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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent
social thinkers in France, Germany, and the United States sought to
understand the modern world taking shape around them. Although they
worked in different national traditions and emphasized different
features of modern society, they repeatedly invoked Jews as a
touchstone for defining modernity and national identity in a
context of rapid social change. In Modernity and the Jews in
Western Social Thought, Chad Alan Goldberg brings us a major new
study of Western social thought through the lens of Jews and
Judaism. In France, where antisemites decried the French Revolution
as the "Jewish Revolution," Emile Durkheim challenged depictions of
Jews as agents of revolutionary subversion or counterrevolutionary
reaction. When German thinkers such as Karl Marx, Georg Simmel,
Werner Sombart, and Max Weber debated the relationship of the Jews
to modern industrial capitalism, they reproduced, in secularized
form, cultural assumptions derived from Christian theology. In the
United States, William Thomas, Robert Park, and their students
conceived the modern city and its new modes of social organization
in part by reference to the Jewish immigrants concentrating there.
In all three countries, social thinkers invoked real or purported
differences between Jews and gentiles to elucidate key dualisms of
modern social thought. The Jews thus became an intermediary through
which social thinkers discerned in a roundabout fashion the nature,
problems, and trajectory of their own wider societies. Goldberg
rounds out his fascinating study by proposing a novel explanation
for why Jews were such an important cultural reference point. He
suggests a rethinking of previous scholarship on Orientalism,
Occidentalism, and European perceptions of America, arguing that
history extends into the present, with the Jews and now the Jewish
state continuing to serve as an intermediary for self-reflection in
the twenty-first century.
American public universities were founded in a civic tradition that
differentiated them from their European predecessors-steering away
from the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Like many such
higher education institutions across the United States, the
University of Wisconsin's mission, known as the Wisconsin Idea,
emphasizes a responsibility to serve the needs of the state and its
people. This commitment, which necessarily requires a pledge to
academic freedom, has recently been openly threatened by state and
federal actors seeking to dismantle a democratic and expansive
conception of public service. Using the Wisconsin Idea as a lens,
Education for Democracy argues that public higher education
institutions remain a bastion of collaborative problem solving.
Examinations of partnerships between the state university and
people of the state highlight many crucial and lasting
contributions to issues of broad public concern such as
conservation, LGBTQ rights, and poverty alleviation. The
contributors restore the value of state universities and humanities
education as a public good, contending that they deserve renewed
and robust support.
There was a time when America's poor faced a stark choice between
access to social welfare and full civil rights--a predicament that
forced them to forfeit their citizenship in exchange for economic
relief. Over time, however, our welfare system improved
dramatically. But as Chad Alan Goldberg here demonstrates, its
legacy of disenfranchisement persisted. Indeed, from Reconstruction
onward, welfare policies have remained a flashpoint for recurring
struggles over the boundaries of citizenship.
"Citizens and Paupers" explores this contentious history by
analyzing and comparing three major programs: the Freedmen's
Bureau, the Works Progress Administration, and the present-day
system of workfare that arose in the 1990s. Each of these overhauls
of the welfare state created new groups of clients, new policies
for aiding them, and new disputes over citizenship--conflicts that
were entangled in racial politics and of urgent concern for social
activists.
This combustible mix of racial tension and social reform continues
to influence how we think about welfare, and "Citizens and Paupers"
is an invaluable analysis of the roots of the debate.
There was a time when America's poor faced a stark choice between
access to social welfare and full civil rights--a predicament that
forced them to forfeit their citizenship in exchange for economic
relief. Over time, however, our welfare system improved
dramatically. But as Chad Alan Goldberg here demonstrates, its
legacy of disenfranchisement persisted. Indeed, from Reconstruction
onward, welfare policies have remained a flashpoint for recurring
struggles over the boundaries of citizenship.
"Citizens and Paupers" explores this contentious history by
analyzing and comparing three major programs: the Freedmen's
Bureau, the Works Progress Administration, and the present-day
system of workfare that arose in the 1990s. Each of these overhauls
of the welfare state created new groups of clients, new policies
for aiding them, and new disputes over citizenship--conflicts that
were entangled in racial politics and of urgent concern for social
activists.
This combustible mix of racial tension and social reform continues
to influence how we think about welfare, and "Citizens and Paupers"
is an invaluable analysis of the roots of the debate.
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