A woman prays in a cave containing the tombs of rabbis in Safed, Israel, the capital of Jewish mysticism.Menahem Kahana / AFP In the beginning, there was Madonna. At least that’s how most see the ...

In ‘The Relativity of Death,’ Shyfrin transforms centuries of mystical thought into a structured framework – connecting ...

According to Margarethe Weissenstein, the Vienna-born Jewish author of The Power of the Charlatan, Casanova — who was born 300 years ago in 1725 — was an itinerant charlatan who manipulated credulous ...

Nan Goodman doesn’t spend much time wondering what Madonna, Mick Jagger or Ashton Kutcher may have gotten from dabbling in the “Kabbalah trend” of the early 2000s. What concerns Goodman are what ...

Kabbalah literally means “tradition” and it’s taken to refer to the Jewish mystical tradition. When you think of tradition you think of something that’s unified, but Kabbalistic tradition is very ...

In this accessible, eminently readable survey, Aramaic scholar Freedman (The Murderous History of Bible Translations) provides a balanced look at a religious tradition whose reach has extended far ...

Shambhala, 332 pages., $24.95. As everyone seems to know by now, Kabbalah has broken into the mainstream. Thanks to Esther, née Madonna Louise Ciccone, the mystical teachings of medieval Jews are now ...

Kabbalah, Judaism's mystical tradition, has been practiced for at least 800 years and is, at its essence, as old as mankind. And yet, judging by a profusion of classes, books and celebrity ...

In another era, it might have been hard to imagine the likes of Madonna, Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears spearheading a revival of ancient Jewish mystical traditions. But what began not so long ago ...