual traditions of West Africa: Tijani Sufism and Ifa. Employing a unique methodological approach that thinks with and from—rather than merely about—these traditions, Oludamini Ogunnaike argues that they are, in fact, ......
Irene Eber is one of the foremost authorities on Jews in China during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—a field that, in contrast to the study of the Jewish diaspora in Europe and the Americas, has been critically neglected. This volume gathers fourteen of Eber’s most salient articles and essays on the exchanges between ......
A History of the Southern Levant and the People who Populated It
Ancient Israel is widely regarded as having been set apart from the nations, representing a unique sociopolitical entity in the ancient world. United by a common tribal identity and a commitment to worshiping the God who delivered them from Egypt exclusively, the Israelites established an egalitarian community that stood in contrast to the ......
Assyrian Archival Texts in the Schoyen Collection and Other Documents from North Mesopotamia and Syria
Texts: Old Assyrian (Hertel), Middle Assyrian (Llop-Raduà ), Neo-Assyrian (Radner), N. Babylonian (George), Ugaritic (van Soldt). Photograph, transliteration, translation and commentary on economic documents and letters from ancient Assyria, Babylonia, and Ugarit.
Theurgic Ideas and Practices, Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries
A collection of essays examining medieval and early modern texts aimed at performing magic or receiving illumination via the mediation of angels. Includes discussion of Jewish, Christian and Muslim texts.
