This comprehensive and analytical history of American Jews and Judaism from the Colonial Era to the present explores the impact of America on Jews and of Jews on America. Covering more than four centuries from the Colonial Era forward, Jewish American Chronology offers an introduction to the history of American Jews and Judaism, using individual examples, personality profiles, and illustrations to bring fundamental patterns and major themes to life. Arranged chronologically, the entries illustrate how a variety of different Jewish groups and individuals have adapted to America, both changing in accordance with time and place and retaining tradition and culture, even as they became thoroughly American. Readers will learn how Jews have created community and institutions, confronted anti-Semitism, and interacted among themselves and with other groups. They will read about immigration, migration, and socioeconomic mobility. And they will discover how Jews have filled critical economic niches, contributed disproportionately in a variety of endeavors, and changed over time and in reaction to circumstances. In this wide-ranging work, Jewish Americans are depicted in a balanced and accurate manner, describing Nobel Prize winners and standout economic success stories as well as those who achieved fame and notoriety in other ways. Hundreds of entries, organized chronologically, explain and analyze America's impact on Judaism and Jews, and Jews' impact on America Photographs of individuals, businesses, synagogues, and orphans' homes, striking workers, suffragettes, and statuary with explanatory labels Dozens of glossary entries that define and clarify key terms from "anti-Semitism" to "Zionism," as well as historical jargon like "colonial charters" and "established churches" A select bibliography of books, journals, and web pages guides the reader in further study

This book concerns the history of the Bible, Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism, and theological-political thought in the West. Its operation is threefold. First, it shows that the biblical text can be read as a theological-political narrative about a god who strives to be recognized as such by a group of people. Second, it reconstructs the history of the conversation that took place around this narrative from the fourth century BCE to the beginning of the Middle Ages, showing how it was dependent on social and political circumstances, rather than on theological notions. Lastly, it distinguishes between two strands of the conversation-the Christian and the Rabbinic-that carried the narrative through the Middle Ages and explains why the latter offered a more advanced interface with the political reality than the former. This book introduces a reading of the biblical narrative that takes seriously the difference between the two creation stories that begin the Book of Genesis and considers them as referring to two distinct divinities. This reading reveals in the Bible an overarching narrative about the god Yhwh, who tries to impose himself as the sovereign of Israel by claiming that he is the same god as Elohim-the benevolent creator of the perfect world.

The essays in this volume address the conundrum of how Jewish believers in the divine character of the Sinaitic revelation confront the essential questions raised by academic biblical studies. The first part is an anthology of rabbinic sources, from the medieval period to the present, treating questions that reflect a critical awareness of the Bible. The second part is a series of twenty-one essays by contemporary rabbis and scholars on how they combine their religious beliefs with their critical approach to the Bible.

When the State of Israel claims to represent all Jewish people, defenders of Israeli policy redefine antisemitism to include criticism of Israel. Antisemitism is harmful and real in our society. What must also be addressed is how the deployment of false charges of antisemitism or redefining antisemitism can suppress the global progressive fight for justice. There is no one definitive voice on antisemitism and its impact. Jewish Voice for Peace has curated a collection of essays that provides a diversity of perspectives and standpoints.

"Twitty makes the case that Blackness and Judaism coexist in beautiful harmony, and this is manifested in the foods and traditions from both cultures that Black Jews incorporate into their daily lives...Twitty wishes to start a conversation where people celebrate their differences and embrace commonalities. By drawing on personal narratives, his own and others', and exploring different cultures, Twitty's book offers important insight into the journeys of Black Jews."-Library Journal "A fascinating, cross-cultural smorgasbord grounded in the deep emotional role food plays in two influential American communities."-Booklist The James Beard award-winning author of the acclaimed The Cooking Gene explores the cultural crossroads of Jewish and African diaspora cuisine and issues of memory, identity, and food. In Koshersoul, Michael W. Twitty considers the marriage of two of the most distinctive culinary cultures in the world today: the foods and traditions of the African Atlantic and the global Jewish diaspora. To Twitty, the creation of African-Jewish cooking is a conversation of migrations and a dialogue of diasporas offering a rich background for inventive recipes and the people who create them. The question that most intrigues him is not just who makes the food, but how the food makes the people. Jews of Color are not outliers, Twitty contends, but significant and meaningful cultural creators in both Black and Jewish civilizations. Koshersoul also explores how food has shaped the journeys of numerous cooks, including Twitty's own passage to and within Judaism. As intimate, thought-provoking, and profound as The Cooking Gene, this remarkable book teases the senses as it offers sustenance for the soul. Koshersoul includes 48-50 recipes.

'''Who am I?' and 'Who are we?' are the existential, foundational questions in our lives. In our modern world, there is no construct more influential than 'identity' - whether as individuals or as groups. The concept of group identity is the focal point of a research group named "A Question of Identity" at the Mandel Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center in the Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The papers collected in this volume represent the proceedings of a January 2017 conference organized by the research group which dealt with identity formation in six contextual settings: Ethno-religious identities in light of the archaeological record; Second Temple period textual records on Diaspora Judaism; Jews and Christians in Sasanian Persia; minorities in the Persian achaemenid period; Inter-ethnic dialogue in pre-1948 Palestine; and redefinitions of Christian Identity in the Early Modern period.

May God Avenge Their Blood: a Holocaust Memoir Triptych presents three memoirs by the Yiddish writer Rachmil Bryks (1912-1974). In "Those Who Didn't Survive," Bryks portrays inter-war life in his shtetl Skarzysko-Kamienna, Poland with great flair and rich anthropological detail, rendering a haunting collective portrait of an annihilated community. "The Fugitives" vividly charts the confusion and terror of the early days of World War II in the industrial city of Lodz and elsewhere. In the final memoir, "From Agony to Life," Bryks tells of his imprisonment in Auschwitz and other camps. Taken together, the triptych takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey from Hasidic life before the Holocaust to the chaos of the early days of war and then to the horrors of Nazi captivity. This translation by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub brings the extraordinary memoirs of an important Yiddish writer to English-language readers for the first time.

This book presents original studies of how a cultural concept of Jewishness and a coherent Jewish history came to make sense in the experiences of people entangled in different historical situations. Instead of searching for the inconsistencies, discontinuities, or ruptures of dominant grand historical narratives of Jewish cultural history, this book unfolds situations and events, where Jewishness and a coherent Jewish history became useful, meaningful, and acted upon as a site of causal explanations. Inspired by classical American pragmatism and more recent French pragmatism, we present a new perspective on Jewish cultural history in which the experiences, problems, and actions of people are at the center of reconstructions of historical causalities and projections of future horizons. The book shows how boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish are not a priori given but are instead repeatedly experienced in a variety of situations and then acted upon as matters of facts. In different ways and on different scales, these studies show how people's experiences of Jewishness perpetually probe, test, and shape the boundaries between what is Jewish and non-Jewish, and that these boundaries shape the spatiotemporal linkages that we call history.

The natural world has been "humanized": even areas thought to be wilderness bear the marks of human impact. But this human impact is not simply physical. At the emergence of the environmental movement, the focus was on human effects on "nature." More recently, however, the complexity of the term "nature" has led to fruitful debates and the recognition of how human individuals and cultures interpret their environments. This book furthers the dialogue on religion, ethics, and the environment by exploring three interrelated concepts: to recreate, to replace, and to restore. Through interdisciplinary dialogue the authors illuminate certain unique dimensions at the crossroads between finding value, creating value, and reflecting on one's place in the world. Each of these terms has diverse religious, ethical, and scientific connotations. Each converges on the ways in which humans both think about and act upon their surroundings. And each radically questions the damaging conceptual divisions between nature and culture, human and environment, and scientific explanation and religious/ethical understanding. This book self-consciously reflects on the intersections of environmental philosophy, environmental theology, and religion and ecology, stressing the importance of how place interprets us and how we interpret place. In addition to its contribution to environmental philosophy, this work is a unique volume in its serious engagement with theology and religious studies on the issues of ecological restoration and the meaning of place.

The Jewish practice of bar mitzvah dates back to the twelfth century, but this ancient cultural ritual has changed radically since then, evolving with the times and adapting to local conditions. For many Jewish-American families, a child's bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah is both a major social event and a symbolic means of asserting the family's ongoing connection to the core values of Judaism. Coming of Age in Jewish America takes an inside look at bar and bat mitzvahs in the twenty-first century, examining how the practices have continued to morph and exploring how they serve as a sometimes shaky bridge between the values of contemporary American culture and Judaic tradition. Interviewing over 200 individuals involved in bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies, from family members to religious educators to rabbis, Patricia Keer Munro presents a candid portrait of the conflicts that often emerge and the negotiations that ensue. In the course of her study, she charts how this ritual is rife with contradictions; it is a private family event and a public community activity, and for the child, it is both an educational process and a high-stakes performance. Through detailed observations of Conservative, Orthodox, Reform, and independent congregations in the San Francisco Bay Area, Munro draws intriguing, broad-reaching conclusions about both the current state and likely future of American Judaism. In the process, she shows not only how American Jews have forged a unique set of bar and bat mitzvah practices, but also how these rituals continue to shape a distinctive Jewish-American identity.

"An expedition into the troubled soul of one of the world's greatest songwriters."-Haaretz "Not only is a hidden side of Cohen revealed but so too a hidden side of Israel."-David Bezmozgis The little-known story of Leonard Cohen's concert tour to the front lines of the Yom Kippur War, including never-before-seen selections from an unfinished manuscript by Cohen and rare photographs In October 1973, the poet and singer Leonard Cohen-thirty-nine years old, famous, unhappy, and at a creative dead end-traveled from his home on the Greek island of Hydra to the chaos and bloodshed of the Sinai desert when Egypt attacked Israel on the Jewish high holiday of Yom Kippur. Moving around the front with a guitar and a group of local musicians, Cohen met hundreds of young soldiers, men and women at the worst moment of their lives. Those who survived never forgot the experience. And the war transformed Cohen. He had announced that he was abandoning his music career, but he instead returned to Hydra and to his family, had a second child, and released one of the best albums of his career. In Who by Fire, journalist Matti Friedman gives us a riveting account of those weeks in the Sinai, drawing on Cohen's previously unpublished writing and original reporting to create a kaleidoscopic depiction of a harrowing, formative moment for both a young country at war and a singer at a crossroads.

This book is a groundbreaking study of one of the greatest science fiction writers, the Polish master Stanislaw Lem. It offers a new direction in research on his oeuvre and corrects several errors commonly appearing in his biographies. The author painstakingly recreates the context of Lem's early life and his traumatic experiences during the Second World War due to his Jewish background, and then traces these through original and brilliant readings of his fiction and non-fiction. She considers language, worldbuilding, themes, motifs and characterization as well as many buried allusions to the Holocaust in Lem's published and archival work, and uses these fragments to capture a different side of Lem than previously known. The book discusses various issues concerning the writer's life, such as his upbringing in a Jewish, Zionist-minded family, the extensive relations between the Lem family and the elite of Lviv at that time, details of the Lem family killed during the German occupation and attempts to reconstruct what happened to Lem's parents and to the writer himself after escaping the ghetto. Part of the Studies in Global Genre Fiction series, this English translation of the Polish original, which has already been considered a milestone in Lem studies, offers a fresh perspective on the writer and his work. It will be an important intervention for scholars and researchers of Jewish studies, Holocaust literature, science fiction studies, English literature, world war studies, minority studies, popular culture, history and cultural studies.

First ever volume on Holocaust in Thessaloniki in English, utilizing new sources and interpretation schemes Thessaloniki was for centuries one of the most prominent Jewish communities in the world, which lost more than 90% of its population during the Holocaust Book will be a great contribution to the local efforts underway to reconcile Thessaloniki with its Jewish past and honor the victims of the Holocaust An ambitious Holocaust Memorial Museum, with the backing of several governments and institutions, is schedule to open in the city by 2021.

Trouble in the Tribe explores the increasingly contentious place of Israel in the American Jewish community. In a fundamental shift, growing numbers of American Jews have become less willing to unquestioningly support Israel and more willing to publicly criticize its government. More than ever before, American Jews are arguing about Israeli policies, and many, especially younger ones, are becoming uncomfortable with Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Dov Waxman argues that Israel is fast becoming a source of disunity for American Jewry, and that a new era of American Jewish conflict over Israel is replacing the old era of solidarity. Drawing on a wealth of in-depth interviews with American Jewish leaders and activists, Waxman shows why Israel has become such a divisive issue among American Jews. He delves into the American Jewish debate about Israel, examining the impact that the conflict over Israel is having on Jewish communities, national Jewish organizations, and on the pro-Israel lobby. Waxman sets this conflict in the context of broader cultural, political, institutional, and demographic changes happening in the American Jewish community. He offers a nuanced and balanced account of how this conflict over Israel has developed and what it means for the future of American Jewish politics. Israel used to bring American Jews together. Now it is driving them apart. Trouble in the Tribe explains why.

First collection in English by this esteemed scholar of the Protocols Contains groundbreaking research on origins of this pernicious antisemitic conspiracy theory Shows baleful influence of this notorious forgery into the present day

Shoah and Torah systematically takes up the task of reading the Shoah through the lens of the Torah and the Torah through the lens of the Shoah.The investigation rests upon (1) the metaphysical standing that the Nazis ascribed to the Torah, (2) the obliteration of the Torah in the extermination of the Jews, (3) the significance of the Torah for an understanding of the Shoah, and (4) the significance of the Shoah for an understanding of the Torah.The basis for the inquiry lies not in the content of a certain belief but in the categories of a certain mode of thought. Distinct from all other studies, this book is grounded in the categories of Jewish thought and Judaism-the categories of creation, revelation, and redemption-that the Nazis sought to obliterate in the Shoah.Thus, the investigation is itself a response to the Nazi project of the extermination of the Jews and the millennial testimony of the Jews to the Torah.

The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Mass Atrocity, and Genocide explores the many and sometimes complicated ways in which religion, faith, doctrine, and practice intersect in societies where mass atrocity and genocide occur. This volume is intended as an entry point to questions about mass atrocity and genocide that are asked by and of people of faith and is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, historical events, and heated debates in this subject area. The 39 contributions to the handbook, by a team of international contributors, span five continents and cover four millennia. Each explores the intersection of religion, faith, and mainly state-sponsored mass atrocity and genocide, and draws from a variety of disciplines. This volume is divided into six core sections: Genocide in Antiquity and Holy Wars The Genocide of Indigenous Peoples Religion and the State The Role of Religion during Genocide Post Genocide Considerations Memory Culture Within these sections central issues, historical events, debates, and problems are examined, including the Crusades; Jihad and ISIS, colonialism, the Holocaust, desecration of ritual objects, politics of religion, Shinto nationalism, attacks on Rohingya Muslims; the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, responses to genocide; gender-based atrocities, ritualcide in Cambodia, burial sites and mass graves, transitional justice, forgiveness, documenting genocide, survivor memory narratives, post-conflict healing and memorialization. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Genocide is essential reading for students and researchers with an interest in religion and genocide, religion and violence, and religion and politics. It will be of great interest to students of theology, philosophy, genocide studies, narrative studies, history, and international relations and those in related fields, such as cultural studies, area studies, sociology, and anthropology.

This extraordinary wartime diary provides a rare glimpse into the daily life of French and foreign-born Jewish refugees under the Vichy regime during World War II. Long hidden, the diary was written by Lucien Dreyfus, a native of Alsacewho was a teacher at the most prestigious high school in Strasbourg, an editor of the leading Jewish newspaper of Alsace and Lorraine, the devoted father of an only daughter, and the doting grandfather of an only granddaughter. In 1939, after the French declaration of war on Hitler's Germany, Lucien and his wife, Marthe, were forced by the French state to leave Strasbourg along with thousands of other Jewish and non-Jewish residents of the city. The couple found refuge in Nice, on the Mediterranean coast in the south of France. Anti-Jewish laws prevented Lucien from resuming his teaching career and his work as a newspaper editor. But he continued to write, recording his trenchant reflections on the situation of France and French Jews under the Vichy regime. American visas allowed his daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter to escape France in the spring of 1942 and establish new lives in the United States, but Lucien and Marthe were not so lucky. Rounded up during an SS raid in September 1943, they were deported and murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau two months later. As the only diary by an observant Jew raised bi-culturally in French and German, Dreyfus's writing offers a unique philosophical and moral reflection on the Holocaust as it was unfolding in France.

This volume of eight essays written by French scholars analyzes Daniel Mendelsohn's first three volumes of nonfiction (The Elusive Embrace, 1999, The Lost, 2006, and An Odyssey, 2017) as well as an illustrated interview (2019) in which Mendelsohn tackles various aspects of his work as a literary and cultural critic, as a professor of classical literature, as a translator, and as a memoirist. The essays discussing The Elusive Embrace (1999) argue that, in addition to offering a subtle reflection on sexual identity and genres, Mendelsohn's first volume already broadens his topic and patiently weaves links between ancient and present times, feeding his meditation with his knowledge of Greek culture and myths-a natural movement of back and forth which would become his signature. The Lost (2006), his much acclaimed investigation into the death by bullet of six of his family members during the Shoah, is analyzed as a close-up on the disappearance of a whole world, the unspeakability of which Mendelsohn addressed through intertwining several languages, linguistic echoes, and biblical references. Finally, Mendelsohn's recent An Odyssey (2017) is studied as a brilliant musing on teaching Homer's masterpiece while building up a memoir on his declining father sitting among his students and allowing Homer's universal questions and lessons to enlighten a father and son's last journey.

This book is a groundbreaking study of one of the greatest science fiction writers, the Polish master Stanislaw Lem. It offers a new direction in research on his oeuvre and corrects several errors commonly appearing in his biographies. The author painstakingly recreates the context of Lem's early life and his traumatic experiences during the Second World War due to his Jewish background, and then traces these through original and brilliant readings of his fiction and non-fiction. She considers language, worldbuilding, themes, motifs and characterization as well as many buried allusions to the Holocaust in Lem's published and archival work, and uses these fragments to capture a different side of Lem than previously known. The book discusses various issues concerning the writer's life, such as his upbringing in a Jewish, Zionist-minded family, the extensive relations between the Lem family and the elite of Lviv at that time, details of the Lem family killed during the German occupation and attempts to reconstruct what happened to Lem's parents and to the writer himself after escaping the ghetto. Part of the Studies in Global Genre Fiction series, this English translation of the Polish original, which has already been considered a milestone in Lem studies, offers a fresh perspective on the writer and his work. It will be an important intervention for scholars and researchers of Jewish studies, Holocaust literature, science fiction studies, English literature, world war studies, minority studies, popular culture, history and cultural studies.

Jews are typically viewed as urban dwellers. However there was a considerable Jewish presence in villages from the very beginning of their settlement in Eastern Europe in the 12th century, up until the Holocaust. The presence of a large Jewish population in villages was, in fact, one of the most distinctive features of East European Jewry. The colourful personality of Jewish leaseholders of the production and sale of alcoholic beverages was often depicted in Polish, Russian and Jewish literature of the 19th century, but the real knowledge about the East European rural Jews beyond the stereotypical view is still at large. The book presents the results of a systematic survey, the first of its kind, on the rural Jews in the Minsk Guberniya, from its establishment as a major administrative unit within the Russian Empire in 1793, to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The present study is based mainly on systematic sources, which produced, for the first time, a full picture of Jewish settlement in the countryside in one particular region of the Russian Empire.

Keepers of Memory answers the question of how descendants of Holocaust survivors remember the Holocaust, the event that preceded their birth but has shaped their lives. Through personal stories and in-depth interviews, Rich examines the complicated relationship between history, truth, and memory. Keepers of Memory explores topics that include how stories of survival become stories of either empowerment or trauma for the descending generations, career choice as a form of commemoration, religion, and family life. Ultimately, this work paints a compelling picture of the promises and pitfalls of memory and points to implications for memory and commemoration in the coming generations.

Fifty Key Jewish Thinkers is a panoramic survey of over 2,000 years of Jewish thought, religious and secular, ancient and modern. Now in its second edition, this essential reference guide contains new introductions to the lives and works of such thinkers as: Hannah Arendt, Immanuel Levinas, Judith Plaskow, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin.

Also including fully updated guides to further reading on figures from the middle ages through to the twenty-first century, historical maps and a chronology placing the thinkers in context, this is an essential and affordable one-volume reference to a rich and complex tradition.

This book is a microsociological study of religious practice, based on fieldwork with Conservative Jews, Bible Belt Muslims, white Baptists, black Baptists, Buddhist meditators, and Latino Catholics. In each case, the author scrutinizes how a congregation's ritual strategies help or hinder their efforts to achieve a transformative spiritual encounter, an intense feeling that becomes the basis of their most fundamental understandings of reality. The book shows how these transformative spiritual encounters routinely depend on issues that can seem rather mundane by comparison, such as where the sanctuary's entrance is located, how many misprints end up in the church bulletin, or how long the preacher continues to preach beyond lunchtime. The spirit responds to other dynamics, as well, such as how congregations collectively imagine outsiders, or how they talk about ideas like individualism and patriarchy. Building on provocative theories from sociologists such as Emile Durkheim, Erving Goffman, Randall Collins, and Anne Warfield Rawls, this book shows how "interaction ritual theory" opens compelling new pathways for sociological scholarship on religion. Micro-level specifics from fieldwork in Texas are supplemented with large-scale survey analysis of a wide array of religious organizations from across the United States.

'The gripping memoir of a remarkable woman who rose to the top in a man's world. A compelling political story of courage and struggle, power and leadership, war and crisis - and the making of Israel. A classic of 20th century history' Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of JERUSALEM: THE BIOGRAPHY 'A remarkable, almost incredible personal history ... stimulating and fascinating' IRISH TIMES 'A rare and wholly unforgettable work' SATURDAY REVIEW WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY JULIA NEUBERGER Golda Meir was without doubt one of the most incredible women of her - and any - time. Born in 1898 in Kyiv, she was the daughter of an impoverished carpenter - and became the first (and only) female Prime Minister of Israel. Meir's earliest memory is of her father boarding up the front door in response to rumours of an imminent pogrom. The family emigrated to the US and for a while Meir lived with her sister, where she was exposed to debates on Zionism, women's suffrage, literature and socialism. She became a teacher, and after her marriage emigrated again to Palestine, settling on a kibbutz. Always politically active, she became Israel's first envoy to Moscow; was promoted to Foreign Minister and ultimately elected as Prime Minister, leader of Israel. In her autobiography she wrote: 'To me, being Jewish means and has always meant being proud to be part of a people that has maintained its distinct identity for more than 2,000 years, with all the pain and torment that has been inflicted upon it'