A collection of lectures on the features of the movement of mysticism that began in antiquity and continues in Hasidism today.

One of the great spiritual seekers, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1722-1810) is among the most often quoted of the Hasidic masters. In this adaptation, he speaks once again to a spiritually seeking generation in strong, insightful ways, providing vital words of inspiration and wisdom for life today for people of any faith, or of no faith.

Martin Buber was one of the most significant religious thinkers of the twentieth century. In this short and remarkable book he presents the essential teachings of Hasidism, the mystical Jewish movement which swept through Eastern Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Told through stories of imagination and spirit, together with Buber's own unique insights, The Way of Man offers us a way of understanding ourselves and our place in a spiritual world. 'There is something', he suggests, 'that can only be found in one place. It is a great treasure, which may be called the fulfilment of existence. The place where this treasure can be found is the place on which one stands.' Challenging us to recognize our own potential and to reach our true goal, The Way of Man is a life-enhancing book.

“Excuse me, are you Jewish?” With these words, the relentlessly cheerful, ideologically driven emissaries of Chabad-Lubavitch approach perfect strangers on street corners throughout the world in their ongoing efforts to persuade their fellow Jews to live religiously observant lives. In The Rebbe’s Army, award-winning journalist Sue Fishkoff gives us the first behind-the-scenes look at this small Brooklyn-based group of Hasidim and the extraordinary lengths to which they take their mission of outreach. They seem to be everywhere—in big cities, small towns, and suburbs throughout the United States, and in sixty-one countries around the world. They light giant Chanukah menorahs in public squares, run “Chabad houses” on college campuses from Berkeley to Cambridge, give weekly bible classes in the Capitol basement in Washington, D.C., run a nonsectarian drug treatment center in Los Angeles, sponsor the world’s biggest Passover Seder in Nepal, establish synagogues, Hebrew schools, and day-care centers in places that are often indifferent and occasionally hostile to their outreach efforts. They have built a billion-dollar international empire, with their own news service, publishing house, and hundreds of Websites.Who are these people? How successful are they in making Jews more observant? What influence does their late Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (who some thought was the Messiah), continue to have on his followers? Fishkoff spent a year interviewing Lubavitch emissaries from Anchorage to Miami and has written an engaging and fair-minded account of a Hasidic group whose motives and methodology continue to be the subject of speculation and controversy.

Mitzvah Girls is the first book about bringing up Hasidic Jewish girls in North America, providing an in-depth look into a closed community. Ayala Fader examines language, gender, and the body from infancy to adulthood, showing how Hasidic girls in Brooklyn become women responsible for rearing the next generation of nonliberal Jewish believers. To uncover how girls learn the practices of Hasidic Judaism, Fader looks beyond the synagogue to everyday talk in the context of homes, classrooms, and city streets. Hasidic women complicate stereotypes of nonliberal religious women by collapsing distinctions between the religious and the secular. In this innovative book, Fader demonstrates that contemporary Hasidic femininity requires women and girls to engage with the secular world around them, protecting Hasidic men and boys who study the Torah. Even as Hasidic religious observance has become more stringent, Hasidic girls have unexpectedly become more fluent in secular modernity. They are fluent Yiddish speakers but switch to English as they grow older; they are increasingly modest but also fashionable; they read fiction and play games like those of mainstream American children but theirs have Orthodox Jewish messages; and they attend private Hasidic schools that freely adapt from North American public and parochial models. Investigating how Hasidic women and girls conceptualize the religious, the secular, and the modern, Mitzvah Girls offers exciting new insights into cultural production and change in nonliberal religious communities.

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz begins this book by describing Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav as an "original and outstanding thinker," a phrase that surely describes the reputation achieved by Rabbi Steinsaltz himself. It is therefore no surprise that The Tales of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, retold with commentary by a world-renowned rabbi such as Adin Steinsaltz, is a remarkable volume. Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (1772-1810) emerged from the hasidic world as a great leader with devoted followers both in his lifetime and to this very day. He produced several masterpieces of religious writing, but of all his works, his tales are considered to be at the peak of his creative life. As Rabbi Steinsaltz writes: "These stories, which are essentially fairy tales dating from Nachman's last years, are a mixture of intellectual and poetic imagination, simplicity of form, and complexity of content. On the one hand, any child can read them as one would a tale of ancient days, as the author himself put it; and, on the other hand, one can as an adult read them again and again, analyze and study them, and constantly discover in them layer upon layer of hitherto unrevealed symbol and meaning." Rabbi Nachman's tales were originally told in Yiddish. They were recorded by his outstanding pupil, Rabbi Nathan, who translated them into Hebrew and published them after Rabbi Nachman's death. While these tales are structurally similar to folk or fairy tales, they include highly compressed and clearly defined Torah teachings expressed in literary and poetic form. Rabbi Nachman's stories are a medium for conveying hidden aspects of Torah, yet in such a veiled way that the content is not outwardly apparent. These complex allegories, intended by their author to have several dimensions, are presented here by Rabbi Steinsaltz with his own commentary, pointing the way for the modern reader to begin to grasp Rabbi Nachman's profound tales. Of the thirteen major tales by Rabbi Nachman, this volume offers six of them, each with extensive commentary

Discusses the European background, the prehistory of the movement, five decades of Zionist activities, and ends with the establishement of the state of Israel.