The Tragedy of a Generation is the story of a failed ideal: an autonomous Jewish nation in Europe. It traces the origins of two influential strains of Jewish thought—Yiddishism and Diaspora Nationalism—and documents the waning hopes and painful reassessments of their leading representatives against the rising tide of Nazism and the Holocaust.
This superior account of the development of Jewish nationalism offers one of those rare glimpses into the past that can truly illuminate the present. In The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism Doron Mendels combines his unique insight into ancient Palestine with a careful analysis of historical and literacy sources, from Josephus to New Testament apocrypha, to explore the development of Jewish nationalism within the context of the Hellenistic world. Originally published as part of the Anchor Bible Reference Library, this study is of interest not only for its brilliant discussion of Jewish nationalism during the Second Temple period but also because its subject matter echoes the thorny questions raised by the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks of today.
Discover, in this fascinating history, the passionate beginnings of the early Jewish nation, and how it fundamentally shaped our modern struggles of nationalism. Mendels unearths the primary symbols of political nationalism in Ancient Palestine and examines their evolution through the rise of Christianity and Western Civilization.
A historical tour de force, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a groundbreaking account of Jewish and Israeli history. Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In this iconoclastic work, which spent nineteen weeks on the Israeli bestseller list and won the coveted Aujourd'hui Award in France, Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel's future.
Contrary to the widespread view that nationalism is a modern phenomenon, Goodblatt argues that it can be found in the ancient world. He argues that concepts of nationalism compatible with contemporary social scientific theories can be documented in the ancient sources from the Mediterranean Rim by the middle of the last millennium BCE. In particular, the collective identity asserted by the Jews in antiquity fits contemporary definitions of nationalism. After the theoretical discussion in the opening chapter, the author examines several factors constitutive of ancient Jewish nationalism. He shows how this identity was socially constructed by such means as the mass dissemination of biblical literature, retention of the Hebrew language, and through the priestly caste. The author also discusses each of the names used to express Jewish national identity: Israel, Judah and Zion.
This latest volume in the Studies in Antisemitism Series looks at the interaction between nationalism and antisemitism in post-Napoleonic Europe. Using a framework of major historical events for the period 1815-1945, Shmuel Almog traces the radicalization of national ideology in these years and its relationship to the rise of political antisemitism. Nationalism in early nineteenth-century Europe developed originally as a liberal-democratic philosophy in opposition to existing political, social and economic structures. This coincided with a period of increasing integration of the Jewish minority into mainstream European life, particularly in economic spheres. By the 1870s, however, the continued growth of nationalist aspirations, increasingly allied to an imperialist, conservative and militaristic culture, led to a rise in discord between nations and a concomitant increase in the importance of national peculiarities. This was to have a profound effect on the Jewish communities in Europe, with the Jews being viewed as an alien and even dangerous force within the newly-created nation-states. The book argues that growing extremism in nationalist attitudes afforded a suitable ideological and social background for antisemitic activity, as manifested by calls for discriminatory legislation against Jews, the pogroms of Eastern Europe and, ultimately, the Nazi Holocaust. This analysis is substantiated and reinforced by a series of annotated documents and illustrations. This book is a clear account of the development of one of the key elements of antisemitic ideology in this important period of European history.
"Black Power, Jewish Politics expands with this revised edition that includes the controversial new preface, an additional chapter connecting the book's themes to the national reckoning on race, and a foreword by Jews of Color Initiative founder Ilana Kaufman that all reflect on Blacks, Jews, race, white supremacy, and the civil rights movement"--
Benjamin Schreier argues that Jewish American literature's dominant cliché of "breakthrough"—that is, the irruption into the heart of the American cultural scene during the 1950s of Jewish American writers like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley—must also be seen as the critically originary moment of Jewish American literary study. According to Schreier, this is the primal scene of the Jewish American literary field, the point that the field cannot avoid repeating and replaying in instantiating itself as the more or less formalized academic study of Jewish American literature. More than sixty years later, the field's legibility, the very condition of its possibility, remains overwhelmingly grounded in a reliance on this single ethnological narrative. In a polemic against what he sees as the unexamined foundations and stagnant state of the field, Schreier interrogates a series of professionally powerful assumptions about Jewish American literary history—how they came into being and how they hardened into cliché. He offers a critical genealogy of breakthrough and other narratives through which Jewish Studies has asserted its compelling self-evidence, not simply under the banner of the historical realities Jewish Studies claims to represent but more fundamentally for the intellectual and institutional structures through which it produces these representations. He shows how a historicist scholarly narrative quickly consolidated and became hegemonic, in part because of its double articulation of a particular American subject and of a transnational historiography that categorically identified that subject as Jewish. The ethnological grounding of the Jewish American literary field is no longer tenable, Schreier asserts, in an argument with broad implications for the reconceptualization of Jewish and other identity-based ethnic studies.
"Examining the entire span of Jewish history through the lens of thirty pivotal moments in the Jewish people's experience from biblical times through the present, Turning Points in Jewish History provides "the big picture": both a broad and a deep understanding of the Jewish historical experience"--
Sixteen different biblical stories and ideas are examined to provide an overview of Zionism's origins and presence in the Torah. the final chapter ties these arguments to modern Zionist views
