Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar (1909-87), the daughter of Jules Perquel, a financier and newspaper editor, and Ellen Allatini, was brought up in the Paris suburb of Passy. In 1928 she went to the Sorbonne and in 1930 married André Amar (1908-90), who was at the École Normale Supérieure; he was the son of a banker who had come to Paris from Salonika. The Amars' daughter Sylvie was born in 1934; meanwhile Jacqueline wrote magazine articles. When war broke out the family lived in Bordeaux, Marseille, Nice and nine different places in Paris, often separately because André was first in the French army and then joined a Jewish resistance network. After 1945 the Amars largely devoted their lives to Jewish causes. In 1957 Jacqueline's diary for 18th July-25th August 1944, together with some of her post-war articles, was published as Ceux qui ne dormaient pas, translated by Persephone Books as Maman, What Are We Called Now?

The changed situation of Western Jewry in the 19th-20th centuries caused Jews to revise their conceptions of Jewry as a community and of its place in the world. Six Judaic systems emerged. Discusses each one in detail. While the 19th-century trends (Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative) developed in response to the needs of integration with the non-Jewish world, the 20th-century Judaisms (Zionism, Jewish Socialism and Yiddishism, and the American Judaism of Holocaust and Redemption) were a response to aggressive antisemitism and to the crisis caused by the rapid social and economic restructuring of Central and Eastern Europe. The events of May-June 1967 in the Middle East brought about a new trend - Holocaust and Redemption Judaism, in the center of which are the Holocaust (mythicized and perceived as a metaphor for absolute evil) and the State of Israel (perceived as the redemption for the Holocaust). This Judaism contains a salvific myth and possesses all the traits of a religious system. The exposition is accompanied by excerpts from books and articles.

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

Rafael, a young Jewish boy living in Spain during the Inquisition, wants to have a Bar Mitzvah and when his father opposes it, Rafael leaves, meets and falls in love with Miriam, and journeys with her toward Safed, Israel, the spiritual home of mystical Jews.

Ammiel Alcalay's groundbreaking work, After Jews and Arabs, published in 1993, redrew the geographic, political, cultural, and emotional map of relations between Jews and Arabs in the Levantine/Mediterranean world over a thousand-year period. Based on over a decade of research and fieldwork in many disciplines-including history and historiography; anthropology, ethnography, and ethnomusicology; political economy and geography; linguistics; philosophy; and the history of science and technology-the book presented a radically different perspective than that presented by received opinion. Given the radical and iconoclastic nature of Alcalay's perspective, After Jews and Arabs met great resistance in attempts to publish it. Though completed and already circulating in 1989, it didn't appear until 1993. In addition, when the book was published, there wasn't enough space to include its original bibliography, a foundational part of the project. A Bibliography for After Jews and Arabs presents the original bibliography, as completed in 1992, without changes, as a glimpse into the historical record of a unique scholarly, political, poetic, and cultural journey. The bibliography itself had roots in research begun in the late 1970s and demonstrates a very wide arc. In addition to the bibliography, we include three accompanying texts here. In "Behind the Scenes: Before After Jews and Arabs, " Alcalay takes us behind the closed doors of the academic process, reprinting the original reader reports and his detailed rebuttals, and in "A Bibliography for After Jews and Arabs A Brief Introduction," Alcalay contextualizes his own path to the work he undertook, in methodological, historical, and political terms. Also included is "A Poetics of Bibliography." Poet, novelist, translator, critic, and scholar Ammiel Alcalay teaches at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. His books include After Jews and Arabs, Keys to the Garden, Memories of Our Future, Islanders, and neither wit nor gold: from then. A 10th-anniversary edition of from the warring factions, a book-length poem dedicated to Srebrenica, and a book of essays, a little history, came out in 2013. a little history also came out in a Portuguese translation with Editor Lumme, São Paolo in 2019. During the wars in ex-Yugoslavia, he was the primary translator of texts from Bosnia, and translations include Sarajevo Blues and Nine Alexandrias by poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic, as well as works by journalist Zlatko Dizdarevic, and many others. Alcalay is the General Editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, a series of student and guest-edited archival texts emerging from New American Poetry, and he was the recipient of a 2017 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for this work.

A collection of essays, all published previously. The following deal with antisemitism:

A collection of essays, all published previously. The following deal with antisemitism:

Jacob Rader Marcus (1896-1995), scholar, professor, and rabbi, was called the Dean of American Jewish historians by students and colleagues alike. A seminal force in the evolution of the academic study of American Jewish history, Marcus was the first to apply modern critical methodology to this field. In the course of his long life, he published more than 300 books and articles on the history of American Jews. In 1947 he founded the American Jewish Archives, which he directed for almost fifty years. A beloved teacher and mentor for several generations of Hebrew Union College (HUC) students, Dr. Marcus remains a very significant figure in the history of American Jewry during the twentieth century. Marcus, raised in West Virginia, was the child of East European immigrants. At the age of 15, he moved to Cincinnati to matriculate at HUC, America's oldest rabbinical seminary. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War I, Marcus became a member of the HUC faculty upon his rabbinical ordination in 1920. He subsequently moved to Europe to pursue doctoral studies and, upon returning to Cincinnati, Marcus taught courses in Jewish history. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Marcus realized that the i American Jewry was fast becoming the most influential Jewish community in the world. In the aftermath of the brutal destruction of European Jewry during World War II, Marcus's keen interest in the history of American Jewry burgeoned. Marcus left the pulpit for a career of scholarship and teaching, he nevertheless maintained a close connection to his students and, through them, to the American rabbinate. A mentor to generations of HUC students and graduates, Marcus was an active participant in the Central Conference of American Rabbis (the organizational arm of the American Reform rabbinate), serving as its president from 1949-1951. In this volume, Gary Philip Zola brings together a unique assortment of Marcus's most important unpublished essays, written for a more popular audience between 1916 and 1989. Read collectively, these essays bring the key themes of Marcus's work into bold relief. In the early "America: The Spiritual Center of Jewry" (1916), as in the much later "Three Hundred Years in America" (1955), Marcus calls upon American Jewry to study its heritage, arguing that this knowledge will kindle a renaissance in American Jewish life. In "Lost: Judaism in the American Expeditionary Forces, the Urgent Need for Welfare Work" (1919), he insists that the Jewish experience in America consists of a symbiotic relationship between individual Jews and the larger Jewish community. A focus on the individual in relation to the whole guided many of Marcus's essays, as did his emphasis on Jews studying their own past, strong echoes of both can be found in "New Literary Responsibilities (1941-1942) as well as works for specific occasions, such as "The Program of the American Jewish Archives" (1947) and Genesis: College Beginnings (1989). Another leitmotif linking these diverse topics is Marcus's view that American Judaism will thrive and distinguish itself as long as Jewish education and Jewish cultural life become a high priority on the Jewish communal agenda. This collection enhances our understanding of how the ideas of one of American Jewry's pioneering historians evolved, while preserving historical documents that trace the development of American Jewish life over the course of the twentieth century.

When King Philip VI expelled the Jews in 1306, some 100,000 men, women, and children were driven from royal France into the neighboring lands of Spain, Provence, Italy, and North Africa. The great expulsion of 1306 was arguably one of the most traumatic moments of medieval Jewish history and would prove to be the harbinger of a series of recalls and expulsions, local and general, culminating in King Charles VI's expulsion decree of 1394. Despite the upheavals of the fourteenth century, the literary productivity of Jews was astonishing. Yet there are few direct references to the catastrophic events of 1306, even in Jewish liturgical and historiographic texts, where one would expect to find them. In No Place of Rest , Susan Einbinder coaxes out the literary traces of this traumatic expulsion. Why did the memory of this proud and vibrant Jewish community fade from historical memory? Where do its remnants reside among later communities and readers? From the lyrics of the supposed "Jewish troubadour" Isaac HaGorni to medical texts and astronomical charts, Einbinder studies a range of writings she reveals to be commemorative. Her careful readings uncover the ways in which medieval Jews asserted their identity in exile and, perhaps more important, helped to preserve or efface their history.

This book is the first to examine closely the interaction between Jewish culture, medicine, and science during Europe's age of 'scientific revolution'. Most students of Jewish history have treated the period from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries as a mere extension of the Jewish Middle Ages, a time when the Jewish world was cut off from intellectual developments in the Christian world. The eminent scholar David Ruderman here argues, however, that during this era Jewish culture and society became increasingly aware of medical and scientific advances, and that a new Jewish scientific discourse evolved that had significant repercussions for Jewish religious concerns.

A collection of essays, most of them published previously. Ch. 5 (pp. 133-172), "The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania", appeared as the introduction to Herman Kruk's book of the same name, published in 2002. Describes the fate of Herman Kruk (1897-1944), a Jewish Yiddishist intellectual, a librarian, a chronicler of the Vilnius ghetto, and author of a diary, who perished in a Nazi labor camp in Estonia a day before its liberation by the Soviets. Describes also the history of Jewish Vilnius, especially of the wartime ghetto. Reflects on two Holocausts: the killing of six million Jews and the annihilation of secular Jewish culture in Europe.

In recent times, ethnicity and issues of origin have become a hotly debated topic among Jews both in Israel and in the Diaspora. This is particularly true both of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, who for years had remained at the margins of the Israeli national narrative, as well as the Israeli Palestinian minority. Much the same may be said of Diaspora Jews. Among the public spaces where ethnicity has become more visible are museums, together with heritage centres, art galleries, and the Internet. The aim of Memory and Ethnicity is to investigate how ethnicity is represented and narrated in such spaces. How have groups of Jews from such different backgrounds as Morocco, Egypt, India or the US elaborated their past legacies and traditions vis-a-vis a variety of national narratives and cultural or political ideologies? This volume describes the emergence of a new museological scene - that mirrors a multi-vocal Jewish and Israeli public sphere in which ethnicity has become central to a nation's cultural imagination. By considering museums as places of memory where an ethnic/communal identity is displayed, Memory and Ethnicity analyses which memories are preserved, and which suppressed. This study sets out to enrich the understanding of Israeli and Jewish cultural history, and also to deepen the field of museum studies from little investigated perspectives.

"'The economic history of European jews' attempts to make sense of the economic foundations of Jewish life in the different parts of late antique and early medieval Europe. In the first part Michael Toch describes the demographic arc, decline, subsequent rise, and spatial distribution of Jewish populations. This data is then broadened to include the range of economic activities. The second part analyses the actual share of Jews in different branches of the economy. This includes the idea of their pioneer role and the notion of an intercontinental network of Jewish commerce, the phenomenon of Jews in agriculture and entrepreneurship, gender roles and the household mode of production, and the difficult subject of the significance of minority status for economic activity, among others"--provided by publisher.

The good news (euangelion) of the crucified and risen Messiah was proclaimed first to Jews in Jerusalem, and then to Jews throughout the land of Israel. In Jerusalem Crucified, Jerusalem Risen, Mark Kinzer argues that this initial audience and geographical setting of the euangelion is integral to the eschatological content of the message itself. While the good news is universal in concern and cosmic in scope, it never loses its particular connection to the Jewish people, the city of Jerusalem, and the land of Israel. The crucified Messiah participates in the future exilic suffering of his people, and by his resurrection offers a pledge of Jerusalem's coming redemption. Basing his argument on a reading of the Acts of the Apostles and the Gospel of Luke, Kinzer proposes that the biblical message requires its interpreters to reflect theologically on the events of post-biblical history. In this context he considers the early emergence of Rabbinic Judaism and the much later phenomenon of Zionism, offering a theological perspective on these historical developments that is biblically-rooted, attentive to both Jewish and Christian tradition, and minimalist in the theological constraints it imposes on the just resolution of political conflict in the Middle East.

The only country in the world with a line in its national anthem as desperate as “this people has already suffered for its past and its future,” Hungary is a nation defined by poverty, despair, and conflict. Its history, of course, took an even darker and more tragic turn during the Holocaust. But the story of the Jews in Hungary is also one of survival, heroism, and even humor—and that is the one acclaimed author Adam Biro sets out to recover in One Must Also Be Hungarian , an inspiring and altogether poignant look back at the lives of his family members over the past two hundred years. A Hungarian refugee and celebrated novelist working in Paris, Biro recognizes the enormous sacrifices that his ancestors made to pave the way for his successes and the envious position he occupies as a writer in postwar Europe. Inspired, therefore, to share the story of his family members with his grandson, Biro draws some moving pictures of them here: witty and whimsical vignettes that convey not only their courageous sides, but also their inner fears, angers, jealousies, and weaknesses—traits that lend an indelible humanity to their portraiture. Spanning the turn of the nineteenth century, two destructive world wars, the dramatic rise of communism, and its equally astonishing fall, the stories here convey a particularly Jewish sense of humor and irony throughout—one that made possible their survival amid such enormous adversity possible. Already published to much acclaim in France, One Must Also Be Hungarian is a wry and compulsively readable book that rescues from oblivion the stories of a long-suffering but likewise remarkable and deservedly proud people.

"A wave of plague ravaged the cities of northern Italy in 1630-31, ravaging Christian and Jewish communities alike. In Writing Plague Susan L. Einbinder explores the Hebrew texts that lay witness to the event. These Jewish sources on the Great Italian Plague have never been treated together as a group, Einbinder observes, but they can contribute to a bigger picture of this major outbreak and how it affected people, institutions, and beliefs; how individuals and institutions responded; and how they did or did not try to remember and memorialize it"-- Provided by publisher.

First published in 1994. This volume takes as its theme Jewish education and learning throughout the ages. The essays explore the nature and function of the 'Jewish Academies' in the broadest sense, the leading personalities associated with them and their social, cultural and moral effect on the Jewish communities of their day.

Book by Porter, Jack Nusan