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.

From its founding in the late seventeenth century, Newark, New Jersey, was a vibrant and representative center of Jewish life in America. Geographically and culturally situated between New York City and its outlying suburbs, Newark afforded Jewish residents the advantages of a close-knit community along with the cultural abundance and social dynamism of urban life. In Newark, all of the representative stages of modern Jewish experience were enacted, from immigration and acculturation to upward mobility and community building. The Enduring Community is a lively and evocative social history of the Jewish presence in Newark as well as an examination of what Newark tells us about social assimilation, conflict and change.

Grounded in documentary research, the volume makes extensive use of interviews and oral histories. The author traces the growth of the Jewish population in the pre-Revolutionary period to its settlement of German Jews in the 1840s and Eastern European Jews in the 1880s. Helmreich delineates areas of contention and cooperation between these groups and relates how an American identity was eventually forged within the larger ethnic mix of the city. Jewish population in politics, the establishment of Jewish schools, synagogues, labor unions, charities, and community groups are described together with cultural and recreational life. Despite the formal and emotional bonds that formed over a century, Jewish neighborhoods in Newark did not survive the postwar era. The trek to the suburbs, the erosion of Newark's tax base, and deteriorating services accelerated a movement outward that mirrored the demographic patterns of cities across America. By the time of the Newark riots in 1967, the Jewish presence was largely absent.

This volume reclaims a lost history and gives personalized voice to the dreams, aspirations, and memories of a dispersed community. It demonstrates how former Newarkers built new Jewish communities in the surrounding suburbs, an area dubbed "MetroWest" by Jewish leaders. The Enduring Community is must reading for students of Jewish social history, sociologists, urban studies specialists, and readers interested in the history of New Jersey. The book includes archival photographs form the periods discussed.

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.

The thirteen chapters in this book are derived from the First International Conference on Jewish Humor held at Tel-Aviv University. The authors are scientists from the areas of literature, linguistics, sociology, psychology, history, communications, the theater, and Jewish studies. They all try to understand different aspects of Jewish humor, and they evoke associations, of a local-logical nature, with Jewish tradition. This compilation reflects the first interdisciplinary approach to Jewish humor.

The chapters are arranged in four parts. The first section relates to humor as a way of coping with Jewish identity. Joseph Dorinson's chapter underscores the dilemma facing Jewish comedians in the United States. These comics try to assimilate into American culture, but without giving up their Jewish identity. The second section of the book deals with a central function of humor--aggression. Christie Davies makes a clear distinction between jokes that present the Jew as a victim of anti-Semitic attacks and those in which the approach is not aggressive. The third part focuses on humor in the Jewish tradition. Lawrence E. Mintz writes about jokes involving Jewish and Christian clergymen. The last part of the book deals with humor in Israel. David Alexander talks about the development of satire in Israel.

Other chapters and contributors include: "Psycho-Social Aspects of Jewish Humor in Israel and in the Diaspora" by Avner Ziv; "Humor and Sexism: The Case of the Jewish Joke" by Esther Fuchs; "Halachic Issues as Satirical Elements in Nineteenth Century Hebrew Literature" by Yehuda Friedlander; "Do Jews in Israel still laugh at themselves?" by O. Nevo; and "Political Caricature as a Reflection of Israel's Development" by Kariel Gardosh. Each chapter in this volume paves the way for understanding the many facets of Jewish humor. This book will be immensely enjoyable and informative for sociologists, psychologists, and scholars of Judaic studies.

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.

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

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.

"[An] unusual meditation on sex, death, art, and Jewishness. . . . Weber weaves in musings on his own sexual and religious experiences, creating a freewheeling psychoanalytic document whose approach would surely delight the doctor, even if its conclusions might surprise him." -New Yorker "Freud's Trip to Orvieto is at once profound and wonderfully diverse, and as gripping as any detective story. Nicholas Fox Weber mixes psychoanalysis, art history, and the personal with an intricacy and spiritedness that Freud himself would have admired." -John Banville, author of The Sea and The Blue Guitar "This is an ingenious and fascinating reading of Freud's response to Signorelli's frescoes at Orvieto. It is also a meditation on Jewish identity, and on masculinity, memory, and the power of the image. It is filled with intelligence, wit, and clear-eyed analysis not only of the paintings themselves, but how we respond to them in all their startling sexuality and invigorating beauty." -Colm Toibin, author of Brooklyn and Nora Webster After a visit to the cathedral at Orvieto in Italy, Sigmund Freud deemed Luca Signorelli's frescoes the greatest artwork he'd ever encountered; yet, a year later, he couldn't recall the artist's name. When the name came back to him, the images he had so admired vanished from his mind's eye. This is known as the "Signorelli parapraxis" in the annals of Freudian psychoanalysis and is a famous example from Freud's own life of his principle of repressed memory. What was at the bottom of this? There have been many theories on the subject, but Nicholas Fox Weber is the first to study the actual Signorelli frescoes for clues. What Weber finds in these extraordinary Renaissance paintings provides unexpected insight into this famously confounding incident in Freud's biography. As he sounds the depths of Freud's feelings surrounding his masculinity and Jewish identity, Weber is drawn back into his own past, including his memories of an adolescent obsession with a much older woman. Freud's Trip to Orvieto is an intellectual mystery with a very personal, intimate dimension. Through rich illustrations, Weber evokes art's singular capacity to provoke, destabilize, and enchant us, as it did Freud, and awaken our deepest memories, fears, and desires. Nicholas Fox Weber is the director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and author of fourteen books, including biographies of Balthus and Le Corbusier. He has written for the New Yorker, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, ARTnews, Town & Country, and Vogue, among other publications.

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.

"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.

As a field, German-Jewish Studies emphasizes the dangers of nationalism, monoculturalism, and ethnocentrism, while making room for multilingual and transnational perspectives with questions surrounding migration, refugees, exile, and precarity. Focussing on the relevance and utility of the field for the twenty-first century, German-Jewish Studies explores why studying and applying German-Jewish history and culture must evolve and be given further attention today. The volume brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholars to reconsider the history of antisemitism-as well as intersections of antisemitism with racism and colonialism-and how connections to German Jews shed light on the continuities, ruptures, anxieties, and possible futures of German-speaking Jews and their legacies.

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.

[An] engrossing literary debut...Writing in Adolfo's voice gives this suspenseful narrative candor and immediacy. - Kirkus Reviews Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger's Life is "worthy of the best spy novels" and tells the story of Sarah Kaminsky's father, "the genius-forger who committed his know-how and convictions to serve the French Resistance during World War II, saving thousands of Jewish families, and many others over the course of 30 years for various causes around the world." - TED.com A detailed and touching story traversing a century in clandestine shadow crossings, where Adolfo's skill meant life...or death. - Liberation, France Riveting. - Haaretz, Israel Technical prowess, creativity, and self-denial drive the plot in the incredibly lucky life of Adolfo Kaminsky narrated in this exciting historical document. - Elle Magazine, France; 2010 Reader's Choice Award Undoubtedly one of the most captivating books of the season. - Paris Today A pointed, sober biography ...of one of the world's best forgers. - Der Spiegel If made into a film, the life of Adolfo Kaminsky would have the ingredients of suspense thriller, war movie, historical tragedy, intimate drama, romantic comedy and scenes of terror. - O Globo, Brazil A thrilling book. - la Repubblica Federal, Italy Kaminsky has lived, in the shadows, the brightest hours of the Resistance. - Le Monde Best-selling author Sarah Kaminsky takes readers through her father Adolfo Kaminsky's perilous and clandestine career as a real-life forger for the French Resistance, the FLN, and numerous other freedom movements of the twentieth century. Recruited as a young Jewish teenager for his knowledge of dyes, Kaminsky became the primary forger for the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Then, as a professional photographer, Kaminsky spent the next twenty-five years clandestinely producing thousands of counterfeit documents for immigrants, exiles, underground political operatives, and pacifists across the globe. Kaminsky kept his past cloaked in secrecy well into his eighties, until his daughter convinced him to share the details of the life-threatening work he did on behalf of people fighting for justice and peace throughout the world.

Employs the social-psychological study of social rejection, social identity theory, and social memory theory, shedding new light on the topic.

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.

The Trajectory of Holocaust Memory: The Crisis of Testimony in Theory and Practice re-considers survivor testimony, moving from a subject-object reading of the past to a subject-subject encounter in the present. It explores how testimony evolves in relationship to the life of eyewitnesses across time. This book breaks new ground based on three principles. The first draws on Martin Buber's "I-Thou" concept, transforming the object of history into an encounter between subjects. The second employs the Jungian concept of identity, whereby the individual (internal identity) and the persona (external identity) reframe testimony as an extension of the individual. They are a living subject, rather than merely a persona or narrative. The third principle draws on Daniel Kahneman's concept of the experiencing self, which relives events as they occurred, and the remembering self, which reflects on their meaning in sum. Taken together, these principles comprise a new literacy of testimony that enables the surviving victim and the listener to enter a relationship of trust. Designed for readers of Holocaust history and literature, this book defines the modalities of memory, witness, and testimony. It shows how encountering the individual who lived through the past changes how testimony is understood, and therefore what it can come to mean.

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.