Browse

On August 3, 1492, the same day that Columbus set sail from Spain, the long and glorious history of that nation's Jewish community officially came to a close. The expulsion of Europe's last major Jewish community ended more than a thousand years of unparalleled prosperity, cultural vitality and intellectual productivity. Yet, the crisis of 1492 also gave rise to a dynamic and resilient diaspora society spanning East and West. This book traces the various paths of migration and resettlement of Sephardic Jews and Conversos over the course of the tumultuous sixteenth century. Pivotally, it argues that the exiles did not become “Sephardic Jews” overnight. Only in the second and third generation did these disparate groups coalesce and adopt a “Sephardic Jewish” identity. The book presents a new and fascinating portrait of Jewish society in transition from the medieval to the early modern period, a portrait that challenges many longstanding assumptions about the differences between Europe and the Middle East.

Over the past generation, modern Israel has evolved in ways that often differ from both what its founders envisioned and how it is popularly perceived. In this volume, experts draw on recent scholarship from both the humanities and the social sciences to explore subjects that illustrate these insights. Topics discussed include the changing composition of Israel’s population, feminist trends in its Orthodox community, and transformations in its culture and social identity, as well as the country’s Palestinian citizens and the development of Israel’s relationship to the American Jewish community.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient inscriptions, and Jewish books preserved within various Christian communities demonstrate that Jewish identity took a variety of forms in the period following that described in the Hebrew Bible. However, the teachings of only one of these groups – the rabbis – became normative. This was also the period during which prayer and synagogues emerged as a widespread practice. It was also at this time that the foundation for the eventual break with Christianity, which began as a form of Judaism, was laid. Remarkably, several of the features from this Second Temple period are shared with our modern times.

What do Jews think scripture is? How do the People of the Book conceive of the Book of Books? In what ways is it authoritative? Who has the right to interpret it? Is it divinely or humanly written? And have Jews always thought about the Bible in the same way? This book traces the way some of the most important Jewish thinkers throughout history have addressed these questions from the rabbinic era through the medieval Islamic world to modern Jewish scholarship. The chapters address why different Jewish thinkers, writers, and communities have turned to the Bible—and what they expect to get from it. Ultimately, the book argues, in understanding the ways Jews construct scripture, we begin to understand the ways Jews construct themselves.

This book challenges the conventional view of waning American Jewish support for Israel. Instead, it shows that we are in the midst of a shift from a “mobilization” approach, which first emerged with the new state and focused on supporting Israel through big, centralized organizations, to an “engagement” approach marked by direct and personal relations with the Jewish state. Today, growing numbers of American Jews travel to Israel, consume Israeli news and culture, and focus their philanthropy and lobbying in line with their personal political viewpoints. As a result, American Jews find Israel more personally meaningful than ever before. Yet, at the same time, their ability to impact policy has diminished as they no longer speak with a unified voice.

Despite an outpouring of scholarship on the Holocaust, little work has focused on what happened to Europe’s Jewish communities after the war ended. And unlike many other European nations in which the majority of the Jewish population perished, France had a significant postwar Jewish community that numbered in the hundreds of thousands. This book offers new insight on key aspects of French Jewish life in the decades following the end of World War II. How Jews had been treated during the war continued to influence both Jewish and non-Jewish society in the post-war years. The book examines the ways in which moral and political issues of responsibility combined with the urgent problems and practicalities of restoration, and it illustrates how national imperatives, international dynamics, and a changed self-perception all profoundly helped to shape the fortunes of post-war French Judaism. The book offers a variety of perspectives on Jewish studies, modern and contemporary history, literary and cultural analysis, philosophy, sociology, and theology. It establishes multiple connections between such different areas of concern as the running of orphanages, the establishment of new social and political organizations, the restoration of teaching and religious facilities, and the development of intellectual responses to the Holocaust.

Since 1999 hundreds of thousands of young American Jews have visited Israel on an all-expense-paid 10-day pilgrimage-tour known as Birthright Israel. The most elaborate of the state-supported homeland tours that are cropping up all over the world, this tour seeks to foster in the American Jewish diaspora a lifelong sense of attachment to Israel based on ethnic and political solidarity. Over a half-billion dollars (and counting) has been spent cultivating this attachment, and despite 9/11 and the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict the tours are still going strong. Based on over seven years of first-hand observation in modern day Israel, the book provides an on-the-ground look at this hotly debated and widely emulated use of tourism to forge transnational ties. We ride the bus, attend speeches with the Prime Minister, hang out in the hotel bar, and get a fresh feel for young American Jewish identity and contemporary Israel. We see how tourism's dynamism coupled with the vibrant human agency of the individual tourists inevitably complicate tour leaders' efforts to rein tourism in and bring it under control. By looking at the broader meaning of tourism, the book brings to light the contradictions inherent in the tours and the ways that people understand their relationship to place both materially and symbolically. The book offers a new way of thinking about tourism as a way through which people develop understandings of place, society, and self.

Jews have played an integral role in the history of obscenity in America. For most of the 20th century, Jewish entrepreneurs and editors led the charge against obscenity laws. Jewish lawyers battled literary censorship even when their non-Jewish counterparts refused to do so, and they won court decisions in favor of texts including Ulysses, A Howl, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Tropic of Cancer. Jewish literary critics have provided some of the most influential courtroom testimony on behalf of freedom of expression. The anti-Semitic stereotype of the lascivious Jew has made many historians hesitant to draw a direct link between Jewishness and obscenity. This book addresses the Jewishness of participants in obscenity controversies in the U.S. directly, exploring the transformative roles played by a host of neglected figures in the development of modern and postmodern American culture. The diversity of American Jewry means that there is no single explanation for Jews'interventions in this field. Rejecting generalizations, the book offers case studies that pair cultural histories with close readings of both contested texts and trial transcripts to reveal the ways in which specific engagements with obscenity mattered to particular American Jews at discrete historical moments.

Although women constitute half of the Jewish population and have always played essential roles in ensuring Jewish continuity and the preservation of Jewish beliefs and values, only recently have their contributions and achievements received sustained scholarly attention. Scholars have begun to investigate Jewish women's domestic, economic, intellectual, spiritual, and creative roles in Jewish life from biblical times to the present. Yet little of this important work has filtered down beyond specialists in their respective academic fields. This book brings the broad new insights they have uncovered to the world. It communicates this research to a wider public of students and educated readers outside of the academy by presenting accessible and engaging chapters written by key senior scholars that introduce the reader to different aspects of women and Judaism. The chapters discuss feminist approaches to Jewish law and Torah study, the spirituality of Eastern European Jewish women, Jewish women in American literature, and many other issues.