How the Wise Men Got to Chelm is the first in-depth study of Chelm literature and its relationship to its literary precursors. When God created the world, so it is said, he sent out an angel with a bag of foolish souls with instructions to distribute them equally all over the world-one fool per town. But the angel's bag broke and all the souls spilled out onto the same spot. They built a settlement where they landed: the town is known as Chelm. The collected tales of these fools, or "wise men," of Chelm constitute the best-known folktale tradition of the Jews of eastern Europe. This tradition includes a sprawling repertoire of stories about the alleged intellectual limitations of the members of this old and important Jewish community. Chelm did not make its debut in the role of the foolish shtetl par excellence until late in the nineteenth century. Since then, however, the town has led a double life-as a real city in eastern Poland and as an imaginary place onto which questions of Jewish identity, community, and history have been projected. By placing literary Chelm and its "foolish" antecedents in a broader historical context, it shows how they have functioned for over three hundred years as models of society, somewhere between utopia and dystopia. These imaginary foolish towns have enabled writers both to entertain and highlight a variety of societal problems, a function that literary Chelm continues to fulfill in Jewish literature to this day.

The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction examines texts that portray the inner experience of Holocaust perpetrators and thus transform them from archetypes of evil into complex psychological and moral subjects. Employing relevant methodological tools of narrative theory, Erin McGlothlin analyzes these unsettling depictions, which manifest a certain tension regarding the ethics of representation and identification. Such works, she asserts, endeavor to make transparent the mindset of their violent subjects, yet at the same time they also invariably contrive to obfuscate in part its disquieting character. The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction contains two parts. The first focuses on portraits of real-life perpetrators in nonfictional interviews and analyses from the 1960s and 1970s. These works provide a nuanced perspective on the mentality of the people who implemented the Holocaust via the interventional role of the interviewer or interpreter in the perpetrators' performances of self-disclosure. In part two, McGlothlin investigates more recent fictional texts that imagine the perspective of their invented perpetrator-narrators. Such works draw readers directly into the perpetrator's experience and at the same time impede their access to the perpetrator's consciousness by retarding their affective connection. Demonstrating that recent fiction featuring perpetrators as narrators employs strategies derived from earlier nonfictional portrayals, McGlothlin establishes not only a historical connection between these two groups of texts, whereby nonfictional engagement with real-life perpetrators gradually gives way to fictional exploration, but also a structural and aesthetic one. The book bespeaks new modes of engagement with ethically fraught questions raised by our increasing willingness to consider the events of the Holocaust from the perspective of the perpetrator. Students, scholars, and readers of Holocaust studies and literary criticism will appreciate this closer look at a historically taboo topic.

Crimes committed by Jews, especially ritual murders, have long been favorite targets in the antisemitic press. This book investigates popular and scientific conceptualizations of criminals current in Austria and Germany at the turn of the last century and compares these to those in the contemporary antisemitic discourse. It challenges received historiographic assumptions about the centrality of criminal bodies and psyches in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century criminology and argues that contemporary antisemitic narratives constructed Jewish criminality not as a biologico-racial defect, but rather as a coolly manipulative force that aimed at the deliberate destruction of the basis of society itself. Through the lens of criminality this book provides new insight into the spread and nature of antisemitism in Austria-Hungary around 1900. The book also provides a re-evaluation of the phenomenon of modern Ritual Murder Trials by placing them into the context of wider narratives of Jewish crime.

Daniel Mark Vyleta was educated in Germany, the USA and England. He holds a PhD in History from King's College, University of Cambridge. Currently, he serves as Assistant Professor in Foreign Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconisn-Milwaukee.

"It has ever been the boast of the Jewish people, that they support their own poor," declared Kentucky attorney Benjamin Franklin Jonas in 1856. "Their reasons are partly founded in religious necessity, and partly in that pride of race and character which has supported them through so many ages of trial and vicissitude." In That Pride of Race and Character, Caroline E. Light examines the American Jewish tradition of benevolence and charity and explores its southern roots.

Light provides a critical analysis of benevolence as it was inflected by regional ideals of race and gender, showing how a southern Jewish benevolent empire emerged in response to the combined pressures of post-Civil War devastation and the simultaneous influx of eastern European immigration. In an effort to combat the voices of anti-Semitism and nativism, established Jewish leaders developed a sophisticated and cutting-edge network of charities in the South to ensure that Jews took care of those considered "their own" while also proving themselves to be exemplary white citizens. Drawing from confidential case files and institutional records from various southern Jewish charities, the book relates how southern Jewish leaders and their immigrant clients negotiated the complexities of "fitting in" in a place and time of significant socio-political turbulence. Ultimately, the southern Jewish call to benevolence bore the particular imprint of the region's racial mores and left behind a rich legacy.

Today, more than 75 years after the Holocaust and World War II, antisemitism remains a poisonous force in European culture and politics, whether cloaked in the garb of reactionary nationalism or manifested in outright physical violence. Nothing New in Europe? provides a sobering look at the persistence of European antisemitism today through fifteen interviews with Jewish Israelis living in Germany, Poland, France, and other countries, supplemented with in-depth scholarly essays. The interviewees draw upon their lived experiences to reflect on anti-Jewish rhetoric, the role of Israel, and the relationship between antisemitism and the persecution of other minorities.

Of about a million Jews that arrived to Israel from the (former) USSR after 1989 some 12% left the country by the end of 2017. It is estimated that about a half of them left "back" for the FSU, and the rest for the USA, Canada and the Western Europe. The book provides a comprehensive analysis of this specific Jewish Israeli Diaspora group through cutting-edge approaches in the social sciences, and examines the settlement patterns of Israeli Russian-speaking emigrants, their identity, social demographic profile, reasons of emigration, their economic achievements, identification, and status vis-a-vis host Jewish and non-Jewish environment, vision of Israel, migration interests and behavior, as well as their social and community networks, elites and institutions. Vladimir Ze'ev Khanin makes a significant contribution to migration theory, academic understanding of transnational Diasporas, and sheds a new light on the identity and structure of contemporary Israeli society. The book is based on the unique statistics from Israeli and other Government sources and sociological information obtained from the author's first of this kind on-going study of Israeli Russian-speaking emigrant communities in different regions of the world.

This book analyses four case studies of Holocaust memory activism in Poland, contextualized within recent debates about Polish-Jewish relations and approached through a theoretical framework informed by critical theory. Three cases are advocacy groups, each located in a different region of Poland-Lublin, Krakow, and Sejny-and each group is presented with attention to the local context and specific dynamics of its vision and strategy. The fourth case study is the state, which has emerged as a powerful memory actor. Using research based on extensive fieldwork, including interviews and direct observation, the author argues that memory activism must grapple with emotional attachments to identity if it is to move beyond a reconciliation paradigm. Drawing on works from semiotics and critical trauma studies, the volume analyzes the assumptions each memory actor makes about three dimensions of Holocaust memory: 1) the relationship of the individual to Polish national identity; 2) the possibility of a reconciled Polish-Jewish history; and 3) the assignment of traumatic suffering to a particular group or event.

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) was the first Ashkenazic chief rabbi of mandatory Palestine. Admired for the incredible diversity of his talents and interests--talmudist, halakhist, kabbalist, mystic, theologian, moralist, poet, and communal leader--Rav Kook's world outlook extolled breadth and derided narrow specialization. More than any other Orthodox thinker in modern times, he addressed, squarely and boldly, the confrontation between Judaism and the modern world. Kook serves as a natural model to those Jews who seek a religious understanding of and response to the culture and politics of the modern age.
These essays, most published here for the first time, offer a range of analyses and interpretations covering, in an accessible, systematic, and comprehensive fashion the major areas of Rav Kook's thought. Among the issues discussed are: his relationship to the Jewish mystical, philosophical, and halakhic traditions; poetry and spirituality; harmonism and pluralism; tolerance and its limits; Zionism, messianism, and politics; and Rav Kook today.

Medical experimentation on human subjects during the Third Reich raises deep moral and ethical questions. This volume features prominent voices in the filed of bioethics reflecting on a wide rang of topics and issues. Amid all contemporary discussions of ethical in science, many ethicists, historians, Holocaust specialists and medical professionals strongly feel that we should understand the past in order to make more enlightened ethical decisions.

In Poland and elsewhere there has been a noticeable increase of interest in various aspects of the Polish-Jewish past which can be explained, the author argues, in terms of a broader intellectual need to explore the "blank spots" of Poland's national history. This quest begins and ends with Polish anti-Semitism and the Shoah, during which most of Europe's Jews were annihilated on Polish soil, but also focuses on the events of 1946-1968, the years of pogroms, anti-Semitic campaigns, and mass emigration of the Jews from Poland. All these became main issues of public reflection in Poland after a silence for almost forty years and led to the widespread view that Polish-Jewish relations are irredeemably poisoned by anti-Semitism. If this is the case, how is it possible then, the author asks, that Jews still play an important role in the cultural expressions and the consciousness of the Polish people? To find an answer, she explored Polish-Jewish relations in a small Galacian town from the early 19th century to the end of World War II. Detailed analysis of archival materials as well as interviews with Polish inhabitants of this town and Jewish survivors living elsewhere reveal a pattern of Polish-Jewish interdependence that has led to a far more complex picture than is generally assumed.

This bibliography provides comprehensive coverage of Polish-Jewish relations from the first partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772 up to the outbreak of World War II in 1939. It demonstrates the immensity of the writing dedicated to Jewish-Polish coexistence during the last two centuries. The rich heritage of this coexistence, during times of partitions and interwar independence, is presented here in an incisive documentary collection of sources for academic research. These sources are entered topically under thirty-four distinct chapter headings that represent a wide variety of subject matter, including cultural activity, labor and political movements, social reform, religion, and demography.

The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewryis a collection of eyewitness testimonies, letters, diaries, affidavits, and other documents on the activities of the Nazis against Jews in the camps, ghettoes, and towns of Eastern Europe. Arguably, the only apt comparism is to The Gulag Archipelago of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This definitive edition of The Black Book, including for the first time materials omitted from previous editions, is a major addition to the literature on the Holocaust. It will be of particular interest to students, teachers, and scholars of the Holocaust and those interested in the history of Europe.

By the end of 1942, 1.4 million Jews had been killed by the Einsatzgruppen that followed the German army eastward; by the end of the war, nearly two million had been murdered in Russia and Eastern Europe. Of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, about one-third fell in the territories of the USSR. The single most important text documenting that slaughter is The Black Book, compiled by two renowned Russian authors Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman. Until now, The Black Book was only available in English in truncated editions. Because of its profound significance, this new and definitive English translation of The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry is a major literary and intellectual event.

From the time of the outbreak of the war, Ehrenburg and Grossman collected the eyewitness testimonies that went into The Black Book. As early as 1943 they were planning its publication; the first edition appeared in 1944. During the years immediately after the war, Grossman assisted Ehrenburg in compiling additional materials for a second edition, which appeared in 1946 (in English as well as Russian).

Since the fall of the Soviet regime, Irina Ehrenburg, the daughter of Ilya Ehrenburg, has recovered the lost portions of the manuscript sent to Yad Vashem. The texts recovered by Ms. Ehrenburg include numerous documents that had been censored from the original manuscript, as well as items that had been hidden by the Grossman family. In addition, she verified and, where appropriate, corrected the accuracy of documents that had already appeared in earlier editions of The Black Book.

The Bible presents only a small portion of the laws necessary for a state to function. Nevertheless, whole tractates of the Talmud discuss a wide variety of legal issues both civil and criminal. Although the jurisdiction of the beth din was limited in every land where Jews have lived, the scholars felt that it was important to develop a system which dealt with every aspect of life. Quite a few of the issues were discussed at a purely theoretical level. But faced with specific problems in their respective communities, the rabbinic scholars were forced to be practical and go beyond the traditional halakhah in order to protect the community. This mixture of idealism and reality shape the later rabbinic discussions, some elements of which have been incorporated into modern Israeli law, but also shape modern Jewish thinking in the Diaspora. This area of the halakhah has been rather neglected, but this volume will no doubt stimulate further research. Published in Association with the Solomon B. Freehof Institute of Progressive Halakhah

Oliver Cromwell's readmission of the Jews to England in 1656 has traditionally been regarded as a watershed in the history of the Jews in England; the culmination of a Christian enthusiasm for Jewish ideas which had been gathering strength since the Reformation. As well as providing a critical account of the historiography of readmission as a definitive act of toleration, this book reinterprets Christian philosemitism of the early modern period in the context of historically specific religious and political debates.

The Israel Conflict in the Jewish Community.

Since 1945, the Jewish population in Germany has grown steadily and there has been a flourishing of "Jewish" culture in Germany. Does this development mean that Jews are playing a significant role in German social life or that the German-Jewish relationship, often referred to as a kind of symbiosis, has re-emerged? The essays in this book cover the changes in German society since 1945 in Jewish communities, literature, theater, film, architecture, and other areas including an examination of the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Austria.