Priests in Exile is the first comprehensive scholarly opus in English to reconstruct the history of the mysterious Temple of Onias, a Jewish temple built by a Jerusalemite high priest in his Egyptian exile that functioned in parallel with the Temple of Jerusalem. Piotrkowski's book addresses a topic that is mysterious, important and anomalous: a Jewish community of mercenary priests in the (Egyptian) Diaspora in which the priestly sacrificial ritual was carried out daily over a period of more than two hundred years until the first century CE, outlasting the Jerusalem Temple by about three years. Although the book focuses on the very circumscribed topic of the parallel Temple it casts a wide net, placing the story in the context of Jewish Diaspora life in ancient times. Ancient topics and texts are brought to bear, including papyri, epigraphy, archaeology, as well as the modern literature. Piotrkowski throws new light on a fascinating episode of ancient Jewish history that is usually left in the dark.

Like most 19th and 20th century national movements, culture played a focal role in the shaping of Jewish-Israeli national identity, and with Zionism being the secular movement that it is, culture became the effective prism through which religious and historical notions of Jewish nationalism were filtered. As Israel reaches its 50th year of statehood, Israeli society faces a deepening crisis of identity. This is particularly evident in Israeli culture which, for quite some time, has been effectively disintegrating into several simultaneous sub-cultures. This process has gained momentum during the 1990s due to a relaxation of national cohesiveness following the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations on the one hand, and the growing post-modern influences on Israeli culture, on the other. This, in turn, has brought to the fore a whole range of questions which have hitherto been ignored, not least the inter-relationship between the Hebrew and Jewish aspects of Israeli culture.

These essays address Jewish identity, Jewish survival, and Jewish continuity. The authors account for and analyze trends in Jewish identification and the reciprocal effects of the relationship between the Diaspora and Israel at the end of the twentieth century. Jewish identification in contemporary society is a complex phenomenon. Since the emancipation of Jews in Europe and the major historic events of the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel, there have been substantial changes in the collective Jewish identity. As a result, Jewish identity and the Jewish process of identification had to confront the new realities of an open society, its economic globalization, and the impacts of cultural pluralism. The trends in Jewish identification are toward fewer and weaker points of attachment: fewer Jews who hold religious beliefs with such beliefs held less strongly; less religious ritual observance; attachment to Zionism and Israel becoming diluted; and ethnic communal bonds weakening. Jews are also more involved in the wider society in the Diaspora due to fewer barriers and less overt anti-Semitism. This opens up possibilities for cultural integration and assimilation. In Israel, too, there are signs of greater interest in the modern world culture. The major questions addressed by this volume is whether Jewish civilization will continue to provide the basic social framework and values that will lead Jews into the twenty-first century and ensure their survival as a specific social entity. The book contains special contributions by Professor Julius Gould and Professor Irving Louis Horowitz and chapters on "Sociological Analysis of Jewish Identity"; "Jewish Community Boundaries"; and "Factual Accounts from the Diaspora and Israel."

This balanced history offers a concise, readable introduction to Nazi Germany. Combining compelling narrative storytelling with analysis, Joseph W. Bendersky offers an authoritative survey of the major political, economic, and social factors that powered the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Now in its fifth edition, the book incorporates significant research of recent years, analysis of the politics of memory, postwar German controversies about World War II and the Nazi era, and more on non-Jewish victims. Delving into the complexity of social life within the Nazi state, it also reemphasizes the crucial role played by racial ideology in determining the policies and practices of the Third Reich. Bendersky paints a fascinating picture of how average citizens negotiated their way through both the threatening power behind certain Nazi policies and the strong enticements to acquiesce or collaborate. His classic treatment provides an invaluable overview of a subject that retains its historical significance and contemporary importance.

This book introduces the reader to the past and present of Jewish life in Turkey and to Turkish Jewish diaspora communities in Israel, Europe, Latin America and the United States. It surveys the history of Jews in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, examining the survival of Jewish communities during the dissolution of the empire and their emigration to America, Europe, and Israel. In the cases discussed, members of these communities often sought and seek close connections with Turkey, even if those 'ties that bind' are rarely reciprocated by Turkish governments. Contributors also explore Turkish Jewishness today, as it is lived in Israel and Turkey, and as found in 'places of memory' in many cities in Turkey, where Jews no longer exist today.

2006 National Jewish Book Award, Modern Jewish Thought

Long the object of curiosity, admiration, and gossip, rabbis' wives have rarely been viewed seriously as American Jewish religious and communal leaders. We know a great deal about the important role played by rabbis in building American Jewish life in this country, but not much about the role that their wives played. The Rabbi's Wife redresses that imbalance by highlighting the unique contributions of "rebbetzins" to the development of American Jewry.

Tracing the careers of "rebbetzins" from the beginning of the twentieth century until the present, Shuly Rubin Schwartz chronicles the evolution of the role from a few individual rabbis' wives who emerged as leaders to a cohort who worked together on behalf of American Judaism. The Rabbi's Wife reveals the ways these women succeeded in both building crucial leadership roles for themselves and becoming an important force in shaping Jewish life in America.

What does it mean to be Jewish? What is an anti-Semite? Why does the enigmatic identity of the men who founded the first monotheistic religion arouse such passions? We need to return to the Jewish question. We need, first, to distinguish between the anti-Judaism of medieval times, which persecuted the Jews, and the anti-Judaism of the Enlightenment, which emancipated them while being critical of their religion. It is a mistake to confuse the two and see everyone from Voltaire to Hitler as anti-Semitic in the same way. Then we need to focus on the development of anti-Semitism in Europe, especially Vienna and Paris, where the Zionist idea was born. Finally, we need to investigate the reception of Zionism both in the Arab countries and within the Diaspora. Re-examining the Jewish question in the light of these distinctions and investigations, Roudinesco shows that there is a permanent tension between the figures of the universal Jew and the territorial Jew . Freud and Jung split partly over this issue, which gained added intensity after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the Eichmann trial in 1961. Finally, Roudinesco turns to the Holocaust deniers, who started to suggest that the Jews had invented the genocide that befell their people, and to the increasing number of intellectual and literary figures who have been accused of anti-Semitism. This thorough re-examination of the Jewish question will be of interest to students and scholars of modern history and contemporary thought and to a wide readership interested in anti-Semitism and the history of the Jews.

This innovative, ethnographic study of a neighborhood beauty salon investigates how customers constitute a lively, affirming community of peers during their weekly visits. Facing the Mirror gives voice to older women, who, in a sexist and ageist society, are frequently devalued and rendered invisible. These older, mostly Jewish women articulate their experiences of bodily self-presentation, femininity, aging, and caring pertaining to their lives within and outside Julie's International Salon. This book explores the socio-moral significance of these experiences which reveals as much about society as about older women themselves. Women's narratives expose structures of power, inequality, and resistance in the ways women perceive reality, make choices and live in their worlds.

The Torah. The family. The kiddush. The joy. In Jewish Neighborhoods in California: History and Development, Keith Warwick amplifies the essence of Judaism as experienced in California s historic Jewish neighborhoods. Both memory and history, this book contains facts, images, inspiration and a little of what the author calls poetry. There have been, are, and will be Jewish neighborhoods in California, which is home to over a million Jews. These range from Oakland's Jewish Community Center, which was active in West Oakland until the 1960s, to several Jewish enclaves in San Francisco. Los Angeles is a national Center of Judaism. Warwick traces its development over time. The city's Fairfax District contains only a sliver of the Jewry that it held in the early 1900s, while the Pico Robertson Jewish neighborhood is actively growing and is currently home to a growing community of Orthodox Jews. This book captures their vibrant history and changing present.

"Dinner Talk" draws upon the recorded dinner conversations of, and extensive interviews with, native Israeli, American Israeli, and Jewish American middle-class families to explore the cultural styles of sociability and socialization in family discourse. The thesis developed is that family dinners in Western middle-class homes fulfill important functions of sociability for all participants and, at the same time, serve as crucial sites of socialization for children through language and for language use. The book demonstrates the way talk at dinner constructs, reflects, and invokes familial, social, and cultural identities and provides social support for easing the passage of children into adult discourse worlds.
Family discourse at dinner emerges as a particularly rich site for discursive socialization and a highly meaningful enactment of sociable behavior in culturally patterned ways. Although all the families studied have a commom Eastern European background, Israeli and Jewish American families are shown to differ extensively in their interactional styles, in ways that enact historically different, community-related interpretations of the dialectics of continuity and change. Native Israeli, American Israeli, and Jewish American families differ culturally in the ways they negotiate issues of power, independence, and involvement through various speech activities such as the choice and initiation of topics, conversational story-telling, naming practices, metapragmatic discourse, politeness strategies, and in immigrant, bilingual families, language choice and code switching. "Dinner Talk" demonstrates the unique interactional style of each of the groups, linking the observed communication patterns to the ideological, sociocultural, and historical contexts of their respective communities.
This innovative study of family discourse from a cross-cultural perspective will appeal to students and specialists in sociolinguistics, communication, anthropology, child language, and family and Jewish studies, as well as to all interested in patterns of communication within families.

Friedrich Nietzsche occupies a contradictory position in the history of ideas: he came up with the concept of a master race, yet an eminent Jewish scholar like Martin Buber translated his Also sprach Zarathustra into Polish and remained in a lifelong intellectual dialogue with Nietzsche. Sigmund Freud admired his intellectual courage and was not at all reluctant to admit that Nietzsche had anticipated many of his basic ideas.
This unique collection of essays explores the reciprocal relationship between Nietzsche and Jewish culture. It is organized in two parts: the first examines Nietzsche's attitudes towards Jews and Judaism; the second Nietzsche's influence on Jewish intellectuals as diverse and as famous as Franz Kafka, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Sigmund Freud. Each carefully selected essay explores one aspect of Nietzsche's relation to Judaism and German intellectual history, from Heinrich Heine to Nazism.

Friedrich Nietzsche occupies a contradictory position in the history of ideas: he came up with the concept of a master race, yet an eminent Jewish scholar like Martin Buber translated his Also sprach Zarathustra into Polish and remained in a lifelong intellectual dialogue with Nietzsche. Sigmund Freud admired his intellectual courage and was not at all reluctant to admit that Nietzsche had anticipated many of his basic ideas.
This unique collection of essays explores the reciprocal relationship between Nietzsche and Jewish culture. It is organized in two parts: the first examines Nietzsche's attitudes towards Jews and Judaism; the second Nietzsche's influence on Jewish intellectuals as diverse and as famous as Franz Kafka, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Sigmund Freud. Each carefully selected essay explores one aspect of Nietzsche's relation to Judaism and German intellectual history, from Heinrich Heine to Nazism.

When The Ghetto first appeared seventy years ago, Bruno Lasker in the New York Times called it "the most informing general account of the cultural background and psychological development of the American Jew." Arguably, the book still occupies this special niche in ethnic studies. Hasia Diner's extensive new introduction, in itself an important contribution to the history of sociological ideas, points out that The Ghetto "stands in a class by itself as a piece of scholarship of the early twentieth century." That judgment stands.

The Ghetto traces back to the medieval era the Jewish immigrant colonies that have virtually disappeared from our modern cities--to be replaced by other ghettoes. Analytical as well as historical, Wirth's book lays bare the rich inner life hidden behind the drab exterior of the ghetto. The book describes the significant physical, social, and psychic influences of ghetto life upon the Jews. Wirth demonstrates that the economic life of the modern Jew still reflects the impress of the social isolation of ghetto life; at first self-imposed, later formalized, and finally imposed by others through a variety of extralegal mechanisms. He presents a faithful picture of an environment now largely vanished and illustrates a sociological method in so doing.

In his foreword to the book, Robert E. Park reminds us that the city is not merely an artifact but an organism. Its growth is often uncontrolled and undesigned. The forms it tends to assume are those which represent and correspond to the functions that it is called upon to perform. The Ghetto will be important to scholars in Jewish studies, the history of sociology, American ethnic history, and social history. This volume is the second in a series of studies in ethnicity edited by Ronald H. Bayor of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

With an overview essay, timeline, reference entries, and annotated bibliography, this resource is a concise, one-stop reference on antisemitism in today's society. Stretching back to biblical times, antisemitism is perhaps the world's oldest hatred of a group. It has manifested itself around the world, sometimes taking the form of superficially innocent jokes and at other times promoting such tragedies as the Holocaust. Far from disappeared, its continued existence in today's society is evidenced by vandalism of Jewish cemeteries and shootings at synagogues. This book explores the causes and consequences of contemporary antisemitism, placing this form of hatred in its historical, political, and social contexts. An overview essay surveys the background and significance of antisemitism and provides historical context for discussions of contemporary topics. A timeline highlights key events related to antisemitism. Some 50 alphabetically arranged reference entries provide objective, fundamental information about people, events, and other topics related to antisemitism. These entries cite works for further reading and provide cross-references to related topics. An annotated bibliography cites and evaluates some of the most important resources on antisemitism suitable for student research. An overview essay places antisemitism in its historical context and discusses its contemporary significance A timeline identifies key developments related to antisemitism Roughly 50 alphabetically arranged reference entries provide objective, fundamental information about topics related to antisemitism, with an emphasis on modern society Entry bibliographies direct users to specific sources of additional information An annotated bibliography lists and evaluates some of the most important broad works on antisemitism

In this illuminating history, Dan Cohn-Sherbok traces the development of Jewish history from ancient times to the present day. Containing over 100 maps and 30 photographs, this is a comprehensive atlas of Jewish history designed for students and the general reader. It is ideally suited for those courses in Jewish or Biblical Studies, serving as a handy reference guide as well as a textbook.

Soviet Jewish Aliyah 1989-92 provides new insights into a period of fundamental change in Israel and the Middle East. It explains how the Israeli government failed to effectively handle the integration of new emigres from the Soviet Union, and how it alienated traditional Likud supporters among Oriental Jews in Israel. Clive Jones's argument is that, by placing its ideological commitment to the retention of the West Bank above other priorities, the Likud leadership made itself beholden to the United States for financial assistance which was then denied. The resulting fundamental change in the composition and orientation of the Israeli political leadership has had a major influence on the course of the Arab-Israeli peace process.

Throughout the nineteenth century the entire structure of the Ashkenazi world crumbled. What remains of Ashkenazi Jewry today is split into irreconcilable religious camps on the one hand, and a large body of secularized Jews of greater or lesser ethnicity on the other. The Sephardi and Oriental Jews, who form the other great branch of world Jewry, had a very different encounter with the forces of modernity. This book examines some of their responses to its challenges. The Sephardi religious leaders, who had been historically more open to general culture, reacted with neither the anti-traditionalism of Reform Judaism nor the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox's uncompromising rejection of everything new. Their response was rather one of active and creative halakhic engagement coupled with a tolerant attitude toward the growing secularized elements of their communities. Much has been written on the social, economic, and political transformation of Sephardi and Oriental Jewry in the modern era. However, this is the first book in English devoted to the religious changes taking place in this important segment of Jewry which now constitutes the majority of Jews in the Jewish state.

This book represents a new reading of a key moment in the history of East European Jewry, namely the period preceding the collapse of the Russian Empire. Offering a novel analysis of relations between the Russian army and Jews during the First World War, it points to the army and military authorities as the 'gravediggers' of the Jews' fragile co-existence with the tsarist regime. It focuses on various aspects of the Russian army's brutal treatment of Jews living in or near the Eastern Front, where three quarters of European Jewry were living when the war began. At the same time, it shows the enormous harm this anti-Jewish campaign wreaked on the Russian empire's economy, finances, public security, and international status.

This work includes international secondary literature on anti-Semitism published throughout the world, from the earliest times to the present. It lists books, dissertations, and articles from periodicals and collections from a diverse range of disciplines. Written accounts are included among the recorded titles, as are manifestations of anti-Semitism in the visual arts (e.g. painting, caricatures or film), action taken against Jews and Judaism by discriminating judiciaries, pogroms, massacres and the systematic extermination during the Nazi period. The bibliography also covers works dealing with philo-Semitism or Jewish reactions to anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hate. An informative abstract in English is provided for each entry, and Hebrew titles are provided with English translations.

In the autumn of 1917, the British government established three batallions of infantry for the reception of non-nationalized Russian Jews. Known colloquially as the Jewish Legion, the batallions served in Egypt and Palestine, before their eventual disbandment in the late spring of 1921. By drawing on the testimonies of over 600 veterans, this unique unit is analyzed from within its political and social context, providing fresh insights into Anglo-Jewish relations during the early twentieth century.