The wide-ranging portrayal of modern Jewishness in artistic terms invites scrutiny into the relationship between creativity and the formation of Jewish identity and into the complex issue of what makes a work of art uniquely Jewish. Whether it is the provenance of the artist, as in the case of popular Israeli singer Zehava Ben, the intention of the iconography, as in Ben Shahn's antifascist paintings, or the utopian ideals of the Jewish Palestine Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, clearly no single formula for defining Jewish art in the diaspora will suffice. The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times is the first work to analyze modern Jewry's engagement with the arts as a whole, including music, theater, dance, film, museums, architecture, painting, sculpture, and more. Working with a broad conception of what counts as art, the book asks the following questions: What roles have commerce and politics played in shaping Jewish artistic agendas? Who determines the Jewishness of art and for what purposes? What role has aesthetics played in reshaping religious traditions and rituals? This richly illustrated volume illuminates how the arts have helped Jews confront the various challenges of modernity, including cultural adaptation and self-preservation, economic diversification, and ritual transformation. There truly is an art to being Jewish in the modern world--or, alternatively, an art to being modern in the Jewish world--and this collection fully captures its range, diversity, and historical significance.

"Here is the extraordinary Diary of Rywka Lipszyc, finally published 70 years after it was created. Handwritten in a school notebook between October 1943 and April 1944, this remarkable diary depicts the nightmare of life under the Nazis in Poland's infamous Lodz ghetto--through the eyes of brilliant, 14-year-old Jewish girl"--Dust jacket flap.

Despite its deceptively simple title, this book ponders the thorny issue of the place of the Bible in Jewish religion and culture. By thoroughly examining the complex link that the Jews have formed with the Bible, Jewish scholar Jean-Christophe Attias raises the uncomfortable question of whether it is still relevant for them. The Jews and the Bible reveals how the Jews define themselves in various times and place with the Bible, without the Bible, and against the Bible. Is it divine revelation or national myth? Literature or legislative code? One book or a disparate literary? Text or object? For the Jews, over the past two thousand years or more, the Bible has been all that and much more, telling a fascinating story and raising provocative philosophical and ethical questions. The Bible is indeed an elusive book, so Attias explores the fundamental discrepancy between what we think the Bible tells us about Judaism and what Judaism actually tells us about the Bible. With passion and intellect, Attias informs and enlightens the reader, never shying from the difficult questions, ultimately asking: In our post-genocide and post-Zionist culture, can the Bible be saved?

"This book is a frank, confronting yet surprisingly funny memoir based on the life experiences and recollections of a Jewish childhood over a time span from 1928 to the mid-forties. In some telling, names of people, places and dates have been changed. Mercifully, those named who are or were of a repellent nature have long since gone to God. The stories present incidents from the life of one person, the first-person narrator. The memoir is purposely unsentimental. The writer has worked hard to circumvent cheap emotion. Some readers might find it confronting. The linked stories encompass a childs unsparingly honest observations as he is buffeted by events which range from indifference and naked cruelty to sparkling life-affirming exuberance."--Provided by publisher.

Although the ideas of “tradition” and “modernity” may seem to be directly opposed, David Ellenson, a leading contemporary scholar of modern Jewish thought, understood that these concepts can also enjoy a more fluid relationship. In honor of Ellenson, editors Michael A. Meyer and David N. Myers have gathered contributors for Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity: Rethinking an Old Opposition to examine the permutations and adaptations of these intertwined forms of Jewish expression. Contributions draw from a range of disciplines and scholarly interests and vary in subject from the theological to the liturgical, sociological, and literary. The geographic and historical focus of the volume is on the United States and the State of Israel, both of which have been major sites of inquiry in Ellenson's work.

340 pages.

Book by Marrus Michael R

A study of Jewish life in the Polish-Lithuanian town of Ejszyszki (Eisiskes), based largely on interviews with former residents of the town. Pt. 6 (pp. 557-697), "The Bitter End: 1933-41, " deals with the Holocaust period. The story of the destruction of the Jewish community is interlaced with the story of Eliach's family, the Sonensons, and their experiences during the war. Many Jews were killed by the Nazis and local collaborators on 25-26 September 1941. The Sonensons were among the few who managed to escape; they passed through some small ghettos and were then hidden by a Polish farmer, Kazimierz Korkuc. They returned to Eisiskes after the liberation, but Eliach's mother and baby brother were murdered in their home by rampaging Polish AK partisans in October 1944. Contends that, despite the relatively large number of rescuers, the majority of Poles were antisemitic and wished for a "Poland without Jews." The Nazis would not have been able to carry out the genocide of the Jews without widespread Polish and Lithuanian collaboration.

Analyzes the communal organization, political affiliations, and cultural contributions of Vienna's Jews from 1848 to World War I. After 1848, Jewish emancipation became an issue in party politics. Jews identified with the Austrian Liberal Party, with the Emperor and Germanism, in all of which they saw safeguards of Jewish emancipation. Analyzes the antisemitism of Schönerer's Pan-German Party, which found many adherents at the University of Vienna, and of Lueger's Christian Social Party. Describes the cautious reactions of Jewish officials, who supported the Liberal Party even in defeat and in the face of that party's desertion of the Jewish cause; the more nationalist faction led by Rabbi Joseph Samuel Bloch, a member of the Austrian parliament from 1884-95 and a militant fighter against antisemitism; and the Austrian Israelite Union set up in 1886 to encourage pride in Jewish identity and combat antisemitism. Surveys the role of antisemitism in the rise of Zionism. Suggests that the surge of antisemitism in Vienna, rather than the Dreyfus case, was responsible for Herzl's concern with the "Jewish question". Analyzes the Jewish self-hatred of Karl Kraus and Otto Weininger, and the role of Jewish identity and antisemitism in the life and work of Freud, Schnitzler, and other Austrian Jewish writers.

Analyzes the causes of the anti-Jewish violence of the First Crusade. The spiritual revival and rapid growth of the 10th-11th centuries led both to Church reform and the Crusades, an attempt to direct feudal violence against the enemies of the Church. Under the impact of popular frenzy and loss of control by the papacy, the traditional Church doctrine of both denigration and toleration of the Jews broke down. The crusading bands' ideological motivation is reflected in contemporary Hebrew chronicles and in two Christian accounts. Discusses the Jewish response of martyrdom in preference to conversion. Contends that 1096 was not a turning-point - the destroyed communities were quickly resettled, and in later Crusades anti-Jewish excesses were prevented by the Church. The massacres indicated a change in Christian attitudes, including the view of Jews as enemies of Christendom, ritual murder accusations, and the demand for the Jews' total destruction or conversion. The appendix (pp. 223-297) contains an English translation of the texts of the two chronicles.

In this volume, scholars from the United States, Israel and Eastern Europe examine the history of the Holocaust on Soviet territory and its treatment in Soviet politics and literature from 1945 to 1991. Of special interest to researchers will be chapters on some of the major research sources for historical study, including census materials, memorial books, archives and recently released documents.

Josephus (A.D. 37-?100), a pro-Roman Jew closely associated with the emperor Titus, is the earliest systematic commentator on the Bible, as well as one of the foremost historians of the beginning of the Christian era. Politically, Josephus was pro-Roman, and although he had no sympathy for extreme Jewish nationalism, he was a zealous defender of Jewish religion and culture. Louis H. Feldman examines the principles that guided Josephus in his understanding of the Bible, investigating his creative contribution in the rewriting of biblical accounts. This comprehensive study evaluates Josephus as a historian and demonstrates the originality and consistency of his work as an author. The first part of Feldman's work attempts to understand Josephus's purposes and techniques in retelling the Bible. The second part reviews Josephus's treatment of twelve key biblical figures. In addition to its reevaluation of an important early historian, this unique compendium provides a mine of information on the reassessment of the most important biblical figures.

The immense service that Langer's careful, thoughtful, immensely intelligent and restrained study renders is that the esthetics of atrocity cease to be an exclusive domain of the victims. Many of his writers are not Jewish and several were not imprisoned or interned, and yet all of them have been driven by the death-camp universe. The atrocity of that time and the atrocities that have succeeded Auschwitz represent a continuity that may almost be called a new tradition, one in which the phantasmagoric and horrific is real and the gentle and generous a prodigy to be remarked with amazement. " The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination is a pioneering work of criticism for it impels us, readers and writers alike, to inquire after the basic paradox: how can literature delight and transfix or warn and modify a humanity from whom nothing is hidden, nothing prohibited, for whom nothing is shocking or unreal." -Arthur A. Cohen, New York Times Book Review "A stimulating, perceptive study of the literature of the Holocaust.... Langer's examination of possible stylistic approaches to the subject, from the delicate whimsy of Aichinger to the graphic bestiality of Kosinski's The Painted Bird is in each case detailed and subtle." - The New Republic

Throughout the nineteenth century, legal barriers to Jewish citizenship were lifted in Europe, enabling organized Jewish communities and individuals to alter radically their relationships with the institutions of the Christian West. In this volume, one of the first to offer a comparative overview of the entry of Jews into state and society, eight leading historians analyze the course of emancipation in Holland, Germany, France, England, the United States, and Italy as well as in Turkey and Russia. The goal is to produce a systematic study of the highly diverse paths to emancipation and to explore their different impacts on Jewish identity, dispositions, and patterns of collective action. Jewish emancipation concerned itself primarily with issues of state and citizenship. Would the liberal and republican values of the Enlightenment guide governments in establishing the terms of Jewish citizenship? How would states react to Jews seeking to become citizens and to remain meaningfully Jewish? The authors examine these issues through discussions of the entry of Jews into the military, the judicial system, business, and academic and professional careers, for example, and through discussions of their assertive political activity. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Geoffrey Alderman, Hans Daalder, Werner E. Mosse, Aron Rodrigue, Dan V. Segre, and Michael Stanislawski. Originally published in 1995. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"Movie-Made Jews focuses on a rich, usable American Jewish cinematic tradition. This tradition includes fiction and documentary films that make Jews through antisemitism, Holocaust indirection, and discontent with assimilation, as well as through the unapologetic assertion of Jewishness, queerness, and alliances across race and religion. By selectively revisiting canonical pre-1990 films and amply representing films of the new millennium, Movie-Made Jews illuminates an American Jewish film tradition that includes jazz singers, pawnbrokers, and serious men. It also features those who tremble before G-d, who commit crimes and misdemeanors, who declare Hineini, Here I Am, who do whatever works, who leave and then return to Delancey Street and Liberty Heights. In these pages, those who might be identified as "just Jews" reside alongside those who are traditionally-and sometimes untraditionally-observant. Helene Meyers shows that as we go to our local theater, attend a Jewish film festival, play a DVD, watch streaming videos, Jewishness becomes part of the multicultural mosaic rather than collapsing into a generic whiteness or being represented as a life apart. This engagingly-written book demonstrates that a Jewish movie is neither just a movie nor for Jews only. With incisive analysis of what appears onscreen as well as what happens behind the scenes during production and how audiences respond to what they view, Movie-Made Jews challenges the assumption that American Jewish cinema is a cinema of impoverishment and assimilation. While it's a truism that Jews make movies, this book brings into focus the diverse ways movies make Jews"--

This wide ranging bibliography comprises primary and secondary works on native Chinese Jews in traditional China, most notably the Jewish community of Kaifeng. It also includes the early knowledge and writings by Chinese about Jews and Judaism, as well as the early writings by Jews about China. The author concentrates on primary sources and original contributions, giving subheadings and short annotations for the main items and indicating his judgement of their value.

In 1939 Sweden, two Jewish sisters wait for their parents to join them in fleeing the Nazis in Austria, but while eight-year-old Nellie settles in quickly, twelve-year-old Stephie feels stranded at the end of the world, with a foster mother who is as cold and unforgiving as the island on which they live.

A collection of 15 essays, most of which were published between 1980-90. The following deal with antisemitism and the Holocaust: