As dismissal and disdain of Jews speak through the art of some leading twentieth-century poets, so the poetry of Rodger Kamenetz artfully answers, framing in subtle terms the questions that haunt our culture-about the voices through which culture speaks, about the identity of poet and poetry, about the capacity of art to harm and to heal. Whether subjecting the anti-Semitic verses of T. S. Eliot to a literary trial; conjuring the eloquence with which "Allen Ginsberg forgives Ezra Pound on Behalf of the Jews"; or drawing upon personal history, the Torah, and Jewish mysticism to explore the tangled relations of Jewish identity and modern literature, Kamenetz's poems attest to the inexorable power of language.

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.

This lively ethnography traces a fraught three months in the life of a Jewish congregation stubbornly persisting on the Lower East Side, and affords a candid, lucid and intimate introduction to contemporary synagogue practice. In these pages Jonathan Boyarin invites us to share the intimate life of the Stanton Street Shul, one of the last remaining Jewish congregations on New York's historic Lower East Side. This narrow building, wedged into a lot designed for an old-law tenement, is full of clamorous voices the generations of the dead, who somehow contrive to make their presence known, and the newer generation, keeping the building and its memories alive and making themselves Jews in the process. Through the eyes of Boyarin, at once a member of the congregation and a bemused anthropologist, the book follows this congregation of "year-round Jews" through the course of a summer during which its future must once again be decided. The Lower East Side, famous as the jumping off point for millions of Jewish and other immigrants to America, has recently become the hip playground of twenty-something immigrants to the city from elsewhere in America and from abroad. Few imagine that Jewish life there has stubbornly continued through this history of decline and regeneration. Coming inside with Boyarin, we see the congregation's life as a combination of quiet heroism, ironic humor, disputes for the sake of Heaven and perhaps otherwise, and above all the ongoing search for ways to connect with Jewish ancestors while remaining true to oneself in the present. Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul illustrates in poignant and humorous ways the changes in a historic neighborhood facing the challenges of gentrification. It offers readers with no prior knowledge of Judaism and synagogue life a portrait that is at once intimate and intelligible. Most important, perhaps, it shows the congregation's members to be anything but a monochromatic set of uniform "believers" but rather a gathering of vibrant, imperfect, indisputably down-to-earth individuals coming together to make a community.

"Heeding the Call: Jewish Voices in America's Civil Rights Struggle" chronicles the multifaceted role of Jewish Americans in the difficult struggle for civil rights. Their story will inspire the next generation of young Jews and African Americans to renew the legacy of cooperation which once united both groups. The struggle for equal rights in America forged a close connection between African Americans and Jews. But in recent years, that once amicable relationship has become strained. In "Heeding the Call," young people will discover how much the shared history of both groups unites rather than divides them.

What makes a space Jewish? This wide-ranging volume revisits literal as well as metaphorical spaces in modern German history to examine the ways in which Jewishness has been attributed to them both within and outside of Jewish communities, and what the implications have been across different eras and social contexts. Working from an expansive concept of "the spatial," these contributions look not only at physical sites but at professional, political, institutional, and imaginative realms, as well as historical Jewish experiences of spacelessness. Together, they encompass spaces as varied as early modern print shops and Weimar cinema, always pointing to the complex intertwining of German and Jewish identity.

A study based on ca. 700 personal stories of Jewish survivors of Ravensbrück, including ca. 200 testimonies held in the Yad Vashem archives; information from memoirs; and interviews conducted with survivors after the war or during 1997-2005 by Agassi and the team of scholars from Israel and Germany who worked with her, as well as with relatives of survivors who are no longer alive. The percentage of Jews among Ravensbrück prisoners was small, thus this camp was sometimes neglected by scholars of the Holocaust. Divides the history of the Ravensbrück camp (1939-45) into five periods, and presents a sociological portrait of the Jewish population in each period. Gives the distribution of the Jewish prisoners by countries of origin, reasons for arrest and incarceration, age, marital status, etc. Dwells on the prisoners in the satellite camps, the evacuation marches in the last stage of the war, and the rescue of some of the prisoners by Count Bernadotte in February-March 1945. Notes manifestations of antisemitism on the part of some non-Jewish prisoners. There was little group-wide social organization among non-political Jewish prisoners in Ravensbrück, only small group relationships. Resistance was limited to small-scale sabotage at in work places. Nonetheless, the very survival in Ravensbrück constituted a type of heroism.

This book traces the global, national, and local origins of the conflict between Muslims and Jews in France, challenging the belief that rising anti-Semitism in France is rooted solely in the unfolding crisis in Israel and Palestine. Maud Mandel shows how the conflict in fact emerged from processes internal to French society itself even as it was shaped by affairs elsewhere, particularly in North Africa during the era of decolonization. Mandel examines moments in which conflicts between Muslims and Jews became a matter of concern to French police, the media, and an array of self-appointed spokesmen from both communities: Israel's War of Independence in 1948, France's decolonization of North Africa, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the 1968 student riots, and Francois Mitterrand's experiments with multiculturalism in the 1980s. She takes an in-depth, on-the-ground look at interethnic relations in Marseille, which is home to the country's largest Muslim and Jewish populations outside of Paris. She reveals how Muslims and Jews in France have related to each other in diverse ways throughout this history - as former residents of French North Africa, as immigrants competing for limited resources, as employers and employees, as victims of racist aggression, as religious minorities in a secularizing state, and as French citizens. In Muslims and Jews in France, Mandel traces the way these multiple, complex interactions have been overshadowed and obscured by a reductionist narrative of Muslim-Jewish polarization. (AllBooks)

From the close of the Dreyfus Affair to the outbreak of World War II, the French Jewish community was profoundly altered by the immigration of Eastern European Jews. Bringing with them ethnic definitions of Jewish identity and notions of political activism, the immigrants stimulated a major transformation- demographic, socio-economic, institutional, and ideological- in a French Jewish community that has practiced an ideology of assimilation since the mid-nineteenth century. This book explores this process of transformation against the backdrop of the increasingly xenophobic climate of France at the beginning of the twentieth century. It shows how the French setting shaped the meeting of native and immigrant Jews, and explores why that confrontation proved more difficult in France than in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Drawing on new archival sources, the author deals not only with the politics of native and immigrant Jews, but with their social history as well. This work adds a comparative dimension to previous studies of Jewish immigration, most of which have focused on North America, and also provides a view of France from the vantage point of one of her most significant minorities. -- Publisher description.

Jewish cultures existing in the Western world during the last two centuries have been and continue to be read as hyphenated phenomena within a specific national context, such as German-Jewish or American-Jewish culture. Yet to what extent do such nationalized constructs of Jewish culture and identity still dominate Jewish self-expressions, and the discourses about them, in the rapidly globalizing world of the twenty-first century? In a world in which Diaspora societies have begun to reshape themselves as part of a super- or nonnational identity, what has happened to a cosmopolitan Jewish identity? In a post-Zionist world, where one of the newest and most substantial Diaspora communities is that of Israelis, in the new globalized culture, is "being Jewish" suddenly something that can reach beyond the older models of Diasporic integration or nationalism? Which new paradigms of Jewish self-location, within the evolving and conflicting global discourses, about the nation, race, Genocides, anti-Semitism, colonialism and postcolonialism, gender and sexual identities does the globalization of Jewish cultures open up? To what extent might transnational notions of Jewishness, such as European-Jewish identity, create new discursive margins and centers? Is there a possibility that a "virtual makom (Jewish space)" might constitute itself? Recent studies on cosmopolitanism cite the Jewish experience as a key to the very notion of the movement of people for good or for ill as well as for the resurgence of modern nationalism. These theories reflect newer models of postcolonialism and transnationalism in regard to global Jewish cultures. " This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Review of History.

Tristan Brodsky, sprung from the asphalt of the Depression-era Bronx, goes on to become one of the swaggering Jewish geniuses who remake American culture, but slowly suffocates his poet wife, who harbors secrets of her own. Nina Hricek, a driven young Czech photographer, escapes from behind the Iron Curtain with a group of black American musicians, only to find herself trapped yet again, this time in a doomed love affair. And finally, Tris Freedman, grandson of Tristan and lover of Nina, a graffiti artist and unanchored revolutionary, cannibalizes his family history to feed his muse. In the end, their stories converge, and the survival of each requires the sacrifice of another.

This book traces the global, national, and local origins of the conflict between Muslims and Jews in France, challenging the belief that rising anti-Semitism in France is rooted solely in the unfolding crisis in Israel and Palestine. Maud Mandel shows how the conflict in fact emerged from processes internal to French society itself even as it was shaped by affairs elsewhere, particularly in North Africa during the era of decolonization. Mandel examines moments in which conflicts between Muslims and Jews became a matter of concern to French police, the media, and an array of self-appointed spokesmen from both communities: Israel's War of Independence in 1948, France's decolonization of North Africa, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the 1968 student riots, and François Mitterrand's experiments with multiculturalism in the 1980s. She takes an in-depth, on-the-ground look at interethnic relations in Marseille, which is home to the country's largest Muslim and Jewish populations outside of Paris. She reveals how Muslims and Jews in France have related to each other in diverse ways throughout this history--as former residents of French North Africa, as immigrants competing for limited resources, as employers and employees, as victims of racist aggression, as religious minorities in a secularizing state, and as French citizens. In Muslims and Jews in France, Mandel traces the way these multiple, complex interactions have been overshadowed and obscured by a reductionist narrative of Muslim-Jewish polarization.

In order to "Bolshevize" the Jewish population, the Soviets created within the Party a number of special Jewish Sections. Charged with the task of integrating the largely hostile or indifferent Jews into the new state the Sections' programs are, in effect, a case study of the modernization and secularization of an ethnic and religious minority. Zvi Gitelman's analysis of the Sections during the first decade of Soviet rule examines the nature of the challenge that modernization posed, the crises it created, and the responses it evoked. Originally published in 1972. 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.

Examines the role of the image of "Jewish criminality" in the rise of Nazism, in the Holocaust, and in the perception of Jews in postwar Germany. The conception of Jews as born criminals, and of Nazism as a force which rose to put an end to "lawlessness", occupied a larger role in Nazi anti-Jewish ideology and practices than has heretofore been acknowledged in the historiography of the Holocaust. Nazi racism as such was not sufficient to convince the German masses of the "Jewish danger": the centuries-long stereotype of the "Jewish criminal" influenced the population's internalization of Nazi dogma and served as a rationalization and excuse for Nazi anti-Jewish measures - from boycott to mass murder. However, it was the Nazi system itself that promoted criminality and moral corruption, both amongst the victims and the perpetrators. For instance, the Nazi-invented ghetto, in 1940-43, became a hotbed of criminality. Dwells on the Jewish police in the ghettos as a manifestaion of this moral decay. In the Nazi camps, it was the criminals who took the top positions in the prisoners' hierarchy. Focuses, in particular, on a shift in Nazi ideology in 1944-45: the attitude toward Zionism, which had been ambivalent before then, changed to a view of Zionism as a great danger and as the foremost enemy. The Nazis depicted Zionism as the greatest incarnation of Jewish criminality. The stereotype of Jews as criminals persisted in postwar Germany, and affected the perception of the DPs on the part of both the Germans and the U.S. Army.

Describes the life of Jewish middle-class women in Wilhelmine Germany. Pp. 148-152, "Anti-Semitism in the University, " state that until about 1905 women students, discriminated against because of their sex, tended to show solidarity by forming organizations open to all, in contrast to the segregated male students' organizations. Russian Jewish women were especially despised, even by German Jewish male students. Pp. 182-185 describe discrimination against Jewish teachers, noting that their chances of employment were highly limited. See also the index under "Anti-Semitism."

The unique duality of Jewish existence, wherein a major Jewish centre in the Land of Israel flourished alongside a large and prosperous diaspora, was one of the outstanding features of Second Temple and post-Temple Jewish life. As in modern times, ongoing Jewish dispersion raised questions that went to the heart of Jewish self-identity, and declarations of allegiance to the ancestral homeland were frequently accompanied by seemingly contrary expressions of 'local-patriotism' on the part of Jewish diaspora communities. The destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 CE, and the subsequent failure under Bar-Kokhba to revive political independence (135 CE) forced Jews in Judaea as well as in the diaspora to re-evaluate the nature of the bonds that linked Jews throughout the world to 'The Land', and at the same time effected a re-examination of the authority structure that claimed priority for the communal leaders still functioning in Jewish Palestine. The chapters of this book, first delivered in Oxford as the Third Jacobs Lectures in Rabbinic Thought in January 1994, address a broad spectrum of questions relating to the centre-diaspora reality of Jewish life in Late Antiquity.

This is a selection of essays written during the first decade of the twenty-first century, by a figure widely acknowledged as the conscience of European liberalism. In Walter Laqueur's lifetime, there have been more acutely dangerous situations, such as the coming of a world war or the seemingly unstoppable march to victory of totalitarian regimes, than in any other previous epoch. Such immediate dangers may not exist at the present time. But long-term trends are equally or even more threatening, as we now see in the ability of small groups of people, unprecedented in history, to inflict enormous damage. This is the underlying essence of Laqueur's thinking, as expressed in this new volume. As Laqueur observes, one learns from long experience that the worst does not always happen, and if it does, probably not in one's lifetime. Ideas and intellectual fashions emerging from the groves of academe, particularly in America can seem wrongheaded and often out of touch with the real world. This growing isolation causes growing bitterness, alienation, and a feeling of impotence on the part of intellectuals, which turns into greater radicalization and farfetched thinking. Laqueur fortunately does not fall into this trap. The articles and essays selected for this volume deal with a variety of topics. They do not entirely reflect Laqueur's interests, which during this period were more in the cultural field than in politics. However, politics intrude irrespective of the author's predilections. Laqueur deals with unpleasant truths in concrete geopolitical settings, but poignantly takes his stand with the men and women who strive to overcome self-censorship in the search for accurate judgment.

God bless you, England, on this glorious Year of Our Lord, 1145. Things are definitely not right in Nottingham. Rebecca, daughter of a Jewish money-lender, has a sense for it. A mad monk schemes to resurrect the Christ from body parts. A bone harpist murders creatures of legend for a price. A fae creature binds its wings and embraces a new God and his son. And don't even mention the Hood. The Man in Green. The Prince of Thieves. The tick-tock taker of the ten-toll tax. What hope have the series of sheriffs sent to hold the peace? It's the forest, you see. Sherwood. Ice Age ancient, impenetrable, hiding a dark and secret heart. But hearts, no matter how black, no matter how hidden, are not immune to change. The old world is dying... and a terrifying new one is waiting to take its place. Rebecca senses an opportunity. But how far is she willing to go, and what price - because there is always a price - will she have to pay? The Hood is Lavie Tidhar's narcotic reweirding of an ancient English myth, a tale stitched together from legends lost to time, a tale told and retold, reworked and renewed for each passing century. A tale, reader, for today. 'A wild, inventive tapestry of myth and magic, with a wry sense of humor. Tidhar's writing is wonderfully vibrant' Silvia Moreno-Garcia, bestselling author of Mexican Gothic

The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939-1945 examines one of the central problems in the history of Polish-Jewish relations: the attitude and the behavior of the Polish Underground - the resistance organization loyal to the Polish government-in-exile - toward the Jews during World War II. Using a variety of archival documents, testimonies, and memoirs, Zimmerman offers a careful, dispassionate narrative, arguing that the reaction of the Polish Underground to the catastrophe that befell European Jewry was immensely varied, ranging from aggressive aid to acts of murder. By analyzing the military, civilian, and political wings of the Polish Underground and offering portraits of the organization's main leaders, this book is the first full-length scholarly monograph in any language to provide a thorough examination of the Polish Underground's attitude and behavior towards the Jews during the entire period of World War II.

Ca. 28,000 Jews went into hiding in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation - some refused to move into the ghetto in 1940, while others fled from the ghetto at various stages or came to Warsaw from other towns. Ca. 70,000-90,000 Poles were involved in their rescue. In this way, a secret city which consisted of hidden Jews, their helpers, and those who preyed on them on the "Aryan side" (blackmailers, "blue police", etc.) came into being. Describes escapes of Jews from the ghetto, the network of rescue and accommodation on the "Aryan side", and the problems and dangers which the fugitives encountered. Jewish-Polish relationships on the "Aryan side" were complex and multifaceted, and the line between Polish helpers and enemies was not always clear. The Warsaw uprising of 1944 marked the end of the "secret city". 5,400 Jews perished in the uprising and its aftermath, some of them killed by the insurgents - fighters of the Armia Krajowa. Contends that flight and life in hiding presented the best chances for survival for the Jews; despite all odds, more than 60% of the Jewish fugitives in Warsaw survived the war.