The Song of Songs: Love Lyrics from the Bible, translated by Marcia Falk. Illustrated by Barry Moser.

Striking in its appeal to the senses, the Song of Songs¿the Bible¿s only book of love poems¿is remarkable for its lack of sexual stereotyping and its expression of mutuality in relationships between men and women. Marcia Falk¿s rich and lyrical translation, praised by poets and scholars alike, is paired here with the original Hebrew text.

Women of the Book: Jewish Artists, Jewish Themes. Curated by Judith A. Hoffberg.

This beautiful paperback is actually a companion catalog to an exhibition of 90 women artists who have created bookworks of unusual beauty and significance. Among the themes are family rituals, traditions and liturgy, the Holocaust, the integration of Jewish culture into art, humorous takes on being "Jewish," cultural memory and the celebration of festivals, among others. But what is most meaningful in this exhibition of more than 100 bookworks is the sense of "belonging" to either a cultural or religious community, or both.

The Mikvah Project. Photographs by Janice Rubin. Text by Leah Lax.

Ethereal underwater images capture the sensual, enigmatic nature of this now-modern rite. Essays discuss the historical significance and current resurgence of interest in the mikvah ritual. Personal stories are paired with emotionally-charged portraits that resonate with the intimate words of women from across America.

All thirty-nine exhibition photographs are exquisitely reproduced in rich duotone and quadtone.

100 pages - 39 photographs (duotones and four color), essays, and quotations.

Sarah the Priestess: The First Matriarch of Genesis, by Savina J. Teubal.

The only source in which Sarah is mentioned is the Book of Genesis, which contains very few highly selective and rather enigmatic stories dealing with her. On the surface, these stories tell us very little about Sarah, and what they do tell is complicated and confused by the probability that it represents residue surviving from two different written sources based on two independent oral traditions. Nevertheless, the role which Sarah plays, in the Genesis narratives, apears to be a highly energetic one, a role so active, in fact, that it repeatedly overshadows that of her husband.

Dr. Teubal suggests that Sarah and the other matriarchs mentioned in the narratives acted within the established, traditional Mesopotamian role of priestess, of a class of women who retained a highly privileged position vis-a-vis their husbands. She shows that the ¿Sarah tradition¿ represents a nonpatriarchal system struggling for survival in isolation, in the patriarchal environment of what was for Sarah a foreign society.