Includes articles on Walter Benjamin, S.Y. Agnon, Martin Buber, and on Israel and the diaspora.

This Companion provides readers with a comprehensive introduction to the most important and interesting historical and contemporary facets of Judaism in America. Written by twenty-four leading scholars from the fields of religious studies, history, literature, philosophy, art history, sociology, and musicology, the survey adopts an inclusive perspective on Jewish religious experience. Three initial chapters cover the development of Judaism in America from 1654, when Sephardic Jews first landed in New Amsterdam, until today.

Jacob Katz presents a major reinterpretation of modern anti-Semitism that blends history of ideas with social analysis. He describes the process by which a set of negative ideas about the Jews gradually became transformed and then, around 1879, picked up so much social force as to result in the premeditated and systematic destruction of the Jewish people of Europe.

Photographs every aspect of Jewish life in homes, schools, synagoges, and in city and village streets, and chronicles important events in Polish Jewish history

Delineates a number of aspects of Zionist thought, as expressed through the writings of selected central nineteenth and twentieth century individuals. Avineri presents a history of Zionist thought through profiles of some of Zionism's major thinkers. Each chapter is devoted to a specific personality and focuses on a particular topic or approach. By examining the stories of these men, how their ideas developed, and some of their writings, the reader becomes familiar with different aspects of Zionist thought.

A history of the Jews in Germany from the 4th century to 1941. Throughout this period the Jews tried to integrate into German society, but they were unsuccessful due to antisemitism. Pp. 20-31 mention restrictions imposed on the Jews in medieval Germany (e.g. specific Jewish clothing, the yellow badge), and other manifestations of antisemitism (e.g. blood libels, persecution caused by the Black Death, anti-Jewish writings by Luther). Pp. 254-283 describe the situation of German Jews under Nazism between 1933-41.

This volume includes twenty-seven interdisciplinary essays written by Tessa Rajak, a well-known scholar, on aspects of Judaism in the Greco-Roman world. The essays derive from the author's long-standing interests in the analysis of texts as documents of cultural and religious interaction, and in how Jewish communities were woven into the social fabric of Greek cities in the Hellenistic and Roman East. The book is divided into four sections: Greeks and Jews, Josephus, The Jewish Diaspora and Epigraphy, and an epilogue, which addresses modern uses and abuses of the Greek-Jewish polarity as exemplified by three nineteenth-century writers. Scholars and students from a wide variety of backgrounds will benefit. This publication has also been published in hardback, please click here for details.

Nineteenth-century European thought, especially in Germany, was increasingly dominated by a new historicist impulse to situate every event, person, or text in its particular context. At odds with the transcendent claims of philosophy and--more significantly--theology, historicism came to be attacked by its critics for reducing human experience to a series of disconnected moments, each of which was the product of decidedly mundane, rather than sacred, origins. By the late nineteenth century and into the Weimar period, historicism was seen by many as a grinding force that corroded social values and was emblematic of modern societys gravest ills. Resisting History examines the backlash against historicism, focusing on four major Jewish thinkers. David Myers situates these thinkers in proximity to leading Protestant thinkers of the time, but argues that German Jews and Christians shared a complex cultural and discursive world best understood in terms of exchange and adaptation rather than influence.After examining the growing dominance of the new historicist thinking in the nineteenth century, the book analyzes the critical responses of Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Leo Strauss, and Isaac Breuer. For this fascinating and diverse quartet of thinkers, historicism posed a stark challenge to the ongoing vitality of Judaism in the modern world. And yet, as they set out to dilute or eliminate its destructive tendencies, these thinkers often made recourse to the very tools and methods of historicism. In doing so, they demonstrated the utter inescapability of historicism in modern culture, whether approached from a Christian or Jewish perspective.

In 2003-04, Bartov traveled to Eastern Galicia to search for remnants of the rich pre-Holocaust Jewish culture and for Holocaust memorials. In his travel notes and reflections on historical memory in Ukraine, he shows how the memory of the Jewish past is deliberately erased. There is a strong tendency to hide from sight or to demolish or desecrate all remnants of Jewish life and civilization in Eastern Galicia. Memorial tablets commemorating Nazi massacres do not mention that the victims were Jews or that many of the murderers were Ukrainians. In an attempt to create a national myth of the Ukrainian nation as a martyr of Soviet oppression, Jews are slandered and anti-Soviet organizations like OUN and UPA, which took part in the genocide of Jews, are extolled. In many cases, sites of Jewish life and death are filled with symbols of Ukrainian nationalism and glory. Presents quotes from the present-day Ukrainian antisemitic press blaming Jews for alleged "crimes" against the Ukrainian nation. Includes brief accounts of the events of the Holocaust in some of the places that Bartov visited.

Jewish women's exclusion from the public domains of religious and civil life has been reflected in their near absence in the master narratives of the East European Jewish past. As a result, the study of Jewish women in eastern Europe is still in its infancy. The fundamental task of historians to construct women as historical subjects, 'as a focus of inquiry, a subject of the story, an agent of the narrative', has only recently begun. This volume is the first collection of essays devoted to the study of Jewish women's experiences in Eastern Europe. The volume is edited by Paula Hyman of Yale University, a leading figure in Jewish women's history in the United States, and by ChaeRan Freeze of Brandeis University, author of a prize-winning study on Jewish divorce in nineteenth-century Russia. Their Introduction provides a much-needed historiographic survey that summarizes the major work in the field and highlights the lacunae. Their contributors, following this lead, have attempted to go beyond mere description of what women experienced to explore how gender constructed distinct experiences, identities, and meanings. In seeking to recover lost achievements and voices and place them into a broader analytical framework, this volume is an important first step in the rethinking of east European Jewish history with the aid of new insights gleaned from the research on gender. As in earlier volumes of Polin, substantial space is given, in 'New Views', to recent research in other areas of Polish-Jewish studies, and there is a book review section.

A thousand years ago, Arabs & Jews built a paradise in the southern half of Spain. Everyone had the good life. This was a time of acceptance of differences

Hannah Rochel Verbermacher, a Hasidic holy woman known as the Maiden of Ludmir, was born in early-nineteenth-century Russia and became famous as the only woman in the three-hundred-year history of Hasidism to function as a rebbe—or charismatic leader—in her own right. Nathaniel Deutsch follows the traces left by the Maiden in both history and legend to fully explore her fascinating story for the first time. The Maiden of Ludmir offers powerful insights into the Jewish mystical tradition, into the Maiden’s place within it, and into the remarkable Jewish community of Ludmir. Her biography ultimately becomes a provocative meditation on the complex relationships between history and memory, Judaism and modernity. History first finds the Maiden in the eastern European town of Ludmir, venerated by her followers as a master of the Kabbalah, teacher, and visionary, and accused by her detractors of being possessed by a dybbuk, or evil spirit. Deutsch traces the Maiden’s steps from Ludmir to Ottoman Palestine, where she eventually immigrated and re-established herself as a holy woman. While the Maiden’s story—including her adamant refusal to marry—recalls the lives of holy women in other traditions, it also brings to light the largely unwritten history of early-modern Jewish women. To this day, her transgressive behavior, a challenge to traditional Jewish views of gender and sexuality, continues to inspire debate and, sometimes, censorship within the Jewish community.