In the decades following World War II, many American Jews sought to downplay their difference, as a means of assimilating into Middle America. Yet a significant minority, including many prominent Jewish writers and intellectuals, clung to their ethnic difference, using it to register dissent with the status quo and act as spokespeople for non-white America. In this provocative book, Jennifer Glaser examines how racial ventriloquism became a hallmark of Jewish-American fiction, as Jewish writers asserted that their own ethnicity enabled them to speak for other minorities. Rather than simply condemning this racial ventriloquism as a form of cultural appropriation or commending it as an act of empathic imagination, Borrowed Voices offers a nuanced analysis of the technique, judiciously assessing both its limitations and its potential benefits. Glaser considers how the practice of racial ventriloquism has changed over time, examining the books of many well-known writers, including Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Michael Chabon, Saul Bellow, and many others. Bringing Jewish studies into conversation with critical race theory, Glaser also opens up a dialogue between Jewish-American literature and other forms of media, including films, magazines, and graphic novels. Moreover, she demonstrates how Jewish-American fiction can help us understand the larger anxieties about ethnic identity, authenticity, and authorial voice that emerged in the wake of the civil rights movement.

Hebrew has survived as a continuously written literature for nearly 3,000 years. It is the oldest, and in some ways most successful, minority literature. While Hebrew is central to the social history of the Jews, its history also offers a panoramic window into the relationships of other minority literatures to their majority cultures.

Until 1948, written Hebrew was created primarily under the rule of empires, notably those of ancient Mesopotamia, Rome, medieval Islam, and Tsarist Russia. In this controversial volume, David Aberbach analyzes Hebrew's development, arguing that several of the most original periods in its history coincided with--and resulted partially from--imperial crisis. During these periods, social and political instability set off violence against the Jews. In each case a revolutionary body of Hebrew literature emerged, influenced decisively by the dominant culture, but asserting Jewish separatism and, to varying degrees, nationalism.

Revolutionary Hebrew offers a historical account of Judaism from biblical times to 1948, as exemplified through the growth or decline of Hebrew writing. Examining patterns in the social development of Hebrew, Aberbach explicates the role of Hebrew in the survival of Judaism and sheds light on the significance of literary creativity in ethnic survival.

This volume contributes to the growing interest in understanding the phenomenon of prayer and praying in the Hebrew Bible, Early Judaism, and nascent Christianity. Papers by the leading scholars in these fields revisit long-standing questions and chart new paths of inquiry into the nature, form, and practice of addressing the divine in the ancient world. The essays in this volume deal with particular texts of and about prayer, practices of prayer, as well as figures and locations (historical and literary) that are associated with prayer and praying. These studies apply a range of methods and theoretical approaches to prayer and the language of prayer in literatures of Early Judaism and Christianity. Some studies apply the classical methods of biblical studies to Second Temple texts of prayer, including form critical and text critical approaches; others engage in literary and narrative analysis of ancient works that recount discourse directed to the divine. Still other studies draw on anthropological and sociological analyses of prayer or marshal particular theories of discourse, ethics, and moral agency to offer fresh interpretations of address to God in the literature of Second Temple Judaism and earliest Christianity.

Remembering the Holocaust in Germany, Austria, Italy and Israel: "Vergangenheitsbewaltigung" as a Historical Quest offers an account on post-war coming-to-terms with the Holocaust tragedy in some European countries, such as Germany, Austria, and Italy. The subject has attracted more attention in recent years, since the long transition to liberal democracy seems to have put an end to the main theme of the memory of the Second World War. The main point of the volume is the making of a new generational memory after the "end of history". What is to be done after the making of a globalised world? What about the memorialisation of the last century?

Imagine a traditional Jewish community on the eve of the 19th century, and you will most likely picture the Eastern European shtetl. This prevailing European-oriented view obscures the fact that Jewry is a coat of many colors, with many diverse yet traditional manifestations, including the numerous Jewish communities of North Africa and Southwest Asia. While we know that in recent centuries such countries as Iraq, Tunisia, and Morocco contained a large proportion of the Jewish people, and that communities such as Fez, Aleppo, Tunis, and Baghdad were major centers of Jewish culture, our detailed knowledge of these Jewries remains limited.

Jews Among Muslims gathers together some of the most insightful work describing the life and culture of Jews in the traditional Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Spanning the vast belt from Morocco to Afghanistan, which has been dominated by Islam since the seventh and eighth centuries, Jewish communities have long coexisted alongside their Muslim neighbors. Revealing Jewish life in such countries as Yemen, Morocco, Iraq, Iran, Tunisia, Syria, and Kurdistan, Jews Among Muslims tells us much about Jewish religious life and leadership, economic status, connections to the state, social relations with surrouding ethnic groups, internal community organization, and family and gender roles.

Because the Holocaust, at its core, was an extreme expression of a devastating racism, the author contends it has special significance for African Americans. Locke, a university professor, clergyman, and African American, reflects on the common experiences of African American and Jewish people as minorities and on the great tragedy that each community has experienced in its history--slavery and the Holocaust. Without attempting to equate the experiences of African Americans to the experiences of European Jews during the Holocaust, the author does show how aspects of the Holocaust, its impact on the Jewish community worldwide, and the long-lasting consequences relate to slavery, the civil rights movement, and the current status of African Americans.

Written from a Christian perspective, this book argues that the implications of the Holocaust touch all people, and that it is a major mistake to view the Holocaust as an exclusively Jewish event. Instead, the author asks whether it is possible for both African Americans and Jewish Americans to learn from the experience of the other regarding the common threat that minority people confront in Western societies. Locke focuses on the themes of parochialism and patriotism and reexamines the role of the Christian churches during the Holocaust in an effort to challenge some of the prevailing views in Holocaust studies.

Most Jews who now live in Germany have lived elsewhere. They are neither the remnant of those who survived the Holocaust nor those who are in transit to Israel or the United States. They are a disparate but vibrant and growing community of over 80,000 people. Forty thousand of them are members of official Jewish communities in today's Germany. Because of the Nazi past, this proportionately small number of individuals plays an out-of-scale role in German politics and world consciousness. As a study in the formation of minority communities within European national matrices, Cohn's work has interest for sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists as well. It is the only published work on the Jewish community in Germany today.

This unique and richly informative addition to American educational, religious, and cultural history examines the college life of Jews at Yale from the first Jewish graduate in 1809 to the present time, drawing comparisons to the Jewish experience at other elite colleges and universities and to the experiences of other minorities at Yale. In this revised edition, Oren draws on new interviews and references to present the dramatic events of the past twenty years, describing the tensions between majority and minority cultures in an academic world increasingly committed to inclusiveness and the solidification of meritocracy. Reviews of the earlier edition "An admirably probing and balanced account of a subject that was up to now considered taboo." -Lewis Coser "Dan A. Oren's meticulous research reveals how the traditional exclusivist conception of Yale University evolved gradually over time, and with what consequences for Jews and other original outsiders. . . . Judicious in tone, balanced and fluently written." -A.J. Sherman, Times Literary Supplement "A richly researched and well-written book." -Naomi W. Cohen, American Historical Review "A most complete, thoroughly researched, and well documented history." -Melvin Ezer, Educational Studies Dan A. Oren, M.D., is associate professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine.

Kadya Molodowsky, the most prolific woman writer of Yiddish, wrote an autobiographical memoir that left many questions unanswered. Why does she say of her wedding day only that she wore new shoes and fell in the snow? Did she join those who saw communism as the answer to the Jewish problem? Why did she leave Israel after having spent only three years there? It took Zelda Kahan Newman's research at three archives, the YIVO archive in New York, the Municipal Jewish Library in Montreal, and the Machon Lavon archive in Ne'ot Afeka, Israel, to discover the answers to these questions. In this biography, Kahan Newman covers the arc of Molodowsky's life, a life that saw pogroms, World War I, an escape from Europe to the United States, and an attempt to revive Yiddish culture after World War II. Finally, as Kahan Newman notes, it was an ironic twist of fate "that Kadya's death was noted in the U.S., where she felt increasingly alien, and ignored in Israel, where she felt she belonged, if only in spirit.

To the horrors of war and genocide in the twentieth century there were witnesses, among them Hermann Cohen, Emmanuel Levinas, Ernst Bloch, Leo Strauss, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, and Hans Jonas. All defined themselves as Jews and philosophers. Their intellectual concerns and worldviews often in conflict, they nevertheless engaged in fruitful conversation: through the dialogue between Zionist activism and heterodox forms of Marxism, in the rediscovery of hidden traditions of Jewish history, at the intersection of ethics and metaphysics. They shared a common hope for a better, messianic future and a deep interest in and reliance on the cultural sources of the Jewish tradition.

In this magisterial work, Pierre Bouretz explores the thought of these great Jewish philosophers, taking a long view of the tenuous survival of German-Jewish metaphysical, religious, and social thought during the crises and catastrophes of the twentieth century. With deep passion and sound scholarship, Bouretz demonstrates the universal significance of this struggle in understanding the present human condition. The substantial and established influence of the book's subjects only serves to confirm this theory.

Profoundly learned and amply documented, "Witnesses for the Future" explains how these important philosophers came to understand the promise of a Messiah. Its significant bearing on a number of fields--including religious studies, literary criticism, philosophy of history, political theory, and Jewish studies--encourages scholars to rethink and reassess the intellectual developments of the past 100 years.

The starting point for this compilation is the wish to rethink the concept of antisemitism, race and gender in light of Sartre's pioneering Reflexions sur la Question Juive seventy years after its publication. The book gathers texts by prestigious scholars from different disciplines in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, with the objective or revisiting this work locating it within the setting of two other pioneering - and we argue, related - publications, namely Simone De Beauvoir's Le deuxieme sexe of 1949 and Franz Fanon's Peau noire et masques blancs of 1952. This particular and original standpoint sheds new light on the different meanings and political functions of the concept of antisemitism in a political and historical context marked by the post-modern concepts of multi-ethnicity and multiculturalism.

Is Jewish identity flourishing or in decline? Community leaders and scholarly researchers continually seek to determine the attitudes, beliefs, and activities that best measure Jewish identity. At issue, according to these studies, is the very survival of the Jewish community itself. But such studies rarely ask what actually is being examined when we attempt to assess "Jewish identity" or any identity. Most tend to assume that identity is a preexisting, relatively fixed frame of reference reflecting shared cultural and historical experiences.

Drawing on recent work in such fields as cultural studies, poststructuralist theory, postmodern philosophy, and feminist theory, Mapping Jewish Identities challenges this premise. Contesting conventional approaches to Jewish identity, contributors argue that Jewish identity should be conceptualized as an ongoing dynamic process of "becoming" in response to changing cultural and social conditions rather than as a stable defining body of traits.

Contributors, including Daniel Boyarin, Laura Levitt, Adi Ophir, and Gordon Bearn, examine such topics as American Jews' desires to connect with a lost immigrant past through photography, the complicated function of the Holocaust in the identity formation of contemporary Jews, the impact of the struggle with the Palestinians on Israeli group identity construction, and the ways in which repressed voices such as those of women, Mizrahim, and Israeli Arabs have changed our ways of thinking about Jewish and Israeli identity.

Are You Not a Man of God? challenges the accepted readings of several iconic supporting characters from canonical stories of Jewish tradition. These characters have been appropriated throughout history to represent and reinforce central cultural values: the binding of Isaac and the religious value of sacrificing relationship for a higher purpose; the biblical Hannah, appropriated by the rabbis as an archetype of the spirit and practice of prayer; the Talmudic Beruriah and the significance of women's learning and knowledge; and the struggle for intellectual autonomy of the rabbis of the Talmudic story known by its tag-line, "It is not in heaven!" Tova Hartman and Charlie Buckholtz make use of religious, psychological, philosophical and literary perspectives to bring these characters to life in their multiple incarnations, examining the varied symbolic uses to which they have been put and their cultural impact. These are all texts that have been studied widely, and characters that are well known. This study shows, however, that the dominant interpretations have served to mask darker, more insightful, and ultimately more critical dimensions of these important figures. Hartman and Buckholtz discover muted voices of personal betrayal and criticism that resonate as damning social critiques of the rabbis themselves. These critiques often highlight the ways in which cultural authorities use, and abuse, their power, and the implications of these systemic moral failings for their legitimacy as communal leaders. In these voices of social criticism, the rabbis evince an awareness of their own vulnerability to such abuses and failings as well as their hurtful, marginalizing effects on members of less powerful social groups.

"This useful compilation of essays serves as an introduction and guide to the complexities arising from the theft of Jewish property during WWII...This anthology belongs in every library."
-- "Choice"

The campaign for the restitution of Jewish property stolen during the Holocaust has touched a raw nerve within European society, bringing many nations to confront their wartime past. Together with the end of the Cold War and generational change, the campaign has created a need to reevaluate conventional historical truths.

Following an unprecedented media campaign, pressure from Jewish organizations, and public opinion, more than 40 European commissions were established to investigate their fellow countrymen's behavior during the war and to ascertain how stolen property was dealt with in its aftermath.

The Plunder of Jewish Property During the Holocaust brings together a range of distinguished international experts to examine the major cases concerning restitution in several countries, covering specific issues such as Nazi gold, wartime theft of works of art, and the ownership of dormant accounts in Swiss banks. The contributors incorporate insights from diverse disciplines such as international law, economics, history, and political science which, taken as a whole, make clear that some chapters of European history will have to be rewritten.

With a preface by Edgar Bronfman and Israel Singer

This chronology provides a detailed look at the history of Israel and the Jewish World from 1948 to the peace agreement with the PLO in September 1993. After a survey of the Holocaust and the immediate post-World War II years, the Edelheits begin their detailed chronology with the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948. The volume is augmented by a glossary, bibliography, and name, place, and subject indexes.

The historic signing of the Israel-Palestinian Arab peace accord of September 1993 in Washington, D.C., signalled the dawn of a new era in Middle Eastern politics. But, the often bewildering speed of recent events means that the historical background to those events has been lost, leading to confusion, misunderstanding, and misinformation. Scholars and interested readers alike need a source of clear and concise information on Israeli and Middle Eastern history in the last half-century.

Following up on "A World in Turmoil," this book reviews the most important events in the 45 year history of the reestablished state of Israel. Risen from the ashes of the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century--the near destruction of European Jewry during the Nazi Holocaust--the state of Israel represents both the Jewish return to sovereignty and is a touchstone for values of peace, honor, and national self-determination. It covers a broad spectrum of events connected with Israel, the postwar Jewish world, and the Middle East. From the ever-turning developments in Israeli political life to the battlefields of six wars, the text provides a useful introduction to the history of one of the world's most crucial regions. An introductory essay helps to place the events in their broader context, while a glossary, bibliography, and name, place, and subject indexes allow readers to seek more information on topics of interest.

This is a landmark study on Aby Warburg's life and work, translated into English.In ""Aby Warburg and Anti-Semitism"", Charlotte Schoell-Glass provides an unprecedented look at the life and writings of cultural critic Aby Warburg through the prism of Warburg's little-known political views. Schoell-Glass argues provocatively based on archival research that Warburg's work and teachings developed as a reaction to the growing anti-Semitism in Germany, which he saw as a threat to classical education and university scholarship. Translated into English for the first time, ""Aby Warburg and Anti-Semitism"" sheds much needed light on Warburg's views on Judaism and the politics of his time.Aby Warburg, scion of a well-known Jewish banking family in Hamburg, sacrificed his birthright to pursue a career as a private scholar. As an independent art historian, he devoted himself almost exclusively to reinterpreting the revival of antiquity within the Renaissance, urging other art historians to approach their work as a brand of the larger study of image making and philosophy. In this study, Schoell-Glass examines Warburg's most influential essays on Durer, Rembrandt, and the Sassetti Chapel and his most innovative concepts - the accessories of motion, the pathos formula, and the afterlife of antiquity - to illustrate how Warburg persistently showed a deep concern over a disappointing and unstable outside world within his own work. Schoell-Glass shows how Warburg attempts to make a response to anti-Semitism the only way he knew how, despite his awareness of the diminishing societal relevance of that response.From this study of Warburg, Schoell-Glass produces a multilayered case study of the encounter between twentieth-century politics and scholarship. Art historians, German historians, and scholars of Jewish studies and cultural studies will be grateful for this volume.

For 300 years, American culture and society have been shaped by ethnic conflict. This book reveals how the unique characteristics of the American socio-political system have impacted intergroup conflict. This contributed volume collects the most current thinking on intergroup dynamics and on specific conflicts and specific groups with a special emphasis on the Jewish-American experience. The demographic portrait of this country has undergone vast changes. Many newly emerging groups that promote building group pride and solidarity are obtaining greater economic and political power. This current emphasis on groups also sheds light on the tribal dimension of the past in American life. This contributed volume examines how these forces are to be reconciled and will be of interest to students of sociology, religion, and multicultural studies.

Scholars, survivors, and other interested parties have offered, over the years, their own interpretations of the meaning of the Holocaust and the lessons we can learn from it. However, the quest to find a rational explanation for this seemingly irrational course of events has led to both controversy and continued efforts at assigning meaning to this most horrible of events. Examining oral histories provided by survivors, written accounts and explanations, scholarly analysis, and commonly held assumptions, Bolkosky challenges the usual collection of platitudes about the lessons or the meanings we can derive from the Holocaust. Indeed, he argues against the kind of reductionism that such a quest for meaning has led to, and he analyzes the nature of the perpetrators in order to support his position on the inconclusivity of the study of the Holocaust.

Dealing with the perpetrators of the Holocaust as manifestations of twentieth century civilized trends foreseen by the likes of Kafka, Ortega y Gassett, Arthur Koestler and Max Weber, Bolkosky suggests a new nature of evil and criminality along the lines developed by Hannah Arendt, Raul Hilberg, and Richard Rosenstein. Woven into the fabric of the text are insights from literary and historical writers, sociologists, and philosophers. This interdisciplinary attempt to shed new light on efforts to determine the meanings and lessons of the Holocaust provides readers with a challenging approach to considering the oral histories of survivors and the popular and professional assumptions surrounding this devastating moment in history.

Jews and Armenians are often perceived as peoples with similar tragic historical experiences. Not only were both groups forced into statelessness and a life outside their homelands for centuries, in the 20th century, in the shadow of war, they were threatened with collective annihilation. Thus far, academic approaches to these two "classical" diasporas have been quite different. Moreover, Armenian and Jewish questions posed during the 19th and 20th centuries have usually been treated separately. The conference "We Will Live After Babylon" that took place in Hanover in February 2019, addressed this gap in research and was one of the first initiatives to deal directly with Jewish and Armenian historical experiences, between expulsion, exile and annihilation, in a comparative framework. The contributions in this volume take on multidisciplinary approaches relating to the conference's central themes: diaspora, minority issues and genocide.

The last 15 years have witnessed deep changes in Israeli society. The naive solidarity of the early years of statehood has given way to more sophisticated approaches, and the atmosphere of the 1990s was conducive towards critique and open discussion. It was the age of the Oslo Accords, of the large wave of immigrants from the Former Soviet Union, economic growth and prosperity, and a concurrent feeling of security and well-being. Israel was fast becoming a postcapitalist society, a junior member of the global village. This newly acquired self-assurance led to openness towards unorthodox views on basic questions of Israeli identity. The new mood found expression in the cultural climate and in the public debates. The Zionist narrative in relation to the Palestinians; the early troubled absorption of immigrants from Islamic countries; the discrimination against the Arab Israeli minority; the delay in the 1950s in incorporating the memory of the Holocaust into collective memory; the Zionist attitude towards the Jewish Diaspora, all these were issues on the cultural and intellectual agenda, subjects of heated controversies. This book attempts to come to grips with these themes. The complex texture of Israeli society is drawn here by a number of hands, presenting up-to-date approaches, as viewed by experts.

Historically leftist ideas and theories have had a profound impact on modern Jewish life. But, the left's impact on the Jewish community has greatly diminished today. Nonetheless, it can still be detected in the tendency of American Jews to vote for the liberal camp. This political tendency has also influenced Jewish communities actions as illustrated by the large numbers of Jews who participated in the civil rights movements of the post-World War II period and in the so-called new Left.

Essential Papers on Jews and the Left presents a sweeping portrait of the defining impact of the left on modern Jewish politics and culture in Europe, Palestine/Israel, and the New World. The contributions in the first part, entitled The Jewish Left, discuss specifically Jewish radical organizations such as the Bund and Poale Zion. The second section, Jews in the Left, explores the activities of Jews in general left wing politics, emphasizing their role in the Russian revolutionary movement. In the final section, The Left and the Jews, the essays examine the attitudes of the left in Europe and America toward the Jewish question, including the key issue of Karl Marx and his reputedly anti-Jewish attitudes.