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.

Professor Ida Frhlich, Professor of Hebrew Studies and Ancient Near Eastern History in the Pzmny Pter Catholic University, Budapest, is a celebrated scholar who has been in the forefront of the remarkable development of Hebrew and Jewish studies in recent decades in Hungary. Among her important publications are 'Time and times and half a time': Historical Consciousness in the Jewish Literature of the Persian and Hellenistic Eras (1996), and, more recently, the first translation of the corpus of the Dead Sea Scrolls into Hungarian. Her current major project is, in collaboration with a group of younger scholars, to prepare a Hungarian translation of all the apocryphal and pseudepigraphical materials. In this very substantial volume, presented to her on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday, the essays of 37 international scholars are arranged in three sections: (1) Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, (2) Apocrypha-Pseudepigrapha and Qumran, and (3) Jewish Studies / Christian Interpretation.

Antisemitism in the German Military Community and the Jewish Response, 1914-1938 explores how German World War I veterans from different social and political backgrounds contributed to antisemitic politics during the Weimar Republic. The book compares how the military, right-wing veterans, and Jewish veterans chose to remember their war experiences and translate these memories into a political reality in the postwar world. Antisemitism addresses several neglected issues. First, there is relatively little scholarship discussing antisemitism in the imperial German army and the impact former imperial officers had on the antisemitic predilections of veteran associations. This subject deserves attention given that veteran politics during the Weimar Republic were of tremendous significance to the collapse of democracy and the rise of National Socialism, and that the primary architects of the Third Reich and the "Final Solution" were either World War I veterans or had been members of paramilitary organizations in the interwar period. The second issue addressed is how veterans influenced the definition of "Aryan" identity, or how race came to be perceived through the prism of war and political violence. Since German Jews had to fight both accusations of shirking military service and the perception of the "Jew" as effeminate, the manner in which these veterans tried to reforge Jewish identity and their relationship with their former comrades is an extraordinarily important issue. The third issue concerns situational antisemitism, or the process by which an organization expressed an opinion or policy concerning Jews in response to internal dissension and external influences.

This invaluable work traces the role of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD, the core group of Himmler's murder units involved in the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question," during and immediately after the German campaign in Poland in 1939. In addition to relevant Einsatzgruppen reports, the book includes key documents from other sources, especially eyewitness accounts from victims or onlookers. Such accounts provide an alternative, often much more realistic, perspective on the nature and consequences of the actions previously known only through documentation generated by the perpetrators. With carefully selected primary sources contextualized by the authors' clear narrative, this work fills an important gap in our understanding of a crucial period in the evolution of policies directed against Jews, Poles, and others deemed dangerous or inferior by the Third Reich. Supplemented by maps and photographs, this book will be an essential reference and research tool.

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.

The American Jewish Year Book, now in its 117th year, is the annual record of the North American Jewish communities and provides insight into their major trends. The first chapter of Part I is an examination of how American Jews fit into the US religious landscape, based on Pew Research Center studies. The second chapter examines intermarriage. Chapters on "The Domestic Arena" and "The International Arena" analyze the year's events as they affect American Jewish communal and political affairs. Three chapters analyze the demography and geography of the US, Canada, and world Jewish populations. Part II provides lists of Jewish institutions, including federations, community centers, social service agencies, national organizations, synagogues, Hillels, day schools, camps, museums, and Israeli consulates. The final chapters present national and local Jewish periodicals and broadcast media; academic resources, including Jewish Studies programs, books, journals, articles, websites, and research libraries; and lists of major events in the past year, Jewish honorees, and obituaries.

‘There are no stupid questions, nor any forbidden ones, but there are some questions that have no answer.’

Hédi Fried was nineteen when the Nazis snatched her family from their home in Eastern Europe and transported them to Auschwitz, where her parents were murdered and she and her sister were forced into hard labour until the end of the war.

Now ninety-four, she has spent her life educating young people about the Holocaust and answering their questions about one of the darkest periods in human history. Questions like, ‘How was it to live in the camps?’, ‘Did you dream at night?’, ‘Why did Hitler hate the Jews?’, and ‘Can you forgive?’.

With sensitivity and complete candour, Fried answers these questions and more in this deeply human book that urges us never to forget and never to repeat.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In recent years the role of religion in the avant-garde has begun to attract scholarly interest. The present volume focuses on the work of the Romanian Jewish poet and visual artist Isidore Isou (1925-2007) who founded the lettrist movement in the 1940s. The Jewish tradition played a critical part in the Western avant-garde as represented by lettrism. The links between lettrism and Judaism are substantial, yet they have been largely unexplored until now. The study investigates the works of a movement that explicitly emphasises its vanguard position while relying on a medieval religious tradition as a source of radical textual techniques. It accounts for lettrism's renunciation of mainstream traditions in favour of a subversive tradition, in this case Jewish mysticism. The religious inclination of lettrism also affects the notion of the avant-garde. The elements of the Jewish tradition in Isou's theories and artistic production evoke a broader framework where religion and experimental art supplement each other.

Jewish radical thoughts and actions can be described in a variety of terms and dimensions. Often, there is a connection implied between left-wing ideas and activists as well as their radicalism. This volume surveys Jewish radicalisms and present different approaches on this global historical phenomenon which are conceptualised as three different phenomena: Cultural, political and religious radicalism. The volume is focussed on the 20th century and tries to grasp the manifold Ideas of Jewish radicalism and, thereby, wants to open up the discussion on this category. This discussion is needed not only within Jewish Studies to engage with this topic and broaden our understanding of Jewish Radicalism as well as to form a useful applicable category. This volume is to be understood as a call for and a contribution to this debate.

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.

The Book of Job has held a central role in defining the project of modernity from the age of Enlightenment until today. The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics and Hermeneutics offers new perspectives on the ways in which Job's response to disaster has become an aesthetic and ethical touchstone for modern reflections on catastrophic events. This volume begins with an exploration of questions such as the tragic and ironic bent of the Book of Job, Job as mourner, and theJoban body in pain, and ends with a consideration of Joban works by notable writers - from Melville and Kafka, through Joseph Roth, Zach, Levin, and Philip Roth.

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.

"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 book is the original zionist classic by Theodor Herzl. The book is about the start of a Jewish state, and played a big role in Israel becoming a state. It is an important text for those studying the history of Israel and Theodor Herzl is undoubtedly the most important author modern Jewish studies. This is also an interesting read for those studying other religions, as Israel plays such a central role to most of the major religions of the world.