Using the lives of the three outstanding French intellectuals of the twentieth century, renowned historian Tony Judt offers a unique look at how intellectuals can ignore political pressures and demonstrate a heroic commitment to personal integrity and moral responsibility unfettered by the difficult political exigencies of their time. Through the prism of the lives of Leon Blum, Albert Camus, and Raymond Aron, Judt examines pivotal issues in the history of contemporary French society—antisemitism and the dilemma of Jewish identity, political and moral idealism in public life, the Marxist moment in French thought, the traumas of decolonization, the disaffection of the intelligentsia, and the insidious quarrels rending Right and Left. Judt focuses particularly on Blum's leadership of the Popular Front and his stern defiance of the Vichy governments, on Camus's part in the Resistance and Algerian War, and on Aron's cultural commentary and opposition to the facile acceptance by many French intellectuals of communism's utopian promise. Severely maligned by powerful critics and rivals, each of these exemplary figures stood fast in their principles and eventually won some measure of personal and public redemption. Judt constructs a compelling portrait of modern French intellectual life and politics. He challenges the conventional account of the role of intellectuals precisely because they mattered in France, because they could shape public opinion and influence policy. In Blum, Camus, and Aron, Judt finds three very different men who did not simply play the role, but evinced a courage and a responsibility in public life that far outshone their contemporaries. "An eloquent and instructive study of intellectual courage in the face of what the author persuasively describes as intellectual irresponsibility."—Richard Bernstein, New York Times

A collection of seven essays (published previously or delivered as lectures, but extensively revised here) attacking fashionable academic movements in contemporary America, such as postmodernism and deconstruction. Uses the attitude of these movements towards the Holocaust as a critical touchstone. Argues that the "New History's" attempt to describe daily life under the Nazis excludes any understanding of the evil inherent in the society and effectively writes the Nazi leadership out of history. Shows that deconstruction's denial of any genuine historical reality tends towards Holocaust denial, connecting this with Heidegger's and de Man's refusal to condemn their Nazi past. Describes how some postmodern historians, such as Hayden White, have tried to find a middle way between denial of reality in dealing with the Holocaust and a conventional narrative approach.

This broad-ranging work explores the cultural world of Babylonian rabbis and their students through the prism of the stories they included in the Bavli, the primary interpretive text of rabbinic Judaism. The anonymous editors of the Bavli, known as the Stammaim, were part of a large institution with a distinctive culture. Jeffrey L. Rubenstein illustrates how their presentation of earlier rabbinic teachings was influenced by their own values and practices. Rubenstein examines the hierarchical structure of the rabbinic academy, the use of dialectics in teaching, the functions of violence and shame within the academy, the role of lineage in rabbinic leadership, the marital and family lives of the rabbis, and the relationship between the rabbis and the rest of the Jewish population.

The Jews of northern France, Germany, and England, known collectively as Ashkenazic Jewry, have commanded the attention of scholars since the beginnings of modern Jewish historiography. Kanarfogel examines the educational process in Ashkenaz, exploring whether there was a developed system of education, whether compensation for Torah study was permitted and what the social status of those who taught Torah was; in the first comprehensive study of the relationship between the educational institutions, leadership, and the communities in medieval Ashkenaz.

This book is the first Comprehensive study of the relationship between the eductional institutions and leadership and the communities in medieval Ashkenaz.

Long before there were Jewish communities in the land of the tsars, Jews inhabited a region which they called medinat rusiya, the land of Russia. Prior to its annexation by Russia, the land of Russia was not a center of rabbinic culture. But in 1772, with its annexation by Tsarist Russia, this remote region was severed from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; its 65,000 Jews were thus cut off from the heartland of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Forced into independence, these Jews set about forging a community with its own religious leadership and institutions. The three great intellectual currents in East European Jewry--Hasidism, Rabbinic Mitnagdism, and Haskalah--all converged on Eastern Belorussia, where they clashed and competed. In the course of a generation, the community of Shklov—the most prominent of the towns in the area—witnessed an explosion of intellectual and cultural activity. Focusing on the social and intellectual odysseys of merchants, maskilim, and rabbis, and their varied attempts to combine Judaism and European culture, David Fishman here chronicles the remarkable story of these first modern Jews of Russia.