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Jewish Traditions: JPS Guide (A JPS Guide)
by Dr. Ronald L. EisenbergThanks to these generous donors for making the publication of this book possible: Miles z&”l and Chris Lerman; David Lerman and Shelley WallockThe bestselling guide to understanding Jewish traditions, now in paperbackThis is a comprehensive and authoritative resource with ready answers to questions about almost all aspects of Jewish life and practice: life-cycle events, holidays, ritual and prayer, Jewish traditions and customs, and more. Ronald Eisenberg has distilled an immense amount of material from classic and contemporary sources into a single volume, which provides thousands of insights into the origins, history, and current interpretations of a wealth of Jewish traditions and customs.Divided into four sections—Synagogue and Prayers, Sabbaths and Festivals, Life-Cycle Events, and Miscellaneous (a large section that includes such diverse topics as Jewish literature, food, and plants and animals)—this is an encyclopedic reference for anyone who wants easily accessible, accurate information about all things Jewish. Eisenberg writes for a wide, diversified audience, and is respectful of the range of practices and beliefs within today's American Jewish community—from Orthodox to liberal.
Jewish-Transjordanian Relations 1921-1948: Alliance of Bars Sinister
by Yoav GelberYoav Gelber traces the relation between the stae of Israel and the Hashemite dynasty of Transjordan by focusing on the connection between the two regions from as early as 1921 when Abdullah first appeared on the scene, and by using Jewish sources as well as British records.
Jewish Travellers
by Elkan Nathan AdlerFirst published in 1930. The wandering Jew is a very real character in the great drama of history. He has travelled as nomad and settler, as fugitive and conqueror, as exile and colonist and as merchant and scholar. Of necessity bilingual and therefore the master of many languages, the Jew was the ideal commercial traveller and interpreter.Based on the volume of 24 Hebrew texts of Jewish travellers by J D Eisenstein, this volume begins with the ninth century. After the sixteenth century geographical discoveries had made the whole world familiar to most people. Consequently, the wandering Jew becomes less the diplomatist or scientist but still remains a link between the scattered members of the Diaspora. The volume ends in the middle of the eighteenth century and taken as a whole provides a survey of Jewish travel during the Middle Ages. For this translation, some of the texts have been abridged, whilst retaining many of the original notes.
The Jewish Wars: Reflections By One Of The Belligerents
by Edward AlexanderEdward Alexander launches a counterattack in the war of ideas over Zionism, very much a warrior using words and ideas as his weapons. This book begins with a dissection of the first (1987) Intifada and deals with people and events through 1994, when Israel, having embraced the PLO, began their withdrawal from the disputed territories. Alexander shows how the Intifada proved to be a potent propaganda tool for its organizers. The spectacle of young Palestinians facing Israeli soldiers won for Arabs precisely the victory they had sought: it moved liberal, especially Jewish liberal, sympathy decisively to the side of the Palestinians.Alexander criticizes prominent figures in politics, journalism, education, and literature who express hatred of Jews, Judaism, and Israel. He gives special attention to major combatants in the Jewish wars such as the late Edward Said, Desmond Tutu, Patrick Buchanan, Alexander Cockburn, Michael Lerner, Noam Chomsky, and still more to certain personality types: the timorous Jew cloaking his timidity in the robes of the biblical prophet; the treacherous Jew presenting betrayal of his own people as ethical idealism; the Israelophobe parading as a dispassionate "critic of Israeli policies," the journalist exploiting the full public address and public relations systems provided by his profession.The recurring themes in Alexander's essays are the relations between American and Israeli Jews and the incorporation of anti-Zionism into liberalism, multiculturalism, and literary criticism. He analyzes the politically motivated distortion and exploitation of the Holocaust, the strategies of moral and political discrimination used against Israel, the self-deceptions by which prominent American and Israeli Jews evade the implications of such discrimination, and the growing impunity with which antisemitic tropes can be employed at both ends of the political spectrum. The author's new introduction traces these developments into the twenty-f
Jewish West Virginia (Images of America)
by Julian H. PreislerWest Virginia has a unique history of Jewish settlement dating back to 1849 when the first Jewish organization in the state, a Jewish burial society, was established by a small group of German Jewish immigrants in the city of Wheeling. From modest beginnings, Jews settled in towns and cities and established businesses and communal organizations. Since that time, the Jews of the Mountain State have been an integral part of the state's economic, cultural, and political life. Though always relatively small in size, West Virginia's Jewish population has been a strong advocate for the state and gained prominence in many areas. Readers will recognize images of well-known institutions such as Shoney's, Cohen's, Frankenberger's, Embee's, and others that bring back fond memories. Despite declines in Jewish population numbers, today's Jewish community remains active and involved in the life of the state.
Jewish Wit and Wisdom (Dover Thrift Editions: Speeches/Quotations)
by Herb Galewitz"It's no disgrace to be poor," observed Sholom Aleichem, "but it's no great honor, either." "Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city," remarked George Burns, while Marc Chagall noted that "Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers and never succeeding." These and many more classic examples of Jewish wit and wisdom — sometimes hilarious, frequently profound, almost always incisive — enliven the pages of this entertaining and practical little volume.Some 500 aphorisms include observations and remarks from statesmen, writers, artist, philosophers, jurists, musicians, and celebrities — from the prophets of the Old Testament, the Talmud, and Maimonides to Joey Adams, Barbra Streisand, and Woody Allen. Here also are memorable quotes from Louis Brandeis, Martin Buber, Fanny Brice, Heinrich Heine, Sam Goldwyn, Golda Meir, Karl Marx, Groucho Marx, Herman Mankiewicz, Albert Einstein, and many others.Arranged alphabetically by author, these thought-provoking pronouncements will not only serve as a handy resource for speech writers and public speakers but will also amuse and inspire all readers.
Jewish Women: Between Conformity and Agency (Routledge Jewish Studies Series)
by Katharina GalorJewish Women: Between Conformity and Agency examines the concepts of gender and sexuality through the primary lens of visual and material culture from antiquity through to the present day. The backbone of this transhistorical and transcontextual study is the question of Jewish women’s agency in four different geographical, chronological, and methodological contexts, beginning with women’s dress codes in Roman-Byzantine Syro-Palestine, continuing with rituals of purity in medieval Ashkenaz, worship in papal Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin, and ending with marriage and divorce in Israeli film. Each of these explorations is interested in creating a dialogue between the patriarchal legacy of the traditional texts and the chronologically corresponding visual and material culture. The author challenges traditional approaches to the study of Jewish culture by employing tools from art history, archaeology, and film and media studies. In each of these different contexts, there is ample evidence that women—despite persistent overall structural discrimination—have found ways to challenge male constructs of gender norms. Ultimately, these examples from past and present times highlight women’s eminence in shaping Jewish history and culture. Bringing a new interdisciplinary lens to the study of the history of gender and sexuality, the book will be of interest to students and researchers of Jewish history and culture, art history, archaeology, and film studies.
Jewish Women in Therapy: Seen But Not Heard
by Ellen Cole Rachel J SiegelHere is the first volume ever to focus on the issues of Jewish women in the context of counseling and psychotherapy. Through poignant reflection and observation, the authors convey the richness and variety of Jewish women’s experiences and the Jewishness and femaleness of the concerns, issues, values, and attitudes that Jewish women--both clients and therapists--bring into the therapy room.Jewish Women in Therapy is a landmark book in many ways. It calls attention to the historical and political realities of the Jewish heritage and acknowledges the oppression of both Jews and women that therapists have typically ignored. And although Jewish women have participated in the therapeutic process, as clients, scholars, and therapists, seldom have they chosen to write about it.Never before have the writings of so many distinguished leaders in the field, including Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Evelyn Torton Beck, and Susannah Heschel, been compiled. They examine the damaging stereotypes of Jewish women--the Jewish American Princess and the Jewish Mother--that flourish today. Chapters also address the conflicts that many women feel about being Jewish and being female, celebrate the contributions of Jewish women to feminism and to therapy, examine the deliberate omission of women from the political process and the religious ritual, and convey the complexities of the oppression that are still blatantly directed at both Jews and females.
Jewish Women Writers in Britain
by Nadia ValmanAgainst a background of enormous cultural change during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, writing by British Jewish women grappled with shifting meanings of Jewish identity, the pressure of social norms, and questions of assimilation. Until recently, however, the distinctive experiences and perspectives of Jewish women have been absent from accounts of both British Jewish literature and women's writing in Britain. Drawing on new research in Jewish studies, postcolonial criticism, trauma theory and cultural geography, contributors in Jewish Women Writers in Britain examine the ways that these women writers interpreted the experience of living between worlds and imaginatively transformed it for a wide general readership. Editor Nadia Valman brings together contributors to consider writers whose Jewish identity was central to their practice as well as those whose relationship to their Jewish heritage was oblique, complicated, or mobile and figured in their work in varied and often unexpected ways. The chapters cover a range of genres including didactic fiction, devotional writing, modernist poetry, autobiographical fiction, the postmodern novel, memoir, and public poetry. Among the writers discussed are Grace Aguilar, Celia and Marion Moss, Katie Magnus, Lily Montagu, Amy Levy, Nina Salaman, Mina Loy, Betty Miller, Eva Figes, Ruth Fainlight, Elaine Feinstein, Anita Brookner, Julia Pascal, Diane Samuels, Jenny Diski, Linda Grant, and Sue Hubbard. Expanding the concerns of Jewish literature beyond existing male-centered narratives of the heroic conflict between family expectations and personal aspirations, women writers also produced fiction and poetry exploring the female body, maternity, sexual politics, and the transmission of memory. While some sought to appropriate traditional Jewish literary forms, others used formal and stylistic experimentation to challenge a religious establishment and social conventions that constrained women's public freedoms. The extraordinary range of responses to Jewish culture and history in the work of these writers will appeal to literary scholars and readers interested in Jewish women's history.
Jewish Women Writers in the Soviet Union (Routledge Studies in the History of Russia and Eastern Europe)
by Rina LapidusThis book presents the lives and works of eleven Jewish women authors who lived in the Soviet Union, and who wrote and published their works in Russian. The works include poems, novels, memoirs and other writing. The book provides an overview of the life of each author, an overview of each author’s literary output, and an assessment of each author’s often conflicted view of her "feminine self" and of her "Jewish self". At a time when the large Jewish population which lived within the Soviet Union was threatened under Stalin’s prosecutions the book provides highly-informative insights into what it was like to be a Jewish woman in the Soviet Union in this period. The writers presented are: Alexandra Brustein, Elizaveta Polonskaia, Raisa Bloch, Hanna Levina, Ol'ga Ziv, Yulia Neiman, Rahil’ Baumwohl’, Margarita Alliger, Sarah Levina-Kul’neva, Sarah Pogreb and Zinaida Mirkina.
Jewish Women's Torah Study: Orthodox Religious Education and Modernity (Routledge Jewish Studies Series)
by Ilan FuchsOne of the cornerstones of the religious Jewish experience in all its variations is Torah study, and this learning is considered a central criterion for leadership. Jewish Women’s Torah Study addresses the question of women's integration in the halachic-religious system at this pivotal intersection. The contemporary debate regarding women’s Torah study first emerged in the second half of the 19th century. As women’s status in general society changed, offering increased legal rights and opportunities for education, a debate on the need to change women’s participation in Torah study emerged. Orthodoxy was faced with the question: which parts, if any, of modernity should be integrated into Halacha? Exemplifying the entire array of Orthodox responses to modernity, this book is a valuable addition to the scholarship of Judaism in the modern era and will be of interest to students and scholars of Religion, Gender Studies and Jewish Studies.
The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton
by Andrew PorwancherThe untold story of the founding father’s likely Jewish birth and upbringing—and its revolutionary consequences for understanding him and the nation he fought to create In The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Porwancher debunks a string of myths about the origins of this founding father to arrive at a startling conclusion: Hamilton, in all likelihood, was born and raised Jewish. For more than two centuries, his youth in the Caribbean has remained shrouded in mystery. Hamilton himself wanted it that way, and most biographers have simply assumed he had a Christian boyhood. With a detective’s persistence and a historian’s rigor, Porwancher upends that assumption and revolutionizes our understanding of an American icon.This radical reassessment of Hamilton’s religious upbringing gives us a fresh perspective on both his adult years and the country he helped forge. Although he didn’t identify as a Jew in America, Hamilton cultivated a relationship with the Jewish community that made him unique among the founders. As a lawyer, he advocated for Jewish citizens in court. As a financial visionary, he invigorated sectors of the economy that gave Jews their greatest opportunities. As an alumnus of Columbia, he made his alma mater more welcoming to Jewish people. And his efforts are all the more striking given the pernicious antisemitism of the era. In a new nation torn between democratic promises and discriminatory practices, Hamilton fought for a republic in which Jew and Gentile would stand as equals.By setting Hamilton in the context of his Jewish world for the first time, this fascinating book challenges us to rethink the life and legend of America's most enigmatic founder.
Jewish Writers/Irish Writers: Selected Essays on the Love of Words
by Maurice Wohlgelernter"These essays on representative Jewish and Irish writers are true to the form's definition as an attempt or experiment rather than a credo. Wohlgelernter defines the author's ""excited imagination"" by thoroughgoing analysis of the work's constituent parts. He gives particular emphasis to the author's own words and expressions, those verbal inventions that linger in the mind long after the act of reading or criticism. He finds a passionate love of words and language forging a powerful link between Jewish and Irish literature, rooted as they are in similar historical experience. Both literatures engage the human struggle with life and death, virtue and weakness, success and failure, dreams and nightmares, all under the constant surveillance of tradition.Wohlgelernter divides his book into four general categories: the Holocaust, Jewish-American writers, Irish writers, and memoirs and autobiography. His chapters on Holocaust literature engage a range of literary perspectives that combine memoir, journalism, fiction, and philosophical reflection in the writings of Ladislas Fuks, Lucy Dawidowicz, Sabine Reichel, and Primo Levi. Chapters on postwar Jewish writers including Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth explore the ambivalences of assimilation with its encroachments of a provincial past and dissatisfactions with mainstream culture. Wohlgelernter notes how all yoke street raciness and high cultural mandarin in a distinctive contribution to American prose style. A similar richness of language and preoccupation with the political and cultural claims of the past characterize the chapters on the great short story writer Frank O'Connor, the playwright Brendan Behan, and the Irish-American journalist and novelist Pete Hamill.The last decades of the twentieth century have seen a prolific outpouring of autobiographical writing, and in the concluding section of the book the author treats representative examples that amplify or reflect on the personal an"
Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation (The Modern Jewish Experience)
by Daniella Doron“Highlights the debates surrounding family and identity as French Jewish communities slowly recovered and reestablished their place in the French nation.” —ChoiceAt the end of World War II, French Jews faced a devastating demographic reality: thousands of orphaned children, large numbers of single-parent households, and families in emotional and financial distress. Daniella Doron suggests that after years of occupation and collaboration, French Jews and non-Jews held contrary opinions about the future of the nation and the institution of the family. At the center of the disagreement was what was to become of the children. Doron traces emerging notions about the postwar family and its role in strengthening Jewish ethnicity and French republicanism in the shadow of Vichy and the Holocaust.“Doron’s book appears at a key moment. Its emphasis on children emerging from hunger, displacement and war should render it standard reading for policymakers, NGOs and others interested in shaping the destinies of today’s abandoned children.” —French History“Raises fundamental questions for the understanding of not only Jewish reconstruction in post-World War II France, but also Holocaust memory, postwar French society and culture and the history of postwar European families and children.” —French Politics, Culture and Society“Doron’s deftly argued and well researched book is an important intervention into a growing body of scholarship on the postwar decade. She convincingly documents the central role that the rehabilitation of Jewish children and the reconstruction of Jewish families played in post-war French Jewish reconstruction and underscores the importance of the decade following the war in shaping Jewish historical evolution in France.” —Maud Mandel, author of Muslims and Jews in France
Jews Across the Americas: A Sourcebook, 1492–Present (Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History)
by Adriana M. Brodsky and Laura Arnold LeibmanAn overview of the history of American Jewry using primary sources from Latin America, theCaribbean, Canada, and the United StatesJews Across the Americas is a groundbreaking sourcebook capturing the historical diversity and culturalbreadth of American Jews across Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States. Featuringprimary documents as well as scholarly interpretations, Jews Across the Americas builds upon newdevelopments in Jewish Studies, engaging with transnationalism, race, sexuality, and gender, andhighlighting the lived experiences of those often left out of Jewish history.Jews Across the Americas features an impressively broad and far-reaching range of historical sources,including artifacts and objects that have not previously been featured as integral to Jewish history in theWestern hemisphere. Entries teach readers how to understand everything from wills andadvertisements to sermons, and how to interpret photographs, domestic architecture, and comics.Whether it’s a recipe from Brazil that blends Moroccan and Amazonian foodways, or a text about thefirst non-binary Jew to cross the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, each entry broadens ourunderstanding of Jewish American history.
Jews Against Themselves
by Edward AlexanderThis volume features powerful essays by Edward Alexander on the phenomenon of anti-Zionism on the part of the Jewish intelligentsia. It also analyses the explosive growth of traditional anti-Semitism, especially in Europe, among intellectuals and Muslims. Alexander notes that anti-Zionism has established a presence even in Israel, where it frequently takes the form of intellectuals sympathizing with their country's enemies and perversely apologizing for their own existence.Alexander begins with an examination of the origins of Jewish self-hatred in nineteenth-century Europe. He then explores the mindset of disaffected Jews in reacting, or failing to react, to the two events that shape modern Jewry: the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel.The book concludes with a focus on contemporary anti-Zionism, including three essays about the role played by Jews in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement to expel Israel from the family of nations. A final essay addresses the need for American Jews to decide whether they are going to judge Judaism by the standards of The New York Times or The New York Times by the standards of Judaism.
Jews Among the Nations
by Erich KahlerThis is an augmented edition of a superb volume by one of the foremost analysts of European institutions and ideas. Here the late Erich Kahler turns his attention to the special character of the Jewish people, formed uniquely through the interaction of internal and external circumstances in which past and present merge.The chapters in this book deal with persistent problems of Jewish identity. Kahler claims these can be fully understood only by awareness of the close interconnection between the singular ethnic nature and the unique social structure of the Jewish people. He discusses the Jews in Europe, specifically the historical implications of a strict tribal ritual that yet permitted the widest spiritual scope.The second half of the book concerns anti-Semitism, in relation to Jews and Germans. How did the German people, seemingly so congenial to the Jews, develop a murderous revulsion against them, ending a long and fruitful symbiosis? Kahler sees this as a parallel to the parricidal rejection of the Jews by the Christian church. His argument is deepened in an added chapter, new to this volume, on the major forms and features of anti-Judaism, 'in which the earlier theme of the universal and the specific are seen as central not only to the inner history of Judaism but also to the specific interaction of Jews and Gentiles throughout social history.
Jews and Christians in Thirteenth-Century France
by Elisheva Baumgarten Judah D. GalinskyIn light of the growing tendency to view both religious communities as intimately linked, this work seeks to examine a variety of perspectives on Jewish and Christian life in northern France during the thirteenth-century. Contributors investigate the social and cultural changes which took place in European medieval society through legal developments, religious polemic, gender, social history, perceptions of the 'other,' language, literature and art. A secondary, but no less important goal,of this collection is to break down the artificial boundaries that divide the various academic disciplines and those that separate 'medieval studies' from 'Jewish studies'.
Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe
by Ephraim Shoham-SteinerJews and Crime in Medieval Europe is a topic laced by prejudice on one hand and apologetics on the other. Beginning in the Middle Ages, Jews were often portrayed as criminals driven by greed. While these accusations were, for the most part, unfounded, in other cases criminal accusations against Jews were not altogether baseless. Drawing on a variety of legal, liturgical, literary, and archival sources, Ephraim Shoham-Steiner examines the reasons for the involvement in crime, the social profile of Jews who performed crimes, and the ways and mechanisms employed by the legal and communal body to deal with Jewish criminals and with crimes committed by Jews. A society’s attitude toward individuals identified as criminals—by others or themselves—can serve as a window into that society’s mores and provide insight into how transgressors understood themselves and society’s attitudes toward them. The book is divided into three main sections. In the first section, Shoham-Steiner examines theft and crimes of a financial nature. In the second section, he discusses physical violence and murder, most importantly among Jews but also incidents when Jews attacked others and cases in which Jews asked non-Jews to commit violence against fellow Jews. In the third section, Shoham-Steiner approaches the role of women in crime and explores the gender differences, surveying the nature of the crimes involving women both as perpetrators and as victims, as well as the reaction to their involvement in criminal activities among medieval European Jews. While the study of crime and social attitudes toward criminals is firmly established in the social sciences, the history of crime and of social attitudes toward crime and criminals is relatively new, especially in the field of medieval studies and all the more so in medieval Jewish studies. Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe blazes a new path for unearthing daily life history from extremely recalcitrant sources. The intended readership goes beyond scholars and students of medieval Jewish studies, medieval European history, and crime in pre-modern society.
Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home
by Laura LevittBy interrogating America's promise of a home for Jews as citizens of the liberal state, Jews and Feminism questions the very terms of this social "contract". Maintaining that Jews, women, and Jewish women are not necessarily secure within this construction of the state, Laura Levitt links this contractual construction of belonging and acceptance to legacies of marriage as a contractual home for Jewish women. Exploring the immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe for America, as well as their desire to make this country their permanent home, Levitt raises questions about the search for stability in specific Jewish religious and cultural traditions which is linked to the liberal academy as well as feminist study, thus offering an account of an ambivalent Jewish feminist embrace of America as home.
Jews and Genes: The Genetic Future in Contemporary Jewish Thought
by Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff Dr Laurie ZolothWell aware of Jews having once been the victims of Nazi eugenics policies, many Jews today have an ambivalent attitude toward new genetics and are understandably wary of genetic forms of identity and intervention. At the same time, the Jewish tradition is strongly committed to medical research designed to prevent or cure diseases. Jews and Genes explores this tension against the backdrop of various important developments in genetics and bioethics—new advances in stem cell research; genetic mapping, identity, testing, and intervention; and the role of religion and ethics in shaping public policy. Jews and Genes brings together leaders in their fields, from all walks of Judaism, to explore these most timely and intriguing topics—the intricacies of the genetic code and the wonders of life, along with cutting-edge science and the ethical issues it raises.
Jews and Gentiles: A Historical Sociology of Their Relations
by Werner J. Cahnman"Studies of the Jewish experience among peoples with whom they live share some similarities with the usual histories of anti-Semitism, but also some differences. When the focus is on anti-Semitism, Jewish history appears as a record of unmitigated hostility against the Jewish people and of passivity on their part. However, as Werner J. Cahnman demonstrates in this posthumous volume, Jewish-Gentile relations are far more complex. There is a long history of mutual contacts, positive as well as antagonistic, even if conflict continues to require particular attention.Cahnman's approach, while following a historical sequence, is sociological in conception. From Roman antiquity through the Middle Ages, into the era of emancipation and the Holocaust, and finally to the present American and Israeli scene, there are basic similarities and various dissimilarities, all of which are described and analyzed. Cahnman tests the theses of classical sociology implicitly, yet unobtrusively. He traces the socio-economic basis of human relations, which Marx and others have emphasized, and considers Jews a ""marginal trading people"" in the Park-Becker sense. Simmel and Toennies, he shows, understood Jews as ""strangers"" and ""intermediaries."" While Cahnman shows that Jews were not ""pariahs,"" as Max Weber thought, he finds a remarkable affinity to Weber's Protestantism-capitalism argument in the tension of Jewish-Christian relations emerging from the bitter theological argument over usury.The primacy of Jewish-Gentile relations in all their complexity and variability is essential for the understanding of Jewish social and political history. This volume is a valuable contribution to that understanding."
Jews and Germans: Promise, Tragedy, and the Search for Normalcy
by Guenter LewyJews and Germans is the only book in English to delve fully into the history and challenges of the German-Jewish relationship, from before the Holocaust to the present day. The Weimar Republic era—the fifteen years between Germany&’s defeat in World War I (1918) and Hitler&’s accession (1933)—has been characterized as a time of unparalleled German-Jewish concord and collaboration. Even though Jews constituted less than 1 percent of the German population, they occupied a significant place in German literature, music, theater, journalism, science, and many other fields. Was that German-Jewish relationship truly reciprocal? How has it evolved since the Holocaust, and what can it become? Beginning with the German Jews&’ struggle for emancipation, Guenter Lewy describes Jewish life during the heyday of the Weimar Republic, particularly the Jewish writers, left-wing intellectuals, combat veterans, and adult and youth organizations. With this history as a backdrop he examines the deeply disparate responses among Jews when the Nazis assumed power. Lewy then elucidates Jewish life in postwar West Germany; in East Germany, where Jewish communists searched for a second German-Jewish symbiosis based on Marxist principles; and finally in the united Germany—illuminating the complexities of fraught relationships over time.
Jews and India: Perceptions and Image (Routledge Jewish Studies Series)
by Yulia EgorovaExploring the image of Jews in India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book looks at both the Indian attitudes towards the Jewish communities of the subcontinent and at the way Jews and Judaism in general have been represented in Indian discourse. Despite the fact that the Indian Jewish population constitutes one of the country’s tiniest minorities, the relations of the local Jews with other communities form an integral part in the history of Indian multiculturalism. This has become increasingly apparent over the last two centuries as Judaism and its image have been incorporated into the discussions of some of the most prominent figures of different religious and nationalist movements, leaders of independent India, and the Indian mass media. Furthermore, recent decades witnessed mass adoption of Israelite identity by Indians from two different regions and religious groups. Being a topic that has received little attention, Jews and India seeks to rectify this situation by examining these developments and providing a fascinating insight into these issues. This volume will be of interest to scholars of Jewish and Indian cultural studies.
Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union
by Yaacov Ro'IThe main focus of this book is Jewish life under the Soviet regime. The themes of the book include: the attitude of the government to Jews, the fate of the Jewish religion and life in Post-World War II Russia. The volume also contains an assessment of the prospects for future emigration.