Best Jewish Hasidism Books
Here you will get Best Jewish Hasidism Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg
Author: by Nathaniel Deutsch
English
408 pages
0300231091
The epic story of Satmar Hasidic Williamsburg, from the decline of New York to the gentrification of Brooklyn”Groundbreaking…. To fully understand Satmar, of course, one has to be born into it. But to understand how political prowess and real-estate know-how shaped the group’s current iteration in Brooklyn, it would be wise to start with this outstanding book.”Laura E.
Adkins, LA Review of Books The Hasidic community in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn is famously one of the most separatist, intensely religious, and politically savvy groups of people in the entire United States. Less known is how the community survived in one of the toughest parts of New York City during an era of steep decline, only to later resist and also participate in the unprecedented gentrification of the neighborhood.
Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper unravel the fascinating history of how a group of determined Holocaust survivors encountered, shaped, and sometimes fiercely opposed the urban processes that transformed their gritty neighborhood, from white flight and the construction of public housing to rising crime, divestment of city services, and, ultimately, extreme gentrification.
2. Becoming Eve: My Journey from Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi to Transgender Woman
Author: by Abby Stein
English
272 pages
1580059163
The powerful coming-of-age story of an ultra-Orthodox child who was born to become a rabbinic leader and instead became a womanAbby Stein was raised in a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, isolated in a culture that lives according to the laws and practices of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, speaking only Yiddish and Hebrew and shunning modern life.
Stein was born as the first son in a dynastic rabbinical family, poised to become a leader of the next generation of Hasidic Jews. But Abby felt certain at a young age that she was a girl. She suppressed her desire for a new body while looking for answers wherever she could find them, from forbidden religious texts to smuggled secular examinations of faith.
Finally, she orchestrated a personal exodus from ultra-Orthodox manhood to mainstream femininity-a radical choice that forced her to leave her home, her family, her way of life. Powerful in the truths it reveals about biology, culture, faith, and identity, Becoming Eve poses the enduring question: How far will you go to become the person you were meant to be?
3. All Who Go Do Not Return: A Memoir
Author: by Shulem Deen
English
288 pages
1555977057
Named one of “forty-two books to read before you die” by the Independent (UK)2015 National Jewish Book Award Winner 2016 Winner of the GLCA New Writers Award in NonfictionOne of Star Magazine’s “Fab 5 Can’t-Miss Entertainment Picks”A moving and revealing exploration of Hasidic life, and one man’s struggles with faith, family, and communityShulem Deen was raised to believe that questions are dangerous.
As a member of the Skverers, one of the most insular Hasidic sects in the US, he knows little about the outside world-only that it is to be shunned. His marriage at eighteen is arranged and several children soon follow.
Deen’s first transgression-turning on the radio-is small, but his curiosity leads him to the library, and later the Internet. Soon he begins a feverish inquiry into the tenets of his religious beliefs, until, several years later, his faith unravels entirely.
Now a heretic, he fears being discovered and ostracized from the only world he knows. His relationship with his family at stake, he is forced into a life of deception, and begins a long struggle to hold on to those he loves most: his five children.
4. Toward a Meaningful Life: The Wisdom of the Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson
Author: by Simon Jacobson
William Morrow Paperbacks
English
336 pages
Toward a Meaningful Life is a spiritual road map for living based on the teachings of one of the foremost religious leaders of our time: Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Head of the Lubavitcher movement for forty-four years and recognized throughout the world simply as the Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who passed away in June 1994, was a sage and a visionary of the highest order.
Toward a Meaningful Life gives people of all backgrounds fresh perspectives on every aspect of their livesfrom birth to death, youth to old age; marriage, love, intimacy, and family; the persistent issues of career, health, pain, and suffering; and education, faith, science, and government.
We learn to bridge the divisions between accelerated technology and decelerated morality, between unprecedented worldwide unity and unparalleled personal disunity. Although the Rebbe’s teachings are firmly anchored in more than three thousand years of scholarship, the urgent relevance of these old-age truths to contemporary life has never been more manifest.
5. Rebbe: The Life and Teachings of Menachem M. Schneerson, the Most Influential Rabbi in Modern History
Author: by Joseph Telushkin
Harper Wave
English
640 pages
One of the greatest religious biographies ever written. Dennis PragerIn this enlightening biography, Joseph Telushkin offers a captivating portrait of the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, a towering figure who saw beyond conventional boundaries to turn his movement, Chabad-Lubavitch, into one of the most dynamic and widespread organizations ever seen in the Jewish world.
At once an incisive work of history and a compendium of Rabbi Schneerson’s teachings, Rebbe is the definitive guide to understanding one of the most vital, intriguing figures of the last centuries. From his modest headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the Rebbe advised some of the world’s greatest leaders and shaped matters of state and society.
Statesmen and artists as diverse as Ronald Reagan, Robert F. Kennedy, Yitzchak Rabin, Menachem Begin, Elie Wiesel, and Bob Dylan span the spectrum of those who sought his counsel. Rebbe explores Schneerson’s overarching philosophies against the backdrop of treacherous history, revealing his clandestine operations to rescue and sustain Jews in the Soviet Union, and his critical role in the expansion of the food stamp program throughout the United States.
6. It's All The Same To Me: A Torah Guide To Inner Peace and Love of Life
Author: by Moshe Gersht
English
154 pages
1736139002
Wall Street Journal Bestseller – USA Today Bestseller – Barnes & Noble Bestseller – Amazon BestsellerAfter spending a decade and a half studying the depths of Torah, Kaballah, Chasidus, and Spirituality, Moshe Gersht has gifted us with a new lens on life.
With his spiritual guide It’s All The Same To Me, Moshe Gersht inspires readers to discover the freedom and joy of a life lived in the deep connection of “sameness.” Gersht introduces the powerful kaballistic idea of Hishtavus to explain how getting beyond our ego is not only essential to your happiness, but is also the key to loving the life you experience.
Gersht makes the most esoteric concepts seem like an easy read and every page is an enjoyable moment. It’s All The Same To Me has been compared to Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now,” as author of “Mastering Life,” Dov Ber Cohen, says “The next level!
The Power of Now meets The Power of Torah. Awesome guide to real inner work and exactly what the world needs right now.”Illuminating, enlightening, and uplifting, Moshe Gersht’s It’s All The Same To Me is a joyful spiritual guide for a better way to live and for building a better world.
7. Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn
Author: by Ayala Fader
English
280 pages
0691139172
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.
8. Exodus: A Memoir
Author: by Deborah Feldman
Plume
English
304 pages
The author of the explosive New York Times bestselling memoir Unorthodox (now a Netflix limited series) chronicles her continuing journey as a single mother, an independent woman, and a religious refugee. In 2009, at the age of twenty-three, Deborah Feldman walked away from the rampant oppression, abuse, and isolation of her Satmar upbringing in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to forge a better life for herself and her young son.
Since leaving, Feldman has navigated remarkable experiences: raising her son in the real world, finding solace and solitude in a writing career, and searching for love. Culminating in an unforgettable trip across Europe to retrace her grandmother’s life during the Holocaust, Exodus is a deeply moving exploration of the mysterious bonds that tie us to family and religion, the bonds we must sometimes break to find our true selves.
9. Tales of the Hasidim (The Early Masters / The Later Masters)
Author: by Martin Buber
0805209956
Schocken (July 23, 1991)
English
This new paperback edition brings together volumes one and two of Buber’s classic work Takes of the Hasidim, with a new foreword by Chaim Potok. Martin Buber devoted forty years of his life to collecting and retelling the legends of Hasidim.
“Nowhere in the last centuries,” wrote Buber in Hasidim and Modern Man, “has the soul-force of Judaism so manifested itself as in Hasidim… Without an iota being altered in the law, in the ritual, in the traditional life-norms, the long-accustomed arose in a fresh light and meaning.”These marvelous talesterse, vigorous, often crypticare the true texts of Hasidim.
The hasidic masters, of whom these tales are told, are full-bodied personalities, yet their lives seem almost symbolic. Through them is expressed the intensity and holy joy whereby God becomes visible in everything.
10. Tanya the Masterpiece of Hasidic Wisdom: Selections Annotated & Explained (SkyLight Illuminations)
Author: by Rabbi Rami Shapiro
SkyLight Paths
English
240 pages
The wisdom of Jewish spirituality and mysticism can be a companion for your own spiritual journey. Tanya, “It Was Taught,” is one of the most powerful and potentially transformative books of Jewish wisdom. Written in 1797 by Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad Hasidism, Tanya sets forth the fundamentals of Jewish spirituality and mysticism.
While a focus of daily study by tens of thousands of Hasidic Jews, Tanya is little known outside the world of Jewish mysticism. Until now, its kabbalistic terms and esoteric language have made this essential text of Jewish spirituality inaccessible to most readers.
In this engaging volume, Rabbi Rami Shapiro offers a contemporary English translation of key selections of Tanya coupled with commentary designed to clarify and amplify the wisdom it contains. He also outlines the philosophical and spiritual framework on which Tanya is basedGod’s nonduality; the ve dimensions of reality and their corresponding intelligences (body, heart, mind, soul, and spirit); the purpose of mitzvot, the practices of Jewish life, as catalysts to God realization and the hallowing of all life through godlinessto help you understand the selected Tanya translations in a way that enhances your own spiritual development.
11. God Was in This Place & I, I Did Not Know―25th Anniversary Ed: Finding Self, Spirituality and Ultimate Meaning
Author: by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner
Jewish Lights
English
192 pages
“A profound exploration of the necessity of paying attention to God’s presence.”Library JournalIn a daring blend of scholarship and imagination, psychology and history, Lawrence Kushner gathers an inspiring range of interpretations of Genesis 28:16 given by sages, from Shmuel bar Nachmani in third-century Palestine to Hannah Rachel Werbermacher of Ludomir who lived in Poland two hundred years ago.
Through a fascinating new literary genre and Kushner’s creative reconstruction of the teachers’ lives and times, we enter the study halls and sit at the feet of these spiritual masters to learn what each discovered about God’s Self and ourselves as they ascend and descend Jacob’s ladder.
In this illuminating journeycelebrated in this special 25th anniversary edition with a new preface by the authorour spiritual guides ask and answer the fundamental questions of human experience: Who am I?Who is God? What is God’s role in history?
What is the nature of evil? How should I relate to God and other people? Could the universe really have a self?
12. The Empty Chair: Finding Hope and Joy―Timeless Wisdom from a Hasidic Master, Rebbe Nachman of Breslov
Author: by Rabbi Nachman of Breslov
English
128 pages
1879045672
“Know!A person walks in life on a very narrow bridge. The most important thing is not to be afraid.”A treasury of insights and advice for living joyously and spiritually today, for people of all faithsand no faith. One of the great spiritual seekers, Rebbe Nachman of Breslov (17721810) is among the most often quoted of the Hasidic masters.
Even after two centuries, his teachings have a potent, meaningful message: Never lose hope; find joy and cause for happiness in everything that happens to you. In these pages, his powerful wisdom brings us inspiration for life today. Always remember:joy is not merely incidentalto your spiritual quest.It is vital.
Rebbe Nachman of Breslov17721810 To some, Rebbe Nachman is best known for stories that possess profound depth and speak to the very soul. To others, his teachings shed light on some of life’s deepest mysteries. Now, as before, he speaks to a spiritually seeking generation in strong and uplifting ways.
Teacher, guide and spiritual master, Rebbe Nachman provides vital words of inspiration for life today. With timeless insight and wisdom, Rebbe Nachman shows us how to fill the empty chairthe alienated selfby leaving sadness and finding hope and joy.
13. Story of Our Lives: An Epic Quest for the Soul of our Tradition
Author: by Yaakov Klein
English
459 pages
0578749440
While on a journey, I told a story. Whoever heard it had a thought of repentance. WITH THESE TIMELESS words, Rebbe Nachman of Breslov zya introduced The Lost Princess, the story that would ultimately become the most famous of his legendary tales.
In his groundbreaking book, The Story of Our Lives, R’ Yaakov Klein reveals how Rebbe Nachman’s remarkable short story contains the seeds of a unique path to avodas Hashem tailor-made for our wondrous generation. A veritable textbook on the theological revolution of Chassidus and its relevance to the challenges of the modern era, this seminal work presents a compelling argument for the need to dig deeper in our individual and communal engagement with avodas Hashem.
Expansive, thorough, and well-sourced, this book’s systematic presentation of many foundational concepts in penimiyus haTorah will excite the mind just as the 66-life lessons explicated in its pages are sure to uplift, encourage, and inspire. Most significantly, this book deepens and broadens the thought of repentance this story inspires, introducing the reader to a transformative vision of the spiritual journey.
14. Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar
Author: by Alan Morinis
B0052UG7F0
December 2, 2008
English
Mussar is an illuminating, approachable, and highly practical set of teachings for cultivating personal growth and spiritual realization in the midst of day-to-day life. Here is an accessible and inspiring introduction to this Jewish spiritual path, which until lately has been best known in the world of Orthodox Judaism.
The core teaching of Mussar is that our deepest essence is inherently pure and holy, but this inner radiance is obscured by extremes of emotion, desire, and bad habits. Our work in life is to uncover the brilliant light of the soul.
The Mussar masters developed transformative teachings and practicessome of which are contemplative, some of which focus on how we relate to others in daily lifeto help us to heal and refine ourselves.
15. The Light and Fire of the Baal Shem Tov
Author: by Yitzhak Buxbaum
Continuum
English
448 pages
This is a life, in stories, of Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov (1700-1760), the founder of Hasidism. The Baal Shem Tov, or the Besht, as he is commonly called, led a revival in Judaism that put love and joy at the center of religious life and championed the piety of the common folk against the rabbinic establishment.
He has been recognized as one of the greatest teachers in Jewish history, and much of what is alive and vibrant in Judaism today, in all denominations, derives from his inspiration. Abraham Joshua Heschel, who was descended from several illustrious Hasidic dynasties, wrote: “The Baal Shem Tov brought heaven to earth.
He and his disciples, the Hasidim, banished melancholy from the soul and uncovered the ineffable delight of being a Jew.”
