Men’s World: Reading Masculinity in Jewish Stories in a Spiritual Context

Men’s World presents a selection of tales from the Jewish sources concerned with masculinity and machismo, which it analyzes with tools taken from a range of disciplines: gender studies, psychoanalysis, anthropology, literature, and philosophy. These narratives depict a diversity of human situations in everyday life: love and jealousy, ugliness and beauty, wealth and poverty, pettiness and magnanimity, falseness and authenticity. The book is based on the Buberian claim that the nucleus of Jewish belief strives to create a society in which attentiveness to the Other is its prime religious interest. The discussions in Men’s World examine this view in light of the Jewish sources concerned with the question of masculinity and its accompanying phallic elements. The book is divided into three parts: Machismo and Violence in the World of the Rabbis; The Attitude to the Other - the Stranger; Authenticity: the Individual Faces Life’s Questions.