Jewish Culture and Creativity

Eitan P. Fishbane is Professor of Jewish Thought at The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), and he specializes in the study of Jewish mysticism from medieval to modern times. Among his books are: As Light Before Dawn: The Inner World of a Medieval Kabbalist (Stanford, 2009); The Art of Mystical Narrative: A Poetics of the Zohar (Oxford, 2018); and Embers of Pilgrimage (Panui Poetry Series, 2021). He is currently completing work on a new book, entitled Shabbat in Hasidic Thought: Sacred Time and Mystical Consciousness.Elisha Russ-Fishbane, Associate Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, is a historian of Jewish life and culture in the medieval Islamic world. His books include Judaism, Sufism, and the Pietists of Medieval Egypt: A Study of Abraham Maimonides and His Times (Oxford, 2015) and Ageing in Medieval Jewish Culture (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2022). He is currently at work on a book on Islam in the medieval Jewish imagination.

“There is no shortage of books by Michael Fishbane or his students. Jewish Culture and Creativity isn’t even the first book in honor of Fishbane. Inside are loosely chronologically ordered essays by many of his past students, ranging from history, to theology, to rabbinic texts. Individually, the essays are all rather enjoyable. While some of them are rather dense, none of them are beyond the grasp of your average reader, whoever that might be. The variety of topics means that even if some of the essays do not speak to an individual reader, there is likely something in this book for everyone.”— Andrew Lillien, AJL News & Reviews