Facing the dizzying array of changes commonly referred to as modernity, Jews in 19th-century Eastern Europe and early 20th-century America reflected the crises and opportunities of the modern world most eloquently in their speech, culture, and literature. Relying on those spoken and written words as eyewitnesses, Eli Lederhendler illustrates how the self- perceptions of Jews evolved, both in the Old World and among immigrants to America. He focuses on a wide range of subjects to provide an overview of this clash between old and new and to reveal ways in which cultural conflicts were reconciled.

How, for instance, was messianic language adapted to serve nationalistic goals? What did America signify to Jewish thinkers at the turn of the century? What do Jewish user's guides to the New World tell us about Jewish secular culture and its perspective on sex, love, marriage, etiquette, and health? More generally, what do Jewish letters and literature tell us about how communities adapt to radically new environments?

"Jewish Responses to Modernity" highlights the manner in which codes and symbols are passed from one generation to the next, reinforcing a group's sense of self and helping to define its relations with other. The book clearly demonstrates the importance of language as a vehicle for minority-group self-expression in the past and in the present.

Volume XXV of the distinguished annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry explores new understandings and approaches to Jewish "ethnicity." In current parlance regarding multicultural diversity, Jews are often considered to belong socially to the "majority," whereas "otherness" is reserved for "minorities." But these group labels and their meanings have changed over time. This volume analyzes how "ethnic," "ethnicity," and "identity" have been applied to Jews, past and present, individually and collectively.
Most of the symposium papers on the ethnicity of Jewish people and the social groups they form draw heavily on the case of American Jews, while others offer wider geographical perspectives. Contributors address ex-Soviet Jews in Philadelphia, comparing them to a similar population in Tel Aviv; Communism and ethnicity; intermarriage and group blending; American Jewish dialogue; and German Jewish migration in the interwar decades. Leading academics, employing a variety of social scientific methods and historical paradigms, propose to enhance the clarity of definitions used to relate "ethnic identity" to the Jews. They point to ethnic experience in a variety of different social manifestations: language use in social context, marital behavior across generations, spatial and occupational differentiation in relation to other members of society, and new immigrant communities as sub-ethnic units within larger Jewish populations. They also ponder the relevance of individual experience and preference as compared to the weight of larger socializing factors.
Taken as a whole, this work offers revisionist views on the utility of terms like "Jewish ethnicity" that were given wider scope by scholars in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s.

This book contains fifteen original papers covering, a broad spectrum of topics in Jewish demography and identity, considering both Diaspora communities and the population of Israel. While most of the papers make use of quantitative data, some base themselves on qualitative and archive materials. The book is divided into five parts, reflecting the different complementary dimensions investigated: historical demography, history, and politics, immigration and immigrant adaptation, transnationalism, and demography and identity. This work is presented to Professor Sergio Dellapergola upon his retirement from teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Eli Lederhendler's Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 1880-1920: From Caste to Class reexamines the immigration of Russian Jews to the United States around the turn of the 20th century - a group that accounted for 10 to 15 percent of immigrants to the United States between 1899 and 1920 - challenging and revising common assumptions concerning the ease of their initial adaptation and image as a 'model' immigrant minority. Lederhendler demonstrates that the characteristics for which Jewish immigrants are commonly known - their industriousness, 'middle-class' domestic habits, and political sympathy for the working class - were, in fact, developed in response to their new situation in the United States. This experience realigned Jewish social values and restored to these immigrants a sense of status, honor, and a novel kind of social belonging, and with it the 'social capital' needed to establish a community quite different from the ones they came from.

Volume XXIX of Studies in Contemporary Jewry takes its title from a joke by Groucho Marx: "I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member." The line encapsulates one of the most important characteristics of Jewish humor: the desire to buffer oneself from potentially unsafe or awkward situations, and thus to achieve social and emotional freedom. By studying the history and development of Jewish humor, the essays in this volume not only provide nuanced accounts of how Jewish humor can be described but also make a case for the importance of humor in studying any culture. A recent survey showed that about four in ten American Jews felt that "having a good sense of humor" was "an essential part of what being Jewish means to them," on a par with or exceeding caring for Israel, observing Jewish law, and eating traditional foods. As these essays show, Jewish humor has served many functions as a form of "insider" speech. It has been used to ridicule; to unite people in the face of their enemies; to challenge authority; to deride politics and politicians; in America, to ridicule conspicuous consumption; in Israel, to contrast expectations of political normalcy and bitter reality. However, much of contemporary Jewish humor is designed not only or even primarily as insider speech. Rather, it rewards all those who get the punch line. A Club of Their Own moves beyond general theorizing about the nature of Jewish humor by serving a smorgasbord of finely grained, historically situated, and contextualized interdisciplinary studies of humor and its consumption in Jewish life in the modern world.

Volume XXI of the distinguished annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry marks sixty years since the end of the Second World War and forty years since the Second Vatican Council's efforts to revamp Church relations with the Jewish people and the Jewish faith. Jews, Catholics, and the Burden of History offers a collection of new scholarship on the nature of the Jewish-Catholic encounter between 1945 and 2005, with an emphasis on how this relationship has emerged from the shadow of the Holocaust.

Facing the dizzying array of changes commonly referred to as modernity, Jews in 19th-century Eastern Europe and early 20th-century America reflected the crises and opportunities of the modern world most eloquently in their speech, culture, and literature. Relying on those spoken and written words as eyewitnesses, Eli Lederhendler illustrates how the self- perceptions of Jews evolved, both in the Old World and among immigrants to America. He focuses on a wide range of subjects to provide an overview of this clash between old and new and to reveal ways in which cultural conflicts were reconciled.

How, for instance, was messianic language adapted to serve nationalistic goals? What did America signify to Jewish thinkers at the turn of the century? What do Jewish user's guides to the New World tell us about Jewish secular culture and its perspective on sex, love, marriage, etiquette, and health? More generally, what do Jewish letters and literature tell us about how communities adapt to radically new environments?

"Jewish Responses to Modernity" highlights the manner in which codes and symbols are passed from one generation to the next, reinforcing a group's sense of self and helping to define its relations with other. The book clearly demonstrates the importance of language as a vehicle for minority-group self-expression in the past and in the present.

Understanding the history of Jews in America requires a synthesis of over 350 years of documents, social data, literature and journalism, architecture, oratory, and debate, and each time that history is observed, new questions are raised and new perspectives found. This book presents a readable account of that history, with an emphasis on migration patterns, social and religious life, and political and economic affairs. It explains the long-range development of American Jewry as the product of 'many new beginnings' more than a direct evolution leading from early colonial experiments to latter-day social patterns. This book also shows that not all of American Jewish history has occurred on American soil, arguing that Jews, more than most other Americans, persist in assigning crucial importance to international issues. This approach provides a fresh perspective that can open up the practice of minority-history writing, so that the very concepts of minority and majority should not be taken for granted.

Understanding the history of Jews in America requires a synthesis of over 350 years of documents, social data, literature and journalism, architecture, oratory, and debate, and each time that history is observed, new questions are raised and new perspectives found. This book presents a readable account of that history, with an emphasis on migration patterns, social and religious life, and political and economic affairs. It explains the long-range development of American Jewry as the product of 'many new beginnings' more than a direct evolution leading from early colonial experiments to latter-day social patterns. This book also shows that not all of American Jewish history has occurred on American soil, arguing that Jews, more than most other Americans, persist in assigning crucial importance to international issues. This approach provides a fresh perspective that can open up the practice of minority-history writing, so that the very concepts of minority and majority should not be taken for granted.

Eli Lederhendler's Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 1880-1920: From Caste to Class reexamines the immigration of Russian Jews to the United States around the turn of the 20th century - a group that accounted for 10 to 15 percent of immigrants to the United States between 1899 and 1920 - challenging and revising common assumptions concerning the ease of their initial adaptation and image as a 'model' immigrant minority. Lederhendler demonstrates that the characteristics for which Jewish immigrants are commonly known - their industriousness, 'middle-class' domestic habits, and political sympathy for the working class - were, in fact, developed in response to their new situation in the United States. This experience realigned Jewish social values and restored to these immigrants a sense of status, honor, and a novel kind of social belonging, and with it the 'social capital' needed to establish a community quite different from the ones they came from.

Bringing together contributions from established scholars as well as promising younger academics, Volume XVII of Studies in Contemporary Jewry offers a broad-ranging view of why Judaism, a religion whose observance is more honored in the breach in most western Jewish communities, has garnered attention, authority and controversy in the late 20th century. The volume considers the ways in which theological writings, sweeping social changes, individual or small-group needs, and intra-communal diversity have re-energised Judaism even amidst secular trends in America and Israel.

The closing decade of the 20th century witnessed dramatic upheavals across landscapes that had, until 1939, housed most of the world's Jewish population: the overturning of the East European Communist governments and the fall of the USSR, accompanied by a major Jewish emigration movement. The legacy of the Jewish presence in those countries, and the ways in which it became enmeshed in the quest by people of the region-Jews and non-Jews alike-to secure their future, highlights fundamental issues about the politics of memory, national identity, and the relative stability of regimes in the region. If those questions were important even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, understanding their implications now seems even more crucial. In a field fraught with conflicting narratives, the challenges of social and political reconstruction are primary concerns for peoples and governments. The experts contributing to this volume apply interdisciplinary approaches to analyze and interpret a multiplicity of post-communist social realities and aid our understanding of recent events.