Is patriarchy necessary to ensure responsible fathering? Lawrence H. Fuchs, author of Family Matters, argues that the link between male dominance and fatherhood is no longer iron-clad. Analyzing the universality of patriarchy and its incentives for cultural fatherhood, Fuchs concedes that the importance of biological differences between the sexes was a possible, even plausible, basis for the evolution of patriarchy. But in this timely work he imagines a new paradigm of fatherhood for a post-patriarchal age, one inspired by the history of Jewish patriarchy. Two millennia ago the rabbis established the strategies to curb the extreme abuses of patriarchy found in all civilizations. They did so by according wives significant sexual and economic rights. In the last two centuries as Jews became more integrated into the societies in which they lived, their unique variation of patriarchy was disrupted. Fuchs argues that the Jewish story sets the precedent for fundamental change in the nature of patriarchy today, thus breaking what may have been the evolutionary connection between male dominance and incentives for fatherhood. It is Fuchs's startling conclusion that the Jewish precedent points to the next step in evolution: fathers without patriarchy.

From stories of biblical patriarchs and matriarchs and their children, through the Gospel’s Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and to modern Jewish families in fiction, film, and everyday life, the family has been considered key to transmitting Jewish identity. Current discussions about the Jewish family’s supposed traditional character and its alleged contemporary crisis tend to assume that the dynamics of Jewish family life have remained constant from the days of Abraham and Sarah to those of Tevye and Golde in Fiddler on the Roof and on to Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint . Jonathan Boyarin explores a wide range of scholarship in Jewish studies to argue instead that Jewish family forms and ideologies have varied greatly throughout the times and places where Jewish families have found themselves. He considers a range of family configurations from biblical times to the twenty-first century, including strictly Orthodox communities and new forms of family, including same-sex parents. The book shows the vast canvas of history and culture as well as the social pressures and strategies that have helped shape Jewish families, and suggests productive ways to think about possible futures for Jewish family forms.

The Vienna Paradox is Marjorie Perloff's memoir of growing up in pre-World War II Vienna, her escape to America in 1938 with her upper-middle-class, highly cultured, and largely assimilated Jewish family, and her self-transformation from the German-speaking Gabriele Mintz to the English-speaking Marjorie--who also happened to be the granddaughter of Richard Schüller, the Austrian foreign minister under Chancellor Dollfuss and a special delegate to the League of Nations. Compelling as the story is, this is hardly a conventional memoir. Rather, it interweaves biographical anecdote and family history with speculations on the historical development of early 20th-century Vienna as it was experienced by her parents' generation, and how the loss of their "high" culture affected the lives of these cultivated refugees in a democratic United States that was, and remains, deeply suspicious of perceived "elitism." This is, in other words, an intellectual memoir, both elegant and heartfelt, by one of America's leading critics, a narrative in which literary and philosophical reference is as central as the personal.

"Based on his own family history, David Pryce-Jones’s virtuosic novel tells the tale of the Ellingens, one of the richest and most powerful Jewish families in the Habsburg Empire. Gustav will ascend from the poverty and obscurity of an orphanage to the pinnacle of Viennese society, steering the family’s fortunes through defeat in the Great War, the inflation of Weimar, and the perils of Depression. His only child, Henriette, must cope with the challenges of innocence and wealth. But her only child, Jules, will face a far more terrible challenge in the rise of Nazism. The Afternoon Sun is a vivid portrait of four brilliant generations and their Europe by a peerless observer who knew them as few others could."--

In recent years, the high rate of intermarriage and other demographic factors have created a challenge for American Jewry: How can rabbis, policy planners, educators, and parents transmit most effectively Jewish religion, culture, and values to their children? Prior research shows that Jewish education is the one area in which communal leaders and lay people can act to make a positive difference in the future cultural transmission of Judaism. Family Matters offers groundbreaking essays on Jewish education by scholars drawn from anthropology, education, history, and sociology. Essays by Steven M. Cohen, Sylvia Barack Fishman, Shaul Kelner, Jeffrey S. Kress, Alex Pomson, Riv-Ellen Prell, and Jack Wertheimer range from interviews about educational decisions with families, teenagers, and Jewish educators to sweeping new statistical data about the actual state of Jewish education in American cities. Making new links among parents, community, and Jewish schools, Family Matters is a vital study in the sociology of the contemporaryAmerican Jewish community.

Growing up, Daniel seemed like a model son: a student activist blessed with easy charm and a fluid intelligence, who believed that he was heir to a better and brighter future. When that dream faded, he drifted from his family and into a rootless life, marked by wasted possibility.Bearing the Body begins when Daniel’s younger brother, Nathan, a medical resident in Boston, learns that Daniel has died in San Francisco. The circumstances are unclear, and the police are involved. Nathan, who suffers from chronic anger and uncontrollable compulsions, travels to New York to inform their father, Sol, of Daniel’s death. Sol is an Auschwitz survivor who has spent most of his adult energy compiling an archive of the fates of Hitler’s victims. Due in part to this obsessive research, he has lost touch with his sons. He nevertheless decides to join Nathan on a trip to the West Coast, where both men hope to learn more about Daniel’s untimely death. In San Francisco they meet Abby and her son, Ben, who were Daniel’s companions in a life that his family never knew about or shared.A moving study of isolation and its costs, Bearing the Body is a book about history and memory, about family and loss. Most of all, it is a book about the past, which, far from receding quietly, weighs ever more heavily on those who hope to leave it behind

Esther, seventeen years old, wild and rebellious, is sent from Israel to Cameroon to stay with her hardheaded uncle Sicourelle, who is charged with straightening her out. But Esther resists her uncle's plans for her future-which include marriage to a cousin-and in the privileged indolence of postcolonial Africa, she looks to the past instead. Using sepia portraits and scraps of letters, Esther pieces together the history of her family, a once-grand Egyptian-Jewish clan, and its displacement from Cairo in the 1950s to Israel, West Africa, and New York. As the worn photographs yield their secrets, Esther uncovers a rich tale of wives and ex-wives; revolving mistresses and crushing marriages; intrigues and disappointments; poignant contrats between the living past and the dead present. In sensuous, inventive prose, Matalon penetrates the mysteries of cultural exile and family life to produce a first novel that is mature, authentic, and deeply moving.

Text: English, Hebrew (translation)

From Kirkus Reviews paper 0-8142-0780-4 A second collection from English professor (U. of Mass.) and critic Clayton, the first winner of the Sandstone Prize for Short Fiction. Clayton's new volume is, in many ways, a maturing of the concerns of his previous collection. As in Bodies of the Rich (1984), he focuses on the minutiae of daily life as a reflection of the ways in which his intelligent, middle-class protagonists express and experience loss. In Radiance, the protagonists are almost all Jews, assimilated to varying degrees but aware of and generally comfortable with their ethnic/religious identity. What they arent comfortable with is their lives--marriage as an act of settling for less, marriages that are failing or have long since dissolved, friends and family who die, parents who commit suicide. For several of his low-key heroes--in ``Glory,'' ``Open-Heart Surgery,'' and the most fully realized piece here, ``The Man Who Could See Radiance''--coping with loss takes the form of a sort of magic realist device in which people see and feel beyond their senses, becoming aware of a larger presence that may be understood as having a religious significance. The use of this device in three stories out of only ten, though, makes for a certain repetitiveness. Two tales, ``Muscles'' and ``Time Exposure,'' about episodes in an unhappy marriage that involves the husband's domineering brotherall as experienced by the couples sonhave the feeling of sketches for a novel-in-progress; theyre affecting but seem unfinished. Still, Clayton's best, ``Talking to Charlie'' and ``History Lessons,'' have a poignance that comes from an intense sensitivity to the quiet suffering that most often goes unexpressed in the rush of daily life. Uneven but distinctive short fiction from an author with a genuine gift. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Product Description A collection of short stories about the lives of assimilated American Jews, who attempt to reach an opening into the spiritual realm while dealing with unsuccessful marriages, middle-class life, and the unhappiness of existence Review ...[Clayton writes] with compassion, simplicity and power... -- The New York Times Book Review, Patrick Farrell