Jason Kalman

In "Though Your Beginning Be Small," Jason Kalman addresses how the library of Hebrew Union College, then a small Midwestern institution, built a monumental repository of Jewish knowledge. Kalman offers a detailed account of the individuals and the books who shaped the life of the Library and the community that used it from the first donation in 1873 until Adolph Oko's appointment as librarian in 1907. The idea of founding a library in the mid-1870s in the United States was hardly novel in and of itself, but by virtue of intended contents, scope, and mission, Issac Mayer Wise's vision for creating a library was distinct. In contrast to its peer institutions that grew through acquiring massive private collections, HUC's library emerged through countless small donations--individual books plus modest personal libraries gifted by rabbis, congregants, and Jewish intellectuals across America. Each volume represented a personal connection to Jewish learning along with a vote of confidence in Wise's bold aim to create not merely a school library but rather a central repository for Jewish scholarship in Cincinnati, which housed America's second-largest Jewish community during that period. Kalman raises fascinating questions concerning the people who built this early collection book by book. Who were these donors who chose to entrust their family treasures to Cincinnati as opposed to institutions in New York or Philadelphia? How did immigrant families decide which precious Jewish books to bring across the Atlantic? Moreover, what compelled them subsequently to donate these treasured heirlooms? What motivated Samuel Adler, former rabbi of New York's Temple Emanu-El, to send his 1,400-volume collection to HUC instead of the Jewish Theological Seminary in his own city? The anwers to these questions concern more than an institutional history; they constitute a window into American Jewish book culture of the late 19th century, revealing the social networks and personal connections that transformed a modest collection into a world-class library.

The renowned interior designers share residential projects and designs for furniture that embody their sleek and refined contemporary aesthetic Los Angeles-based Magni Kalman Design brings its vision of clean-lined modernism and polished sumptuousness to every project – whether it’s on the Pacific Coast of California or among desert mountains. In The Art of Modern Design: The Interiors of James Magni & Jason Kalman, they showcase thirteen projects that blend a rich modernist palette of glass, concrete, stone, and steel, with plush textiles and blue-chip art. A chapter on developing their luxury furnishings – exclusive pieces from the Magni Home Collection, that the designers approach as unique sculptures – offers further insight into their creative outlook. This new book is a celebration of artistry, craftsmanship, and the timeless beauty of contemporary interiors.

Despite its general absence from the Jewish liturgical cycle and its limited place in Jewish practice, the Book of Job has permeated Jewish culture over the last 2,000 years. Job has not only had to endure the suffering described in the biblical book, but the efforts of countless commentators, interpreters, and creative rewriters whose explanations more often than not challenged the protagonist's righteousness in order to preserve Divine justice. Beginning with five critical essays on the specific efforts of ancient, medieval, and modern Jewish writers to make sense of the biblical book, The Book of Job in Jewish Life and Thought concludes with a detailed survey of the place of Job in the Talmud and Midrashic corpus, in medieval biblical commentary, in ethical, mystical, and philosophical tracts, as well as in poetry and creative writing in a wide variety of Jewish languages from around the world from the second to sixteenth centuries.

The bare outline of the story of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is well known both to scholars and in the popular imagination. The precise details--the sequence and causal interplay of events, even some of the key players behind the scenes--are less well known and sometimes completely forgotten or misconstrued. The recovery of this history in all its complexity is vital for understanding how and why scholarly work on the Scrolls developed as it did over the six decades during which the texts were slowly published. Jason Kalman recovers the fascinating story of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion's involvement with the Dead Sea Scrolls from their discovery in 1948 until the early 1990s when they were first made accessible to all scholars and to the public. Scholars at HUC-JIR actively participated in efforts to acquire and preserve the manuscripts and played a significant part in breaking the monopoly of scholars initially assigned to publish them. Despite these activities, a number of HUC-JIR's influential teachers took a negative view of the scrolls. As a consequence, rabbinical students either did not encounter the material or left the institution with a view of it that was far from the mainstream. This book traces the activities of HUC-JIR's administration and faculty over five decades, the contribution they made to the new academic field, and their influence on how knowledge of the Dead Sea Scrolls was shared with the community at large. Many details about security negatives stored at HUC and about the bootleg reconstruction are revealed for the first time.

Providing many vibrant details, the authors examine the intrigue surrounding the Dead Sea Scrolls and debunk many of the myths about them, including allegations of the Vatican's involvement in hiding the texts from scholars, the possibility that they contained earth shattering revelations, and the actual status of the infamous international editorial committee who limited access to the texts. A fascinating account of international relations, religious negotiation, and scholars, Canada's Big Biblical Bargain reveals another part of the fascinating tale of the Dead Sea Scrolls.