The Stranger in Early Modern and Modern Jewish Tradition
The Stranger in Early Modern and Modern Jewish Tradition

Author: Catherine Bartlett

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-07-15

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 9004435468

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Throughout history, Jews have often been regarded, and treated, as “strangers.” In The Stranger in Early Modern and Modern Jewish Tradition, authors from a wide variety of disciplines discuss how the notion of “the stranger” can offer an integrative perspective on Jewish identities, on the non-Jewish perceptions of Jews, and on the relations between Jews and non-Jews in an innovative way. Contributions from history, philosophy, religion, sociology, literature, and the arts offer a new perspective on the Jewish experience in early modern and modern times: in contact and conflict, in processes of attribution and allegation, but also self-reflection and negotiation, focused on the figure of the stranger.

Re-envisioning Jewish Identities
Re-envisioning Jewish Identities

Author: Efraim Sicher

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-08-30

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9004462252

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This innovative study combines readings of contemporary literature, art, and performance to explore the diverse and complex directions of contemporary Jewish culture in Israel and the diaspora.

When Jews Argue
When Jews Argue

Author: Ethan B. Katz

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-10-06

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 1000969541

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This book re-thinks the relationship between the world of the traditional Jewish study hall (the Beit Midrash) and the academy: Can these two institutions overcome their vast differences? Should they attempt to do so? If not, what could two methods of study seen as diametrically opposed possibly learn from one another? How might they help each other reconceive their interrelationship, themselves, and the broader study of Jews and Judaism? This book begins with three distinct approaches to these challenges. The chapters then follow the approaches through an interdisciplinary series of pioneering case studies that reassess a range of topics including religion and pluralism in Jewish education; pain, sexual consent, and ethics in the Talmud; the place of reason and devotion among Jewish thinkers as diverse as Moses Mendelssohn, Jacob Taubes, Sarah Schenirer, Ibn Chiquitilla, Yair Ḥayim Bacharach, and the Rav Shagar; and Jewish law as a response to the post-Holocaust landscape. The authors are scholars of rabbinics, history, linguistics, philosophy, law, and education, many of whom also have traditional religious training or ordination. The result is a book designed for learned scholars, non-specialists, and students of varying backgrounds, and one that is sure to spark debate in the university, the Beit Midrash, and far beyond.

Stranger in My Own Country
Stranger in My Own Country

Author: Yascha Mounk

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2014-01-07

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1429953780

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A moving and unsettling exploration of a young man's formative years in a country still struggling with its past As a Jew in postwar Germany, Yascha Mounk felt like a foreigner in his own country. When he mentioned that he is Jewish, some made anti-Semitic jokes or talked about the superiority of the Aryan race. Others, sincerely hoping to atone for the country's past, fawned over him with a forced friendliness he found just as alienating. Vivid and fascinating, Stranger in My Own Country traces the contours of Jewish life in a country still struggling with the legacy of the Third Reich and portrays those who, inevitably, continue to live in its shadow. Marshaling an extraordinary range of material into a lively narrative, Mounk surveys his countrymen's responses to "the Jewish question." Examining history, the story of his family, and his own childhood, he shows that anti-Semitism and far-right extremism have long coexisted with self-conscious philo-Semitism in postwar Germany. But of late a new kind of resentment against Jews has come out in the open. Unnoticed by much of the outside world, the desire for a "finish line" that would spell a definitive end to the country's obsession with the past is feeding an emphasis on German victimhood. Mounk shows how, from the government's pursuit of a less "apologetic" foreign policy to the way the country's idea of the Volk makes life difficult for its immigrant communities, a troubled nationalism is shaping Germany's future.

Jewish-American Identity and Critical Intercultural Communication
Jewish-American Identity and Critical Intercultural Communication

Author: Miriam Shoshana Sobre

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-11-08

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 179360519X

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Jewish-American Identity and Critical Intercultural Communication: Never Forget, Tikkun Olam, and Kindness to Strangers explores what it means to be Jewish on a personal, sociocultural, and global-political level. This book employs 50+ interviews with diverse Jewish voices to provide a history of Jewish migration to the US and to privilege voices that are not necessarily White and Eastern European/Ashkenazic. Sobré argues for a more inclusive form of intercultural theorizing that favors intersectionality and allyship over oppression Olympics (stereotypes between members of different nondominant groups) and colorism (within nondominant group discrimination). Such siloing of differences, and further competing about whose differences are the most egregious, minimizes critical intercultural coalition opportunities allowing for such groups as those who gave power to Trump and Netanyahu to connect while inclusive progressives engage in in-fighting and separatism. The author calls for transversal dialogic politics, racially and historically accurate school curriculum, intersectionality and more inclusive intercultural communication scholarship and practice as various means of working together against white nationalism and white supremacy in the US and the world. Scholars of religious studies, cultural anthropology, and intercultural communication will find this book of particular interest.

Betwixt and Between Liminality and Marginality
Betwixt and Between Liminality and Marginality

Author: Zohar Hadromi-Allouche

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023-03-20

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 179364490X

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Betwixt and Between Liminality and Marginality: Mind the Gap offers an interdisciplinary thinking on “the marginal” within society. Using the framework of Victor Turner’s earlier notions of liminality, the book both challenges Turner’s symbolic anthropology, and celebrates its continued influence across disciplines, and under new theoretical constraints. Liminality in its simplest forms provides language for meaningful approaches to articulate transition and change. It also represents complex social theories beyond Turner’s classical symbolic approach. While demonstrating the enduring relevance of Turner’s language for expressing transition, this volume keeps an eye toward the validity of critiques against him. It thus theorizes with Turner’s work while updating, even abandoning, some of his primary ideas, when applying it to contemporary social issues. A central focus of this volume is marginality. Turner recognized that marginals, like liminars, are betwixt and between; however, they lack assurance that their ambiguity will be resolved. This volume explores the dialogic relationship of space and agency, to recognize marginal groups and people, and inquire, without a harmonious resolution, what happens to the marginals? Have race, class, gender, and sexual orientation become the space for thinking about reintegration and communitas? Each chapter examines how marginal groups, or liminal spaces and ideas, destabilize, shape, and affect the dominant culture.

Ben Ammi Ben Israel
Ben Ammi Ben Israel

Author: Michael Miller

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-07-27

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1350295159

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This text introduces Ben Ammi, the leader and theologian of the African Hebrew Israelite community, as a systematic thinker and theologian. It examines his many books and speeches in order to provide a comprehensive introduction to his thought in the context of both African American and Jewish contemporaries and precursors. Divided into three thematic sections, History, Law, and Language, the text introduces Ben Ammi's understanding of the nature of God, the responsibilities of the human, and the narrative of history. Ben Ammi was a deeply spiritual but also remarkably modern thinker who blended scientific thought into his evolving socio-theology, while seeking to remove religion from the realm of mythology. The book evaluates how Ben Ammi's theology is one bound to concepts of humility and learning how to go with the grain of the natural world in order to find humanity's true center as a part of nature.

The Moralization of Jewish Heritage in Germany
The Moralization of Jewish Heritage in Germany

Author: Sarah M. Ross

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2024-09-16

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1666904406

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This book explores and reveals the intricacies of Jewish heritage in contemporary Germany, the role it plays as a "moral heritage" in the symbolic representation of Jews and Judaism in the national landscape, and its relevance for the cultural sustainability of local Jewish communities. The practice of synagogue music in the past and present is a central case study in the discussions. This ethnographic study examines how Jewish liturgical music as the cultural heritage of minorities has been constructed, treated, discussed, appropriated, and passed on to different actors in different forms and for different purposes over time. It also examines the resulting moral and ethical questions and power imbalances. The author discusses how both Jewish and non-Jewish stakeholders utilize the music of 19th- and early 20th-century Reform Judaism and the Minhag Ashkenaz for a symbolic reconstruction of German Jewry. Furthermore, they repatriate it in local Jewish communities today. This is usually done for individual, sometimes commercial, rather than religious reasons. The Jewish-musical cultural heritage process is characterized by moral imperatives and complex negotiations about power and representation. It reveals problematic aspects of German-Jewish relations, cross-generational rifts, and denominational differences between the Jewish communities in post-war Germany.

Early Modern Jewish Civilization
Early Modern Jewish Civilization

Author: David Graizbord

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-09-18

Total Pages: 471

ISBN-13: 1040004784

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This collection is an introductory historical survey and selective cultural analysis of the development, coalescence, and eventual waning of a diasporic civilization—that of the Jews of the early modern period (ca. 1391–1789) in Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and key nodes of the Iberian Empires in the Americas. Each chapter explores key factors that shaped both distinctive early modern Jewish communities and a remarkably coalescent and far broader community-of-communities. The contributors engage and answer the following questions: What do historians mean by “early modernity,” and to what extent does the concept illuminate the history and culture(s) of Jews from the end of the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment? What were the general demographic contours of the Jewish diaspora over this period and how did they change? How did culture, politics, technology, economics, and gender shape diasporic Jewish communities across eastern and western Europe and the New World over the course of some 400 years? Ultimately, the work renders a portrait of coherence and diversity, continuity and discontinuity, in early modern Jewish life within and across temporal and geographic boundaries. Early Modern Jewish Civilization is essential reading for all students of Jewish history and civilization and early modern history more broadly.