You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
What History Tells presents an impressive collection of critical papers from the September 2001 conference "An Historian’s Legacy: George L. Mosse and Recent Research on Fascism, Society, and Culture." This book examines his historiographical legacy first within the context of his own life and the internal development of his work, and secondly by tracing the many ways in which Mosse influenced the subsequent study of contemporary history, European cultural history and modern Jewish history. The contributors include Walter Laqueur, David Sabean, Johann Sommerville, Emilio Gentile, Roger Griffin, Saul Friedländer, Jay Winter, Rudy Koshar, Robert Nye, Janna Bourke, Shulamit Volkov, and Steven E. Aschheim.
DIV Elijah ben Solomon, the "Genius of Vilna,” was perhaps the best-known and most understudied figure in modern Jewish history. This book offers a new narrative of Jewish modernity based on Elijah's life and influence. While the experience of Jews in modernity has often been described as a process of Western European secularization—with Jews becoming citizens of Western nation-states, congregants of reformed synagogues, and assimilated members of society—Stern uses Elijah’s story to highlight a different theory of modernization for European life. Religious movements such as Hasidism and anti-secular institutions such as the yeshiva emerged from the same democratization of knowledge and privatization of religion that gave rise to secular and universal movements and institutions. Claimed by traditionalists, enlighteners, Zionists, and the Orthodox, Elijah’s genius and its afterlife capture an all-embracing interpretation of the modern Jewish experience. Through the story of the “Vilna Gaon,” Stern presents a new model for understanding modern Jewish history and more generally the place of traditionalism and religious radicalism in modern Western life and thought. /div
Sorkin seeks to reorient Jewish history by offering the first comprehensive account in any language of the process by which Jews became citizens with civil and political rights in the modern world.
Tracing its history from Moses Mendelssohn to today, Alan Levenson explores the factors that shaped what is the modern Jewish Bible and its centrality in Jewish life today. The Making of the Modern Jewish Bible explains how Jewish translators, commentators, and scholars made the Bible a keystone of Jewish life in Germany, Israel and America. Levenson argues that German Jews created a religious Bible, Israeli Jews a national Bible, and American Jews an ethnic one. In each site, scholars wrestled with the demands of the non-Jewish environment and their own indigenous traditions, trying to balance fidelity and independence from the commentaries of the rabbinic and medieval world.
The Berlin Haskalah was the Jewish attempt to rearticulate belief to accommodate the new science and philosophy of the Enlightenment. This study argues that the Haskalah should be understood within the context of the wider Central European religious and intellectual changes.
The Italian educator and physician Maria Montessori is best known for the teaching method that bears her name, but historian Erica Moretti reframes Montessori's work, showing that pacifism was the foundation of her pioneering efforts in psychiatry and pedagogy.
Since the defeat of the Nazi Third Reich and the end of its horrific eugenics policies, battles over the politics of life, sex, and death have continued and evolved. Dagmar Herzog documents how reproductive rights and disability rights, both latecomers to the postwar human rights canon, came to be seen as competing—with unexpected consequences. Bringing together the latest findings in Holocaust studies, the history of religion, and the history of sexuality in postwar—and now also postcommunist—Europe, Unlearning Eugenics shows how central the controversies over sexuality, reproduction, and disability have been to broader processes of secularization and religious renewal. Herzog also re...
What should one know in order to position oneself vis-à-vis other religions and confessions? What is religious knowledge and how should it be taught? This volume sheds light on educational media in Judaism and Christianity such as catechisms, children’s bibles, and sermons as well as Jewish and Protestant teacher training in 19th-century Germany and explores the methodological potentials of educational media as a source for (inter-)religious history. It reflects on broader processes of knowledge production and the impact of science and scholarship on religious edu-cation and knowledge production within Christian and Jewish contexts. The volume draws on an interdisciplinary conference that...
In February of 1945, during the final months of the Third Reich, Eva Noack-Mosse was deported to the Nazi concentration camp of Theresienstadt. A trained journalist and expert typist, she was put to work in the Central Evidence office of the camp, compiling endless lists—inmates arriving, inmates deported, possessions confiscated from inmates, and all the obsessive details required by the SS. With access to camp records, she also recorded statistics and her own observations in a secret diary. Noack-Mosse's aim in documenting the horrors of daily life within Theresienstadt was to ensure that such a catastrophe could never be repeated. She also gathered from surviving inmates information abo...
Examines the integration of Jews into German society between 1860-1925, taking as an example the city of Breslau (then Germany, now Wrocław, Poland). Questions whether there was a continuous line from the German treatment of Jews before World War I to Nazi antisemitism. During and after World War I, relations between Jews and non-Jews worsened and the high level of Jewish integration eroded between 1916-25. Although the constitution of the Weimar Republic accorded Jews equality, they experienced acts of violence and discrimination. Argues that antisemitism became stronger as the economic situation of the Jews deteriorated, due to inflation and the emigration to Germany of 4,273 impoverished Jews from Poland and Russia between 1919-23. Concludes, nevertheless, that no direct line can be drawn between the antisemitism in Imperial Germany and that of the Nazi period.