"In August 1970, David Biale, a 21-year-old American Jewish student, arrived at Kibbutz Kfar Ruppin in Israel's Bet She'an Valley as a volunteer. There, he met Rachel Korati, nine days shy of her eighteenth birthday. They began an intense dialogue about how a secular Jew might be Jewish and what the role of Israel and kibbutz ought to be in modern Jewish life. They also found a common language in the counter-culture of the 1960s to which both were drawn. Upon David's return to university studies in Berkeley and Rachel's first steps into independent adulthood - living in a town near Tel Aviv and working as a youth movement counselor -- the two commenced a correspondence in which they continued their intellectual and ideological discussions from the summer, engaging Jewish sources on the one hand, and contemporary events on the other. Gradually, the letters became more intimate and so began an epistolary romance, which one might associate more with the nineteenth century and which would be inconceivable in today's world of texting and email. Over the next two years, the correspondence continued, often on a daily basis. Twice, David's plans to come to Israel were dashed. The two struggled to hold onto a relationship composed primarily of written words. In the fall of 1971, Rachel was drafted into the Israeli Army and David had his own brush with the American draft in the last phase of the Vietnam War. Aerograms Across the Ocean: A Love Story in Letters opens a rare window into the lives and thoughts of two passionate young people, trying to find their identities and life trajectories in the tumultuous early 1970s. By turns philosophical and playful, poetic and prosaic, idealistic and uncertain, pensive and erotic, this jointly-written memoir is a coming-of-age story in Israel after the Six Day War and in America in the shadow of the Vietnam War. The book is organized around the 258 letters the authors exchanged, a correspondence that takes readers back into a different age, half a century ago." --

The view of themselves as the chosen people of God has been maintained by Jews from the beginnings of their history to the present. The author explores the development of this idea in Jewish theology and law, and essays a contemporary retrieval of the classical doctrine of election. Through an examination of the philosophical implications of the idea, he argues for the correlation of election and revelation, and shows both what the notion of election should mean for Jews today, and how non-Jews can better understand it.

The Universal Jew analyzes literary images of the Jewish nation and the Jewish national subject at Zionism’s formative moment. In a series of original readings of late nineteenth-century texts—from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda to Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland to the bildungsromane of Russian Hebrew and Yiddish writers—Mikhal Dekel demonstrates the aesthetic and political function of literary works in the making of early Zionist consciousness. More than half a century before the foundation of the State of Israel and prior to the establishment of the Zionist political movement, Zionism emerges as an imaginary concept in literary texts that create, facilitate, and naturalize the transition from Jewish-minority to Jewish-majority culture. The transition occurs, Dekel argues, mainly through the invention of male literary characters and narrators who come to represent "exemplary" persons or "man in general" for the emergent, still unformed national community. Such prototypical characters transform the symbol of the Jew from a racially or religiously defined minority subject to a "post-Jewish," particularuniversal, and fundamentally liberal majority subject. The Universal Jew situates the "Zionist moment" horizontally, within the various intellectual currents that make up the turn of the twentieth century: the discourse on modernity, the crisis in liberalism, Nietzsche’s critique of the Enlightenment, psychoanalysis, early feminism, and fin de siècle interrogation of sexual identities. The book examines the symbolic roles that Jews are assigned within these discourses and traces the ways in which Jewish literary citizens are shaped, both out of and in response to them. Beginning with an analysis of George Eliot’s construction of the character Deronda and its reception in Zionist circles, the Universal Jew ends with the self-fashioning of male citizens in fin de siècle and post-statehood Hebrew works, through the aesthetics oftragedy. Throughout her readings, Dekel analyzes the political meaning of these nascent images of citizens, uncovering in particular the gendered arrangements out of which they are born.

Identity Papers argues that contemporary Jewish American literature revises our understanding of Jewishness and Jewish difference. Moving beyond the reductive labeling of texts and authors as “too Jewish” or “not Jewish enough,” and focusing instead on narratives that portray Jewish regeneration through feminist Orthodoxy, queerness, off-whiteness, and intermarriage, Helene Meyers resists a lachrymose view of contemporary Jewish American life. She argues that such gendered, sexed, and raced debates about Jewish identity become opportunities rather than crises, signs of creative potential rather than symptoms of assimilation and deracination. Thus, feminist debates within Orthodoxy are allied to Jewish continuity by Rebecca Goldstein, Allegra Goodman, and Tova Mirvis; the geography of Jewish identity is racialized by Alfred Uhry, Tony Kushner, and Philip Roth; and the works of Jyl Lynn Felman, Judith Katz, Lev Raphael, and Michael Lowenthal queer the Jewish family as they reveal homophobia to be an abomination. Even as Identity Papers expands Jewish literary horizons and offers much-needed alternatives to the culture wars between liberal and traditional Jews, it argues that Jewish difference productively troubles dominant narratives of feminist, queer, and whiteness studies. Meyers demonstrates that the evolving Jewish American literary renaissance is anything but provincial; rather, it is engaged with categories of difference central to contemporary academic discourses and our national life.

Much more than a particular period in world history, modernity has fundamentally transformed how we think and live, and especially how we understand and relate to religious traditions. As the 'ghetto walls' have fallen, both empirically and metaphorically, Judaism is compelled to compete in an open marketplace of ideas. Jews can no longer count on an assumedly necessary Jewish identity or commitment, nor on the rallying force of anti-Semitism to ensure an individual and collective sense of belonging. Rather Jewish moral, spiritual and historical values and ideas must be read with new eyes and challenged to address modernity's proliferating array of questions and realities. The pertinent questions modern Jewry faces are how to embrace modernity as Jews and what such an embrace means for the meaning and future of Jewish life. This collection of essays, authored by scholars of the Shalom Hartman Institute, addresses three critical challenges posed to Judaism by modernity: the challenge of ideas, the challenge of diversity, and the challenge of statehood, and provides insights and ideas for the future direction of Judaism. Providing readers with new insights into Judaism and the Jewish people in contemporary times, the collection explores a wide range of issues that includes: the significance of Israel for the future of Judaism; the Jewish people as a people; the relationship between monotheism and violence; revelation and ethics; Judaism and the feminist challenge; and Judaism and homosexuality.

This is an eloquent and deeply felt memoir exploring the author's complex relationship with his Jewish identity. "If I Am Not Myself" is a passionate, thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be Jewish in the twenty-first century. It traces the author's upbringing in 1960s Jewish-American suburbia, his anti-war and pro-Palestinian activism on the British Left, and life as a Jew among Muslims in Pakistan, Morocco, and Britain. Interwoven with this are the experiences of his grandfather's life in Jewish New York of the 1930s and '40s, his struggles with anti-Semitism and the twists and turns that led him from anti-Fascism to Militant Zionism. In the course of this deeply personal story, Marqusee refutes the claims of Israel and Zionism on Jewish loyalty and laments their impact on the Jewish Diaspora. Rather, he argues for a richer, more multi-dimensional understanding of Jewish history and identity, and reclaims vital political and personal space for those castigated as self-haters by the Jewish establishment.

Against the Grain is a collection of challenging and insightful essays from a reflective historian. Jerold Auerbach, Professor Emeritus at Wellesley College (where he taught for 40 years), writes in the Foreword how his academic career and his time in Israel "each in its own distinctive way converged to liberate me from my past as a non-Jewish Jew." He adds: "Regardless of the subject-law, modern American history, Pueblo Indians, American Judaism, Israel-deference to the conventional wisdom never had been my style. I always enjoyed the stimulation of writing against the grain: discovering hidden meanings, challenging historical and political pieties, and exposing the self-serving ideology that often lurked beneath self-evident truths. Providing intellectual catnip, it also enabled me to reach readers far beyond the narrow confines of academic journals. "My creative work always was done in the solitude of my study, my sanctum within my home. Enclosed within the treasured artifacts, maps, photographs, prints, and books accumulated during decades of research and travel, I explored the historical past that both inspired and reflected my own intellectual trajectory. Virtually every book I have written, to my genuine surprise, contained within it the seed of its successor. That, of course, is discernible only with hindsight-which, after all, is the distinctive attribute of a historian. I invite my family, friends, and interested readers to accompany me to some favorite destinations during my journey." A new book in Quid Pro's Journeys & Memoirs Series, Against the Grain presents this distinctive hindsight in essays and excerpts targeted to a general audience interested in such issues, in addition to historians and college students. Many of the essays were first published in non-academic periodicals and are accessible to this broader audience, though they are nonetheless supported with the prodigious research, evocative prose, and candor of a widely published writer.

In the current situation of polarization in the Middle East, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that a long tradition of dialogue and openness toward the "Other" exists in many strands of Jewish thought. Himself or herself the quintessential Other in a world in which she or he has existed dispersed, in exile, as a minority, the Jew has consistently envisioned the self in relation to surrounding societies. Esther Benbassa and Jean-Christophe Attias show that alterity is a useful and morally compelling notion with which to structure Judaism's historically specific and politically charged encounters with deity, femininity, the Christian West, and the Muslim East. In Benbassa and Attias's view, the Other may be rejected, but it is also a mirror, both reminding the Jew of ethical duties and constituting a source of temptation and danger. Sometimes, the authors find, the Other is the enemy. They note that it is with the enemy that peace is made, peace with the Other and peace with the self. The Jew and the Other , which is an extended commentary on a dozen Biblical verses and which follows the five books of the Pentateuch, offers the history of that encounter as an inextricable part of the Jewish condition and is itself a meditation on this encounter.

"Embracing Exile is a comprehensive history of Jewish responses to and conceptions of their exiles/diasporas. Jews have, since their beginnings, been a wandering people. According to their origin story, they wandered from Ur of Chaldees to Canaan to Egypt and then back to Canaan. From there, they were exiled to Babylon, where they built their longest-lived home, one that survived until the twentieth century. Over the span of centuries, they resettled in Persia, Egypt, Morocco, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Poland, Ukraine, and the United States, often flourishing. Thanks to these experiences, Diaspora became "natural" to Jews, and though they may have hoped for a return to their Promised Land at the End of Days, they made sense of their many homes, defending Diaspora as the realm where Jewish life could grow and Jews fulfill their covenantal obligations in the company of their God. The texts and expressions the volume documents in Defending Diaspora include biblical and rabbinic texts, philosophical treatises, Kabbalah, Hasidism, and a multiplicity of modern expressions. The book offers revised readings of the book of Esther and other biblical texts, a survey of Talmudic treatments of exile, an in-depth analysis of the thought of the Maharal of Prague, analyses of works by Philip Roth, and other modern authors, and much more. The book shows that lament has not been the most common Jewish response to diaspora and that Zionism is not the natural outcome of either Jewish ideology or history"-- Provided by publisher.

"Roth examined the concept of Jewish identity years before the onset of National Socialism and looked ahead with apprehension to Germany's future. Emotionally ravaged by the whirlwind events of Weimar Germany, he dared to write about the historical schism between Eastern and Western Jews, warning of the false comforts of materialism and assimilation and urging his fellow Jews to embrace their heritage and the land of Palestine as a nascent Jewish homeland. As one of Berlin's most eminent journalists, he traveled throughout Europe and composed these essays with both an exigency and restrained contemplation that have earned him comparisons to his more celebrated contemporaries, Thomas Mann and Isaac Babel. By the mid-1930s, as anti-Semitism crested and Roth fled Germany for what he thought were safer climes in Paris, he became increasingly desperate and hobbled by alcoholism. He had tremendous difficulties securing a German publisher, and his powerful 1937 preface, written for what he hoped would be the second edition of The Wandering Jews and included here, was never published in his lifetime."-- Jacket.

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.

Discusses Jewish identity in America as reflected in the culture of immigrants and descendants of immigrants. Self-hatred or, at least, ambivalence about oneself in the face of native American values is one theme. Ch. 5 (pp. 98-125), "To Make 'a Jew': Projecting Antisemitism in Post-War America", analyzes two novels - Arthur Miller's "Focus" and Saul Bellow's "The Victim" - that explore the psychosocial dimensions of postwar antisemitism. They raise the question whether possibilities of Jewish-Gentile relations might lead to personal and social renovation. In "Focus", a crypto-fascist antisemite who has internalized racist stereotypes finally identifies symbolically as a Jew. In "The Victim", both Jew and Gentile partially overcome their mutual stereotyping. The main Jewish protagonist also overcomes some negative aspects of his self-image.

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.

Documents the tension between the ultra-Orthodox and the secular Jews, discussing both the history, politics, and culture that continues to fuel the animosity between these two groups.

The rise and fall of the Jews is compressed into the enigmatic character of Ebenezer Schneerson, who has somehow become the final repository of all Jewish culture following the ravages of World War II.

"The relationship between Jewish studies and religious studies is a long and complicated one, full of tensions and possibilities. Whereas the majority of scholars working within Jewish studies contend that the discipline is in a very healthy state, many who work in theory and method in religious studies disagree. For them, Jewish studies represents all that is wrong with the modern academic study of religion: too introspective, too ethnic, too navel-gazing, and too willing to reify or essentialize data that it constructs in its own image. In this book, Aaron W. Hughes explores the unique situation of Jewish studies and how it intersects with religious studies, noting particular areas of concern for those interested in the field's intellectual health and future flourishing. Hughes provides a detailed study of origins, principles, and assumptions, documenting the rise of Jewish studies in Germany and its migration to Israel and the United States. Current issues facing the academic study of Judaism are discussed, including the role of private foundations that seek inroads into the academy"--back cover.

The past two decades have witnessed a remarkable renaissance in the academic study of the history of the Jews in Great Britain and of their impact upon British history. In this volume Professor Geoffrey Alderman presents essays that reflect the richness of this renaissance, penned by a new generation of British and American scholars who are uninhibited by the considerations of communal image and public obligation that once exercised a powerful influence on Anglo-Jewish historiography. History does not have lessons, says Alderman, but it may provide signposts, and he adds that in the case of the essays presented here "I believe there is one signpost that we would all do well to ponder: in multicultural Britain hard-working immigrants may be welcome, or they may be feared -- or both. They are destined to remain not quite British, and, for better or worse, they are destined to bequeath this otherness to the generations that follow them."

"This volume assembles twenty-three essays by Erich S. Gruen, who has written extensively on the literature and history of early Judaism and the experience of the Jews in the Greco-Roman world. Twenty-two of the articles have previously been published, and one new one was composed for the volume"--Back cover.

This book, a linguist's reassessment of early European Jewish history, will be of interest to anyone who has ever wondered how the Jewish people, lacking their own territorial base and living as a minority among often hostile non-Jewish peoples over the four corners of the globe, succeeded in preserving a separate identity for close to two thousand years. The book makes a number of innovative and controversial claims about the relationship of the contemporary Jews to the Old Palestinian Jews.