The Wandering Who?
The Wandering Who?

Author: Gilad Atzmon

Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1846948754

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An investigation of Jewish identity politics and Jewish contemporary ideology using both popular culture and scholarly texts. Jewish identity is tied up with some of the most difficult and contentious issues of today. The purpose in this book is to open many of these issues up for discussion. Since Israel defines itself openly as the e~Jewish Statee(tm), we should ask what the notions of e(tm)Judaisme(tm), e~Jewishnesse(tm), e~Jewish culturee(tm) and e~Jewish ideologye(tm) stand for. Gilad examines the tribal aspects embedded in Jewish secular discourse, both Zionist and anti Zionist; the e~holocaust religione(tm); the meaning of e~historye(tm) and e~timee(tm) within the Jewish political discourse; the anti-Gentile ideologies entangled within different forms of secular Jewish political discourse and even within the Jewish left. He questions what it is that leads Diaspora Jews to identify themselves with Israel and affiliate with its politics. The devastating state of our world affairs raises an immediate demand for a conceptual shift in our intellectual and philosophical attitude towards politics, identity politics and history.

The Figural Jew
The Figural Jew

Author: Sarah Hammerschlag

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-05-15

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 0226315134

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The rootless Jew, wandering disconnected from history, homeland, and nature, was often the target of early twentieth-century nationalist rhetoric aimed against modern culture. But following World War II, a number of prominent French philosophers recast this maligned figure in positive terms, and in so doing transformed postwar conceptions of politics and identity. Sarah Hammerschlag explores this figure of the Jew from its prewar usage to its resuscitation by Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida. Sartre and Levinas idealized the Jew’s rootlessness in order to rethink the foundations of political identity. Blanchot and Derrida, in turn, used the figure of the Jew to call into question the very nature of group identification. By chronicling this evolution in thinking, Hammerschlag ultimately reveals how the figural Jew can function as a critical mechanism that exposes the political dangers of mythic allegiance, whether couched in universalizing or particularizing terms. Both an intellectual history and a philosophical argument, The Figural Jew will set the agenda for all further consideration of Jewish identity, modern Jewish thought, and continental philosophy.

Jews and Journeys
Jews and Journeys

Author: Joshua Levinson

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2021-08-06

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 0812297938

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Journeys of dislocation and return, of discovery and conquest hold a prominent place in the imagination of many cultures. Wherever an individual or community may be located, it would seem, there is always the dream of being elsewhere. This has been especially true throughout the ages for Jews, for whom the promises and perils of travel have influenced both their own sense of self and their identity in the eyes of others. How does travel writing, as a genre, produce representations of the world of others, against which one's own self can be invented or explored? And what happens when Jewish authors in particular—whether by force or of their own free will, whether in reality or in the imagination—travel from one place to another? How has travel figured in the formation of Jewish identity, and what cultural and ideological work is performed by texts that document or figure specifically Jewish travel? Featuring essays on topics that range from Abraham as a traveler in biblical narrative to the guest book entries at contemporary Israeli museum and memorial sites; from the marvels medieval travelers claim to have encountered to eighteenth-century Jewish critiques of Orientalism; from the Wandering Jew of legend to one mid-twentieth-century Yiddish writer's accounts of his travels through Peru, Jews and Journeys explores what it is about travel writing that enables it to become one of the central mechanisms for exploring the realities and fictions of individual and collective identity.

Jews and Power
Jews and Power

Author: Ruth R. Wisse

Publisher: Schocken

Published: 2008-12-24

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0307533131

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Part of the Jewish Encounter series Taking in everything from the Kingdom of David to the Oslo Accords, Ruth Wisse offers a radical new way to think about the Jewish relationship to power. Traditional Jews believed that upholding the covenant with God constituted a treaty with the most powerful force in the universe; this later transformed itself into a belief that, unburdened by a military, Jews could pursue their religious mission on a purely moral plain. Wisse, an eminent professor of comparative literature at Harvard, demonstrates how Jewish political weakness both increased Jewish vulnerability to scapegoating and violence, and unwittingly goaded power-seeking nations to cast Jews as perpetual targets. Although she sees hope in the State of Israel, Wisse questions the way the strategies of the Diaspora continue to drive the Jewish state, echoing Abba Eban's observation that Israel was the only nation to win a war and then sue for peace. And then she draws a persuasive parallel to the United States today, as it struggles to figure out how a liberal democracy can face off against enemies who view Western morality as weakness. This deeply provocative book is sure to stir debate both inside and outside the Jewish world. Wisse's narrative offers a compelling argument that is rich with history and bristling with contemporary urgency.

The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess: Race, Religion, and DNA
The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess: Race, Religion, and DNA

Author: Jeff Wheelwright

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2012-01-16

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 039308342X

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A brilliant and emotionally resonant exploration of science and family history. A vibrant young Hispano woman, Shonnie Medina, inherits a breast-cancer mutation known as BRCA1.185delAG. It is a genetic variant characteristic of Jews. The Medinas knew they were descended from Native Americans and Spanish Catholics, but they did not know that they had Jewish ancestry as well. The mutation most likely sprang from Sephardic Jews hounded by the Spanish Inquisition. The discovery of the gene leads to a fascinating investigation of cultural history and modern genetics by Dr. Harry Ostrer and other experts on the DNA of Jewish populations. Set in the isolated San Luis Valley of Colorado, this beautiful and harrowing book tells of the Medina family’s five-hundred-year passage from medieval Spain to the American Southwest and of their surprising conversion from Catholicism to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the 1980s. Rejecting conventional therapies in her struggle against cancer, Shonnie Medina died in 1999. Her life embodies a story that could change the way we think about race and faith.

The Invention of the Jewish People
The Invention of the Jewish People

Author: Shlomo Sand

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2010-06-14

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 178168362X

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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.

Being in Time
Being in Time

Author: Gilad Atzmon

Publisher:

Published: 2017-04-18

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 9781911072201

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The events of 2016 - Brexit and Trump - broke the mould which shaped ideas of democracy, politics and social identity. Gilad Atzmon argues that in the post-political universe in which we live, Left and Right have become indistinguishable and meaningless. Much of humanity has been reduced to serving the interests of big money and oligarchies. The freedom to think openly is now just a distant memory. Being in Time is a courageous attempt to grasp the intellectual developments that led towards the current dystopia. Book jacket.

When Peace Is Not Enough
When Peace Is Not Enough

Author: Atalia Omer

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-05-27

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 022600807X

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The state of Israel is often spoken of as a haven for the Jewish people, a place rooted in the story of a nation dispersed, wandering the earth in search of their homeland. Born in adversity but purportedly nurtured by liberal ideals, Israel has never known peace, experiencing instead a state of constant war that has divided its population along the stark and seemingly unbreachable lines of dissent around the relationship between unrestricted citizenship and Jewish identity. By focusing on the perceptions and histories of Israel’s most marginalized stakeholders—Palestinian Israelis, Arab Jews, and non-Israeli Jews—Atalia Omer cuts to the heart of the Israeli-Arab conflict, demonstrating how these voices provide urgently needed resources for conflict analysis and peacebuilding. Navigating a complex set of arguments about ethnicity, boundaries, and peace, and offering a different approach to the renegotiation and reimagination of national identity and citizenship, Omer pushes the conversation beyond the bounds of the single narrative and toward a new and dynamic concept of justice—one that offers the prospect of building a lasting peace.

The Wondering Jew
The Wondering Jew

Author: Micah Goodman

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2020-11-10

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0300252242

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A celebrated Israeli author explores the roots of the divide between religion and secularism in Israel today, and offers a path to bridging the divide "A thoughtful social, political, and philosophical examination of Judaism. . . . A cogent consideration of the place of religion in the modern world."--Kirkus Reviews Zionism began as a movement full of contradictions, between a pull to the past and a desire to forge a new future. Israel has become a place of fragmentation, between those who sanctify religious tradition and those who wish to escape its grasp. Now, a new middle ground is emerging between religious and secular Jews who want to engage with their heritage--without being restricted by it or losing it completely. In this incisive book, acclaimed author Micah Goodman explores Israeli Judaism and the conflict between religion and secularism, one of the major causes of political polarization throughout the world. Revisiting traditional religious sources and seminal works of secularism, he reveals that each contains an openness to learn from the other's messages. Goodman challenges both orthodoxies, proposing a new approach to bridge the divide between religion and secularism and pave a path toward healing a society torn asunder by extremism.

Jewish Hearts
Jewish Hearts

Author: Betty N. Hoffman

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 0791490785

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This ethnographic study compares and contrasts the changing ethnic identity of those Russian Jews who settled in Hartford, Connecticut between 1881 and 1930 with that of the Soviet Jews who remained in Russia after the Revolution, became Soviet citizens, and emigrated after 1975. Although both groups were labeled "Jews," their internal definitions of what constituted being Jewish and their personal experiences were radically different. Using both archival and contemporary oral histories, Betty N. Hoffman traces the stories of real people whose lives and choices were affected by both their ethnic identity and the larger movements around them as they made new homes in the United States.