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Pauline Wengeroff, the only nineteenth-century Russian Jewish woman to publish a memoir, sets out to illuminate the "cultural history of the Jews of Russia" in the period of Jewish "enlightenment," when traditional culture began to disintegrate and Jews became modern. Wengeroff, a gifted writer and astute social observer, paints a rich portrait of both traditional and modernizing Jewish societies in an extraordinary way, focusing on women and the family and offering a gendered account (and indictment) of assimilation. In Volume 1 of Memoirs of a Grandmother, Wengeroff depicts traditional Jewish society, including the religious culture of women, during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, who wished "his" Jews to be acculturated to modern Russian life.
This work seeks to understand how, in nineteenth-century Germany, Jews and non-Jews shaped and experienced Jewish emancipation, a process whereby Jews were freed from ancient discriminatory laws and, over the course of decades, became citizens. Unlike most other works on German Jewish emancipation, this book examines how so fundamental and dramatic a transformation in the relation of Jews and non-Jews was experienced by the people who lived it, how economic, social, political, and ideological forces interacted to bring about change, and how accommodation actually occurred. The book focuses on Cologne, the most populous and economically powerful city in the Rhineland. Jews, excluded since 142...
Pauline Wengeroff's Memoirs of a Grandmother offers a unique first-person window into traditionalism, modernity, and the tensions linking the two in nineteenth-century Russia. Wengeroff (1833–1916), a perceptive, highly literate social observer, tells a gripping tale of cultural transformation, situating her narrative in the experience of women and families. In Volume Two, Wengeroff claims that Jewish women were capable and desirous of adopting the best of European modernity but were also wedded to tradition, while Jewish men recklessly abandoned tradition and forced their wives to do the same. The result was not only marital and intergenerational conflict but also catastrophic cultural lo...
"Alice Shalvi is one of the few women in the world who lived through a world devastated by fascism, and advanced a democracy in which people are linked, not ranked. Reading about her past will inspire our future." Gloria Steinem Professor Alice Shalvi - scholar, educator, and heroic activist, tells the story of her life in a simple, almost matter-of-fact manner, as though each stage of her very rich and varied career simply flowed most naturally the one from the other. There is in this kind of presentation an underlying tone of modesty, one which downplays the struggles, the persistence and enormous energy which resulted in her massive achievements in the areas of social activism and feminism. This energy tempered with such modesty resonates as an undercurrent throughout this classic autobiography.
Solutions to divorce abuse in Jewish societies Jewish Marital Captivity centers on the experience of women encountering systemic disadvantage in rabbinic marriage and divorce throughout Jewish history and across the map of Jewish life. In rabbinic law, marriage is a unilateral act by the husband, making divorce, similarly, the husband’s sole prerogative, in which his conscious will is also sacrosanct. Abuse necessarily follows, and has been the case from earliest recorded history when husbands abandoned wives, perished on business trips or in war or criminal incidents, or maliciously refused wives a rabbinic writ of divorce (get), or extorted for one, leaving wives trapped in marriage, inc...
In the past decades the “German-Jewish phenomenon” (Derrida) has increasingly attracted the attention of scholars from various fields: Jewish studies, intellectual history, philosophy, literary and cultural studies, critical theory. In all its complex dimensions, the post-enlightenment German-Jewish experience is overwhelmingly regarded as the most quintessential and charged meeting of Jews with the project of modernity. Perhaps for this reason, from the eighteenth century through to our own time it has been the object of intense reflection, of clashing interpretations and appropriations. In both micro and macro case-studies, this volume engages the multiple perspectives as advocated by manifold interested actors, and analyzes their uses, biases and ideological functions over time in different cultural, disciplinary and national contexts. This volume includes both historical treatments of differing German-Jewish understandings of their experience – their relations to their Judaism, general culture and to other Jews – and contemporary reflections and competing interpretations as to how to understand the overall experience of German Jewry.
This book is about the social history of the Arab JewsJews living in Arab countriesagainst the backdrop of Zionist nationalism. By using the term "Arab Jews" (rather than "Mizrahim," which literally means "Orientals") the book challenges the binary opposition between Arabs and Jews in Zionist discourse, a dichotomy that renders the linking of Arabs and Jews in this way inconceivable. It also situates the study of the relationships between Mizrahi Jews and Ashkenazi Jews in the context of early colonial encounters between the Arab Jews and the European Zionist emissariesprior to the establishment of the state of Israel and outside Palestine. It argues that these relationships were repro...
This book examines the Jewish community of Morocco in the late 18th and early 19th centuries through the life of a merchant who was the chief intermediary between the Moroccan sultans and Europe .
The subject of Jewish identity is one of the most vexed and contested issues of modern religious and ethnic group history. This interdisciplinary collection draws on work in law, anthropology, history, sociology, literature, and popular culture to consider contemporary and historical responses to the question: "Who and what is Jewish?"
Pauline Wengeroff was born in 1833 into a pious Jewish family in Bobruisk. Her life, as recounted in this biography, based in part on the author's critical edition of Wengeroff's 'Memoirs of a Grandmother', was one of upheaval and transformation during Russian Jewry's passage from tradition to modernity. Wengeroff's narrative refracts communal experience and larger cultural, economic, and political developments through her own family life. In this, her memoirs are the basis for much new thinking about gender and modernity. This text probes Wengeroff's consciousness and social positioning as a woman of her era and argues that, though Wengeroff was well aware of the women's movement in Russia, she wrote not from a feminist perspective but as a by-product of her socialization in traditional Jewish society.