Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer -- all are ex-friends of Norman Podhoretz, the renowned editor and critic and leading member of the group of New York intellectuals who came to be known as "the Family." As only a family member could, Podhoretz tells the story of these friendships, once central to his life, and shows how the political and cultural struggles of the past fifty years made them impossible to sustain. With wit, piercing insight, and startling honesty, we are introduced as never before to a type of person for whom ideas were often matters of life and death, and whose passing from the scene has left so large a gap in American culture. Podhoretz was the trailblazer of the now-famous journey of a number of his fellow intellectuals from radicalism to conservatism -- a journey through which they came to exercise both cultural and political influence far beyond their number. With this fascinating account of his once happy and finally troubled relations with these cultural icons, Podhoretz helps us understand why that journey was undertaken and just how consequential it became. In the process we get a brilliantly illuminating picture of the writers and intellectuals who have done so much to shape our world. Combining a personal memoir with literary, social, and political history, this unique gallery of stern and affectionate portraits is as entertaining as a novel and at the same time more instructive about postwar American culture than a formal scholarly study. Interwoven with these tales of some of the most quixotic and scintillating of contemporary American thinkers are themes that are introduced, developed, and redeveloped in a variety of contexts, with each appearance enriching the others, like a fugue in music. It is all here: the perversity of brilliance; the misuse of the mind; the benightedness of people usually considered especially enlightened; their human foibles and olympian detachment; the rigors to be endured and the prizes to be won and the prices to be paid for the reflective life. Most people live their lives in a very different way, and at one point, in a defiantly provocative defense of the indifference shown to the things by which intellectuals are obsessed, Norman Podhoretz says that Socrates' assertion that the unexamined life was not worth living was one of the biggest lies ever propagated by a philosopher. And yet, one comes away from Ex-Friends feeling wistful for a day when ideas really mattered and when there were people around who cared more deeply about them than about anything else. Reading of a time when the finest minds of a generation regularly gathered in New York living rooms to debate one another with an articulateness, a passion, and a level of erudition almost extinct, we come to realize how enviable it can be to live a life as poignantly and purposefully examined as Norman Podhoretz's is in Ex-Friends.

" The public intellectual, as a person and ideal, has a long and storied mythology. Writing in venues like the New Republic and Foreign Affairs, they are expected to opine on a broad array of topics, from foreign policy to literature to economics. Yet in recent years a new kind of thinker has supplanted that archetype: the thought leader. Equipped with one big idea, thought leaders focus their energies on TED talks more than highbrow periodicals. How did this shift happen? In The Ideas Industry, Daniel W. Drezner points to the roles of political polarization, heightened inequality, and eroding trust in authority as ushering in the change. In contrast to public intellectuals, thought leaders gain fame as single-idea merchants. Their ideas are often laudable and highly ambitious: ending global poverty by 2025, for example. But instead of a class composed of university professors and freelance intellectuals debating in highbrow magazines, thought leaders can bypass traditional gatekeepers to directly influence policymakers and the public. They are more immune to criticism--and in this century, the criticism of public intellectuals also counts for less. Three factors have reshaped the world of ideas: waning trust in expertise, increasing political polarization and rising levels of plutocracy. The erosion of trust has lowered the barriers to entry in the marketplace of ideas. Thought leaders don't need doctorates or fellowships to advance their arguments. Polarization is hardly a new phenomenon, but in contrast to their predecessors, today's intellectuals are more likely to enjoy the support of ideologically friendly private funders and be housed in ideologically-driven think tanks. Increasing inequality is a key driver: more than ever before, contemporary plutocrats fund intellectuals and policy shops that generate arguments that align with their own. There are downsides to the contemporary ideas industry, but Drezner argues that it is very good at broadcasting ideas widely and reaching large audiences of people hungry for new thinking. Both fair-minded and trenchant, The Ideas Industry will reshape our understanding of contemporary public intellectual life in America and the West."--

"Schiffrin evokes the bittersweet tang of emigre life in New York." --The New York Times Book Review Andre Schiffrin was born the son of one of France's most esteemed publishers, in a world peopled by some of the day's leading writers and intellectuals, such as Andre Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Antoine de Saint-Exupery. But this world was torn apart when the Nazis marched into Paris on young Andre's fifth birthday. Beginning with the family's dramatic escape to Casablanca--thanks to the help of the legendary Varian Fry--and eventually New York, A Political Education recounts the surprising twists and turns of a life that saw Schiffrin become, himself, one of the world's most respected publishers. Emerging from the emigre community of wartime New York (a community that included his father's friends Hannah Arendt and Helen and Kurt Wolff), he would go on to develop an insatiable appetite for literature and politics: heading a national student group he renamed the Students for a Democratic Society--the SDS. leading student groups at European conferences, once, as an unwitting front man for the CIA. and eventually being appointed by Random House chief Bennett Cerf to head the very imprint cofounded by his father--Pantheon. There, he would discover and publish some of the world's leading writers, including Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, Art Spiegelman, Studs Terkel, and Marguerite Duras. But in a move that would make headlines, Schiffrin would ultimately rebel at corporate ownership and form his own publishing house--The New Press--where he would go on to set a new standard for independent publishing. A Political Education is a fascinating intellectual memoir that tells not only the story of a unique and important figure, but of the tumultuous political times that shaped him. From the Hardcover edition"--

Described as “a continuous carnival” and “the crossroads of the world,” Times Square is a singular phenomenon: the spot where imagination and veracity intersect. To esteemed scholar and author Marshall Berman, it is also the flashing, teeming, and strangely beautiful nexus of his life. In this remarkable book, Berman takes us on a thrilling illustrated tour of Times Square, revealing a landscape both mythic and real. On the Town is a unique look through the lens of the ideas and works of art that inspired–or were inspired by–this landmark’s allure. Times Square pulses with life, drawing countless millions who long to be surrounded by too many in the midst of too much. Beyond the immense crowds, the intoxicating lights, the imposing architecture, and even the recent incursion of corporate headquarters that limn the Square’s present boundaries, there is an indefatigable humanity (and undeniable sexual tension) that, for more than a century, has nourished creative expression. Interleafing his own recollections with astute social commentary, Berman reveals how movies, graphic arts, literature, popular music, television, and, of course, the Broadway theater have reflected Times Square’s voluminous light to illuminate a vast spectrum of themes and vignettes. Berman shows us Times Square as it is seen in Alfred Eisenstadt’s iconic photography, the movies of Busby Berkeley, John Schlesinger, and Martin Scorsese, and the stage choreography of Jerome Robbins. Conversely, we see how Times Square’s distinctive aura finds its source in a stunningly diverse list of performers, writers, and impresarios, including Theodore Dreiser, Florenz Ziegfeld, Ethel Merman, Al Jolson, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen. Berman also celebrates the unsung heroes of Times Square–the artists, engineers, and hucksters behind the Square’s landmark signs that, throughout the decades, re-created raging waterfalls, blew smoke rings, bathed onlookers in the Square’s eerily welcoming light, and projected the image of what Americans want to be against a surface of who we really are. Part love letter, part revelatory semiotic exposition of a place known to all, On the Town is a nonstop excursion to the heart of American civilization, written by one of our keenest, most entertaining cultural observers.

"The House of Twenty Thousand Books is journalist Sasha Abramsky's elegy to the vanished intellectual world of his grandparents, Chimen and Miriam, and their vast library of socialist literature and Jewish history. A rare book dealer and self-educated polymath who would go on to teach at Oxford and consult for Sotheby's, Chimen Abramsky drew great writers and thinkers like Isaiah Berlin and Eric Hobsbawm to his north London home; his library grew from his abiding passion for books and his search for an enduring ideology. The books, documents, and manuscripts that covered every shelf at 5 Hillway were testaments to Chimen's quest -- from the Jewish orthodoxy of his boyhood, to the Communism of his youth, to the liberalism of his mature years. The House of Twenty Thousand Books is at once the story of a fascinating family and chronicle of the embattled twentieth century. The House of Twenty Thousand Books includes 43 photos. "--

Deepens and enriches our understanding of the Jewish literary tradition and the implications of the Shoah. Challenging the notion that Jewish American and Holocaust literature have exhausted their limits, this volume reexamines these closely linked traditions in light of recent postmodern theory. Composed against the tumultuous background of great cultural transition and unprecedented state-sponsored systematic murder, Jewish American and Holocaust literature both address the concerns of postmodern human existence in extremis. In addition to exploring how various mythic and literary themes are deconstructed in the lurid light of Auschwitz, this book provides critical reassessments of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth, as well as contemporary Jewish American writers who are extending this vibrant tradition into the new millennium. These essays deepen and enrich our understanding of the Jewish literary tradition and the implications of the Shoah.

"Although Jewish participation in German society increased after World War I, Jews did not completely assimilate into that society. In fact, says Michael Brenner in this intriguing book, the Jewish population of Welmar Germany became more aware of its Jewishness and created new forms of German-Jewish culture in literature, music, fine arts, education , and scholarship. Brenner presents the first in-depth study of this culture, drawing a fascinating portrait of people in the midst of redefining themselves." "The Weimar Jews chose neither a radical break with the past nor a return to the past but instead dressed Jewish traditions in the garb of modern forms of cultural expression. Brenner describes, for example, how modern translations made classic Jewish texts accessible, Jewish museums displayed ceremonial artifacts in a secular framework, musical arrangements transformed synagogue liturgy for concert audiences, and popular novels recalled aspects of the Jewish past. Brenner's work, while bringing this significant historical period to life, illuminates contemporary and even enhancement of Jewish distinctiveness, combined with the seemingly successful participation of Jews in a secular, non-Jewish society, offer fresh insight into modern questions of Jewish existence, identity, and integration into other cultures."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Jewish women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lived with a sense of painful connection to a culture that rejected their aspirations. Raised in a Jewish environment wary of female aspirations and in a wider world that was only marginally more sympathetic to their ambitions, this diverse group often found that a life devoted to literary expression required sacrifices and painful choices. Writing, however, enabled them to reclaim and explore their Jewish heritage. Responding to a variety of Jewish women's voices in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, and Spanish, this collection of seventeen essays surveys the achievements of Jewish women writers from the Middle Ages to the present. Scholars of Jewish literature chronicle the Jewish encounter with modernity and document female strategies for constructing intellectual and emotional identities amidst the competing demands of traditional norms, familial obligations, and economic survival. The themes of repression and equivocal liberation resonate throughout, as the authors reflect on the silencing of the female voice in a traditional Jewish culture that most often denied women the education and the empowerment requisite for recording their thoughts and feelings. While individual essays reveal literary discoveries of self and forgings of identity by women rising to the opportunities and challenges of drastically altered Jewish social realities, a significant number also show the sad decline of women writers upon whom silence was reimposed. Several chapters consider how Jewish women were depicted by male writers from the Middle Ages through the mid-nineteenth century. A final essay documents the ways in which memory, testimony, and survival affect the writing of women who survived the Holocaust, a perspective frequently marginalized in studies of Holocaust literature. Women of the Word is part of an emerging effort to listen to the voices of Jewish women both past and present. Written in a period when Jewish women writers internationally are creating a wealth of diverse literary works, these essays take note of the short time during which Jewish women's writing has flourished and inspire readers with the richness of the literature that such writers have already produced.

The Severan dynasty is a lineage of Roman Emperors, reigning several decades from the late 2nd century to the early 3rd century. The text is concerned with the culture of the Greek and Roman world during that period.

Winner of the 2013 National Jewish Book Award, Anthologies and Collections The year 1929 represents a major turning point in interwar Jewish society, proving to be a year when Jews, regardless of where they lived, saw themselves affected by developments that took place around the world, as the crises endured by other Jews became part of the transnational Jewish consciousness. In the United States, the stock market crash brought lasting economic, social, and ideological changes to the Jewish community and limited its ability to support humanitarian and nationalist projects in other countries. In Palestine, the anti-Jewish riots in Hebron and other towns underscored the vulnerability of the Zionist enterprise and ignited heated discussions among various Jewish political groups about the wisdom of establishing a Jewish state on its historical site. At the same time, in the Soviet Union, the consolidation of power in the hands of Stalin created a much more dogmatic climate in the international Communist movement, including its Jewish branches. Featuring a sparkling array of scholars of Jewish history, 1929 surveys the Jewish world in one year offering clear examples of the transnational connections which linked Jews to each other—from politics, diplomacy, and philanthropy to literature, culture, and the fate of Yiddish—regardless of where they lived. Taken together, the essays in 1929 argue that, whether American, Soviet, German, Polish, or Palestinian, Jews throughout the world lived in a global context.

Benjamin Schwartz taught at Harvard from 1950 until his retirement in 1987. Through his teaching and writing, he became a major force in the field of Chinese studies, setting standards--above all in the area of intellectual history--that have been a source of inspiration to students and scholars worldwide. His influence extends well beyond the China field, cutting across conventional disciplinary boundaries, touching political science, religion, philosophy, and literature as well as history. The essays in this book are by scholars who have studied with Benjamin Schwartz. Given the range of his own interests, it is fitting that they embrace an expanse of time from the Zhou dynasty to the present and a range of subjects equally inclusive--ancient and medieval Chinese thought, the fate of democracy in early Republican China, the development of aesthetic modernism in the 1920s and 1930s and its reemergence in the post-Mao era, the emphasis on spiritual regeneration and cultural transformation in Chinese and Japanese Marxism, popular values in twentieth-century China (as reflected in village theatrical performances), the larger issue of what part our own values should take in the study and assessment of other societies and cultures, and the equally broad issue of how we are to address the relationship between Chinese modernization and China's traditional culture. Despite this heterogeneity and the fact that the contributors include two political scientists, five historians with strong philosophical interests, and three scholars whose writing bridges the disciplines of history and literature, there is a surprising coherence to the volume. Almost all the authors consciously address either aspects of Schwartz's general approach or specific themes dealt with in his work. Each contribution is about ideas and takes ideas and their societal roles seriously. Although presented in the specific context of China, the issues raised in these essays are important to the world beyond China. Exploring them in both their Chinese and non-Chinese settings reflects the power of Schwartz's own work in illuminating a broader canvas of human thought.

The ten essays published in this volume were written over the space of a decade, but they were conceived from the start as a coherent whole, presenting Peiresc's study of discrete languages and literatures of the Near East and North Africa. For Peiresc the student of the Classical past, this described the eastern and southern space in which the Greeks and Romans lived and strove. For Peiresc the Christian, this was the world of the Bible that impacted upon the Greeks and Romans. And for Peiresc of the Mediterranean (for he was born in Aix, spent much time in Marseille, and lived outside of the region for only 6 of his 57 years), this was the territory that his friends and colleagues sailed to, lived in and, usually, came back from. The convergence of these axes in the life of one man, and a man of singular intellectual power and charm whose vast personal paper arsenal had survived, makes this such a compelling project. The essays are arranged in a roughly chronological order. They follow the course of Peiresc's own projects from his early encounter with the ancient Near East in Greek and Roman literature, through his engagement with Arabic to his deepening kowledge of rabbinic texts to the wider world of the new oriental studies of the seventeenth century which he helped create: Samaritan, Coptic and Ethiopic.

Over ten years ago, Benjamin Fain, a physicist now living in Tel Aviv, attempted to hold a conference on Jewish culture in Moscow, an effort that was foiled by the KGB. Many of the participants were eventually able to flee, most emigrating to Israel. In this book, these distinguished scholars and others from around the world present their personal and professional views of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union. The book explores a wide range of topics, including underground literature, religious revival, and the rise of a national Jewish consciousness. Some writers claim that the refuseniks are not the leaders of the Soviet Jews but rather an isolated minority, with most Jews being assimilated, acculturated, and uninterested in fleeing. Other essayists look at the ambivalent role traditionally played by the Soviet Union in both allowing some forms of cultural expression and suppressing any efforts at individual religious practice. Others explore the revival of Jewish culture as instanced by underground teaching of Hebrew. A major debate involves the Nature of Jewish emigration, whether the Jews will go to Israel or to America.

Among the brilliant writers and thinkers who emerged from the multicultural and multilingual world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For them, the trauma of World War I included the sudden loss of the geographical entity into which they had been born: in 1918, the empire was dissolved overnight, leaving Austria a small, fragile republic that would last only twenty years before being annexed by Hitler{u2019}s Third Reich. In this major reconsideration of European modernism, Marjorie Perloff identifies and explores the aesthetic world that emerged from the rubble of Vienna and other former Habsburg territories{u2014}an 2Austro-Modernism3 that produced a major body of drama, fiction, poetry, and autobiography. Perloff explores works ranging from Karl Kraus{u2019}s drama The Last Days of Mankind and Elias Canetti{u2019}s memoir The Tongue Set Free to Ludwig Wittgenstein{u2019}s notebooks and Paul Celan{u2019}s lyric poetry. Throughout, she shows that Austro-Modernist literature is characterized less by the formal and technical inventions of a modernism familiar to us in the work of Joyce and Pound, Dada and Futurism, than by a radical irony beneath a seemingly conventional surface, an acute sense of exile, and a sensibility more erotic and quixotic than that of its German contemporaries. Skeptical and disillusioned, Austro-Modernism prefers to ask questions rather than formulate answers

The site of a thriving literary tradition, Washington, DC, has been the home to many of our nation's most acclaimed writers. From the city's founding to the beginnings of modernism, literary luminaries including Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Henry Adams, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston have lived and worked at their craft in our nation's capital. In A Literary Guide to Washington, DC, Kim Roberts offers a guide to the city's rich literary history. Part walking tour, part anthology, A Literary Guide to Washington, DC is organized into five sections, each corresponding to a particularly vibrant period in Washington's literary community. Starting with the city's earliest years, Roberts examines writers such as Hasty-Pudding poet Joel Barlow and "Star-Spangled Banner" lyricist Francis Scott Key before moving on to the Civil War and Reconstruction and touching on the lives of authors such as Charlotte Forten Grimké and James Weldon Johnson. She wraps up her tour with World War I and the Jazz Age, which brought to the city some writers at the forefront of modernism, including the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Sinclair Lewis. The book's stimulating tours cover downtown, the LeDroit Park and Shaw neighborhoods, Lafayette Square, and the historic U Street district, bringing the history of the city to life in surprising ways. Written for tourists, literary enthusiasts, amateur historians, and armchair travelers, A Literary Guide to Washington, DC offers a cultural tour of our nation's capital through a literary lens.

In the English-speaking world, it is generally believed that there are very few Jews living and thriving in Germany. Yet, there has been an unlikely postwar history 1945-2001 that has been somewhat repressed in North America and the United Kingdom. While most people are well-informed about the Holocaust and the consequences that this tragic event has had for the world, very few people know that there has been a steady increase in the population of Jews in Germany since 1945 and that there is a flourishing 'Jewish' culture, certainly a relatively strong Jewish presence, in Germany today. Does this development mean that Jews are playing a significant role in German social life? Does this mean that the great German-Jewish relationship, often referred to as a kind of symbiosis, has re-emerged despite the odds against it? The sixteen essays in this book written by the leading critics in the field cover the fascinating changes that have been made in German society since 1945 in the Jewish communities, literature, theater, film, architecture, and other areas of interest including an examination of the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Austria. For anyone interested in reading about the unpredictable transformations in German-Jewish relations since 1945, Unlikely History will provide information and insights into a history that needs to be told to bring about greater understanding of Jews and Germans in contemporary Germany.

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.

Analyzes the works of Canadian Jewish poet A.M. Klein (1909-1972) written in the late 1920s-early 1950s, reading them as a combative poetic response to history. Klein's early poetry in "Hath Not a Jew, " composed against the background of the rise of antisemitism in Europe and in Montreal, his hometown, reveals his deep identification with Jewish tradition and his disillusionment with the humanist inability to confront Nazism. Deeply affected by news of the Holocaust, he wrote his mock epic "The Hitleriad" in 1942, in which he presented Hitler's ugliness, mediocrity, and meanness of spirit. This seems an attempt to demystify Hitler, paralleled perhaps by Arendt's concept of the banality of evil. "The Rocking Chair, " a collection of poems, and the novel "The Second Scroll" represent Klein's attempt to come to terms with the post-Holocaust world. Ch. 4 (pp. 61-80), "The Hitleriad: Against the Silence of the Apocalypse, " appeared in "Studies in American Jewish Literature" 9 (1990).

David Ellenson prefaces this fascinating collection of twenty-three essays with a remarkably candid account of his intellectual journey from boyhood in Virginia to the scholarly immersions in the history, thought, and literature of the Jewish people that have informed his research interests in a long and distinguished academic career. Ellenson, President of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, has been particularly intrigued by the attempts of religious leaders in all denominations of Judaism, from Liberal to Neo-Orthodox, to redefine and reconceptualize themselves and their traditions in the modern period as both the Jewish community and individual Jews entered radically new realms of possibility and change. The essays are grouped into five sections. In the first, Ellenson reflects upon the expression of Jewish values and Jewish identity in contemporary America, explains his debt to Jacob Katz's socio-religious approach to Jewish history, and shows how the works of non-Jewish social historian Max Weber highlight the tensions between the universalism of western thought and Jewish demands for a particularistic identity. In the second section, "The Challenge of Emanicpation," he indicates how Jewish religious leaders in nineteenth-century Europe labored to demonstrate that the Jewish religion and Jewish culture were worthy of respect by the larger gentile world. In a third section, "Denominational Responses," Ellenson shows how the leaders of Liberal and Orthodox branches of Judaism in Central Europe constructed novel parameters for their communities through prayer books, legal writings, sermons, and journal articles. The fourth section, "Modern Responsa," takes a close look at twentieth-century Jewish legal decisions on new issues such as the status of woemn, fertility treatments, and even the obligations of the Israeli government towards its minority populations. Finally, review essays in the last section analyze a few landmark contemporary works of legal and liturgical creativity: the new Israeli Masorti prayer book, David Hartman's works on covenantal theology, and Marcia Falk's Book of Blessings. As Ellenson demonstrates, "The reality of Jewish cultural and social integration into the larger world after Emancipation did not signal the demise of Judaism. Instead, the modern setting has provided a challenging context where the ongoing creativity and adaptability of Jewish religious leaders of all stripes has been tested and displayed."

This book explores two millennia of south Indian Tamil civilization, with a special emphasis on the way Tamil speakers and literati understood the unique features of their language and the major cultural themes articulated in Tamil over this long time span. Tamil is one of the great world languages, with its 80 million speakers, its ancient, classical past, and the profound richness of its cultural traditions, which spread throughout South Asia and beyond to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia and, today, to a large Tamil Diaspora scattered around the globe. Presented in the format of a south Indian musical composition, the chapters take the reader through the whole of Tamil cultural history, from its beginnings at the end of the first millennium B.C. through the stunning poems of love and war known as "Sangam Poetry", the burst of intense religious movements in the mid-first-millennium A.D., the Chola period of imperial expansion, and into late-medieval and modern times, including present-day Tamil politics and the vast cultural production of Chennai, Madurai, and Tanjavur. The treasures of the Tamil language deserve a wide audience--thus the book is aimed at readers with no special knowledge of India no less than at speakers and connoisseurs of Tamil. Translated verses and spicy stories of poets, lovers, musicians, warriors and kings fill the pages of this book, which paints a wide-angle, panoramic canvas of one of the most creative civilizations in the history of South Asia as it evolved and transformed itself from the distant past up to our own generation.--