The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics examines the political, social, and cultural dimensions of Zionism and Bundism, the two major political movements among East European Jews during the first half of the twentieth century.While Zionism achieved its primary aim—the founding of a Jewish state—the Jewish Labor Bund has not only practically disappeared, but its ideals of socialism and secular Jewishness based in the diaspora seem to have failed. Yet, as Zvi Gitelman and the various contributors to this volume argue, it was the Bund that more profoundly changed the structure of Jewish society, politics, and culture.In thirteen essays, prominent historians, political scientists, and professors of literature discuss the cultural and political contexts of these movements, their impact on Jewish life, and the reasons for the Bund's demise, and they question whether ethnic minorities are best served by highly ideological or solidly pragmatic movements.
This book is a concise guide to and analysis of the complexities of modern Jewish politics in the interwar European and American diaspora. "Jewish politics" refers to the different and opposing visions of the Jewish future as formulated by various Jewish political parties and organizations and their efforts to implement their programs and thereby solve the "Jewish question." Mendelsohn begins by attempting a typology of these Jewish political parties and organizations, dividing them into a number of schools or "camps." He then suggests a "geography" of Jewish politics by locating the core areas of the various camps. There follows an analysis of the competition among the various Jewish political camps for hegemony in the Jewish world--an analysis that pays particular attention to the situation in the United States and Poland, the two largest diasporas, in the 1920s and 1930s. The final chapters ask the following questions: what were the sources of appeal of the various Jewish political camps (such as the Jewish left and Jewish nationalism), to what extent did the various factions succeed in their efforts to implement their plans for the Jewish future, and how were Jewish politics similar to, or different from, the politics of other minority groups in Europe and America? Mendelsohn concludes with a discussion of the great changes that have occurred in the world of Jewish politics since World War II.
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
It was not until the emergence of the ideologies of Zionism and Socialism at the end of the last century that the Jewish communities of the Diaspora were perceived by historians as having a genuine political life. In the case of the Jews of Russia, the pogroms of 1881 have been regarded as the watershed event which triggered the political awakening of Jewish intellectuals. Here Lederhendler explores previously neglected antecedents to this turning point in the history of the Jewish people in the first scholarly work to examine concretely the transition of a Jewish community from traditional to post-traditional politics.
These strikingly lucid and accessible essays, ranging over nearly a century of Jewish communal life, examine the ways in which immigrant Jews grappled with issues of group survival in an open and accepting American society. Ten case studies focus on Jewish strategies for maintaining a collective identity while participating fully in American society and public life. Readers will find that these essays provide a fresh, provocative, and compelling look at the fundamental question facing American Jewry at the end of the 20th century, as at its start: how to assure Jewish survival in the benign conditions of American freedom.
American Jewish Political Culture and the Liberal Persuasion begins with the historical background of American Jewish politics before delving into old roots and then moving onto a thematic understanding of American Jewry’s political psyche. This exhaustive work answers the grand question of where American Jewish liberalism comes from and ultimately questions whether the communal motivations behind such behavior are strong enough to withstand twenty-first-century America.
Paula Hyman broadens and revises earlier analyses of Jewish assimilation, which depicted “the Jews” as though they were all men, by focusing on women and the domestic as well as the public realms. Surveying Jewish accommodations to new conditions in Europe and the United States in the years between 1850 and 1950, she retrieves the experience of women as reflected in their writings--memoirs, newspaper and journal articles, and texts of speeches--and finds that Jewish women’s patterns of assimilation differed from men’s and that an examination of those differences exposes the tensions inherent in the project of Jewish assimilation. Patterns of assimilation varied not only between men and women but also according to geographical locale and social class. Germany, France, England, and the United States offered some degree of civic equality to their Jewish populations, and by the last third of the nineteenth century, their relatively small Jewish communities were generally defined by their middle-class characteristics. In contrast, the eastern European nations contained relatively large and overwhelmingly non-middle-class Jewish population. Hyman considers how these differences between East and West influenced gender norms, which in turn shaped Jewish women’s responses to the changing conditions of the modern world, and how they merged in the large communities of eastern European Jewish immigrants in the United States. The book concludes with an exploration of the sexual politics of Jewish identity. Hyman argues that the frustration of Jewish men at their “feminization” in societies in which they had achieved political equality and economic success was manifested in their criticism of, and distancing from, Jewish women. The book integrates a wide range of primary and secondary sources to incorporate Jewish women’s history into one of the salient themes in modern Jewish history, that of assimilation. The book is addressed to a wide audience: those with an interest in modern Jewish history, in women’s history, and in ethnic studies and all who are concerned with the experience and identity of Jews in the modern world.
According to a commonplace narrative, the rise of modern political thought in the West resulted from secularization—the exclusion of religious arguments from political discourse. But in this pathbreaking work, Eric Nelson argues that this familiar story is wrong. Instead, he contends, political thought in early-modern Europe became less, not more, secular with time, and it was the Christian encounter with Hebrew sources that provoked this radical transformation. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Christian scholars began to regard the Hebrew Bible as a political constitution designed by God for the children of Israel. Newly available rabbinic materials became authoritative guides to the institutions and practices of the perfect republic. This thinking resulted in a sweeping reorientation of political commitments. In the book’s central chapters, Nelson identifies three transformative claims introduced into European political theory by the Hebrew revival: the argument that republics are the only legitimate regimes; the idea that the state should coercively maintain an egalitarian distribution of property; and the belief that a godly republic would tolerate religious diversity. One major consequence of Nelson’s work is that the revolutionary politics of John Milton, James Harrington, and Thomas Hobbes appear in a brand-new light. Nelson demonstrates that central features of modern political thought emerged from an attempt to emulate a constitution designed by God. This paradox, a reminder that while we may live in a secular age, we owe our politics to an age of religious fervor, in turn illuminates fault lines in contemporary political discourse.
