Fordham’s Russell Pearce will deliver a lecture on Jewish law and religious lawyering at Touro’s Jewish Law Institute on October 16. For information, please contact the Institute’s director, Professor Samuel J. Levine.
Norton, “On the Muslim Question”
Earlier this year, Princeton University Press published On the Muslim Question, by Anne
Norton (University of Pennsylvania). The publisher’s description follows.
In the post-9/11 West, there is no shortage of strident voices telling us that Islam is a threat to the security, values, way of life, and even existence of the United States and Europe. For better or worse, “the Muslim question” has become the great question of our time. It is a question bound up with others–about freedom of speech, terror, violence, human rights, women’s dress, and sexuality. Above all, it is tied to the possibility of democracy. In this fearless, original, and surprising book, Anne Norton demolishes the notion that there is a “clash of civilizations” between the West and Islam. What is really in question, she argues, is the West’s commitment to its own ideals: to democracy and the Enlightenment trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In the most fundamental sense, the Muslim question is about the values not of Islamic, but of Western, civilization.
Moving between the United States and Europe, Norton provides a fresh perspective on iconic controversies, from the Danish cartoon of Muhammad to the murder of Theo van Gogh. She examines the arguments of a wide range of thinkers–from John Rawls to Slavoj Žižek. And she describes vivid everyday examples of ordinary Muslims and non-Muslims who have accepted each other and built a common life together. Ultimately, Norton provides a new vision of a richer and more diverse democratic life in the West, one that makes room for Muslims rather than scapegoating them for the West’s own anxieties.
“Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire: The Poetics of Power in Late Antiquity” (Dohrmann and Reed, eds.)
This month, University of Pennsylvania Press will publish Jews, Christians, and the 
Roman Empire: The Poetics of Power in Late Antiquity, edited by Natalie B. Dohrmann (U. of Pennsylvania) and Annette Yoshiko Reed (U. of Pennsylvania). The publisher’s description follows.
In histories of ancient Jews and Judaism, the Roman Empire looms large. For all the attention to the Jewish Revolt and other conflicts, however, there has been less concern for situating Jews within Roman imperial contexts; just as Jews are frequently dismissed as atypical by scholars of Roman history, so Rome remains invisible in many studies of rabbinic and other Jewish sources written under Roman rule.
Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire brings Jewish perspectives to bear on longstanding debates concerning Romanization, Christianization, and late antiquity. Focusing on the third to sixth centuries, it draws together specialists in Jewish and Christian history, law, literature, poetry, and art. Perspectives from rabbinic and patristic sources are juxtaposed with evidence from piyyutim, documentary papyri, and synagogue and church mosaics. Through these case studies, contributors highlight paradoxes, subtleties, and ironies of Romanness and imperial power.