By William Kolbrener
Continuum, £13.99

You may well leave a Limmud conference feeling regret at the speakers you missed during an overcrowded programme.

Edited by Michael J. Broyde,
K'hal Publishing, $24.95

This is a fascinating, moving and highly instructive volume. Marking the passing of a decade since the terrorist atrocities of 9/11, it presents Jewish responses at both the halachic and theological levels.

Translation and commentary by Lord Sacks
Edited by Dayan Ivan Binstock,
Koren £29.99

This new machzor, the first of a hoped-for translation and commentary of the whole cycle by the Chief Rabbi, has been worth waiting for. And it has been quite a wait.

Machzorim in this country tend to come at intervals of around a century.

Isaac Sassoon
Cambridge University Press, £45

In ancient days, the prophetess Huldah was said by one venerable sources to dispense her religious teaching from inside a yeshivah.

Erica Brown
Maggid/OU, distributed by Kuperard, £15.99

We are now in the middle of the Three Weeks, the period from the fast of the 17th of Tammuz, when the Romans breached the walls of Jerusalem, to Tishah b'Av, commemorating the destruction of the two Temples (which begins on Monday week).

Norman Lamm
Edited by David Shatz, OU Press, $45

This is an edited collection of sermons delivered over a 50-year period by Rabbi Norman Lamm, Chancellor of Yeshiva University and a well-known voice of modern Orthodoxy.

A translation with commentary by Robert Alter, W.W.Norton, £25

Lawrence Kushner
Jewish Lights, $21.99

Edited Jonathan Romain
The Movement for Reform Judaism, £9.99

This short collection of pen portraits of leading Reform figures was produced to mark the bicentenary of the first Progressive service in 1810. Sketched by various members of the British Reform rabbinate, they have been edited by Jonathan Romain, who gives a typically concise and lucid introduction to the principles of Reform.

John A Davis
Yale University Press, £20

I was talking recently to Professor Tudor Parfitt of London School’s Oriental and African Studies when he he mentioned a story which I had never heard before: about a band of Catholic villagers from San Nicandro in a remote region of south east Italy who took up Judaism in the 1930s and eventually settled in Israel. By chance, just a couple of days later, a new book on the subject appeared at the office.

Rabbi Sherer: the paramount Torah spokesman of our era
Yonoson Rosenblum
ArtScroll Mesorah, £21.25

This book is a biography of Rabbi Moshe (Morris) Sherer, the visionary leader of American (and latterly of World) Agudath Israel from the 1960s until his death. Its author, Yale-educated Rabbi Yonason Rosenblum, is perhaps the most eloquent English-language spokesman for Charedi Jewry.

Edited by Rabbi Elliot J Cosgrove
Jewish Lights, $24.99

We are told so often that Jewish practice is more important than belief that it is possible to think that belief really is not that important at all. Yet belief is the blood that flows through the veins of Judaism; it might not be visible but Judaism would wither without it.