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Now available in English, a provocative new biography of the founder of Hasidism
The German language holds an ambivalent and controversial place in the modern history of European Jews, representing different—often conflicting—historical currents. It was the language of the German classics, of German Jewish writers and scientists, of Central European Jewish culture, and of Herzl and the Zionist movement. But it was also the language of Hitler, Goebbels, and the German guards in Nazi concentration camps. The crucial role of German in the formation of Jewish national culture and politics in the late nineteenth century has been largely overshadowed by the catastrophic events that befell Jews under Nazi rule. German as a Jewish Problem tells the Jewish history of the Germ...
The essays in this volume seek to confront some of the charged meeting points of European—especially German—and Jewish history. All, in one way or another, explore the entanglements, the intertwined moments of empathy and enmity, belonging and estrangement, creativity and destructiveness that occurred at these junctions. These encounters typically unfolded within an uneasy continuum of conflict and co-operation, conformity and resistance, refashioning or maintaining personal and collective dimensions of identity. Clearly, they never allowed for the luxury of indifference. Yet it would be wrong to present meetings of this kind as exclusively confrontational, as stark either-or choices. Li...
"A ground-breaking collection of essays regarding the history, implementation and challenges of using "antisemitism" and related terms as tools for both historical analysis and public debate. A unique, sophisticated contribution to current debates in both the academic and the public realms regarding the nature and study of antisemitism today"--
Aharon David Gordon (1856--1922) is increasingly being recognized as the first Jewish environmentalist. Long before global warming became a major threat, Gordon warned against the mounting dangers of human assault on nature and urged us to open ourselves to nature and re-attune with it. The First Jewish Environmentalist introduces Gordon's ideas and sets them in their historical context, shedding new light on the interconnections between religion, culture, education, and the environment. The book expands Gordon's canonical status beyond the realm of Hebrew culture, and extracts from Gordon's philosophy empowerment and inspiration for seekers advocating the protection of our planet.
This study reframes our understanding of the Palestinian and Zionist national movements, arguing that Palestinian and Hebrew pedagogy could only be truly understood through an analysis of the conscious or unconscious dialogue between them, by examining the way Arabs and Zionists thought, taught, and wrote about their past.
In Germany at the turn of the century, Buddhism transformed from an obscure topic, of interest to only a few misfit scholars, into a cultural phenomenon. Many of the foremost authors of the period were profoundly influenced by this rapid rise of Buddhism—among them, some of the best-known names in the German-Jewish canon. Sebastian Musch excavates this neglected dimension of German-Jewish identity, drawing on philosophical treatises, novels, essays, diaries, and letters to trace the history of Jewish-Buddhist encounters up to the start of the Second World War. Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Leo Baeck, Theodor Lessing, Jakob Wassermann, Walter Hasenclever, and Lion Feuchtwanger are featured alongside other, lesser known figures like Paul Cohen-Portheim and Walter Tausk. As Musch shows, when these thinkers wrote about Buddhism, they were also negotiating their own Jewishness.
Accommodates both the cosmopolitan narrative of the Jewish diaspora with traditional Jews and their culture.
Investigates traditionalist struggles about Zionism and the emergence of national-religious Judaism and ultra-Orthodox in the early twentieth century.
This collection explores the different ways that intellectuals, scholars and institutions have sought to make history Jewish. While practitioners of Jewish history often assume that “the Jews” are a well-defined ethno-national unit with a distinct, continuous history, this volume questions many of the assumptions that underlie and ultimately help construct Jewish history. Starting with a number of articles on the Jews of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Poland and Hungary, continuing with several studies of Jewish encounters with the advent of nationalism and antisemitism, and concluding with a set of essays on Jewish history and politics in twentieth-century eastern Europe, pre-state Palestine and North America, the volume discusses the different methodological, research and narrative strategies involved in transforming past events into part of the larger canon of Jewish history.