Rabbi Josh Yuter

New York Post Best Book of 2016We often think of our capacity to experience the suffering of others as the ultimate source of goodness. Many of our wisest policy-makers, activists, scientists, and philosophers agree that the only problem with empathy is that we dont have enough of it.Nothing could be farther from the truth, argues Yale researcher P...

"One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades." —John Gray, New York Times Book ReviewHailed as "a magisterial critique of top-down social planning" by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastr...

Most works on moral psychology direct our attention to the positive role morality plays for us as individuals, as a society, even as a species. In What's Wrong with Morality?, C. Daniel Batson takes a different approach: he looks at morality as a problem. The problem is not that it is wrong to be moral, but that our morality often fails to produce ...

Is Judaism a religion, a culture, a nationality--or a mixture of all of these? In "How Judaism Became a Religion," Leora Batnitzky boldly argues that this question more than any other has driven modern Jewish thought since the eighteenth century. This wide-ranging and lucid introduction tells the story of how Judaism came to be defined as a religio...

Updated to include the Black Lives Matter movement, the presidency of Barack Obama, the rise of hate speech on the Internet, and moreSince the publication of the first edition of Critical Race Theory in 2001, the United States has lived through two economic downturns, an outbreak of terrorism, and the onset of an epidemic of hate directed against i...

From the days of Plato, the problem of the efficacy and adequacy of the written word as a vehicle of human communication has challenged mankind, yet the mystery of how best to achieve clarity and exactitude of written expression has never been solved. The most repercussive instance of this universal problem has been the exegesis of the law embodied...

Studying the many ideas about how giving charity atones for sin and other rewards in late antique rabbinic literature, this volume contains many, varied, and even conflicting ideas, as the multiplicity must be recognized and allowed expression.Topics include the significance of the rabbis' use of the biblical word "tzedaqah" as charity, the coexist...

Considers Jewish studies as an academic discipline from its origins to the present....

A Philip and Muriel Berman Edition; Translated from the Hebrew by Bernard Auerbach and Melvin SykesJustice Menachem Elon’s classic text surveys the panorama of Jewish law from biblical times to contemporary Israel. The result is the most definitive record to date of a unique legal system that integrates criminal, civil, and religious law to form a ...

“If the Narnia books were like catnip for a certain kind of kid, these books are like crack for a certain kind of adult.” —The New York Times Critics, readers, and fellow writers have all hailed the Magicians trilogy by #1 New York Times bestselling author Lev Grossman as one of the greatest achievements in modern fantasy. Cast out of Fillory, Quen...

Return to Fillory in the riveting sequel to the New York Times bestseller and literary phenomenon, The Magicians, now an original series on Syfy, from the author of the #1 bestselling The Magician’s Land. Quentin Coldwater should be happy. He escaped a miserable Brooklyn childhood, matriculated at a secret college for magic, and graduated to discov...