Jewish art has always been with us, but so has a broader canvas of Jewish imaginings: in thought, in emotion, in text, and in ritual practice. Imagining the Jewish God was there in the beginning, as it were, engraved and embedded in the ways Jews lived and responded to their God. This book attempts to give voice to these diverse imaginings of the Jewish God, and offers these collected essays and poems as a living text meant to provoke a substantive and nourishing dialogue. A responsive, living covenant lies at the heart of this book—a covenantal reciprocity that actively engages the dynamics of Jewish thinking and acting in dialogue with God. The contributors to this volume are committed to this form of textual reasoning, even as they all move us beyond the “text” as foundational for the imagined “people of the book.” That people, we submit, lives and breathes in and beyond the texts of poetry, narrative, sacred literature, film, and graphic mediums. We imagine the Jewish people, and the covenant they respond to, as provocative intimations of the divine. The essays in this volume seek to draw these vocal intimations out so that we can all hear their resonant call.

Contributions by: Rebecca Alpert, Charles Bernstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Jonathan Boyarin, Zachary Braiterman, Laynie Browne, Michael Castro, James Chapson, Alison Creighton, Marcia Falk, Norman Finkelstein, Lewis Freedman, Jeff Friedman, Lenn Goodman, Susan Handelman, Michael Heller, Jack Hirschman, Leonard V. Kaplan, Leonard Kaplan, Martin Kavka, Ken Koltun-Fromm, Shaul Magid, Michael Marmur, Jay Michaelson, David Novak, Alicia Ostriker, Randi Rashkover, Noam Reisner, Jerome Rothenberg, Jonathan Wyn Schofer, Howard Schwartz, Kenneth Seeskin, Bill Sherman, Benjamin Sommer, Gerald Stern