Title: European Jewry and the First Crusade
Author: Chazan, Robert
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: Religion | Medieval History | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: One of the unanticipated results of the First Crusade in 1095 was a series of violent assaults on major Jewish communities in the Rhineland. Robert Chazan offers the first detailed analysis of these events, illuminating the attitudes that triggered the assaults as well as the beliefs that informed J . . . [more]
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Title: A marriage made in heaven: the sexual politics of Hebrew and Yiddish 
Author: Seidman, Naomi
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Gender Studies | Religion | Language and Linguistics
Publisher's Description: With remarkably original formulations, Naomi Seidman examines the ways that Hebrew, the Holy Tongue, and Yiddish, the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews, came to represent the masculine and feminine faces, respectively, of Ashkenazic Jewish culture. Her sophisticated history is the first book-length exploration of the sexual politics underlying the "marriage" of Hebrew and Yiddish, and it has profound implications for understanding the centrality of language choices and ideologies in the construction of modern Jewish identity.Seidman particularly examines this sexual-linguistic system as it shaped the work of two bilingual authors, S.Y. Abramovitsh, the "grand-father" of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature; and Dvora Baron, the first modern woman writer in Hebrew (and a writer in Yiddish as well). She also provides an analysis of the roles that Hebrew "masculinity" and Yiddish "femininity" played in the Hebrew-Yiddish language wars, the divorce that ultimately ended the marriage between the languages.Theorists have long debated the role of mother and father in the child's relationship to language. Seidman presents the Ashkenazic case as an illuminating example of a society in which "mother tongue" and "father tongue" are clearly differentiated. Her work speaks to important issues in contemporary scholarship, including the psychoanalysis of language acquisition, the feminist critique of Zionism, and the nexus of women's studies and Yiddish literary history.   [brief]
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Title: Jewish passages: cycles of Jewish life
Author: Goldberg, Harvey E
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Middle Eastern Studies | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: American or Middle Eastern, Ashkenazi or Sephardi, insular or immersed in modern life - however diverse their situations or circumstances, Jews draw on common traditions and texts when they mark life's momentous events and rites of passage. The interplay of past and present, of individual practice and collective identity, emerges as a central fact of contemporary Jewish experience in Harvey E. Goldberg's multifaceted account of how Jews celebrate and observe the cycles of life. A leading anthropologist of Jewish culture, Goldberg draws on his own experience as well as classic sources and the latest research to create a nuanced portrait of Jewish rituals and customs that balances the reality of "ordinary Jews" with the authority of tradition. Looking at classic rites of passage such as circumcision and marriage, along with emerging life-milestone practices like pilgrimage and identity-seeking tourism, Jewish Passages aptly reflects the remarkable cultural and religious diversity within Judaism. This work offers a new view of Jewish culture and history with the individual firmly situated at their center by blending anecdote and historical vignettes with rabbinic, midrashic, and anthropological insights; by exploring Sephardi and Ashkenazi traditions as well as modern ideologies; and by bringing into sharp relief the activities of women and relations with Gentile neighbors. As such, this book provides a unique window on the particulars - and the significance - of personal and communal acts of identification among Jews past, present, and future.   [brief]
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Title: Jazz, rock, and rebels: cold war politics and American culture in a divided Germany
Author: Poiger, Uta G 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: German Studies | Cultural Anthropology | European History | United States History | American Music | Jazz | Gender Studies | American Studies
Publisher's Description: In the two decades after World War II, Germans on both sides of the iron curtain fought vehemently over American cultural imports. Uta G. Poiger traces how westerns, jeans, jazz, rock 'n' roll, and stars like Marlon Brando or Elvis Presley reached adolescents in both Germanies, who eagerly adopted the new styles. Poiger reveals that East and West German authorities deployed gender and racial norms to contain Americanized youth cultures in their own territories and to carry on the ideological Cold War battle with each other. Poiger's lively account is based on an impressive array of sources, ranging from films, newspapers, and contemporary sociological studies, to German and U.S. archival materials. Jazz, Rock, and Rebels examines diverging responses to American culture in East and West Germany by linking these to changes in social science research, political cultures, state institutions, and international alliance systems. In the first two decades of the Cold War, consumer culture became a way to delineate the boundaries between East and West. This pathbreaking study, the first comparative cultural history of the two Germanies, sheds new light on the legacy of Weimar and National Socialism, on gender and race relations in Europe, and on Americanization and the Cold War.   [brief]
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Title: Unheroic conduct: the rise of heterosexuality and the invention of the Jewish man
Author: Boyarin, Daniel
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Gender Studies | Jewish Studies | Social Theory
Publisher's Description: In a book that will both enlighten and provoke, Daniel Boyarin offers an alternative to the prevailing Euroamerican warrior/patriarch model of masculinity and recovers the Jewish ideal of the gentle, receptive male. The Western notion of the aggressive, sexually dominant male and the passive female reaches back through Freud to Roman times, but as Boyarin makes clear, such gender roles are not universal. Analyzing ancient and modern texts, he reveals early rabbis - studious, family-oriented - as exemplars of manhood and the prime objects of female desire in traditional Jewish society.Challenging those who view the "feminized Jew" as a pathological product of the Diaspora or a figment of anti-Semitic imagination, Boyarin argues that the Diaspora produced valuable alternatives to the dominant cultures' overriding gender norms. He finds the origins of the rabbinic model of masculinity in the Talmud, and though unrelentingly critical of rabbinic society's oppressive aspects, he shows how it could provide greater happiness for women than the passive gentility required by bourgeois European standards.Boyarin also analyzes the self-transformation of three iconic Viennese modern Jews: Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis; Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism; and Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.), the first psychoanalytic patient and founder of Jewish feminism in Germany. Pappenheim is Boyarin's hero: it is she who provides him with a model for a militant feminist, anti-homophobic transformation of Orthodox Jewish society today.Like his groundbreaking Carnal Israel , this book is talmudic scholarship in a whole new light, with a vitality that will command attention from readers in feminist studies, history of sexuality, Jewish culture, and the history of psychoanalysis.   [brief]
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Title: Beyond the conceivable: studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust
Author: Diner, Dan 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: German Studies | Jewish Studies | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: The major essays of Dan Diner, who is widely read and quoted in Germany and Israel, are finally collected in an English edition. They reflect the author's belief that the Holocaust transcends traditional patterns of historical understanding and requires an epistemologically distinct approach. One can no longer assume that actors as well as historians are operating in the same conceptual universe, sharing the same criteria of rational discourse. This is particularly true of victims and perpetrators, whose memories shape the distortions of historical narrative in ways often diametrically opposed. The essays are divided into three groups. The first group talks about anti-Semitism in the context of the 1930s and the ideologies that drove the Nazi regime. The second group concentrates on the almost unbelievably different perceptions of the "Final Solution," with particularly illuminating discussions of the Judenrat, or Jewish council. The third group considers the Holocaust as the subject of narrative and historical memory. Diner focuses above all on perspectives: the very notions of rationality and irrationality are seen to be changeable, depending on who is applying them. And because neither rational nor irrational motives can be universally assigned to participants in the Holocaust, Diner proposes, from the perspective of the victims, the idea of the counterrational. His work is directed toward developing a theory of Holocaust historiography and offers, clearly and coherently, the highest level of reflection on these problems.   [brief]
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Title: Diasporas and exiles: varieties of Jewish identity
Author: Wettstein, Howard
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Jewish Studies | European History | Social and Political Thought | Sociology | Immigration
Publisher's Description: Diaspora, considered as a context for insights into Jewish identity, brings together a lively, interdisciplinary group of scholars in this innovative volume. Readers needn't expect, however, to find easy agreement on what those insights are. The concept "diaspora" itself has proved controversial; galut, the traditional Hebrew expression for the Jews' perennial condition, is better translated as "exile." The very distinction between diaspora and exile, although difficult to analyze, is important enough to form the basis of several essays in this fine collection. "Identity" is an even more elusive concept. The contributors to Diasporas and Exiles explore Jewish identity - or, more accurately, Jewish identities - from the mutually illuminating perspectives of anthropology, art history, comparative literature, cultural studies, German history, philosophy, political theory, and sociology. These contributors bring exciting new emphases to Jewish and cultural studies, as well as the emerging field of diaspora studies. Diasporas and Exiles mirrors the richness of experience and the attendant virtual impossibility of definition that constitute the challenge of understanding Jewish identity.   [brief]
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Title: Weimar: a jurisprudence of crisis 
Author: Jacobson, Arthur J
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Law | Social and Political Thought | German Studies | Political Theory
Publisher's Description: This selection of the major works of constitutional theory during the Weimar period reflects the reactions of legal scholars to a state in permanent crisis, a society in which all bets were off. Yet the Weimar Republic's brief experiment in constitutionalism laid the groundwork for the postwar Federal Republic, and today its lessons can be of use to states throughout the world. Weimar legal theory is a key to understanding the experience of nations turning from traditional, religious, or command-and-control forms of legitimation to the rule of law. Only two of these authors, Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt, have been published to any extent in English, but they and the others whose writings are translated here played key roles in the political and constitutional struggles of the Weimar Republic. Critical introductions to all the theorists and commentaries on their works have been provided by experts from Austria, Canada, Germany, and the United States. In their general introduction, the editors place the Weimar debate in the context of the history and politics of the Weimar Republic and the struggle for constitutionalism in Germany. This critical scrutiny of the Weimar jurisprudence of crisis offers an invaluable overview of the perils and promise of constitutional development in states that lack an entrenched tradition of constitutionalism.   [brief]
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Title: Pseudo-Hecataeus, On the Jews: legitimizing the Jewish diaspora 
Author: Bar-Kochva, Bezalel
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Jewish Studies | History | Ancient History | Jewish Studies
Publisher's Description: Debate over the authenticity of "On the Jews" has persisted for nearly 1,900 years. Bezalel Bar-Kochva attempts to overcome this stalemate in his finely detailed and convincingly argued study that proves the forgery of the book and suggests not only a source for the text, but also a social, political, and cultural setting that explains its conception.Bar-Kochva argues that the author of this treatise belonged to the moderate conservative Jews of Alexandria, whose practices were contrary to the contemporary trends of Hellenistic Judaism. They rejected the application of Greek philosophy and allegorical interpretations of the Holy scriptures and advocated the use of Pentateuch Hebrew as the language for educating and for religious services. They showed a keen interest in Judea and identified themselves with the Jews of the Holy Land. "On the Jews," then, was the manifesto of this group and was written at the peak period of the Hasmonean kingdom. Its main purpose was to legitimize Jewish residence in Egypt, despite being explicitly prohibited in the Pentateuch, and to justify the continued residence of Jews there in a time of prosperity and expansion of the Jewish independent state.   [brief]
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Title: Protecting motherhood: Women and the family in the politics of postwar West Germany 
Author: Moeller, Robert G
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | European History | Women's Studies | German Studies
Publisher's Description: Robert G. Moeller is the first historian of modern German women to use social policy as a lens to focus on society's conceptions of gender difference and "woman's place." He investigates the social, economic, and political status of women in West Germany after World War II to reveal how the West Germans, emerging from the rubble of the Third Reich, viewed a reconsideration of gender relations as an essential part of social reconstruction.The debate over "woman's place" in the fifties was part of West Germany's confrontation with the ideological legacy of National Socialism. At the same time, the presence of the Cold War influenced all debates about women and the family. In response to the "woman question," West Germans defined the boundaries not only between women and men, but also between East and West.Moeller's study shows that public policy is a crucial arena where women's needs, capacities, and possibilities are discussed, identified, defined, and reinforced. Nowhere more explicitly than in the first decade of West Germany's history did, in Joan Scott's words, "politics construct gender and gender construct politics."   [brief]
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Title: Weimar surfaces: urban visual culture in 1920s Germany
Author: Ward, Janet 1963-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Literature | Architecture | Film | European Studies | European History | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: Germany of the 1920s offers a stunning moment in modernity, a time when surface values first became determinants of taste, activity, and occupation: modernity was still modern, spectacle was still spectacular. Janet Ward's luminous study revisits Weimar Germany via the lens of metropolitan visual cu . . . [more]
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Title: Jewish memories 
Author: Valensi, Lucette
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: Collective memory: a living, breathing gift from the past, less fragmentary than the recollections of any one individual, more personal by far than "history." The authors of Jewish Memories saw in the large numbers of Jews who migrated to France during the twentieth century the chance to retrieve a past that might otherwise be lost forever. Through dozens of interviews, they listened to men and women talking of their lives and the places they came from, and found an almost uncanny resonance of individual voices with one another. Individual memories became part of a shared memory, projecting major themes of the Jewish tradition - exile and the sense of loss, the duty to remember, and the transmission of Jewish experience to the next generations.Hélène H. tells of dropping the all-important family teakettle during a terrified race to escape skirmishing soldiers. Charles H. talks about the innocent love he shared with a non-Jewish girl who studied with him. Anna D. describes her wordless reunion with her wounded husband after World War II. From communities now disappeared, scenes of home and family life, occupations, happy times and holidays reinforce one another, and we can feel the painful nostalgia for a kind of existence no longer possible.Two distinct but parallel sets of memories run through the narrative, that of Sephardi and that of Ashkenazi Jews, all of whom found their way to France. They arrived from Tunisia, Turkey, Poland, and Russia, from poor and well-to-do families, almost always driven from their homes by difficult circumstances, often with their most recent memories filled with horror and tragedy. The desire to remember it all and to pass it on to others who will also remember shines from every page, and makes this book as memorable for general readers as it is valuable for anthropologists, sociologists, and historians.   [brief]
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Title: Beyond the pale: the Jewish encounter with late imperial Russia
Author: Nathans, Benjamin
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | Jewish Studies | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: A surprising number of Jews lived, literally and figuratively, "beyond the Pale" of Jewish Settlement in tsarist Russia during the half-century before the Revolution of 1917. Thanks to the availability of long-closed Russian archives, along with a wide range of other sources, Benjamin Nathans reinterprets the history of the Russian-Jewish encounter. In the wake of Russia's "Great Reforms," Nathans writes, a policy of selective integration stimulated social and geographic mobility among the empire's Jews. The reaction that culminated, toward the turn of the century, in ethnic restrictions on admission to universities, the professions, and other institutions of civil society reflected broad anxieties that Russians were being placed at a disadvantage in their own empire. Nathans's conclusions about the effects of selective integration and the Russian-Jewish encounter during this formative period will be of great interest to all students of modern Jewish and modern Russian history.   [brief]
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Title: Jewish life in renaissance Italy
Author: Bonfil, Roberto
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Renaissance History | European History
Publisher's Description: With this heady exploration of time and space, rumors and silence, colors, tastes, and ideas, Robert Bonfil recreates the richness of Jewish life in Renaissance Italy. He also forces us to rethink conventional interpretations of the period, which feature terms like "assimilation" and "acculturation." Questioning the Italians' presumed capacity for tolerance and civility, he points out that Jews were frequently uprooted and persecuted, and where stable communities did grow up, it was because the hostility of the Christian population had somehow been overcome.After the ghetto was imposed in Venice, Rome, and other Italian cities, Jewish settlement became more concentrated. Bonfil claims that the ghetto experience did more to intensify Jewish self-perception in early modern Europe than the supposed acculturation of the Renaissance. He shows how, paradoxically, ghetto living opened and transformed Jewish culture, hastening secularization and modernization.Bonfil's detailed picture reveals in the Italian Jews a sensitivity and self-awareness that took into account every aspect of the larger society. His inside view of a culture flourishing under stress enables us to understand how identity is perceived through constant interplay - on whatever terms - with the Other.   [brief]
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Title: Windows on the house of Islam: Muslim sources on spirituality and religious life
Author: Renard, John 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Religion | Middle Eastern Studies | History | Islam
Publisher's Description: Over the centuries and across the globe, Muslim authors and artists have given moving testimony to their experience of being members of the Islamic community. Their many vantage points come together in this collection, one that represents major Islamic groups from the past through the present and covers a range of themes essential to understanding Islamic spirituality and religious life. More than thirty leading Islam scholars present translations originating from a dozen languages, including Arabic, Persian, Chinese, and Indonesian. Texts include samples of virtually every major literary form of significance to the Muslim faith: the Qur'an, hadith, scriptural commentary, letters, treatises, lyric and didactic poetry, hagiography, historical chronicle, aphorism, endowment deeds, and personal diary entries. In addition, over five dozen illustrations thematically document a full range of artistic forms and historical periods, from ritual objects and architecture to manuscripts of religious texts. This volume and its companion, John Renard's 1996 book, Seven Doors to Islam , are the only books available that integrate such a wide range of Islamic literary and visual forms. Together they offer a superb introduction to the primary religious sources as well as a general understanding of Islamic spirituality and culture.   [brief]
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Title: Arete: Greek sports from ancient sources
Author: Miller, Stephen G
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language | History | Ancient History | Sports
Publisher's Description: From the informal games of Homer's time to the highly organized contests of the Roman world, Miller has compiled a trove of ancient sources - Plutarch on boxing, Aristotle on the pentathlon, Philostratos on clay dust as an anti-perspirant and on the buying and selling of victories, Vitruvius on literary competitions, Xenophon on female body building. With fully twice as many texts as the highly successful first edition, this new version of Arete offers readers an absorbing lesson in the culture of Greek athletics from the greatest of teachers - the ancients themselves.These sources, which Miller himself has translated, provide unparalleled insights into ancient athletic practices and competitive festivals. They emphasize the fundamental role of athletics in education and shed light on such issues as the role of women in athletics and the politics and economics of the games. Ultimately they demonstrate that the concepts of virtue, skill, pride, valor, and nobility embedded in the word arete and so closely associated in the modern mind with Greek athletics are only part of the story from antiquity.   [brief]
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Title: The maiden of Ludmir: a Jewish holy woman and her world
Author: Deutsch, Nathaniel
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Women's Studies | European History | Judaism | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: Hannah Rochel Verbermacher, a Hasidic holy woman known as the Maiden of Ludmir, was born in early-nineteenth-century Russia and became famous as the only woman in the three-hundred-year history of Hasidism to function as a rebbe - or charismatic leader - in her own right. Nathaniel Deutsch follows the traces left by the Maiden in both history and legend to fully explore her fascinating story for the first time. The Maiden of Ludmir offers powerful insights into the Jewish mystical tradition, into the Maiden's place within it, and into the remarkable Jewish community of Ludmir. Her biography ultimately becomes a provocative meditation on the complex relationships between history and memory, Judaism and modernity. History first finds the Maiden in the eastern European town of Ludmir, venerated by her followers as a master of the Kabbalah, teacher, and visionary, and accused by her detractors of being possessed by a dybbuk, or evil spirit. Deutsch traces the Maiden's steps from Ludmir to Ottoman Palestine, where she eventually immigrated and re-established herself as a holy woman. While the Maiden's story - including her adamant refusal to marry - recalls the lives of holy women in other traditions, it also brings to light the largely unwritten history of early-modern Jewish women. To this day, her transgressive behavior, a challenge to traditional Jewish views of gender and sexuality, continues to inspire debate and, sometimes, censorship within the Jewish community.   [brief]
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Title: Heritage and hellenism: the reinvention of Jewish tradition
Author: Gruen, Erich S
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Classics | Classical History | Classical Religions | Judaism | Ancient History | Jewish Studies
Publisher's Description: The interaction of Jew and Greek in antiquity intrigues the imagination. Both civilizations boasted great traditions, their roots stretching back to legendary ancestors and divine sanction. In the wake of Alexander the Great's triumphant successes, Greeks and Macedonians came as conquerors and settled as ruling classes in the lands of the eastern Mediterranean. Hellenic culture, the culture of the ascendant classes in many of the cities of the Near East, held widespread attraction and appeal. Jews were certainly not immune. In this thoroughly researched, lucidly written work, Erich Gruen draws on a wide variety of literary and historical texts of the period to explore a central question: How did the Jews accommodate themselves to the larger cultural world of the Mediterranean while at the same time reasserting the character of their own heritage within it? Erich Gruen's work highlights Jewish creativity, ingenuity, and inventiveness, as the Jews engaged actively with the traditions of Hellas, adapting genres and transforming legends to articulate their own legacy in modes congenial to a Hellenistic setting. Drawing on a diverse array of texts composed in Greek by Jews over a broad period of time, Gruen explores works by Jewish historians, epic poets, tragic dramatists, writers of romance and novels, exegetes, philosophers, apocalyptic visionaries, and composers of fanciful fables - not to mention pseudonymous forgers and fabricators. In these works, Jewish writers reinvented their own past, offering us the best insights into Jewish self-perception in that era.   [brief]
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Title: The Jewish state: a century later 
Author: Dowty, Alan 1940-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Middle Eastern Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: As the fiftieth anniversary of Israeli statehood approaches, along with the commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the World Zionist Organization, the question of what is meant by a "Jewish" state is particularly timely. Alan Dowty takes on that question in a book that is admirable for its clarity and its comprehensive interpretation of the historical roots and contemporary functioning of Israel.Israeli nationhood, democracy, and politics did not unfold in a social or political vacuum, but developed from power-sharing practices in pre-state Jewish communities in Palestine and in Eastern Europe. Dowty elucidates the broad cluster of cultural, historical, and ideological tenets which came to comprise Israel's contemporary political system. He demonstrates that such tenets were not arbitrary but in fact developed logically from Jewish political habits and the circumstances of time. Dowty illustrates how these traditions are balanced with those of ideology and modernization, and he provides an integrated, sophisticated analysis of the Israeli nation's formation and present state.Dowty also proposes thoughtful answers to puzzles regarding the strengths and weaknesses of Israeli democracy in responding to the challenges of communal divisions, religious contention, the country's non-Jewish minority, and accommodation with the Palestinians. The Jewish State will be invaluable for anyone looking for that one book that gives an intelligent overview of both Israel today and of its origins.   [brief]
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Title: Jewish icons: art and society in modern Europe
Author: Cohen, Richard I
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Art | Jewish Studies | European Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: With the help of over one hundred illustrations spanning three centuries, Richard Cohen investigates the role of visual images in European Jewish history. The interaction of Jews with the visual arts takes place, as Cohen says, in a vast gallery of prints, portraits, books, synagogue architecture, ceremonial art, modern Jewish painting and sculpture, political broadsides, monuments, medals, and memorabilia. Pointing to recent scholarship that overturns the stereotype of Jews as people of the text, unconcerned with the visual, Cohen shows how the coming of the modern period expanded the relationship of Jews to the visual realm far beyond the religious context. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the study and collecting of Jewish art became a legitimate and even passionate pursuit, and signaled the entry of Jews into the art world as painters, collectors, and dealers.   [brief]
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