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Author: Noam Pianko
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2010-06-03
Total Pages: 292
ISBN-13: 0253221846
DOWNLOAD EBOOKUncovers the thought of three key interwar Jewish intellectuals who defined Zionism's central mission as challenging the model of a sovereign nation-state: historian Simon Rawidowicz, religious thinker Mordecai Kaplan, and political theorist Hans Kohn.
Author: Noam Pianko
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2010-06-03
Total Pages: 292
ISBN-13: 0253004306
DOWNLOAD EBOOKToday, Zionism is understood as a national movement whose primary historical goal was the establishment of a Jewish state. However, Zionism's association with national sovereignty was not foreordained. Zionism and the Roads Not Taken uncovers the thought of three key interwar Jewish intellectuals who defined Zionism's central mission as challenging the model of a sovereign nation-state: historian Simon Rawidowicz, religious thinker Mordecai Kaplan, and political theorist Hans Kohn. Although their models differed, each of these three thinkers conceived of a more practical and ethical paradigm of national cohesion that was not tied to a sovereign state. Recovering these roads not taken helps us to reimagine Jewish identity and collectivity, past, present, and future.
Author: Ilan Zvi Baron
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 2014-12-22
Total Pages: 312
ISBN-13: 0748692312
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCombining political theory and sociological interviews spanning four countries, Israel, the USA, Canada and the UK, Ilan Zvi Baron explores the Jewish Diaspora/Israel relationship and suggests that instead of looking at Diaspora Jews' relationship with Israel as a matter of loyalty, it is one of obligation. Baron develops an outline for a theory of transnational political obligation and, in the process, provides an alternative way to understand and explore the Diaspora/Israel relationship than one mired in partisan debates about whether or not being a good Jew means supporting Israel. He concludes by arguing that critique of Israel is not just about Israeli policy, but about what it means to be a Diaspora Jew.
Author: Ken Koltun-Fromm
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2013-12-11
Total Pages: 347
ISBN-13: 0739174479
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThinking Jewish Culture in America argues that Jewish thought extends our awareness and deepens the complexity of American Jewish culture. This volume stretches the disciplinary boundaries of Jewish thought so that it can productively engage expanding arenas of culture by drawing Jewish thought into the orbit of cultural studies. The eleven contributors to Thinking Jewish Cultures, together with Chancellor Arnold Eisen’s postscript, position Jewish thought within the dynamics and possibilities of contemporary Jewish culture. These diverse essays in Jewish thought re-imagine cultural space as a public and sometimes contested performance of Jewish identity, and they each seek to re-enliven that space with reflective accounts of cultural meaning. How do Jews imagine themselves as embodied actors in America? Do cultural obligations limit or expand notions of the self? How should we imagine Jewish thought as a cultural performance? What notions of peoplehood might sustain a vibrant Jewish collectivity in a globalized economy? How do programs in Jewish studies work within the academy? These and other questions engage both Jewish thought and culture, opening space for theoretical works to broaden the range of cultural studies, and to deepen our understanding of Jewish cultural dynamics. Thinking Jewish Culture is a work about Jewish cultural identity reflected through literature, visual arts, philosophy, and theology. But it is more than a mere reflection of cultural patterns and choices: the argument pursued throughout Thinking Jewish Culture is that reflective sources help produce the very cultural meanings and performances they purport to analyze.
Author: Laura Almagor
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Published: 2022-05-01
Total Pages: 299
ISBN-13: 1802070745
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFinalist for National Jewish Book Award for Writing Based on Archival Material 2022. Jewish political and cultural behaviour during the first half of the twentieth century comes to the fore in this portrayal of a forgotten movement with contemporary relevance. Commencing with the Zionist rejection of the Uganda proposal in 1905, the Jewish Territorialist Movement searched for areas outside Palestine in which to create settlements of Jews. This study analyses the Territorialists’ ideology and activities in the Jewish context of the time, but their thought and discourse also reflect geopolitical concerns that still have resonance today in debates about colonialist attitudes to peoplehood, territory, and space. As the colonial world order rapidly changed after 1945, the Territorialists did not abandon their aspirations in overseas lands. Instead, in their attempts to find settlement solutions for Europe’s ‘surplus’ Jews, they moved from negotiating predominantly with the European colonizers to negotiating also with the ever more powerful non-Western leaders of decolonizing nations. This book reconstructs the rich history of the activities and changing ideologies of Jewish Territorialism, represented by Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Territorial Organisation (the ITO) and, later, by the Freeland League for Jewish Colonization under the leadership of Isaac Steinberg. Via Uganda, Angola, Madagascar, Australia, and Suriname, this story eventually leads us to questions about yidishkeyt, and to forgotten early twentieth-century ideas of how to be Jewish.
Author: Dean Phillip Bell
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-10-10
Total Pages: 863
ISBN-13: 0429859171
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Routledge Companion to Jewish History and Historiography provides an overview of Jewish history from the biblical to the contemporary period, while simultaneously placing Jewish history into conversation with the most central historiographical methods and issues and some of the core source materials used by scholars within the field. The field of Jewish history is profitably interdisciplinary. Drawing from the historical methods and themes employed in the study of various periods and geographical regions as well as from academic fields outside of history, it utilizes a broad range of source materials produced by Jews and non-Jews. It grapples with many issues that were core to Jewish life, culture, community, and identity in the past, while reflecting and addressing contemporary concerns and perspectives. Divided into four parts, this volume examines how Jewish history has engaged with and developed more general historiographical methods and considerations. Part I provides a general overview of Jewish history, while Parts II and III respectively address the rich sources and methodologies used to study Jewish history. Concluding in Part IV with a timeline, glossary, and index to help frame and connect the history, sources, and methodologies presented throughout, The Routledge Companion to Jewish History and Historiography is the perfect volume for anyone interested in Jewish history.
Author: Michael N. Barnett
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-07-10
Total Pages: 362
ISBN-13: 0691180725
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn incisive account of the foreign policy beliefs of American Jews from the nineteenth century to the present How do American Jews envision their role in the world? Are they tribal—a people whose obligations extend solely to their own? Or are they prophetic—a light unto nations, working to repair the world? The Star and the Stripes is an original, provocative interpretation of the effects of these worldviews on the foreign policy beliefs of American Jews since the nineteenth century. Michael Barnett argues that it all begins with the political identity of American Jews. As Jews, they are committed to their people's survival. As Americans, they identify with, and believe their survival depends on, the American principles of liberalism, religious freedom, and pluralism. This identity and search for inclusion form a political theology of prophetic Judaism that emphasizes the historic mission of Jews to help create a world of peace and justice. The political theology of prophetic Judaism accounts for two enduring features of the foreign policy beliefs of American Jews. They exhibit a cosmopolitan sensibility, advocating on behalf of human rights, humanitarianism, and international law and organizations. They also are suspicious of nationalism—including their own. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that American Jews are natural-born Jewish nationalists, Barnett charts a long history of ambivalence; this ambivalence connects their early rejection of Zionism with the current debate regarding their attachment to Israel. And, Barnett contends, this growing ambivalence also explains the rising popularity of humanitarian and social justice movements among American Jews. Rooted in the understanding of how history shapes a political community's sense of the world, The Star and the Stripes is a bold reading of the past, present, and possible future foreign policies of American Jews.
Author: Isaac Barnes May
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-12-13
Total Pages: 345
ISBN-13: 0197624235
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"This book is about the relationship between the American religious left and secularization. It explores how three liberal religions -liberal Quakers, Unitarians, and Reconstructionist Jews- attempted to preserve their traditions in the modern world by redefining what it meant to be religious. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, these groups underwent the most massive theological change imaginable, allowing their members to opt not to believe in a personal God. As the God of traditional theism did not seem to fit into a post-Darwinian framework, these traditions took the dramatic step of redefining that concept to make a "God" that did fit, and eventually they went even further by making belief in God a matter of purely personal preference. This book narrates how, over the course of the twentieth century, believing in God and being religious became increasingly disconnected. It documents the continuance of these religious communities even after the theological rationales that originally brought them together disappeared, their communal identities instead becoming focused on humanitarian service and political commitments, which began to replace a shared adherence to theism. The radical religious views of these small liberal denominations became influential among the wider society, and eventually became accepted in American popular culture and law"--
Author: Sally Charnow
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-07-01
Total Pages: 323
ISBN-13: 0429589158
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEdmond Fleg and Jewish Minority Culture in Twentieth-Century France, the first critical biography of the leading French writer Edmond Fleg (1874–1963), explores his role in forging a modern French Jewish identity before and after the Second World War. Through his writings – plays, novels, poems, and essays based on Jewish and Christian texts – Fleg fashioned a minority identity within the context of French Third Republic universalism. At the heart of his work we find a radical ecumenism, a rejection of exclusive and homogenous nationalism, and a deep understanding of the necessity of supporting vibrant minority subcultures within the context of a liberal democratic republic. This account is both individual and social, pointing to the ways in which Fleg acted within the possibilities and constraints of his milieu and used his writing to engage with and shape the discursive fabric of twentieth-century French culture. This book appeals to a number of scholarly audiences, including historians and literary critics who work on modern France and Jewish and religious studies and those who focus on issues of identity and difference, as well as a more general audience interested in Modern France and/or modern Jewish history.
Author: Tomohito Baji
Publisher: Springer Nature
Published: 2021-03-11
Total Pages: 232
ISBN-13: 3030662144
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book is a comprehensive examination into the shifting international thought of Alfred Zimmern, a Grecophile intellectual, one of the most prominent liberal internationalists and the world’s first professor of IR. Identifying the writings of Burke and cultural Zionism as two important ideological sources that defined his project for empire and global order, this book argues that Zimmern can best be understood as an apostle of Commonwealth. It shows that while his proposals changed from cosmopolitan democracy to Euro-Atlanticism and to world federal government, they were constantly shaped by the organizing principles of a professedly universal British Commonwealth. It was the empire transhistorically chained to classical Athens.
