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Forging Modern Jewish Identities illuminates facets of modern Jewish identity through engagement with diverse historical moments, political and social currents and literature as an aspect of popular culture. This volume is distinctive, and it can be enjoyed by the general reader as well as having potential as a teaching tool, as the experience of Jewry in the United States, Britain, Central and Western Europe, Russia and the Soviet Union is addressed by experts in each of these fields. Its introduction places the volume within the burgeoning genre of anthologies that constitutes a significant - but little noticed - development in Jewish and ethnic-national historiography. Cutting across disciplinary and national boundaries, the articles highlight Jewry's encounter with modernity from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. While acknowledging the power of acculturation, each of the contributions details how Jews transformed themselves, individually and communally, while reshaping notions of Jewish community and what it means to be a Jew in the modern world.
Focusing on the ideology of regeneration, Jay Berkovitz traces the social, economic, and religious struggles of nineteenth-century French Jews. Nineteenth-century French Jewry was a community struggling to meet the challenges of emancipation and modernity. This struggle, with its origins in the founding of the French nation, constitutes the core of modern Jewish identity. With the Revolution of 1789 came the collapse of the social, political, and philosophical foundations of exclusiveness, forcing French society and the Jews to come to terms with the meaning of emancipation. Over time, the enormous challenge that emancipation posed for traditional Jewish beliefs became evident. In the 1830s, a more comprehensive ideology of regeneration emerged through the efforts of younger Jewish scholars and intellectuals. A response to the social and religious implications of emancipation, it was characterized by the demand for the elimination of rituals that violated the French conceptions of civilization and social integration; a drive for greater administrative centralization; and the quest for inter-communal and ethnic unity. In its various elements, regeneration formed a distinct ideology of emancipation that was designed to mediate Jewish interaction with French society and culture. Jay Berkovitz reveals the complexities inherent in the processes of emancipation and modernization, focusing on the efforts of French Jewish leaders to come to terms with the social and religious implications of modernity. All in all, his emphasis on the intellectual history of French Jewry provides a new perspective on a significant chapter of Jewish history.
This book investigates the intersection between consumption, identity and Jewish history in Europe.
This volume explores literary and material representations of Jews, Jewishness and Judaism from antiquity to the twenty-first century. Gathering leading scholars from within the field of Jewish Studies, it investigates how the debates surrounding literary and material images within Judaism and in Jewish life are part of an on-going strategy of image management - the urge to shape, direct, authorize and contain Jewish literary and material images and encounters with those images - a strategy both consciously and unconsciously undertaken within multifarious arenas of Jewish life from early modern German lands to late twentieth-century North London, late Antique Byzantium to the curation of contemporary Holocaust exhibitions.
Doubly Chosen provides the first detailed study of a unique cultural and religious phenomenon in post-Stalinist Russia—the conversion of thousands of Russian Jewish intellectuals to Orthodox Christianity, first in the 1960s and later in the 1980s. These time periods correspond to the decades before and after the great exodus of Jews from the Soviet Union. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt contends that the choice of baptism into the Church was an act of moral courage in the face of Soviet persecution, motivated by solidarity with the values espoused by Russian Christian dissidents and intellectuals. Oddly, as Kornblatt shows, these converts to Russian Orthodoxy began to experience their Jewishness in a new and positive way. Working primarily from oral interviews conducted in Russia, Israel, and the United States, Kornblatt underscores the conditions of Soviet life that spurred these conversions: the virtual elimination of Judaism as a viable, widely practiced religion; the transformation of Jews from a religious community to an ethnic one; a longing for spiritual values; the role of the Russian Orthodox Church as a symbol of Russian national culture; and the forging of a new Jewish identity within the context of the Soviet dissident movement.
"Olga Litvak has written a book of astonishing originality and intellectual force.... In vivid prose, she takes the reader on a journey through the Russian-Jewish literary imagination." -- Benjamin Nathans Russian Jews were first conscripted into the Imperial Russian army during the reign of Nicholas I in an effort to integrate them into the population of the Russian Empire. Conscripted minors were to serve, in practical terms, for life. Although this system was abandoned by his successor, the conscription experience remained traumatic in the popular memory and gave rise to a large and continuing literature that often depicted Jewish soldiers as heroes. This imaginative and intellectually ambitious book traces the conscription theme in novels and stories by some of the best-known Russian Jewish writers such as Osip Rabinovich, Judah-Leib Gordon, and Mendele Mokher Seforim, as well as by relatively unknown writers. Published with the generous support of the Koret Foundation.
Marketing Identities analyzes how Ost und West (East and West), the first Jewish magazine (1901-1923) published in Berlin by westernized Jews originally from Eastern Europe, promoted ethnic identity to Jewish audiences in Germany and throughout the world. Using sophisticated techniques of modern marketing, such as stereotyping, the editors of this highly successful journal attempted to forge a minority consciousness. Marketing Identities is thus about the beginnings of "ethnicity" as we know it in the late twentieth century. An interdisciplinary study, Marketing Identities illuminates present-day discussions in Europe and the Americas regarding the experience and self-understanding of minority groups and combines media and cultural studies with German and Jewish history.
The postwar decades were not the “golden era” in which American Jews easily partook in the religious revival, liberal consensus, and suburban middle-class comfort. Rather it was a period marked by restlessness and insecurity born of the shock about the Holocaust and of the unprecedented opportunities in American society. American Jews responded to loss and opportunity by obsessively engaging with the East European past. The proliferation of religious texts on traditional spirituality, translations of Yiddish literature, historical essays , photographs and documents of shtetl culture, theatrical and musical events, culminating in the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, illustrate the grip of this past on post-1945 American Jews. This study shows how American Jews reimagined their East European past to make it usable for their American present. By rewriting their East European history, they created a repertoire of images, stories, and ideas that have shaped American Jewry to this day.
Charting the growing religious pluralism of British society, this book investigates the diverse formations of masculinity within and across specific religions, regions and immigrant communities. Contributors look beyond conventional realms of worship to examine men's diverse religious cultures in a variety of contexts.
Collects groundbreaking research on displaced persons (DPs) in Europe in the period after World War II and before the establishment of Israel. By the spring of 1947, less than two years after Nazi Germany's defeat, some 250,000 Jewish refugees remained in the displaced persons camps of Germany, Italy, and Austria. Yet many Jews did not know whether to return to their home countries or move on to someplace else. As a result, these stateless displaced persons (DPs) created a unique space for political, cultural, and social rebirth that was tempered by the complications of overcoming recent trauma. In "We Are Here," editors Avinoam J. Patt and Michael Berkowitz present current research on DPs between the end of the war and the creation of the State of Israel in order to present a more complete and nuanced picture of the DP experience, challenging many earlier assumptions about this group. Contributors to this volume analyze art, music, and literature of the DPs, as well as historical records of specific DP communities to explore the first reactions of survivors to liberation and their understanding of place in the context of postwar Germany and in Europe more generally. A number of the contributions in this volume challenge prior interpretations of Jewish DPs and Holocaust survivors, including the supposedly unified background of the DP population, the notion of a general reluctance to confront the past, the idea of Zionism as an inevitable success after the war, and the suggestion that Jews, despite their presence in Germany, strenuously avoided contact with Germans. Far from constituting a monolithic whole, then, "We Are Here" demonstrates that the DPs were composed of diverse groups with disparate wartime experiences. Responding to burgeoning scholarship on DPs and related issues, "We Are Here" sifts through the copious records DPs left behind to shed light on the many facets of a vibrant DP society. Scholars of the Holocaust and all readers concerned with the Jewish experience immediately after World War II will be grateful for this volume.