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This book traces the emergence and development of an organized, institutionalized Jewish social science, and explores the increasing importance of statistics and other modes of analysis for Jewish elites throughout Europe and the United States. The Zionist movement provided the initial impetus as it looked to the social sciences to provide the knowledge of contemporary Jewish life deemed necessary for nationalist revival. The social sciences offered empirical evidence of the ambiguous condition of the Jewish diaspora, and also charted emancipation and assimilation, viewed as dissolutions of and threats to Jewish identity. Liberal, assimilationist scholars also utilized social science data to demonstrate the continuing viability of Jewish life in the diaspora. Jewish social science grew out of a sustained effort to understand and explain the effects of modernization on Jewry. Above all, Jewish scholars sought to give the enormous transformations undergone by Jewry in the nineteenth century a larger meaning and significance
Why did the social sciences become an integral part of Jewish scholarship beginning in the late nineteenth century? What part did this new scholarship play in the ongoing debate over emancipation and assimilation, Zionism and diasporism, the nature of Jewish identity, and the problem of Jewish continuity and survival. To answer these questions, this book traces the emergence and development of an organized Jewish social science in central Europe, and explores the increasing importance of statistics and other social science modes of analysis for Jewish elites throughout Europe and in the United States. The author locates the initial impetus for an organized, institutionalized Jewish social science in the Zionist movement, as Zionists looked to the social sciences to provide them with the knowledge of contemporary Jewish life deemed necessary for nationalist revival. In particular, the social sciences offered empirical evidence of the ambiguous condition of Jewry in the diaspora. Social science also charted emancipation and assimilation, which were viewed as disintegrative agents for the dissolution of Jewish identity, and hence as a threat to the Jewish future. For Zionists, nationalism offered the means to reverse the process of dissolution. Yet Zionists were not alone in turning to the social sciences to advance their political agenda. This study also examines the involvement of non-Zionists in Jewish social science, focusing on the way liberal, assimilationist scholars utilized social science data to demonstrate the continuing viability of Jewish life in the diaspora. Jewish social science grew out of a sustained effort to understand and explain the effects of modernization on Jewry. Above all, Jewish scholars sought to give the enormous transformations undergone by Jewry in the nineteenth century a larger meaning and significance.
An anthology of writings by Jewish thinkers on Jews as a race
The most prominent story of nineteenth-century German and French Jewry has focused on Jewish adoption of liberal middle-class values. The Modernity of Others points to an equally powerful but largely unexplored aspect of modern Jewish history: the extent to which German and French Jews sought to become modern by criticizing the anti-modern positions of the Catholic Church. Drawing attention to the pervasiveness of anti-Catholic anticlericalism among Jewish thinkers and activists from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, the book turns the master narrative of Western and Central European Jewish history on its head. From the moment in which Jews began to enter the fray of modern European politics, they found that Catholicism served as a convenient foil that helped them define what it meant to be a good citizen, to practice a respectable religion, and to have a healthy family life. Throughout the long nineteenth century, myriad Jewish intellectuals, politicians, and activists employed anti-Catholic tropes wherever questions of political and national belonging were at stake: in theoretical treatises, parliamentary speeches, newspaper debates, the founding moments of the Reform movement, and campaigns against antisemitism.
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to explore the urgent questions surrounding their own identity and status in Europe as insiders and outsiders. Jewish primitivism found expression in a variety of forms in Yiddish, Hebrew, and German literature, photography, and graphic art, including in the work of figures such as Franz Kafka, Y.L. Peretz, S. An-sky, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Moï Ver. In Jewish Primitivism, Samuel J. Spinner argues that these and other Jewish modernists developed a distinct primitivist aesthetic that, by locating the savage present within Europe, challenged the idea of the threatening savage other from outside Europe on which much primitivism relied: in Jewish primitivism, the savage is already there. This book offers a new assessment of modern Jewish art and literature and shows how Jewish primitivism troubles the boundary between observer and observed, cultured and "primitive," colonizer and colonized.
Sacred Bonds of Solidarity is a history of the emergence of Jewish international aid and the language of "solidarity" that accompanied it in nineteenth-century France.
Contemplative Nation challenges the long-standing view that theology is not a vital part of the Jewish tradition. For political and philosophical reasons, both scholars of Judaism and Jewish thinkers have sought to minimize the role of theology in Judaism. This book constructs a new model for understanding Jewish theological language that emphasizes the central role of theological reflection in Judaism and the close relationship between theological reflection and religious practice in the Jewish tradition. Drawing on diverse philosophical resources, Fisher's model of Jewish theology embraces the multiple forms and functions of Jewish theological language. Fisher demonstrates the utility of this model by undertaking close readings of an early rabbinic commentary on the book of Exodus (Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael ) and a work of modern philosophical theology (Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption). These readings advance the discussion of theology in rabbinics and modern Jewish thought and provide resources for constructive Jewish theology.
The role of religion in a democratic society Best Book award given by the Israel Political Science Association Since the 1980s, relationships between secular and religious Israelis have gone from bad to worse. What was formerly a politics of accommodation, one whose main objective was the avoidance of strife through "arrangements" and compromises, has become a winner-take-all, zero-sum game. The conflict is not over who gets what. Rather, it is a conflict over the very character of the polity, a struggle to define Israel's collective character. In Israel and the Politics of Jewish Identity Asher Cohen and Bernard Susser show how this transformation has been caused by structural changes in Israel's public sphere. Surveying many different levels of public life, they explore the change of Israel's politics from a dominant-party system to a balanced two-camp system. They trace the rise of the Haredi parties and the growing consonance of religiosity with right-wing politics. Other topics include the new Basic Laws on Freedom, Dignity, and Occupation; the effects of massive immigration of secular Jews from the former Soviet Union; the greater emphasis on liberal "good government"; and the rise of an aggressive investigative press and electronic media.
An investigation of Jewish identity politics and Jewish contemporary ideology using both popular culture and scholarly texts. Jewish identity is tied up with some of the most difficult and contentious issues of today. The purpose in this book is to open many of these issues up for discussion. Since Israel defines itself openly as the ‘Jewish State’, we should ask what the notions of ’Judaism’, ‘Jewishness’, ‘Jewish culture’ and ‘Jewish ideology’ stand for. Gilad examines the tribal aspects embedded in Jewish secular discourse, both Zionist and anti Zionist; the ‘holocaust religion’; the meaning of ‘history’ and ‘time’ within the Jewish political discourse; the anti-Gentile ideologies entangled within different forms of secular Jewish political discourse and even within the Jewish left. He questions what it is that leads Diaspora Jews to identify themselves with Israel and affiliate with its politics. The devastating state of our world affairs raises an immediate demand for a conceptual shift in our intellectual and philosophical attitude towards politics, identity politics and history.
This book explores a heretical blueprint for Jewish modernization written by a Venetian rabbi (under cover of pseudonym) in the early seventeenth century, almost two centuries before political emancipation. The analysis of this text, Kol Sakhal ("Voice of a Fool"), highlights the ways in which it harnessed concepts and methods drawn from the texts of rabbinic Judaism itself in order to reform Jewish culture from within. This book thus challenges the assumption that pre-modern Jewish society was culturally monolithic and unquestioningly obedient to rabbinic authority. In so doing, it raises fresh and unsettling questions about the periodization of Jewish history. Like the contemporaneous political and religious struggle that the Republic of Venice was waging against papal Rome, this remarkable Jewish attack on rabbinic authority targets—and revises—both the traditional historiography of sacred institutions and the legal canon itself. The text's very iconoclasm is shown to derive from the corpus of rabbinic Judaism, for the preservation of certain strains of inquiry in traditional sources makes them a virtual repository of tolerated dissent. Conjecture about the possible influence that a recently discovered work by a heretical Iberian Jewish convert to Catholicism may have had on the composition of "Voice of a Fool" leads to a discussion of the types of heterodoxy that threatened rabbinic Jewish communities in Italy and elsewhere in the early modern period. Reflections on the significance of the mask adopted by the text's author and on his (false) claim that the work was composed in 1500 in Spain facilitate speculation about his motives in trying to reinvent history. The second half of the book presents the first annotated English translation of "Voice of a Fool." Three appendixes analyze evidence concerning the date and place of the text's composition, the identification of its author, and its various manuscripts.