"The emergence of the state of Israel has fundamentally changed the conditions of Jewish existence. The issues now facing Jews everywhere are totally different to those that confronted them only fifty years ago.This book provides the only thoroughly worldwide modern history of the Jews of the Diaspora. Robert Wistrich has drawn together an outstanding collection of authors from the United States, Europe and Israel in order to analyse the immense changes that have taken place since 1945 in a comprehensive, yet original, manner.Cultural, religious, domestic, political, economic and occupational transformations in Jewry are addressed in up-to-date studies.Terms of Survival reframes the nature of the debate by highlighting continuity and change in the position of the Jews throughout the world." --

What does it mean to be a Jew? In the twenty essays included here, best-selling author Lucy S. Widowhood examines many aspects of modern Jewish life, concentrating on the central experiences of our era- the search for meaning of one's existence as a Jew;bridging the past and the present; reconciling tradition and the Holocaust. While she describes the evolution of American Judaism and surveys its present condition, the author also shows us the continuities between Old world and New World Judaism as she evokes the modern Jew's struggle between faith and secularism

Covering topical issues concerning the nature of the Israeli state, this engaging work presents essays that combine a variety of comparative schemes, both internal to Jewish civilization and extending throughout the world, such as: modern Jewish society, politics and culture; historical consciousness in the 20th century; colonialism, anti-colonialism and postcolonial state-building.With its open-ended, comparative approach, Israel in History provides a useful means of correcting the biases found in so much scholarship on Israel, be it sympathetic or hostile. This book will appeal to scholars and students with research interests in many fields, including Israeli Studies, Middle East Studies, and Jewish Studies.

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?

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"--

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.

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.

An unabridged compilation of the bestselling and award winning trilogy The Boys from Bondi, Going Home and Joshua. A rare look at the adolescent Jewish-Australian experience filled with daring and wit. The unforgettable portrayal of the conflict between Arab and Jew is told with passion, humour and unlikely optimism. The book is a tragi-comic adventure touched with romance and growing up.

"When her marriage suddenly ends, and a diary documenting her beloved grandfather's escape from Nazi-occupied Netherlands in the summer of 1942 is discovered, Naomi K. Lewis decides to retrace his journey to learn about her family history. Despite suffering from extreme disorientation and a lifetime of anxiety, she travels alone for the first time. Moving from Amsterdam to Lyon--relying on the marvels of GPS--she discovers family secrets and her own narrative as a second-generation Jewish Canadian. With vulnerability, humour, and wisdom, Lewis's memoir asks tough questions about her identity as a secular Jew, the accuracy of family stories, and the impact of the Holocaust on subsequent generations. How do immigrants weave their sense of identity into their chosen countries? Must we be able to locate ourselves within family and cultural geography to belong?"--

"This book asks fundamental questions about the uses of history. That it does so from a rootedness in Jewish history, an unassimilated location, is one part of its strength. But history alone doesn't confer this strength; the poet's continuing labor with Jewish meaning does. The other part, of course, is the integrity of its poetics. A Klepfisz poem lives amid complex tensions, even when its texture may appear transparent. There is a voice, sometimes voices, in these poems which can often best be heard by reading aloud. Her sense of phrase, of line, of the shift of tone, is almost flawless. But perfection is not what Irena Klepfisz is after. It is the tension between so many forces: Language, speechlessness, memory, politics, irony, compassion, hunger for what is lost, hunger for a justice still to be made, that makes this poetry crucial to the new unfoldings of history that we begin, in 1990, to imagine." -- from the introduction by Adrienne Rich

An investigation of Jewish identity politics and Jewish contemporary ideology using both popular culture and scholarly texts. Jewish identity is tied up with some of the most difficult and contentious issues of today. The purpose in this book is to open many of these issues up for discussion. Since Israel defines itself openly as the 'Jewish State', we should ask what the notions of 'Judaism', 'Jewishness', 'Jewish culture' and 'Jewish ideology' stand for. Gilad examines the tribal aspects embedded in Jewish secular discourse, both Zionist and anti Zionist; the 'holocaust religion'; the meaning of 'history' and 'time' within the Jewish political discourse; the anti-Gentile ideologies entangled within different forms of secular Jewish political discourse and even within the Jewish left. He questions what it is that leads Diaspora Jews to identify themselves with Israel and affiliate with its politics. The devastating state of our world affairs raises an immediate demand for a conceptual shift in our intellectual and philosophical attitude towards politics, identity politics and history.

Reaching from biblical times to the present day, Esther Benbassa’s prize-winning exploration of Jewish identity is both epic and comprehensive. She shows how in the Jewish world, the representation and ritualization of suffering have shaped the history of both the people and the religion. Benbassa argues that the nineteenth century gave rise to a Jewish ‘lachrymose’ historiography, and that Jewish history was increasingly seen to be a ‘vale of tears’—a development that has become even more pronounced since the Holocaust. The treatment of the Holocaust in the State of Israel now has the form of a civil religion. In principle within reach of everyone, the ‘duty of memory’ and the uniqueness of the genocide have mitigated for many Jews the loss of other traditions. The Israeli government invokes the memory of the Holocaust to neutralize threats to its interests—ensuring that suffering continues to be a central part of Jewish identity and positioning the State of Israeli as a redemptive force.

Jews and Muslims in the Arab World highlights the effects of historical memory on the Arab-Israel conflict, demonstrating that both Jews and Arabs use stories of distant pasts to create their identities and shape their politics. Whether real or imagined, the past filtered through their collective memories has had and will continue to have enormous influence on how Jews and Arabs perceive themselves and each other. Jews and Muslims in the Arab World describes the ways in which the past is absorbed, internalized, and then processed among Jews and Arabs. The book stresses the importance of historical imagination on the current evolving political cultures, but does not claim that explanations from an ancient past shed light on every aspect of contemporary events.

The Jews of post-World War I Iraq saw themselves as patriots of the new state, and the Jewish intelligentsia shared ideas of Arab nationalism. Several factors made the Arab elites regard the Jews as a problematic minority and put their Iraqi identities into question: the growing popularity of Zionism, Arab nationalism, and communism, which began to spread among both Muslim and Jewish youth. In the late 1930s the anti-colonial (i.e. anti-British) struggle, growing conflation of Judaism with Zionism, and Nazi propaganda led to a rise in anti-Jewish sentiments. These erupted in the "Farhud", a series of anti-Jewish riots in Baghdad in June 1941, during which ca. 180 Jews were killed. The Baghdad riots were followed by anti-Jewish excesses in Diwaniyya, Basra, Hila, and elsewhere. The authorities suppressed the riots, and a large number of pogromists were killed. Against the background of the Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine in 1946-51, Iraqi Muslims increasingly identified the Jews with Zionism. The situation for the Jews became unbearable because of their social ostracism and outright discrimination, restrictions, and growing antisemitism. When a new government introduced a denationalization law for the Jews who wished to emigrate; the anti-Jewish atmosphere in the country, repressions, and the hysteria of fear for their future caused a great majority of the Jews to leave.

'Race and Photography' studies the changing function of photography from the 1870s to the 1940s within the field of the 'science of race', what many today consider the paradigm of pseudo-science. Amos Morris-Reich looks at the ways photography enabled not just new forms of documentation but new forms of perception

A unique memoir that interweaves poetry, narrative, meditation, and social history, A Spiritual Life explores the complex facets of a Jewish woman's spiritual coming-of-age, capturing the emotional and spiritual reality of contemporary Jews as well as religious seekers of all types. From the experiences of early childhood, to the spiritual awakening of a secular adolescent encountering Jewish tradition, to the alternately funny and searing tales of new-found independence, early married life, young motherhood, and midlife, Feld comments with remarkable honesty and clarity on the many stages of spiritual and artistic exploration and growth. Overarching all these accounts is the picture of how the cycle of the Jewish calendar year comes to provide an ever-renewing source of sustenance for the author's deepening spiritual expression.

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.

"For everyone who wants to understand the varieties of Jewish identity, it boundaries and inclusions, this book shows the way into an essential aspect of Judaism and allows you to interact directly with the sacred texts of the Jewish tradition"--Inside cover.