In the third volume of Milton Shain’s history of antisemitism in South Africa, he traces and unpacks hostile attitudes towards Jews and irrational fantasies that accompany them in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa.

A historical tour de force that demolishes the myths and taboos that have surrounded Jewish and Israeli history, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a new account of both that demands to be read and reckoned with. Was there really a forced exile in the first century, at the hands of the Romans? Should we regard the Jewish people, throughout two millennia, as both a distinct ethnic group and a putative nation—returned at last to its Biblical homeland?

Shlomo Sand argues that most Jews actually descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered far across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The formation of a Jewish people and then a Jewish nation out of these disparate groups could only take place under the sway of a new historiography, developing in response to the rise of nationalism throughout Europe. Beneath the biblical back fill of the nineteenth-century historians, and the twentieth-century intellectuals who replaced rabbis as the architects of Jewish identity, The Invention of the Jewish People uncovers a new narrative of Israel’s formation, and proposes a bold analysis of nationalism that accounts for the old myths.

After a long stay on Israel’s bestseller list, and winning the coveted Aujourd’hui Award in France, The Invention of the Jewish People is finally available in English. The central importance of the conflict in the Middle East ensures that Sand’s arguments will reverberate well beyond the historians and politicians that he takes to task. Without an adequate understanding of Israel’s past, capable of superseding today’s opposing views, diplomatic solutions are likely to remain elusive. In this iconoclastic work of history, Shlomo Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel’s future.

The 1930s and 40s were tumultuous decades in South Africa’s history. The economy declined sharply in the wake of the Wall Street crash, giving rise to a huge number of poor whites and the growth of a militant and aggressive Afrikaner nationalism that often took its lead from the Nazis in Germany.

A Perfect Storm reveals how the right-wing’s malevolent message moved from the margins to the centre of political life; how antisemitism seeped into mainstream political life with real and lasting consequences. Milton Shain, South Africa’s leading scholar of modern Jewish history, brings into sharp relief the ‘Jewish Problem’, detailing the rise of influential organisations such as the Grey Shirts and the New Order, which fanned the flames of antisemitism. He devotes considerable attention to the Ossewa-Brandwag, which, by 1941, constituted the largest yet mobilisation of Afrikaners.

The National Party itself contributed to the climate of hostility to Jews. It was instrumental in ensuring that only few of the Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and elsewhere were permitted as immigrants. The National Party contributed to the prevailing climate of Jew-baiting. Indeed, some of its worst offenders were accorded high office after 1948 when the National Party came to power.

Combining ethnographic, semiotic, and performative approaches, this book examines texts and accompanying acts of writing of national commemoration. The commemorative visitor book is viewed as a mobilized stage, a communication medium, where visitors' public performances are presented, and where acts of participation are authored and composed. The study contextualizes the visitor book within the material and ideological environment where it is positioned and where it functions. The semiotics of commemoration are mirrored in the visitor book, which functions as a participatory platform that becomes an extension of the commemorative spaces in the museum. The study addresses tourists' and visitors' texts, i.e. the commemorative entries in the book, which are succinct dialogical utterances. Through these public performances, individuals and groups of visitors align and affiliate with a larger imagined national community. Reading the entries allows a unique perspective on communication practices and processes, and vividly illustrates such concepts as genre, voice, addressivity, indexicality, and the very acts of writing and reading. The book's many entries tell stories of affirming, but also resisting the narrative tenets of Zionist national identity, and they illustrate the politics of gender and ethnicity in Israel society. The book presents many ethnographic observations and interviews, which were done both with the management of the site (Ammunition Hill National Memorial Site), and with the visitors themselves. The observations shed light on processes and practices involved in writing and reading, and on how visitors decide on what to write and how they collaborate on drafting their entries. The interviews with the site's management also illuminate the commemoration projects, and how museums and exhibitions are staged and managed.

Whether on a national or a personal level, everyone has a complex relationship with their closest neighbors. Where are the borders? How much interaction should there be? How are conflicts solved? Ancient Israel was one of several small nations clustered in the eastern Mediterranean region between the large empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia in antiquity. Frequently mentioned in the Bible, these other small nations are seldom the focus of the narrative unless they interact with Israel. The ancient Israelites who produced the Hebrew Bible lived within a rich context of multiple neighbors, and this context profoundly shaped Israel. Indeed, it was through the influence of the neighboring people that Israel defined its own identity-in terms of geography, language, politics, religion, and culture. Ancient Israel's Neighbors explores both the biblical portrayal of the neighboring groups directly surrounding Israel-the Canaanites, Philistines, Phoenicians, Edomites, Moabites, Ammonites, and Arameans-and examines what we can know about these groups through their own literature, archaeology, and other sources. Through its analysis of these surrounding groups, this book will demonstrate in a direct and accessible manner the extent to which ancient Israelite identity was forged both within and against the identities of its close neighbors. Animated by the latest and best research, yet written for students, this book will invite readers into journey of scholarly discovery to explore the world of Israel's identity within its most immediate ancient Near Eastern context.

A powerful account of Jewish resistence in Nazi-occupied Europe and why such resistance was so remarkable. Most popular accounts of the Holocaust typically cast Jewish victims as meek and ask, "Why didn't Jews resist?" But we know now that Jews did resist, staging armed uprisings in ghettos and camps throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. In Hope and Honor, Rachel L. Einwohner illustrates the dangers in attempting resistance under unimaginable conditions and shows how remarkable such resistance was. She draws on oral testimonies, published and unpublished diaries and memoirs, and other written materials produced both by survivors and those who perished to show how Jews living under Nazi occupation in the ghettos of Warsaw, Vilna, and Lodz reached decisions about resistance. Using methods of comparative-historical sociology, Einwohner shows that decisions about resistance rested on Jews' assessments of the threats facing them, and somewhat ironically, armed resistance took place only once activists reached the critical conclusion that they had no hope for survival. Rather than ask the typical question of why Jews generally didn't resist, this powerful account of Jewish resistance seeks to explain why they resisted at all when there was no hope for success, and they faced almost certain death.

In Genocide Denials and the Law, Ludovic Hennebel and Thomas Hochmann offer a thorough study of the relationship between law and genocide denial from the perspectives of specialists from six countries. This controversial topic provokes strong international reactions involving emotion caused by denial along with concerns about freedom of speech.
The authors offer an in-depth study of the various legal issues raised by the denial of crimes against humanity, presenting arguments both in favor of and in opposition to prohibition of this expression. They do not adopt a pro or contra position, but include chapters written by proponents and opponents of a legal prohibition on genocide denial.
Hennebel and Hochmann fill a void in academic publications by comparatively examining this issue with a collection of original essays. They tackle this diverse topic comprehensively, addressing not only the theoretical and philosophical aspects of denial, but also the specific problems faced by judges who implement anti-denial laws. Genocide Denials and the Law will provoke discussion of many theoretical questions regarding free speech, including the relationship between freedom of expression and truth, hate, memory, and history.

While Jews are commonly referred to as the "people of the book," American Jewish choreographers have consistently turned to dance as a means to articulate personal and collective identities; tangle with stereotypes; advance social and political agendas; and imagine new possibilities for themselves as individuals, artists, and Jews. Dancing Jewish delineates this rich history, demonstrating that Jewish choreographers have not only been vital contributors to American modern and postmodern dance, but that they have also played a critical and unacknowledged role in the history of Jews in the United States. By examining the role dance has played in the struggle between Jewish identification and integration into American life, the book moves across disciplinary boundaries to show how cultural identity, nationality, ethnicity, and gender are formed and performed through the body and its motions. A dancer and choreographer, as well as an historian, Rebecca Rossen offers evocative analyses of dances while asserting the importance of embodied methodologies to academic research. Featuring over fifty images, a companion website, and key works from 1930 to 2005 by a wide range of artists-including David Dorfman, Dan Froot, David Gordon, Hadassah, Margaret Jenkins, Pauline Koner, Dvora Lapson, Liz Lerman, Sophie Maslow, Anna Sokolow, and Benjamin Zemach-Dancing Jewish offers a comprehensive framework for interpreting performance and establishes dance as a crucial site in which American Jews have grappled with cultural belonging, personal and collective histories, and the values that bind and pull them apart.

Klezmer in Europe has been a controversial topic ever since this traditional Jewish wedding music made it to the concert halls and discos of Berlin, Warsaw, Budapest and Prague. Played mostly by non-Jews and for non-Jews, it was hailed as "fakelore," "Jewish Disneyland" and even "cultural necrophilia." Klezmer's Afterlife is the first book to investigate this fascinating music scene in Central Europe, giving voice to the musicians, producers and consumers of the resuscitated klezmer. Contesting common hypotheses about the klezmer revival in Germany and Poland stemming merely from feelings of guilt which emerged in the years following the Holocaust, author Magdalena Waligorska investigates the consequences of the klezmer boom on the people who staged it and places where it occurred. Offering not only a documentation of the klezmer revival in two of its European headquarters (Krakow and Berlin), but also an analysis of the Jewish / non-Jewish encounter it generates, Waligorska demonstrates how the klezmer revival replicates and reinvents the image of the Jew in Polish and German popular culture, how it becomes a soundtrack to Holocaust commemoration and how it is used as a shining example of successful cultural policy by local officials. Drawing on a variety of fields including musicology, ethnomusicology, history, sociology, and cultural studies, Klezmer's Afterlife will appeal to a wide range scholars and students studying Jewish culture, and cultural relations in post-Holocaust central Europe, as well as general readers interested in klezmer music and music revivals more generally.

Volume XXII of the distinguished annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry explores the major and rapid changes experienced by a population known variously as "Sephardim," "Oriental" Jews and "Mizrahim" over the last fifty years. Although Sephardim are popularly believed to have originated in Spain or Portugal, the majority of Mizrahi Jews today are actually the descendants of Jews from Muslim and Arab countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. They constitute a growing proportion of Israeli Jewry and continue to revitalize Jewish culture in places as varied as France, Latin America, and the United States.
Sephardic Jewry and Mizrahi Jews offers a collection of new scholarship on the issues of self-definition and identity facing Sephardic Jewry. The essays draw on a variety of disciplines--demography, history, political science, sociology, religious and gender studies, anthropology, and literature. Contributors explore the issues surrounding the emergence and increasingly wide usage of "Mizrahi" in place of "Sephardic," as well as the invigoration of Sephardic Judaism. They look at the evolution of Sephardic politics in Israel through the dramatic rise and continuing influence of the Shas political party and its spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. Other contributors examine the variegated nature of Mizrahi immigration to Israel, fictional portraits of female Mizrahi immigrants to Israel in the 1940s and 1950s, contemporary Mizrahi Israel feminism, modern Arab historiography's portrayal of Jews of Muslim lands, and the changing Sephardic halakhic tradition.

Drawing on the great progress in Talmudic scholarship over the last century, The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture is both an introduction to a close reading of rabbinic literature and a demonstration of the development of rabbinic thought on education in the first centuries of the Common Era. In Roman Palestine and Sasanid Persia, a small group of approximately two thousand Jewish scholars and rabbis sustained a thriving national and educational culture. They procured loyalty to the national language and oversaw the retention of a national identity. This accomplishment was unique in the Roman Near East, and few physical artifacts remain. The scope of oral teaching, however, was vast and was committed to writing only in the high Middle Ages. The content of this oral tradition remains the staple of Jewish learning through modern times.
Though oral learning was common in many ancient cultures, the Jewish approach has a different theoretical basis and different aims. Marc Hirshman explores the evolution and institutionalization of Jewish culture in both Babylonian and Palestinian sources. At its core, he argues, the Jewish cultural thrust in the first centuries of the Common Era was a sustained effort to preserve the language of its culture in its most pristine form. Hirshman traces and outlines the ideals and practices of rabbinic learning as presented in the relatively few extensive discussions of the subject in late antique rabbinic sources. The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture is a pioneering attempt to characterize the unique approach to learning developed by the rabbinic leadership in late antiquity.

For most of the postwar period, the destruction of European Jewry was not a salient part of American Jewish life, and was generally seen as irrelevant to non-Jewish Americans. Survivors and their families tended to keep to themselves, forming their own organizations, or they did their best to block out the past. Today, in contrast, the Holocaust is the subject of documentaries and Hollywood films, and is widely recognized as a universal moral touchstone. Reluctant Witnesses mixes memoir, history, and social analysis to tell the story of the rise of Holocaust consciousness in the United States from the perspective of survivors and their descendants. The public reckoning with the Holocaust, the book argues, was due to more than the passage of time. It took the coming of age of the "second generation" - who reached adulthood during the rise of feminism, the ethnic revival, and therapeutic culture - for survivors' families to reclaim their hidden histories. Inspired by the changed status of the victim in American society, the second generation coaxed their parents to share their losses with them, transforming private pains into public stories. Reluctant Witnesses documents how a group of people who had previously been unrecognized and misunderstood managed to find its voice. It tells this story in relation to the changing status of trauma and victimhood in American culture more generally. At a time when a sense of Holocaust fatigue seems to be setting in, and when the remaining survivors are at the end of their lives, it offers a reminder that the ability to speak openly about traumatic experiences had to be struggled for. By confronting traumatic memories and catastrophic histories, the book argues, we can make our world mean something beyond ourselves.

Accounts of the history of Zionism usually trace its origins to the late nineteenth century. In this groundbreaking book, Arie Morgenstern argues that its roots go back even further.
Morgenstern argues compellingly that the Jewish community in Israel may be traced back to a large-scale wave of immigration during the first half of the nineteenth century. Inspired by an expectation for the coming of the Messiah in the year 1840, thousands of Jews from throughout the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and Eastern Europe relocated to Jerusalem. Morgenstern describes the messianic awakening in all these lands but focuses primarily on the concept of redemption through messianic activism that prevailed among the disciples of Rabbi Elijah, the Ga'on of Vilna. These immigrants believed that the Messiah's arrival would bring about the redemption of the Jews, but also that, in order for this redemption to come about, they needed to prepare the way for the Messiah by fulfilling the commandment to dwell in the land of Israel. Morgenstern offers a dramatic account of their relocation, their efforts to renew rabbinic ordination, their reestablishment of the Ashkenazi community, and the building of Jerusalem. He also explores the crisis of faith that followed the Messiah's failure to appear as expected, and its effects on the community.
Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped sources, Morgenstern sheds important new light on the history of messianic Judaism and on the ideological trends that preceded, and eventually gave birth to, modern political Zionism.

Volume XXIV of the distinguished annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry explores the question of relations between Jews and Protestants in modern times. One of the four major branches of Christianity, Protestantism is perhaps the most difficult to write about; it has innumerable sects and churches within it, from the loosely organized Religious Society of Friends to the conservative Evangelicals of the Bible Belt. Different strands of Protestantism hold vastly different views on theology, social problems, and politics. These views play out in differing attitudes and relationships between mainstream Protestant churches and Jews, Judaism, and the State of Israel. In this volume, established scholars from multiple disciplines and various countries delve into these essential questions of the "Protestant-Jewish conundrum." The discussion begins with a trenchant analysis of the historical framework in which Protestant ideas towards Jews and Judaism were formed. Contributors delve into diverse topics including the attitudes of the Evangelical movement toward Jews and Israel; Protestant reactions to Mel Gibson's blockbuster "The Passion of the Christ."; German-Protestant behavior during and after Nazi era; and mainstream Protestant attitudes towards Israel and the Israeli-Arab conflict.. Taken as a whole, this compendium presents discussions and questions central to the ongoing development of Jewish-Protestant relations. Studies in Contemporary Jewry seeks to provide its readers with up-to-date and accessible scholarship on questions of interest in the general field of modern Jewish studies. Studies in Contemporary Jewry presents new approaches to the scholarly work of the latest generation of researchers working on Jewish history, sociology, demography, political science, and culture.

This book describes the vibrant activity of survivors who founded Jewish historical commissions and documentation centers in Europe immediately after the Second World War. In the first postwar decade, these initiatives collected thousands of Nazi documents along with testimonies, memoirs, diaries, songs, poems, and artifacts of Jewish victims. They pioneered in developing a Holocaust historiography that placed the experiences of Jews at the center and used both victim and perpetrator sources to describe the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the everyday life and death of European Jews under the Nazi regime.
This book is the first in-depth monograph on these survivor historians and the organizations they created. A comparative analysis, it focuses on France, Poland, Germany, Austria, and Italy, analyzing the motivations and rationales that guided survivors in chronicling the destruction they had witnessed, while also discussing their research techniques, archival collections, and historical publications. It reflects growing attention to survivor testimony and to the active roles of survivors in rebuilding their postwar lives. It also discusses the role of documenting, testifying, and history writing in processes of memory formation, rehabilitation, and coping with trauma.
Jockusch finds that despite differences in background and wartime experiences between the predominantly amateur historians who created the commissions, the activists found documenting the Holocaust to be a moral imperative after the war, the obligation of the dead to the living, and a means for the survivors to understand and process their recent trauma and loss. Furthermore, historical documentation was vital in the pursuit of postwar justice and was deemed essential in counteracting efforts on the part of the Nazis to erase their wartime crimes. The survivors who created the historical commissions were the first people to study the development of Nazi policy towards the Jews and also to document Jewish responses to persecution, a topic that was largely ignored by later generations of Holocaust scholars.

"The book is the product of a protracted, laborious and scrupulous research and draws on a most extensive and varied assembly of documents. But the archival evidence, factual accounts and even personal narratives would have remained remote, dry and cold if not for the author's remarkable gift of empathy. Barbara Engelking gives the witnesses of the Holocaust a voice which readers of this book will understand....Under her pen memories come alive again."--from the Foreword by Zygmunt BaumanOriginally published in Polish to great acclaim and based on interviews with survivors of the Holocaust in Poland, Holocaust and Memory provides a moving description of their life during the war and the sense they made of it. The book begins by looking at the differences between the wartime experiences of Jews and Poles in occupied Poland, both in terms of Nazi legislation and individual experiences. On the Aryan side of the ghetto wall, Jews could either be helped or blackmailed by Poles. The largest section of the book reconstructs everyday life in the ghetto. The psychological consequences of wartime experiences are explored, including interviews with survivors who stayed on in Poland after the war and were victims of anti-Semitism again in 1968. These discussions bring into question some of the accepted survivor stereotypes found in Holocaust literature. A final chapter looks at the legacy of the Holocaust, the problems of transmitting experience and of the place of the Holocaust in Polish history and culture.

The widespread and long-held preconception that all Jews lived in ghettos and were relentlessly subject to discrimination prior to the Enlightenment has only slowly eroded. Geographically speaking, Jews rarely lived in ghettos and have never been confined within the borders of one nation or country. Power struggles and wars often led to the creation of new national borders that divided communities once united. But if identity formation is subject to change and negotiation, it does not depend solely on shifting geographical borders. A variety of boundaries were and are still being constructed and maintained between ethnic and other collective identities. The contributors to this book, like other post-modernist historians, turn their gaze to a wide range of identities once taken for granted, identities located on the border lines between one country and the next, between Jews and non-Jews as well as on those between one group of Jews and another.

'An unusual and compelling insight into Jewish history... sheer detail and breadth of scale' BBC History Magazine

This newly revised and updated edition of Martin Gilbert's Atlas of Jewish History spans over four thousand years of history in 154 maps, presenting a vivid picture of a fascinating people and the trials and tribulations which have haunted their story.

The themes covered include:

This new edition is also updated to include maps showing Jewish museums in the United States and Canada, and Europe, as well as American conservation efforts abroad. Other topics covered in this revised edition include Jewish educational outreach projects in various parts of the world, and Jews living under Muslim rule. Forty years on from its first publication, this book is still an indispensible guide to Jewish history.

The "Nations" are the "seventy nations": a metaphor which, in the Talmudic idiom, designates the whole of humanity surrounding Israel. In this major collection of essays, Levinas considers Judaism's uncertain relationship to European culture since the Enlightenment, problems of distance and integration. It also includes essays on Franz Rosenzweig and Moses Mendelssohn, and a discussion of central importance to Jewish philosophy in the context of general philosophy. This work brings to the fore the vital encounter between philosophy and Judaism, a hallmark of Levinas's thought.

Amidst the growing forums of kinky Jews, orthodox drag queens, and Jewish geisha girls, we find today's sexy Jewess in a host of reflexive plays with sexed-up self-display. A social phantasm with real legs, she moves boldly between neo-burlesque striptease, comedy television, ballet movies, and progressive porn to construct the 21st Century Jewish American woman through charisma and comic craft, in-your-face antics, and offensive charm. Her image redresses longstanding stereotypes of the hag, the Jewish mother, and Jewish American princess that have demeaned the Jewish woman as overly demanding, inappropriate, and unattractive across the 20th century, even as Jews assimilated into the American mainstream. But why does "sexy" work to update tropes of the Jewish woman? And how does sex link to humor in order for this update to work? Entangling questions of sexiness to race, gender, and class, The Case of the Sexy Jewess frames an embodied joke-work genre that is most often, but not always meant to be funny. In a contemporary period after the thrusts of assimilation and women's liberation movements, performances usher in new versions of old scripts with ranging consequences. At the core is the recuperative performance of identity through impersonation, and the question of its radical or conservative potential. Appropriating, re-appropriating, and mis-appropriating identity material within and beyond their midst, Sexy Jewess artists play up the failed logic of representation by mocking identity categories altogether. They act as comic chameleons, morphing between margin and center in countless number of charged caricatures. Embodying ethnic and gender positions as always already on the edge while ever more in the middle, contemporary Jewish female performers extend a comic tradition in new contexts, mobilizing progressive discourses from positions of newfound race and gender privilege.

Continuing its distinguished tradition of focusing on central political, sociological, and cultural issues of Jewish life in the last century, Volume XXVI of the annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry examines the visual revolution that has overtaken Jewish cultural life in the twentieth century onwards, with special attention given to the evolution of Jewish museums. Bringing together leading curators and scholars, Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History treats various forms of Jewish representation in museums in Europe and the United States before the Second World War and inquires into the nature and proliferation of Jewish museums following the Holocaust and the fall of Communism in Western and Eastern Europe. In addition, a pair of essays dedicated to six exhibitions that took place in Israel in 2008 to mark six decades of Israeli art raises significant issues on the relationship between art and gender, and art and politics. An introductory essay highlights the dramatic transformation in the appreciation of the visual in Jewish culture. The scope of the symposium offers one of the first scholarly attempts to treat this theme in several countries.
Also featured in this volume are a provocative essay on the nature of antisemitism in twentieth-century English society; review essays on Jewish fundamentalism and recent works on the subject of the Holocaust in occupied Soviet territories; and reviews of new titles in Jewish Studies..