A collection of essays that explore the effects of modernization on Jewish self-understanding. Over the last three centurles, the Jewish experience has been profoundly affected by modernity, which Meyer defines as not only technological advance, cultural innovation, and reliance upon human reason but also as the adaptation of Jews to a modern framework within non-Jewish economies, societies, and cultures. Judaism within Modernity begins with an exploration of Jewish historiography and the problems of periodization in modern Jewish history. In these beginning essays we see the range of Meyer's thinking about what constitutes modernization and how to determine its beginning. He discusses the role of history in defining identity among Jews and suggests that finding an adequate paradigm of continuity is essential to the historian's task. The essays in the second section focus on the Jews of Germany. Here Meyer writes about the influence of German Jews on Jews in the United States, comparing the historical experience of the two communities. These essays also address the intersection of religion, scholarship, and history with politics in nineteenth- and twentiety-century Germany. A third section deals with the European Reform movement, which brought a liberal Judaism to the majority of German Jews. Here Meyer likewise presents a fresh perspective on the way the Reform movement was viewed by those outside of it, especially by non-Jews. The essays in the final section explore Judaism in the United States. In particular, they show how reform Judaism and Zionism were able to recondle their initial differences. Judaism within Modernity is an impressive collection of essays written by a renowned Jewish historian and will be a standard volume for students and scholars of the modern Jewish experience.

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"Contributes[s] interesting new dimensions to the literature on Jews and blacks in the United States."
--"The Journal of American History"

"A fascinating text which adds to our understanding of recent Jewish Left and feminist politics and activism"
"--Australian Jewish News, Aug. 2001"

"Blending together 15 oral histories and archival research, Schultz shows how northern Jewish women's commitment to social justice - informed in part by living in the shadow of the Holocaust - played out in a time of enormous political, social, and personal upheaval...Sharply observant of her informants' lives, Schultz opens a new window not only into the civil rights movement but also into the sociology of mid-century Jewish-American culture. Her analysis is most impressive at the book's end, when she perceptively describes the protean nature of Jewish identities in the U.S. Such insightful cultural readings and criticism make this a fine contribution to both the literature of the civil rights movement and the field of Jewish studies."
"--Publishers Weekly"

"Schultz's book makes a substantial contribution to feminist scholarship, but in the end it is also a call to renewed action - to never forget the sacrifices of previous generations."
--"The Journal of Southern History"

"A well-written, serious, and important book. I learned a great deal from this interesting and rich study."
"--Joyce Antler, author of The Journey Home: How Jewish Women Shaped Modern America"

""Going South" is a heartfelt plea for incorporating women's activism into social movement history."
--Linn Shapiro, "American Jewish History"

"Going South is aremarkable book, reflecting the experiences of fifteen women who joined the 1960s civil rights movement showing how and why they got there, what role, if any religion played in their lives, and what happened to them afterwards."
--"Journal of American Studies"

"The strength of the book is that it is based on interviews; the reader is introduced to each women, her family, the work she performed in the South, the people she met and the difficulties she overcame while there."--"Jewish Observer"

Many people today know that the 1964 murder in Mississippi of two Jewish men--Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman--and their Black colleague, James Chaney, marked one of the most wrenching episodes of the civil rights movement. Yet very few realize that Andrew Goodman had been in Mississippi for one day when he was killed; Rita Schwerner, Mickey's wife, had been organizing in Mississippi for six difficult months.

Organized around a rich blend of oral histories, Going South followsa group of Jewish women--come of age in the shadow of the Holocaust and deeply committed to social justice--who put their bodies and lives on the line to fight racism. Actively rejecting the post-war idyll of suburban, Jewish, middle-class life, these women were deeply influenced by Jewish notions of morality and social justice. Many thus perceived the call of the movement as positively irresistible.

Representing a link between the sensibilities of the early civil rights era and contemporary efforts to move beyond the limits of identity politics, the book provides a resource for all who are interested in anti-racism, the civil rights movement, social justice, Jewish activism and radical women's traditions.

Gershon Brin examines the development of biblical law, suggesting that it may be due to different authors with different legal outlooks, or that the differing policies were required in response to different social needs, etc. Biblical laws appearing in the Dead Sea Scrolls literature are treated in a separate unit. Study of this subject can shed light both on the biblical laws as such, as well as on the manner of their reworking by the Judaean Desert sect. Brin also discusses here questions of the style, the idea, and the historical and ideological background underlying the reworking of these laws in Qumran. The second part of the book presents a comprehensive picture of the issues involved in the laws of the first-born, a subject that has legal, social and religious implications.

This study throws light for the first time on a neglected but very important aspect of Jewish life in the Third Reich, the Jewish press. This term does not refer to the significant number of Jews involved in the German media up to the Second World War but to the 65 newspapers and magazines published by 53 publishing houses with a specific German-Jewish readership in mind. These publications appeared until the end of 1938 and allow a valuable insight into the situation of the German Jews under the Nazi regime. They movingly document the efforts of the Jews to cope with the increasing precariousness of their existence in Germany and to find solutions to the growing problems of survival.

It is France that, along with Germany, has persecuted the most Jews. Spoken at the beginning of 1943, this phrase was not a denunciation, but rather an unashamed assertion by Andre Lavagne, the chief of Marshal Petain's civil cabinet. Indeed, France's leadership stood prominently among the governments of occupied Europe in its initiative and zeal in collaborating with the Nazis. Yet nearly three-quarters of the Jews living in France at the beginning of the war survived the Final Solution. How was this possible? And what considerations motivated many prominent representatives of French Jewry, at least initially, to submit to the antisemitic measures of Vichy? Adam Rayski addresses these and other important questions in The Choice of the Jews under Vichy. He writes from the joint perspective of a historian and a participant in the events he describes. An organizer of the communist faction of the Jewish resistance in France, Rayski buttresses his analysis of war-era archival materials with his own personal testimony. the archives of the military, the Central Consistory of French Jewry, police prefectures, and Philippe Petain, Rayski clearly demonstrates the Vichy government's role as an accomplice in the Nazi program of genocide. He also explores the sizeable pre-war divide between French-born and immigrant Jews. This manifested itself in cultural conflicts and mutual antagonism as well as in varied initial responses to the antisemitic edicts and actions of the Vichy government. Rayski reveals how these communities eventually set aside their differences and united to resist the Vichy-supported Nazi threat. Although some French Jews passively submitted to the moves of the Vichy regime, Rayski provides evidence that many did not. With an informed account of the formation and actions of the French Jewish resistance, Rayski combats the cliched image of Jews as victims. He also documents and describes the efforts and the absence of efforts of French Protestant and Catholic groups on behalf of their Jewish countrymen. insight into the story of French Jews during World War II.

Scepticism has been the driving force in the development of Greco-Roman culture in the past, and the impetus for far-reaching scientific achievements and philosophical investigation. Early Jewish culture, in contrast, avoided creating consistent representations of its philosophical doctrines. Sceptical notions can nevertheless be found in some early Jewish literature such as the Book of Ecclesiastes. One encounters there expressions of doubt with respect to Divine justice or even Divine involvement in earthly affairs. During the first centuries of the common era, however, Jewish thought, as reflected in rabbinic works, was engaged in persistent intellectual activity devoted to the laws, norms, regulations, exegesis and other traditional areas of Jewish religious knowledge. An effort to detect sceptical ideas in ancient Judaism, therefore, requires a closer analysis of this literary heritage and its cultural context. This volume of collected essays seeks to tackle the question of scepticism in an Early Jewish context, including Ecclesiastes and other Jewish Second Temple works, rabbinic midrashic and talmudic literature, and reflections of Jewish thought in early Christian and patristic writings. Contributors are: Tali Artman, Geoffrey Herman, Reuven Kiperwasser, Serge Ruzer, Cana Werman, and Carsten Wilke.

In the second haft of the nineteenth century, Jewish nationalism developed in Europe. One vital form of this nationalism that took root at the beginning of the twentieth century in Eastern Europe was the Yiddishist movement, which held that the Yiddish language and culture should be at the center of any Jewish nationalist efforts. As with most European concepts of folklore, the romantic-nationalist ideas of J. G. Herder on the volk were crucial in the formulation of the study and collection of Yiddish folklore.

Herder's volk, however, denoted the peasantry, whereas Polish Jewry were an urban population. This difference determined the focus and pioneering work that this group of collectors accomplished. Defining the Yiddish Nation examines how these folklorists sought to connect their identity with the Jewish past but simultaneously develop Yiddishism, a movement whose eventual outcome would be an autonomous Jewish national culture and a break with the biblical past.

Itzik Nakhmen Gottesman analyzes the evolution of Yiddish folklore and its role in the creation of Yiddish nationalism in Poland between the two world wars. Gottesman studies three important folklore circles in Poland: the Warsaw group led by Noyekh Prilutski, the S. Ansky Vilne Jewish Historic-Ethnographic Society, and the Ethnographic Commission d the Yivo Institute in Vilne.

This book is much more than a study of the evolution of one particular folklore tradition, it is a look into the formation of a nationalist movement. Defining the Yiddish Nation will prove invaluable for scholars of Jewish studies and Yiddish folklore.

European Jews achieved civil emancipation during the nineteenth century, becoming equal citizens with all the rights and responsibilities of their Gentile compatriots. This book explores for the first time the impact of this emancipation on a traditional Jewish population largely untouched by secular culture. Focusing on the Jews of Alsace, Paula E. Hyman explores their patterns of acculturation and integration in both countryside and city, analyzing the political, social, and economic factors that not only reshaped their behavior and self-understanding but also sustained their traditional Jewish practice. Drawing on governmental sources, literature, memoirs, and communal records, Hyman relates the experiences of ordinary Jews-the cattle dealers, peddlers, and shopkeepers who lived in the villages and small towns of Alsace. She finds that these Jews resisted new outlooks and new spheres of activity, and that their transformation was far slower and more uneven than the rapid acculturation of Jewish urban elites discussed by previous historians. Hyman describes the Alsatian Jews' emergence from cultural and social isolation, the impact of migration and urbanization, their drift from religious orthodoxy, and the alliance of their community leaders with French authorities. Since European Jews were a largely rural population until after mid-century, Hyman's social history of a typical village society has important implications for understanding the development of Jewish modernity throughout Europe

The present volume offers the first critical edition, accompanied by an English translation, a commentary, and an introductory study, of Liber nativitatum (Book of Nativities) and Liber Abraham Iudei de nativitatibus (Book on Nativities by Abraham the Jew), two astrological treatises in Latin that were written by Abraham Ibn Ezra or attributed to him, and whose Hebrew source-text or archetype has not survived.

Recent nation-wide surveys of the Jews of France yielded a detailed picture of this community, one of the largest Jewish Diaspora populations, with a long and rich history. This book presents results and analyses of this survey for the first time in English. Key issues explored include demographics, representations of Jewish identity, expressions of community solidarity, social issues, and values. Data was analyzed using multi-dimensional techniques, revealing underlying structural relationships and an axiological typology. The translation of the French edition was expanded for accessibility to an English-speaking audience, including a background on history, socio-political climate and related philosophical works. The cumulative result is the most up-to-date and comprehensive look at the Jews of France at the turn of the third millennium. "...the empirical centerpiece of Cohen's study is sound, invaluable, and often highly illuminating. In the short space provided this reviewer could not fully do justice to the wealth of information presented there..." Ethan Katz, University of Cincinnati

Judaism is a religion and a way of life that combines beliefs as well as practical commandments and traditions, encompassing all spheres of life. Some of the numerous precepts emerge directly from the Torah (the Law of Moses). Others are commanded by Oral Law, rulings of illustrious Jewish legal scholars throughout the generations, and rabbinic responsa composed over hundreds of years and still being written today. Like other religions, Judaism has also developed unique symbols that have become virtually exclusive to it, such as the Star of David and the seven-branched menorah. This book argues that Judaism impacts human geography in significant ways: it shapes the environment and space of its believers, thus creating a unique "Jewish geography.

The five volumes provide a compendium of the history of and discourse about antisemitism - both as a unique cultural and religious category. Antisemitic stereotypes function as religious symbols that express and transmit a belief system of Jew-hatred, which are stored in the cultural and religious memories of the Western and Muslim worlds. This volume explores the phenomenon from the perspectives of Philosophy and Social Sciences.

It has often been argued that Zerubbabel, the Jewish governor of Yehud at the time of the rebuilding of the temple (late 6th century BCE), was viewed by the prophets Haggai and Zechariah as the new king in the line of David. In this new study, Rose offers a contrary proposal for the interpretation of the oracles in Haggai 2 and Zechariah 3 and 6. He traces their background in the pre-exilic prophets, pays special attention to often neglected details of semantics and metaphor, and concludes that neither Haggai nor Zechariah designated Zerubbabel as the new king in Jerusalem. Instead, the oracles in Zechariah 3 and 6 should be seen as fully messianic.>

The entry for "kvetchn (the verbal form) in Uriel Weinreich's "Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary reads simply: "press, squeeze, pinch; strain." There is no mention of grumbling or complaint. You can "kvetch an orange to get juice, "kvetch a buzzer for service, or "kvetch mit di pleytses, shrug your shoulders, when no one responds to the buzzer that you "kvetched. All perfectly good, perfectly common uses of the verb "kvetchn, none of which appears to have the remotest connection with the idea of whining or complaining. The link is found in Weinreich's "strain" which he uses to define "kvetchn zikh, to press or squeeze oneself, the reflexive form of the verb. Alexander Harkavy's 1928 "Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary helps make Weinreich's meaning clearer. It isn't simply to strain, but "to strain," as Harkavy has it, "at stool," to have trouble doing what, if you'd eaten your prunes the way you were supposed to, you wouldn't have any trouble with at all. The connection with complaint lies, of course, in the tone of voice: someone who's "kvetching sounds like someone who's paying the price for not having taken his castor oil---and he has just as eager an audience. A really good "kvetch has a visceral quality, a sense that the "kvetcher won't be completely comfortable, completely satisfied, until it's all come out. Go ahead and ask someone how they're feeling; if they tell you, "Don't ask," just remember that you already have. The twenty-minute litany of "tsuris is nobody's fault but your own.
---from "Born to Kvetch

This first-hand empirical study of elderly Soviet Jews who immigrated to Israel during the Great Exodus of 1989 to 1991 demonstrates the double jeopardy of transnational relocation in later life. The book traces the depletions that occurred in the elderly immigrants' social networks and examines the impact of a range of network factors on their personal well-being. Given the dearth of systematic field research into the problems and needs of elderly immigrants, and of this group in particular, gerontologists and sociologists will find this case study invaluable. Students, teachers, policymakers, social service providers, and other professional practitioners will gain from the findings about elderly immigrants' network relationships and from practical suggestions for the planning of effective network interventions on their behalf.

We commonly associate the term "Holocaust" with Nuremberg and Kristallnacht, the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos, Auschwitz and Treblinka. Appearing as they do in countless books and films, these symbols of hatred penetrate our consciousness, memory, and history. But, unfortunately, our memory is selective, and, in the case of Romania, our knowledge is scant. In 1939 the Jewish population of Romania exceeded 750,000: the third largest concentration of Jews in Europe. By 1944, some 400,000 had disappeared. Another 150,000 Ukrainian Jews died at the hands of Romanian soldiers. In the quest for a "final solution" Romania proved to be Hitler's most enthusiastic ally. In The Silent Holocaust, Butnaru, himself a survivor of the Romanian labor camps, provides a full account and demonstrates that anti-Semitism was a central force in Romania's history. He begins by examining the precarious status of Romanian Jewry in the years prior to World War I. He then reviews the period to the establishment in September, 1940, of the National Legionary State, a period when anti-Semitism became the unifying force in politics. The remainder of the book covers the Holocaust years, and reveals that Romania's premeditated mass murder of Jews was well underway before the Reich's gas chambers became operational. The Silent Holocaust has been called a "work of epic and historical worth" and it is invaluable for students of World War II, the Holocaust, and Jewish and Eastern European studies.

This collection of articles, all being published in English for the first time, focuses on the child-rearing and educational practices of the Kibbutz, and the effect they have on children. Unlike other Kibbutz studies, however, written by outsiders and non-Israelis, almost all of these studies have been authored by Kibbutz members. Fifteen articles are included, drawn from data obtained by the Institute of Research on Kibbutz Education at Oranim Haifa University, and reflect the concern of workers in a system rather than the preoccupation of outside observers. The studies cover a wide range of topics and age groups, from early infancy through adolescence, and taken as a whole provide a panoramic view of the issues of concern to Kibbutz education in their historical context. Each article in the volume was chosen according to three criteria: it had to represent the principal questions of concern to the kibbutz educational system today; reflect the changes that have taken place in recent years in child-rearing; and display an exacting methodology. The studies are divided into four parts according to subject and age groups, covering early childhood and motherhood, the transition from communal to family sleeping arrangements, elementary school children, and adolescence. An additional part brings together articles that fall outside of these categories. Each part and each study also features an introduction containing specific comments, and the book concludes with a bibliography, a name index, and a subject index. This collection of intra-cultural studies will be a significant addition to academic and public libraries, and a valuable reference for courses in sociology, education, and Israelistudies.

This book examines the talmudic writings, politics, and ideology of Y.I. Halevy (1847-1914), one of the most influential representatives of the pre-war eastern European Orthodox Jewish community. It analyzes Halevy's historical model of the formation of the Babylonian Talmud, which, he argued, was edited by an academy of rabbis beginning in the fourth century and ending by the sixth century. Halevy's model also served as a blueprint for the rabbinic council of Agudath Israel, the Orthodox political body in whose founding he played a leading role. Foreword by Jay M. Harris, Harry Austryn Wolfson Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard University and the author of How Do We Know This? Midrash and the Fragmentation of Modern Judaism, among other works.

Hirschka Varshavtchik's story, written by his son, Sidd Raichel is a personal narrative as well as a dramatic family history. It is also, as described by the son himself in his prologue, a quest that each of us has: I grew up confused, surrounded by unuttered family memories I couldn't comprehend. I was all alone in this dark, dark place, where even language itself had failed me. Bits of family stories--true or not, it did not matter--came in hushed breaths. My brother told me once that we got out name Reischer because our father killed a German soldier and took his identity papers. I clutched to each new phrase as a precious piece of the puzzle to answer the questions: "Where did I come from?" and "Who am I?"

With Eyes Toward Zion II is a collection of papers by distinguished scholars who have set out to rediscover the Holy Land and what it means to America. They delve into the hundreds of books and pamphlets that have been written by archaeologists, historians, scientists, Biblical scholars, American consuls, novelists, missionaries, tourists, and, above all, settlers and builders of the land. What results is an overview of the relationship between the American people and the Holy Land until the birth of the State of Israel in 1948.

From the 17th century until the Holocaust, Germany's Jews lurched between progress and setback, between fortune and terrible misfortune. German society shunned Jews in the eighteenth century and opened unevenly to them in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, only to turn murderous in the Nazi era. This book portrays the drama of German-Jewish history - the gradual ascent of Jews from impoverished outcasts to comfortable bourgeois citizens and then their dramatic descent into genocidal torment during the Nazi years - by examining the everyday lives of ordinary Jews. Building on social, economic and political history, it focuses on the qualitative aspects of ordinary life - emotions, subjective impressions, and quotidian perceptions. How did ordinary Jews make sense of their world? How did they construe changes brought about by industrialization? How did they make decisions to enter new professions or stick with the old, juggle traditional mores with contemporary ways? The Jewish adoption of secular, modern European culture and the struggle for legal equality exacted profound costs, both material and psychological. Even in the heady years of progress, a basic insecurity informed German-Jewish life. Jewish successes existed alongside an antisemitism that persisted as a frightful leitmotif throughout German-Jewish history. And yet the history that emerges from these pages belies simplistic interpretations that German antisemitism followed a straight path from Luther to Hitler or that Germans nurtured an "eliminationist" antisemitism. Just as German history cannot be typecast, neither can Germans. Non-Jews were not uniformly antisemitic and maintained a wide variety of religious, regional, political, and class allegiances that fostered a wide range of attitudes towards Jews. Jewish daily life thus provides another vantage point from which to study the social life of Germany. Focusing on both internal Jewish life - family, religion, culture and Jewish community - and the external world of German culture and society provides a uniquely well-rounded portrait of a world defined by the shifting sands of inclusion and exclusion.

Interdisciplinary overview of American Jewish life post-Holocaust. The 1950s and early 1960s have not traditionally been viewed as a particularly creative era in American Jewish life. On the contrary, these years have been painted as a period of inactivity and Americanization. As if exhausted by the traumas of World War II, the American Jewish community took a rest until suddenly reawakened by the 1967 Six-Day War and its implications for world Jewry. Recent scholarship, however, has demonstrated that previous assumptions about the early silence of American Jewry with regard to the Holocaust were exaggerated. And while historians have expanded their borders and definitions to encompass the postwar decades, scholars from other disciplines have been paying increasing attention to the unique literary, photographic, artistic, dramatic, political, and other cultural creations of this period and the ways in which they hearken back to not only the Holocaust itself but also to images of prewar Eastern Europe. Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades brings together scholars of literature, art, history, ethnography, and related fields to examine how the American Jewish community in the post-Holocaust era was shaped by its encounter with literary relics, living refugees, and other cultural productions which grew out of an encounter with Eastern European Jewish life from the pre-Holocaust era.