Top World Guild Award Winner This book is about an idea-namely, that Scripture mandates a Jewish return to the historical region of Palestine-which in turn morphed into a political movement, rallied around a popular slogan ("A country without a nation for a nation without a country"), and eventually contributed to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Christian Zionism continues to influence global politics, especially U.S. foreign policy, and has deeply affected Jewish-Christian and Muslim-Christian relations. Donald M. Lewis seeks to provide a fair-minded, longitudinal study of this dynamic yet controversial movement as he traces its lineage from biblical sources through the Reformation to various movements of today. He explores Christian Zionism's interaction with other movements, forces, and discourses, especially in eschatological and political thought, and why it is now flourishing beyond the English-speaking world. Throughout he demonstrates how it has helped British and American Protestants frame and shape their identity. A Short History of Christian Zionism seeks to bring clarity and context to often-heated discussions.

Shortlisted for the Folklore Society's Katharine Briggs Award 2021 Jews have been active participants in shaping the healing practices of the communities of eastern Europe. Their approach largely combined the ideas of traditional Ashkenazi culture with the heritage of medieval and early modern medicine. Holy rabbis and faith healers, as well as Jewish barbers, innkeepers, and pedlars, all dispensed cures, purveyed folk remedies for different ailments, and gave hope to the sick and their families based on kabbalah, numerology, prayer, and magical Hebrew formulas. Nevertheless, as new sources of knowledge penetrated the traditional world, modern medical ideas gained widespread support. Jews became court physicians to the nobility, and when the universities were opened up to them many also qualified as doctors. At every stage, medicine proved an important field for cross-cultural contacts. Jewish historians and scholars of folk medicine alike will discover here fascinating sources never previously explored-manuscripts, printed publications, and memoirs in Yiddish and Hebrew but also in Polish, English, German, Russian, and Ukrainian. Marek Tuszewicki's careful study of these documents has teased out therapeutic advice, recipes, magical incantations, kabbalistic methods, and practical techniques, together with the ethical considerations that such approaches entailed. His research fills a gap in the study of folk medicine in eastern Europe, shedding light on little-known aspects of Ashkenazi culture, and on how the need to treat sickness brought Jews and their neighbours together.

One of the key ways in which the traditional Jewish world of eastern Europe responded to the challenges of modernity in the nineteenth century was to change the system for educating young men so as to reinforce time-honoured, conservative values. The yeshivas established at that time in Lithuania became models for an educational system that has persisted to this day, transmitting the talmudic underpinnings of the traditional Jewish way of life. To understand how that system works, one needs to go back to the institutions they are patterned on: why they were established, how they were organized, and how they operated. This is the first properly documented, systematic study of the Lithuanian yeshiva as it existed from 1802 to 1914. It is based on the judicious use of contemporary sources-documents, articles in the press, and memoirs-with a view to presenting the yeshiva in its social and cultural context. Three key institutions are considered. Pride of place in the first part of the book is given to the yeshiva of Volozhin, which was founded in 1802 according to an entirely new concept-total independence from the local community-and was in that sense the model for everything that followed. Chapters in the second part focus on the yeshiva of Slobodka, famed for introducing the study of musar (ethics); the yeshiva of Telz, with its structural and organizational innovations; and the kollel system, introduced so that married men could continue their yeshiva education. Topics covered include the leadership and changes in leadership; management and administration; the yeshiva as a place of study; and daily life. This English edition is based on the second Hebrew edition, which was revised to include information that became available with the opening of archives in eastern Europe after the fall of communism.

The book investigates and compares the role of artistic and academic refugees from National Socialism acting as "cultural mediators" or "agents of knowledge" between their origin and host societies. By doing so, it locates itself at the intersection of the recently emerging field of the history of knowledge, transnational history, migration, exile, as well as cultural transfer studies. The case studies provided in this volume are of global scope, focusing on routes of escape and migration to Iceland, Italy, the Near East, Portugal and Shanghai, and South-, Central-, and North America. The chapters examine the hybrid ways refugees envisaged, managed, organized, and subsequently mediated their migrations. It focuses on how they dealt with their escape in their art and science. The chapters ask how the emigrants located themselves--did they associate with ethnic, religious, and/or cultural affiliations, specific social classes, or specific parts of society-and how such identifications were portrayed in their knowledge transfer and cultural translations. Building on such possible avenues for research, this volume aims to offer a global analysis of the multifarious processes not only of cultural translation and knowledge transfer affecting culture, sciences, networks, but also everyday life in different areas of the world.

Bookstores in Chinese cities are stocked with dozens of Chinese-language books on how Jews conduct business, manage the world, and raise their children. At least ten universities throughout China offer popular Jewish Studies programs, some with advanced degrees. Yet there are virtually no Jews in China. The Chinese are constructing an identity for a people that the large majority of them will never meet. This edited volume critically examines the image of Jews from the contemporary perspective of ordinary Chinese citizens. It includes chapters on Chinese Jewish Studies programs, popular Chinese books and blogs about Jews, China's relations with Israel, and innovative examinations of the ancient Jewish community of Kaifeng.

Even before Japan joined Nazi Germany in the Axis Alliance, its leaders clarified to the Nazi regime that the attitude of the Japanese government and people to the Jews was totally different than that of the official German position and that it had no intention of taking measures against the Jews that could be seen as racially motivated. During World War II some 40,000 Jews found themselves under Japanese occupation in Manchuria, China and countries of South East Asia. Virtually all of them survived the war, unlike their brethren in Europe. This book traces the evolution of Japan's policy towards the Jews from the beginning of the 20th century, the existence of anti-Semitism in Japan, and why Japan ignored repeated Nazi demands to become involved in the ""final solution.

Rabbi Marcus Jastrow (1829-1903) was one of the most important figures of nineteenth-century Judaism, but is often neglected. This volume presents his life and his views on the reform of Judaism in the context of the changes and developments of Judaism in his lifetime. It covers his early life and his career in Europe as a preacher and rabbi in Warsaw, Mannheim, and Worms, and then discusses his activities in the United States, where he served as rabbi of Congregation Rodeph Shalom in Philadelphia, as well as his work on his famous dictionary. Jastrow was deeply involved in the important religious and scholarly initiatives of American Jewry: he took part in the emergence of Reform as well as Conservative Judaism, being involved in major controversies and polemics regarding them, and had a great impact on the creation of Jewish scholarship and Judaic studies in America.

Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History revolutionizes the study of modern Israeli art music by tracking the surprising itineraries of Jewish art music in the move from Europe to Mandatory Palestine and Israel. Leaving behind cliches about East and West, Arab and Jew, this book provocatively exposes the legacies of European antisemitism and religious Judaism in the making of Israeli art music.
Shelleg introduces the reader to various aesthetic dilemmas involved in the emergence of modern Jewish art music, ranging from auto-exoticism through the hues of self-hatred to the disarticulation of Jewish musical markers. He then considers part of this musics' translocation to Mandatory Palestine, studying its discourse with Hebrew culture, and composers' grappling with modern and Zionist images of the self. Unlike previous efforts in the field, Shelleg unearths the mechanism of what he calls "Zionist musical onomatopoeias," but more importantly their dilution by the non-western Arab Jewish oral musical traditions (the same traditions Hebrew culture sought to westernize and secularize).
And what had begun with composers' movement towards the musical properties of non-western Jewish musical traditions grew in the 60s and 70s to a dialectical return to exilic Jewish cultures. In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, which reaffirmed Zionism's redemptive and expansionist messages, Israeli composers (re)embraced precisely the exilic Jewish music that emphasized Judaism's syncretic qualities rather than its territorial characteristics. In the 70s, therefore, while religious Zionist circles translated theology into politics and territorial maximalism, Israeli composers deterritorialized the national discourse by a growing return to the spaces shared by Jews and non-Jews, devoid of Zionist appropriations."

Moroccan Jewry has a long tradition, harking back to the area's earliest settlements and possessing deep connections and associations with the historic peoples of the region. In Jews and Muslims of Morocco historians, anthropologists, musicologists, Rabbinic scholars, Arabists, and linguists examine the complex and hybrid history of intercultural exchange between Moroccan Jewry and the Arab and Berber cultures through analyses of the Jews' use of Morocco's multiple languages and dialects, characteristic poetry, and musical works as well as their shared magical rites and popular texts and proverbs. The essays in this collection span political and social interactions throughout history, cultural commonalities, traditions, and halakhic developments. Acknowledging that Jewish life in Morocco has dwindled and continues to exist primarily in the memories of Moroccan Jewish diaspora communities, the volume concludes with personal memories an analysis of a visual memoir, and a photo essay of the vanished world of Jewish life in Morocco.

This book explores how Israeli graphic novelists present depictions of masculinity and femininity that differ from conventional portrayals of gender in Israeli society, rejecting the ways that hypermasculinity and docile femininity have come to be associated with men and women. The book is the first to explore Israeli graphic novels through the lens of gender. It argues that breaking down existing gender delineations with regards to masculinity and femininity is a core feature of the Israeli graphic novel and comics tradition and that through their works, the authors and artists use their platforms to present a freer and looser conceptualization of gender for Israeli society. Undertaking close readings of Israeli graphic novels that have been published in English and/or Hebrew in the last 20 years, the book's texts include Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds and The Property, Ari Folman and David Polonsky's Waltz with Bashir, Galit and Gilad Seliktar's Farm 54, and Asaf Hanuka's "The Realist". This book is of interest to students and scholars in comics studies, Israel Studies, Jewish Studies, and Gender Studies.

Philo-Semitic Violence: Poland's Jewish Past in New Polish Narratives addresses the growing popularity of philo-Semitic violence in Poland between the 2000 revelation of Polish participation in the Holocaust and the 2015 authoritarian turn. Janicka and Zukowski examine phenomena termed a "new opening in Polish-Jewish relations," which stems from sociocultural change and the posthumous inclusion of those subjected to anti-Semitic violence. The authors investigate the terms and conditions of this inclusion whose object is an imagined collective Jewish figure. Different creators and media, same friendly intentions, same warm reception beyond class and political cleavages, regardless of gender and age. The made-to-measure Jewish figure confirms and legitimizes the majority narrative - especially about Polish stances and behaviors during the Holocaust. Enabled by this, philo-Semitic feelings indulge the dominant group in Baudrillard's retrospective hallucinations. The consequence: aggression toward anyone who dares to interrupt the narcissistic self-staging. This book exposes the Polish ethnoreligious identity regime that privileges the concern for the collective image over reality. The authors' inquiry shows how patterns of exclusion and violence are reproduced when anti-Semitism - with its Christian sources and community-building function - is not openly problematized, reassessed, and rejected in light of its consequences and the basic principle of equal rights.

This book examines the early years of the Claims Conference, the organization which lobbies for and distributes reparations to Holocaust survivors, and its operations as a nongovernmental actor promoting reparative justice in global politics. Rachel Blumenthal traces the founding of the organization by one person, and its continued campaign for the payment of compensation to survivors after Israel left the negotiations. This book explores the degree to which the leadership entity served individual victims of the Third Reich, the Jewish public, or member organizations.

Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author's grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16 mm Kodachrome colour film. More than seventy years later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home-movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community, an entire culture that was annihilated in the Holocaust. Three Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz's remarkable four year journey to identify the people in his grandfather's haunting images. His search takes him across the United States to Canada, England, Poland, and Israel. To archives, film preservation laboratories, and an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield. Ultimately, Kurtz locates seven living survivors from this lost town, including an eighty six year old man who appears in the film as a thirteen year old boy. Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, funny, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz's home movie became the sole remaining record of a vibrant town on the brink of catastrophe. From this brief film, Glenn Kurtz creates a riveting exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival, a monument to a lost world.

This anthology brings together eight chapters which examine the life of Jews in Southeast Europe through political, social and cultural lenses. Even though the Holocaust put an end to many communities in the region, this book chronicles how some Holocaust survivors nevertheless tried to restore their previous lives. Focusing on the once flourishing and colorful Jewish communities throughout the Balkans - many of which were organized according to the Ottoman millet system - this book provides a diverse range of insights into Jewish life and Jewish-Gentile relations in what became Greece, Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria after World War II. Further, the contributors conceptualize the issues in focus from a historical perspective. In these diachronic case studies, virtually the whole 20th century is covered, with a special focus paid to the shifting identities, the changing communities and the memory of the Holocaust, thereby providing a very useful parallel to today's post-war and divided societies. Drawing on relevant contemporary approaches in historical research, this book complements the field with topics that, until now in Jewish studies and beyond, remained on the edge of the general research focus. This book was originally published as a special issue of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies.

The Middle East seems to be in perpetual crisis. One might expect a plethora of Marxist analyses of Israel and Palestine. Yet in the literature on Israel and Palestine there are hardly any studies of class, relations of production, or the relationship between the political and economic balance of forces over time. This edited volume brings a diverse array of Marxist-influenced interpretations of the present conjuncture in Israel and Palestine. The collection includes works by luminaries of social theory, such as Noam Chomsky and Fred Jameson, as well as leading scholars of Palestine (Raja Khalidi, Sherene Seikaly, and Orayb Aref Najjar) and Israel (Jonathan Nitzan, Nitzan Lebovic and Amir Locker-Biletzki). It comprises the first-ever collection of Marxist-influenced writings on Palestine and Israel, and the relationship between them. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Rethinking Marxism.

Bernhard Lang, known for his contributions over several decades to biblical anthropology, offers in this volume a selection of essays on the life and literature of the ancient Hebrews. The subjects range from the Hebrew God, the world-view of the Bible, and the formation of the scriptural canon, to peasant poverty, women's work, the good life, and prophetic street theatre. The stories of Joseph, Samson, and the expulsion from Paradise are analysed, and in a departure from the Old Testament, the priestly origins of the Eucharist are considered. Insight into the Hebrew mentality is facilitated by the arrangement of the essays, reflecting the three strata of the ancient society: the peasants, with their common concerns of fertility and happiness; warriors, their martial pursuits, and the divine Lord of War; and the wise - prophets, priests, and sages.

Theologians and scholars of religion draw on rich resources to address the complex issues raised by political reconciliation in the Middle East, the former Yugoslavia, South Africa, Northern Ireland and elsewhere. The questions addressed include: Can truth set a person, or a society, free? How is political forgiveness possible? Are political, personal, and spiritual reconciliation essentially related? Explorations in Reconciliation brings Catholic, Protestant, Mennonite, Jewish and Islamic perspectives together within a single volume to present some of the most relevant theological work today. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/ISBN, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. The support of the Irish School of Ecumenics Trust in making this OA version possible is gratefully acknowledged.

"Literature of the Holocaust" courses, whether taught in high schools or at universities, necessarily cover texts from a broad range of international contexts. Instructors are required, regardless of their own disciplinary training, to become comparatists and discuss all works with equal expertise. This books offers analyses of the ways in which representations of the Holocaust-whether in text, film, or material culture-are shaped by national context, providing a valuable pedagogical source in terms of both content and methodology. As memory yields to post-memory, nation of origin plays a larger role in each re-telling, and the chapters in this book explore this notion covering well-known texts like Night (Hungary), Survival in Auschwitz (Italy), MAUS (United States), This Way to the Gas (Poland), and The Reader (Germany), while also introducing lesser-known representations from countries like Argentina or Australia.

Seha, the traditional wise man-fool in Jewish Morocco is a popular fictional hero in simple yet rich tales, playful yet witty enough to provide life lessons with commitment to social fairness and mutual respect. In this collection of tales, the authors introduce readers to their grandparents and the teaching they imparted. Through humorous Seha tales, the authors transmit deeply engrained Jewish values, accentuated in accompanying socio-historical commentaries which shed light on the evolution of Seha as a popular fictional hero as well as on processes of social change and modernization experienced by Moroccan Jews, who were influenced by movements in three nations that impact their identity, namely Israel, France, and Morocco.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish immigrants upended Protestant control of vaudeville and the silent film industry. This book rejects the commonly held explanations for this shift: Jewish commercial acumen and their desire to assimilate. Instead, this book argues that the "pleasure principle"-a positive view of bodily pleasures and sexuality that Jewish immigrants held --gave rise to the role of Jewish influence on popular culture, an influence still felt today. After discussing the pivotal ascendancy of Jews in vaudeville and silent films, Cherry explores the important role that Jewish performers and middlemen played in the evolution of popular culture throughout the century, from stage and the big screen to radio, television, and the music industry. He concludes with a broader discussion of Jewish values that helps explain the continued outsized role that Jews continue to play in American popular culture.

Science fiction first emerged in the Industrial Age and continued to develop into its current form during the twentieth century. This book analyses the role Jewish writers played in the process of its creation and development. The author provides a comprehensive overview, bridging such seemingly disparate themes and figures as the ghetto legends of the golem and their influence on both Frankenstein and robots, the role of, Jewish authors and publishers in developing the first science fiction magazine in New York in the 1930s, and their later contributions to new and developing medial forms like comics film. Drawing on the historical context and the positions Jews held in the larger cultural environment, the author illustrates how themes and tropes in science fiction and fantasy relate back to the realities of Jewish life in the face of global anti-Semitism, the struggle to assimilate in America, and the hope that was inspired by the founding of Israel.

During the First World War, the Jewish population of Central Europe was politically, socially, and experientially diverse, to an extent that resists containment within a simple historical narrative. While antisemitism and Jewish disillusionment have dominated many previous studies of the topic, this collection aims to recapture the multifariousness of Central European Jewish life in the experiences of soldiers and civilians alike during the First World War. Here, scholars from multiple disciplines explore rare sources and employ innovative methods to illuminate four interconnected themes: minorities and the meaning of military service, Jewish-Gentile relations, cultural legacies of the war, and memory politics.

This book which will come as a surprise to many educated observers and historians suggests that Jews and Jewish intellectuals have played a considerable role in the development and shaping of modern American conservatism. The focus is on the rise of a group of Jewish intellectuals and activists known as neoconservatives who began to impact on American public policy during the Cold War with the Soviet Union and most recently in the lead up to and invasion of Iraq. It presents a portrait of the life and work of the original and small group of neocons including Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Sidney Hook. This group has grown into a new generation who operate as columnists in conservative think tanks like The Heritage and The American Enterprise Institute, at colleges and universities, and in government in the second Bush Administration including such lightning rod figures as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Elliot Abrams. The book suggests the neo cons have been so significant in reshaping modern American conservatism and public policy that they constitute a Neoconservative Revolution.

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.