About this item
The menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum, has traversed millennia as a living symbol of Judaism and the Jewish people. Naturally, it did not pass through the ages unaltered. The Menorah explores the cultural and intellectual history of the Western world's oldest continuously used religious symbol. This meticulously researched yet deeply personal history explains how the menorah illuminates the great changes and continuities in Jewish culture, from biblical times to modern Israel.Though the golden seven-branched menorahs of Moses and of the Jerusalem Temple are artifacts lost to history, the best-known menorah image survives on the Arch of Titus in Rome. Commemorating the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the arch reliefs depict the spoils of the Temple, the menorah chief among them, as they appeared in Titus's great triumphal parade in 71 CE.
About the Author
Steven Fine is a cultural historian, specializing in Jewish history in the Greco-Roman period. His work focuses mainly upon the literature of ancient Judaism, art and archaeology-- and the ways that modern scholars have interpreted Jewish antiquity.
Fine is the Churgin Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University. He is the director of the Arch of Titus Project and of the Yeshiva University Center for Israel Studies and is a founding editor of Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture.
Dr. Fine's blend of history, rabbinic literature, archaeology and art, together with deep engagement with historiography and contemporary culture, is expressed in a broad range of publications. The author of academic monographs, museum catalogs, more than 70 articles and even a book for children, Professor Fine's monograph, -Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology- (Cambridge, 2005, revised edition 2011) received the 2009 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award of the Association for Jewish Studies. He is an editor of -IMAGES: A Journal for the Study of Jewish Art and Visual Culture- and section editor for Judaica of the -Cambridge World History of Religious Architecture- (forthcoming) . Fine's -Art, Archaeology and the History of Judaism in Roman Antiquity -appeared with E. J. Brill in 2013, and his -The Menorah: From the Bible to Modern Israel- was published by Harvard University Press in 2016.
Dr. Fine was curator of -Sacred Realm: The Emergence of the Synagogue in the Ancient World an exhibition organized by Yeshiva University Museum and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (1996-7) . The catalog, published jointly by YU Museum and Oxford University Press, received the Philip Johnson Award for Excellence in Published Exhibition Catalogues of the Society of Architectural Historians. His 1999 edited volume, -Jews, Christians and Polytheists: Cultural Interaction During the Greco-Roman Period- (Routledge) was the finalist for the Charles H. Revson Foundation Award in Jewish-Christian Relations of the National Jewish Book Award.
Steven Fine has lectured to both popular and academic audiences throughout the United States, Israel and Europe, in both English and Hebrew. In recent years, he has given academic presentations at the Pergamon Museum, Berlin, the University of Basle, Bar Ilan University, University of Haifa, Oxford University, the Hebrew University, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Union Theological Seminary, Yale University, the Hebrew Union College, UC Davis, Duke University and the Brooklyn Museum. Dr. Fine delivered the first Cecil Roth Memorial Lecture at the Jewish Museum in London.
Fine's work has been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Biblical Archaeology Review, Haaretz and numerous other news sources.
