This book examines the history of antisemitism in the United States and Germany in a novel way by placing the two countries side by side for a sustained comparison of the anti-Jewish environments in both countries from the 1880s to the end of the Second World War. Author Richard Frankel shatters the widely-held notion of exceptionalism in Germany and America: the belief that antisemitism in Germany was uniquely murderous and led inevitably to the Holocaust and that antisemitism in the United States was uniquely benign, making an American Holocaust all but unthinkable. In a series of new and previously published essays that have been revised, updated, and expanded, the book relates antisemitism to issues including Jewish and Chinese immigration, discrimination and exclusion, the First World War and its aftermath, Hitler and Henry Ford, Nazis, the American Right, and the Roosevelt Administration, and a German Ku Klux Klan. Taken together, these essays reveal that antisemitism in Germany was less aberrant than commonly believed and that American antisemitism was indeed dangerous and more similar to what existed in Germany during the same period. Antisemitism Before the Holocaust is an essential volume for students and scholars alike interested in European and American history, the history of the holocaust and the First World War.

After the death of her mother when she turned ten, Judith Friedland learned to be resilient. She met the expectations for upper-middle-class women in Toronto in the 1940s and 1950s, which included post-secondary education, marriage, and motherhood. While raising a family and supporting her husband's academic career, she continued her formal education through part-time study and gradually began a journey tailored to herself as an individual. In her forties, she embarked on her own academic career, rising through the ranks to a tenured full professor and chairing the department of occupational therapy in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. In There Was a Time for Everything, Friedland reflects on her life and the fact that over time she managed to "have it all" - just not all at once. This memoir draws on conversations with family members, friends, colleagues, and former classmates. It includes family histories that reflect her Jewish life and considers feminist issues within academic and health care settings. There Was a Time for Everything tells a story about the expectations many women faced in the mid-twentieth century while celebrating the importance of relationships and opportunities for living a full life.

At the turn of the century, German popular entertainment was a realm of unprecedented opportunity for Jewish performers. This study explores the terms of their engagement and pays homage to the many ways in which German Jews were instrumental in the birth of an incomparably rich world of popular culture. It traces the kaleidoscope of challenges, opportunities and paradoxes Jewish men and women faced in their interactions with predominantly gentile audiences. Modern Germany was a society riddled by conflicts and contradictory impulses, continuously torn between desires to reject, control and celebrate individual and collective difference. This book demonstrates that an analysis of popular entertainment can be one of the most innovative ways to trace this complicated negotiation throughout a period of great social and political turmoil.

Evan Burr Bukey explores the experience of intermarried couples - marriages with Jewish and non-Jewish partners - and their children in Vienna after Germany's seizure of Austria in 1938. These families coped with changing regulations that disrupted family life, pitted relatives against each other, and raised profound questions about religious, ethnic, and national identity. Bukey finds that although intermarried couples lived in a state of fear and anxiety, many managed to mitigate, delay, or even escape Nazi sanctions. Drawing on extensive archival research, his study reveals how hundreds of them pursued ingenious strategies to preserve their assets, to improve their 'racial' status, and above all to safeguard the position of their children. It also analyzes cases of intermarried partners who chose divorce as well as persons involved in illicit liaisons with non-Jews. Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria concludes that although most of Vienna's intermarried Jews survived the Holocaust, several hundred Jewish partners were deported to their deaths and children of such couples were frequently subjected to Gestapo harassment.

Ma?berot Immanuel is a collection of twenty-eight chapters in Hebrew of rhymed prose and poetry written by the poet and amateur philosopher Immanuel of Rome during an era of rapid political change in late medieval Italy. The final chapter, Mah?beret Ha-Tofet Ve-ha-'Eden (A Tale of Heaven and Hell), like Dante's Commedia, depicts Immanuel's visits to hell and heaven. Bridging Worlds focuses on the interrelation of Immanuel's belletristic work and biblical exegesis to advance a comprehensive and original reading of this final chapter. By reading Immanuel's philosophical commentaries and literary works together, Dana Fishkin demonstrates that Immanuel's narrative made complex philosophical ideas about the soul's quest for immortality accessible to an educated populace. Throughout this work, she explains the many ways Mah?beret Ha-Tofet Ve-ha-'Eden serves as a site of cultural negotiation and translation. Bridging Worlds broadens our understanding of the tensions inherent in the world of late medieval Jewish people who were deeply enmeshed in Italian culture and literature, negotiating two cultures whose values may have overlapped but also sometimes clashed. Fishkin puts forth a valuable and refreshing perspective alongside previously unknown sources to breathe new life into this extremely rich and culturally valuable medieval work.

As one of the most visited museums in Germany's capital city, the Jewish Museum Berlin is a key site for understanding not only German-Jewish history, but also German identity in an era of unprecedented ethnic and religious diversity. Visitors to the House of Memory is an intimate exploration of how young Berliners experience the Museum. How do modern students relate to the museum's evocative architecture, its cultural-political context, and its narrative of Jewish history? By accompanying a range of high school history students before, during, and after their visits to the museum, this book offers an illuminating exploration of political education, affect, remembrance, and belonging.

This volume explores the local specificities and global forces that shaped Jewish experiences in the Americas across five centuries. Featuring a range of case studies by scholars from the United States, Brazil, Europe, and Israel, it explores the culturally, religiously, and politically diverse lives of Jewish minorities in the Western Hemisphere. The chapters are organized chronologically and trace four global forces: the western expansion of early modern European empires, Jewish networks across and beyond empires, migration, and Jewish activism and participation in international ideological movements. The volume weaves together into one narrative the histories of communities and individuals separated by time and space, such as the descendants of Portuguese converts, Moroccan immigrants to Brazil, and U.S.-based Yiddish movie makers. Through its transnational focus and close attention paid to local circumstances, this volume offers new insights into the multicultural pasts of the Americas' Jewish populations and of the different regions that make up North, Central, and South America.

For Gustav Landauer, literary critic and anarchist, scholar of mysticism and participant of the Bavarian revolution, culture and politics occupied the same spiritual space. While identifying with ethical socialism, his Jewish sensibility increasingly gained over the years, not only, but in great measure due to Buber's influence. This volume brings together leading scholars to assess Landauer's ramified literary and political activities, his life as a Jew and anarchist, paying particular attention to his impact on Martin Buber.

Hartung works out both the linguistic and philosophy of language setting as well as socio-political and cultural implications of the radical critique of language developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by philosophers as diverse as Steinthal, Cohen, Simmel or Cassirer. He argues that the theories pleaded for a plurality of linguistic and cultural forms as well as for a new logic beyond the traditional nature/culture partition.

A seminal text in Jewish thought accessible to English readers for the first time. The diagnosis of Jewish self-hatred has become almost commonplace in contemporary cultural and political debates, but the concept's origins are not widely appreciated. In its modern form, it received its earliest and fullest expression in Theodor Lessing's 1930 book Der judische Selbsthass. Written on the eve of Hitler's ascent to power, Lessing's hotly contested work has been variously read as a defense of the Weimar Republic, a platform for anti-Weimar sentiments, an attack on psychoanalysis, an inspirational personal guide, and a Zionist broadside. "The truthful translation by Peter Appelbaum, including Lessing's own footnotes, manages to make this book more readable than the German original. Two essays by Sander Gilman and Paul Reitter provide context and the wisdom of hindsight."-Frank Mecklenburg, Leo Baeck Institute From the forward by Sander Gilman: Theodor Lessing's (1872-1933) Jewish Self-Hatred (1930) is the classic study of the pitfalls (rather than the complexities) of acculturation. Growing out of his own experience as a middle-class, urban, marginally religious Jew in Imperial and then Weimar Germany, he used this study to reject the social integration of the Jews into Germany society, which had been his own experience, by tracking its most radical cases.... Lessing's case studies reflect the idea that assimilation (the radical end of acculturation) is by definition a doomed project, at least for Jews (no matter how defined) in the age of political antisemitism.

The Towns of Death deals with the pogroms of Jews in Eastern Poland in 1941-1942 perpetrated by their Polish neighbors. The book relies on witness reports from survivors, bystanders, and the murderers themselves as found in court testimonies to describe the eerily similar, horrific events that occurred in some dozen towns throughout the region. It Importantly, the author demonstrates the pivotal role of the Catholic clergy and individual priests, the intellectual classes, and political circles in sowing the seeds that allowed anti-Semitism to grow and express itself in the pogroms in which tens of thousands of Polish Jews were slaughtered individually and en masse by their Polish neighbors.

Military cemeteries are one of the most prominent cultural landscapes of Israel. Their story reflects largely the main social processes that Israeli society has been undergoing since the War of Independence (1948) until today. Until the end of the 1970s, the military tombstones and their surroundings were uniform and equal, according to rules set by the State. However, since the 1980s families of the fallen soldiers started to add on the tombstone personal expressions, as well as personal objects, photographs, military artifacts etc. Thus the military tombstone and the Israeli military cemetery became one of the expressions of the dramatic transformation, from a society which emphasized the importance of the collective, to a society which intensifies the significance of the individual. The book is based on many archival documents, as well as interviews and photographs, all of which shed light on one of the most sensitive issues in Israeli society and express its importance as a central component of Israeli identity.

The edition collects and presents all papyri and ostraca from the Ptolemaic period, connected to Jews and Judaism, published since 1957. It is a follow-up to the Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum (= CPJ) of the 1950s and 60s, edited by Victor Tcherikover, which had consisted of three volumes - I devoted to the Ptolemaic period; II to the Early Roman period (until 117 CE); and III to the Late Roman and Byzantine periods. The present book, CPJ vol. IV, is the first in a new trilogy, and is devoted to the Ptolemaic period. The present and upcoming volumes supplement the original CPJ. They present over 300 papyri that have been published since 1957. They also include papyri in languages other than Greek (Hebrew, Aramaic, Demotic), and literary papyri which had not been included in the old CPJ. Aside from quite a number of papyri in these categories, the present volume (of over 100 documents) includes 21 papyri from Herakleopolis in Middle-Egypt that record the existence of a Jewish self-ruling body - the politeuma. These papyri put an end to a long-standing dispute over whether such a Jewish institution had ever existed in Egypt.

Challenging the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement focuses on the efforts to oppose antisemitism, the academic boycott, and the BDS movement. The State of Israel has faced many threats, most of them military, since it was established in 1948, but the threat posed by the NGO forum at the United Nations World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, in August 2001 was different. The forum unleashed the "new" antisemitism which targeted the State of Israel, as well as a non-violent, civil society-based campaign based on the South African anti-apartheid campaign of the 1980s - which was to form the basis of the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement directed at the State of Israel. Featuring case studies from the United States, Great Britain, Israel, and South Africa, each chapter of this wide-ranging volume discusses examples of opposition to the divisive BDS campaign and the proposed academic boycott of Israel over the last two decades, including the fight for formal recognition of the "new" antisemitism by governments and international bodies and the use of a variety of legal measures. The rise of antisemitism within academia and wider society is also examined. This book will be vital reading for students, scholars, and activists with an interest in social movements, Israel, and Middle East politics and history.

Challenging the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement focuses on the efforts to oppose antisemitism, the academic boycott, and the BDS movement. The State of Israel has faced many threats, most of them military, since it was established in 1948, but the threat posed by the NGO forum at the United Nations World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, in August 2001 was different. The forum unleashed the "new" antisemitism which targeted the State of Israel, as well as a non-violent, civil society-based campaign based on the South African anti-apartheid campaign of the 1980s - which was to form the basis of the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement directed at the State of Israel. Featuring case studies from the United States, Great Britain, Israel, and South Africa, each chapter of this wide-ranging volume discusses examples of opposition to the divisive BDS campaign and the proposed academic boycott of Israel over the last two decades, including the fight for formal recognition of the "new" antisemitism by governments and international bodies and the use of a variety of legal measures. The rise of antisemitism within academia and wider society is also examined. This book will be vital reading for students, scholars, and activists with an interest in social movements, Israel, and Middle East politics and history.

An exploration of the work of Jewish women graphic novelists and the intricate Jewish identity is complicated by gender, memory, generation, and place-that is, the emotional, geographical, and psychological spaces that women inhabit. Victoria Aarons argues that Jewish women graphic novelists are preoccupied with embodied memory: the way the body materializes memory. This monograph investigates how memory manifests in the drawn shape of the body as an expression of the weight of personal and collective histories. Aarons explores Jewish identity, diaspora, mourning, memory, and witness in the works of Sarah Lightman, Liana Finck, Anya Ulinich, Leela Corman, and more. Memory Spaces begins by framing this research within contemporary discourse and reflects upon the choice to explore Jewish women graphic novelists specifically. In the chapters that follow, Aarons relates the nuanced issues of memory, transmission of trauma, Jewish cultural identity, and the gendered self to a series of meaningful and noteworthy graphic novels. Aarons's insight, close readings, and integration of contemporary scholarship are conveyed clearly and concisely, creating a work that both captivates readers and contributes to scholarly discourse in Jewish studies, women's literature, memory studies, and identity.

This book surveys the role of Amsterdam's Sephardic merchants in the westward expansion of sugar production and trade in the seventeenth-century Atlantic. It offers an historical-geographic perspective, linking Amsterdam as an emerging staple market to a network of merchants of the "Portuguese Nation," conducting trade from the Iberian Peninsula and Brazil. Examining the "Myth of the Dutch," the "Sephardic Moment," and the impact of the British Navigation Acts, Yda Schreuder focuses attention on Barbados and Jamaica and demonstrates how Amsterdam remained Europe's primary sugar refining center through most of the seventeenth century and how Sephardic merchants played a significant role in sustaining the sugar trade.

Stories about Jewesses proliferated in nineteenth-century Britain as debates about the place of the Jews in the nation raged. While previous scholarship has explored the prevalence of antisemitic stereotypes in this period, Nadia Valman argues that the figure of the Jewess - virtuous, appealing and sacrificial - reveals how hostility towards Jews was accompanied by pity, identification and desire. Reading a range of texts from popular romance to the realist novel, she investigates how the complex figure of the Jewess brought the instabilities of nineteenth-century religious, racial and national identity into uniquely sharp focus. Tracing the narrative of the Jewess from its beginnings in Romantic and Evangelical literature, and reading canonical writers including Walter Scott, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope alongside more minor figures such as Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy, Valman demonstrates the remarkable persistence of this narrative and its myriad transformations across the century.

This work, the fruit of intense research work spanning several years, examines the first serious attempt by the descendants of the Sephardim-the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492-to "return to Sepharad" more than three decades after the abolition of the Inquisition. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a trend towards historical revisionism, backed by Liberals, whose influence was pivotal at the Cortes de Cadiz (the national assembly convened to assert Spanish sovereignty, introduce reform, and establish a modern Spanish nation), combined with economic factors, culminated in the abolition of the Inquisition in 1834. This paved the way, ideologically, for the freedom of worship to be proclaimed in Spain on the heels of La Septembrina, or La Gloriosa, the September Revolution of 1868 in which Queen Isabel II was deposed. European Sephardic Jews, galvanized by their perception of a tolerant Spain, decided to undertake a major project to initiate negotiations with the Spanish state.

A wide-ranging look at the history of Western thinking since the seventeenth century on the purpose of the Jewish people in the past, present, and future What is the purpose of Jews in the world? The Bible singles out the Jews as God's "chosen people," but the significance of this special status has been understood in many different ways over the centuries. What Are Jews For? traces the history of the idea of Jewish purpose from its ancient and medieval foundations to the modern era, showing how it has been central to Western thinking on the meanings of peoplehood for everybody. Adam Sutcliffe delves into the links between Jewish and Christian messianism and the association of Jews with universalist and transformative ideals in modern philosophy, politics, literature, and social thought. The Jews have been accorded a crucial role in both Jewish and Christian conceptions of the end of history, when they will usher the world into a new epoch of unity and harmony. Since the seventeenth century this messianic underlay to the idea of Jewish purpose has been repeatedly reconfigured in new forms. From the political theology of the early modern era to almost all domains of modern thought-religious, social, economic, nationalist, radical, assimilationist, satirical, and psychoanalytical-Jews have retained a close association with positive transformation for all. Sutcliffe reveals the persistent importance of the "Jewish Purpose Question" in the attempts of Jews and non-Jews alike to connect the collective purpose of particular communities to the broader betterment of humanity. Shedding light on questions of exceptionalism, pluralism, and universalism, What Are Jews For? explores an intricate question that remains widely resonant in contemporary culture and political debate.

Using primary sources, Joshua Holo uncovers the day-to-day workings of the Byzantine-Jewish economy in the middle Byzantine period. Built on a web of exchange systems both exclusive to the Jewish community and integrated in society at large, this economy forces a revision of Jewish history in the region. Paradoxically, the two distinct economic orientations, inward and outward, simultaneously advanced both the integration of the Jews into the larger Byzantine economy and their segregation as a self-contained body economic. Dr Holo finds that the Jews routinely leveraged their internal, even exclusive, systems of law and culture to break into - occasionally to dominate - Byzantine markets. In doing so, they challenge our concept of Diaspora life as a balance between the two competing impulses of integration and segregation. The success of this enterprise, furthermore, qualifies the prevailing claim of Jewish economic decline during the Commercial Revolution.

Homeland, Exile, Imagined Homelands are features of the modern experience and relate to the cultural and historical dilemmas of loss, nostalgia, utopia, travel, longing, and are central for Jews and others. This book is an exploration into a world of boundary crossings and of desired places and alternate identities, into a world of adopted kin and invented allegiances.

First published in 1982, The Triangular Connection explores the relationship between two countries, the USA and Israel, and Jews resident in America. Spanning from British Colonial times until 1949, the year in which Israel was admitted to the United Nations, the book traces the interaction between America's Christians and Jews with Zionism and the modern state of Israel. It also details the reasons for America's support of Israel in the past, as well as debating its continued support in the future.

Originally published in 1990, The Politics of Ethnic Pressure examines and evaluates the lobbying activities of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) between 1906 and 1917. The AJC worked to confront two specific problems: the outbreak of a series of programs against the Jews in Russia, and the campaign of the restrictionists in the United States who sought to impede the entry of the "new immigrants" from eastern and southern Europe. This book focuses on the lobbying activities of the AJC with respect to these issues, and puts forward key questions as to why they cared about the Russian problem, how they viewed their place within American society, and how they lobbied on behalf of their Jewish interests.