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The lively essays collected here explore colonial history, culture, and thought as it intersects with Jewish studies. Connecting the Jewish experience with colonialism to mobility and exchange, diaspora, internationalism, racial discrimination, and Zionism, the volume presents the work of Jewish historians who recognize the challenge that colonialism brings to their work and sheds light on the diverse topics that reflect the myriad ways that Jews engaged with empire in modern times. Taken together, these essays reveal the interpretive power of the "Imperial Turn" and present a rethinking of the history of Jews in colonial societies in light of postcolonial critiques and destabilized categories of analysis. A provocative discussion forum about Zionism as colonialism is also included.

Indiana University Press

The Modern Jewish Experience

Colonialism and the Jews

Anat Plocker

In March 1968, against the background of the Six-Day War, a campaign of antisemitism and anti-Zionism swept through Poland. The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland is the first full-length study of the events, their precursors, and the aftermath of this turbulent period. 

Plocker offers a new framework for understanding how this antisemitic campaign was motivated by a genuine fear of Jewish influence and international power. She sheds new light on the internal dynamics of the communist regime in Poland, stressing the importance of middle-level functionaries, whose dislike and fear of Jews had an unmistakable impact on the evolution of party policy. 

The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland examines how Communist Party leader Wladyslaw Gomulka's anti-Zionist rhetoric spiraled out of hand and opened up a fraught Pandora's box of old assertions that Jews controlled the Communist Party, the revival of nationalist chauvinism, and a witch hunt in universities and workplaces that conjured up ugly memories of Nazi Germany.

The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland: Memory Wars and Homeland Anxieties

Sarah A. Cramsey

In Uprooting the Diaspora, Sarah Cramsey explores how the Jewish citizens rooted in interwar Poland and Czechoslovakia became the ideal citizenry for a post–World War II Jewish state in the Middle East. She asks, how did new interpretations of Jewish belonging emerge and gain support amongst Jewish and non-Jewish decision makers exiled from wartime east central Europe and the powerbrokers surrounding them? 
 
Usually, the creation of the State of Israel is cast as a story that begins with Herzl and is brought to fulfillment by the Holocaust. To reframe this trajectory, Cramsey draws on a vast array of historical sources to examine what she calls a "transnational conversation" carried out by a small but influential coterie of Allied statesmen, diplomats in international organizations, and Jewish leaders who decided that the overall disentangling of populations in postwar east central Europe demanded the simultaneous intellectual and logistical embrace of a Jewish homeland in Palestine as a territorial nationalist project. 

Uprooting the Diaspora slows down the chronology between 1936 and 1946 to show how individuals once invested in multi-ethnic visions of diasporic Jewishness within east central Europe came to define Jewishness primarily in ethnic terms. This revolution in thinking about Jewish belonging combined with a sweeping change in international norms related to population transfers and accelerated, deliberate postwar work on the ground in the region to further uproot Czechoslovak and Polish Jews from their prewar homes.

Uprooting the Diaspora: Jewish Belonging and the "Ethnic Revolution" in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1936–1946

Laura Hobson Faure

While the role the United States played in France's liberation from Nazi Germany is widely celebrated, it is less well known that American Jewish individuals and organizations mobilized to reconstruct Jewish life in France after the Holocaust. In A "Jewish Marshall Plan," Laura Hobson Faure explores how American Jews committed themselves and hundreds of millions of dollars to bring much needed aid to their French coreligionists. 

Hobson Faure sheds light on American Jewish chaplains, members of the Armed Forces, and those involved with Jewish philanthropic organizations who sought out Jewish survivors and became deeply entangled with the communities they helped to rebuild. While well intentioned, their actions did not always meet the needs and desires of the French Jews. 

A "Jewish Marshall Plan" examines the complex interactions, exchanges, and solidarities created between American and French Jews following the Holocaust. Challenging the assumption that French Jews were passive recipients of aid, this work reveals their work as active partners who negotiated their own role in the reconstruction process.

A "Jewish Marshall Plan": The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France

Randal F. Schnoor

Alex Pomson

In Jewish Family: Identity and Self-Formation at Home Alex Pomson and Randal F. Schnoor advance a new appreciation for the deep significance of Jewish family in developing Jewish identity. This book is the result of ten years of research focused on a small sample of diverse families. Through their work, the authors paint an intricate picture of the ecosystem that the family unit provides for identity formation over the life course. They draw upon theories of family development as well as sociological theories of the transmission of social and cultural capital in their analysis of the research. They find that family networks, which are often intergenerational, are just as significant as cultural capital, such as knowledge and competence in Judaism, to the formation of Jewish identity. Pomson and Schnoor provide readers with a unique view into the complexity of being Jewish in North America today.

Jewish Family: Identity And Self-Formation At Home

Andrew Sloin

A Dorothy Rosenberg Prize–winner: "A remarkable social history that investigates the process of Sovietization among Jews in Belorussia” (Jeffrey Veidlinger, author of In the Shadow of the Shtetl).

 This insightful history demonstrates how Jewish life in Belorussia fundamentally changed when Jews started joining the Bolshevik movement and populating the front lines of the revolutionary struggle. While Andrew Sloin’s story follows the arc of Bolshevik history, it also shows how the broader movement was enacted in factories and workshops, workers’ clubs and union meetings, and on the Jewish streets of White Russia.

 In the eyes of the Bolshevik leadership, the project of transforming Jews into integrated Soviet citizens was bound inextricably to labor. The protagonists here are shoemakers, speculators, glassmakers, peddlers, leatherworkers, needleworkers, soldiers, students, and local party operatives who were swept up, willingly or otherwise, under the banner of Marxist socialism. With extensive research and keen insight, Sloin stresses the fundamental relationship between economy and identity formation as party officials grappled with the Jewish Question in the wake of the revolution.

The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power

Julie Kalman

“Seeks to further our understanding of the relationship between perceptions of Jews and the reality of their existence in nineteenth-century France.” —H-France Review

Orientalizing the Jew shows how French travelers depicted Jews in the Orient and then brought these ideas home to orientalize Jews living in their homeland during the 19th century. Julie Kalman draws on narratives, personal and diplomatic correspondence, novels, and plays to show how the “Jews of the East” featured prominently in the minds of the French and how they challenged ideas of the familiar and the exotic. Portraits of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, romanticized Jewish artists, and the wealthy Sephardi families of Algiers come to life. These accounts incite a necessary conversation about Jewish history, the history of anti-Jewish discourses, French history, and theories of Orientalism in order to broaden understandings about Jews of the day.

“A well-argued, beautifully written, and intellectually stimulating investigation of representations of Middle Eastern and North African Jews by French Catholic pilgrims, writers, artists, and bureaucrats over the 19th century.” —Maud Mandel, author of Muslims and Jews in France

“Jews of France, nominally full citizens since the French Revolution . . . experienced uncertainty regarding whether their status would be reversed with each change of government . . . Kalman’s work contributes significantly to an understanding of that insecurity, as she fleshes out the stereotypes that others, officials, artists, authors and intellectuals, projected onto the Jews living among them inside France.” —French History

Orientalizing the Jew: Religion, Culture, and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century France

Tatjana Lichtenstein

This book presents an unconventional history of minority nationalism in interwar Eastern Europe. Focusing on an influential group of grassroots activists, Tatjana Lichtenstein uncovers Zionist projects intended to sustain the flourishing Jewish national life in Czechoslovakia. The book shows that Zionism was not an exit strategy for Jews, but as a ticket of admission to the societies they already called home. It explores how and why Zionists envisioned minority nationalism as a way to construct Jews' belonging and civic equality in Czechoslovakia. By giving voice to the diversity of aspirations within interwar Zionism, the book offers a fresh view of minority nationalism and state building in Eastern Europe.

Zionists in Interwar Czechoslovakia: Minority Nationalism and the Politics of Belonging

Daniella Doron

“Highlights the debates surrounding family and identity as French Jewish communities slowly recovered and reestablished their place in the French nation.” —Choice

At the end of World War II, French Jews faced a devastating demographic reality: thousands of orphaned children, large numbers of single-parent households, and families in emotional and financial distress. Daniella Doron suggests that after years of occupation and collaboration, French Jews and non-Jews held contrary opinions about the future of the nation and the institution of the family. At the center of the disagreement was what was to become of the children. Doron traces emerging notions about the postwar family and its role in strengthening Jewish ethnicity and French republicanism in the shadow of Vichy and the Holocaust.

“Doron’s book appears at a key moment. Its emphasis on children emerging from hunger, displacement and war should render it standard reading for policymakers, NGOs and others interested in shaping the destinies of today’s abandoned children.” —French History

“Raises fundamental questions for the understanding of not only Jewish reconstruction in post-World War II France, but also Holocaust memory, postwar French society and culture and the history of postwar European families and children.” —French Politics, Culture and Society

“Doron’s deftly argued and well researched book is an important intervention into a growing body of scholarship on the postwar decade. She convincingly documents the central role that the rehabilitation of Jewish children and the reconstruction of Jewish families played in post-war French Jewish reconstruction and underscores the importance of the decade following the war in shaping Jewish historical evolution in France.” —Maud Mandel, author of Muslims and Jews in France

Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation

Noah Shenker

“An invaluable resource” for individuals and institutions documenting the experiences of Holocaust survivors—or other historical testimony—on video (Journal of Jewish Identities).

Institutions that have collected video testimonies from the few remaining Holocaust survivors are grappling with how to continue their mission to educate and commemorate. Noah Shenker calls attention to the ways that audiovisual testimonies of the Holocaust have been mediated by the institutional histories and practices of their respective archives.

Shenker argues that testimonies are shaped not only by the encounter between interviewer and interviewee, but also by technical practices and the testimony process—and analyzes the ways in which interview questions, the framing of the camera, and curatorial and programming preferences impact how Holocaust testimony is molded, distributed, and received.

Reframing Holocaust Testimony

Rebekah Klein-Pejšová

“Well researched . . . A major contribution to our understanding of the dilemmas and challenges faced by Czechoslovak Jewry in the interwar period.” —Michael Miller, Central European University

In the aftermath of World War I, the largely Hungarian-speaking Jews in Slovakia faced the challenge of reorienting their political loyalties from defeated Hungary to newly established Czechoslovakia. Rebekah Klein-Pejšová examines the challenges Slovak Jews faced as government officials, demographers, and police investigators continuously tested their loyalty. Focusing on “Jewish nationality” as a category of national identity, Klein-Pejšová shows how Jews recast themselves as loyal citizens of Czechoslovakia. Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia traces how the interwar state saw and understood minority loyalty and underscores how loyalty preceded identity in the redrawn map of east central Europe.

“This book makes a crucial contribution to the question of minority loyalties in Central Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. It points to a dramatic divergence of the constructions of loyalties between the majority and minority populations.” —Slovakia

“After WW I, former Hungarian territory became part of the newly established state of Czechoslovakia. Jews who had lived under Hungarian rule faced the problem of status and identity in a new state . . . The overall picture the author presents is skillfully balanced by effective individualized treatments of individuals and events . . . Recommended.” —Choice

“Klein-Pejšová has contributed a succinct and sophisticated profile of an understudied community, one that can help us understand the impossible dynamic faced by all Jews who lived among multiple nationalities with competing national claims.” —Slavic Review

Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia

Keren R. McGinity

“Captures the telling details and the idiosyncratic trajectory of interfaith relationships and marriages in America.” —The Forward

 When American Jewish men intermarry, goes the common assumption, they and their families are “lost” to the Jewish religion. In this provocative book, Keren R. McGinity shows that it is not necessarily so. She looks at intermarriage and parenthood through the eyes of a post-World War II cohort of Jewish men and discovers what intermarriage has meant to them and their families. She finds that these husbands strive to bring up their children as Jewish without losing their heritage. Marrying Out argues that the “gendered ethnicity” of intermarried Jewish men, growing out of their religious and cultural background, enables them to raise Jewish children.

 McGinity’s book is a major breakthrough in understanding Jewish men’s experiences as husbands and fathers, how Christian women navigate their roles and identities while married to them, and what needs to change for American Jewry to flourish. Marrying Out is a must read for Jewish men and all the women who love them.

 “An important analysis of this thorny issue . . . filled with vivid vignettes about intermarried couples.” —Jewish Book World

Marrying Out: Jewish Men, Intermarriage, & Fatherhood

Mel Scult

“An important and powerful work that speaks to Mordecai M. Kaplan’s position as perhaps the most significant Jewish thinker of the twentieth century.” (Deborah Dash Moore coeditor of Gender and Jewish History)
 
 Mordecai M. Kaplan, founder of the Jewish Reconstructionist movement, is the only rabbi to have been excommunicated by the Orthodox rabbinical establishment in America. Kaplan was indeed a radical, rejecting such fundamental Jewish beliefs as the concept of the chosen people and a supernatural God. Although he valued the Jewish community and was a committed Zionist, his primary concern was the spiritual fulfillment of the individual. Drawing on Kaplan’s 27-volume diary, Mel Scult describes the development of Kaplan’s radical theology in dialogue with the thinkers and writers who mattered to him most, from Spinoza to Emerson and from Ahad Ha-Am and Matthew Arnold to Felix Adler, John Dewey, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. This gracefully argued book, with its sensitive insights into the beliefs of a revolutionary Jewish thinker, makes a powerful contribution to modern Judaism and to contemporary American religious thought.
 
 “An interesting, stimulating, and well-done analysis of Kaplan’s life and thought. All students of contemporary Jewish life will benefit from reading this excellent study.” —Jewish Media Review
 
 “The book is highly readable―at times almost colloquial in its language and style―and is recommended for anybody with a familiarity with Kaplan but who wants to understand his thought within a broader context.” —AJL Reviews

The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan

Karen Auerbach

The compelling history of ten Jewish families rebuilding their lives in Warsaw after the Holocaust—“amply illustrated … the book reverberates with hope” (Jewish Book Council).

Warsaw, Poland, once described as the “Paris of the East, ” had been transformed into a landscape of ruin by the ravages of World War II. Among the few areas of the city center that escaped Nazi decimation was Ujazdowskie Avenue, where German officials lived during the occupation. In the late 1940s, while most surviving Polish Jews were making their homes in new countries, ten Jewish families reclaimed a once elegant building at 16 Ujazdowskie Avenue and began reconstructing their lives. These families rebuilt on the rubble of the Polish capital and created new communities as they sought to distance themselves from the memory of a painful past.

Based on interviews with family members, extensive archival research, and the families’ personal papers and correspondence, Karen Auerbach presents an engrossing story of loss and rebirth, political faith and disillusionment, and the persistence of Jewishness.

The House at Ujazdowskie 16: Jewish Families in Warsaw After the Holocaust

Elissa Bemporad

An “endlessly rewarding” contribution to the study of Jewish life in the Soviet Union: “Fascinating … nuanced and respectful of human limitations” (Slavic Review).

Minsk, the present capital of Belarus, was a heavily Jewish city in the decades between the world wars. Recasting our understanding of Soviet Jewish history, Becoming Soviet Jews demonstrates that pre-revolutionary forms of Jewish life in Minsk maintained continuity through the often violent social changes enforced by the communist project.

Using Minsk as a case study of the Sovietization of Jews in the former Pale of Settlement, Elissa Bemporad reveals the ways in which many Jews acculturated to Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s while remaining committed to older patterns of Jewish identity, such as Yiddish culture and education, attachment to the traditions of the Jewish workers’ Bund, circumcision, and kosher slaughter. This pioneering study also illuminates the reshaping of gender relations on the Jewish street and explores Jewish everyday life and identity during the years of the Great Terror.

“Highly readable and brimming with novel facts and insights … [A] rich and engaging portrayal of a previously overlooked period and place. ” —H-Judaic

Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk

Gerald Sorin

A biography of the Jewish American, left-wing author of Spartacus that explores his identity, his work, and his politics.

Howard Fast’s life, from a rough-and-tumble Jewish New York street kid to the rich and famous author of close to one hundred books, rivals the Horatio Alger myth. Author of bestsellers such as Citizen Tom Paine, Freedom Road, My Glorious Brothers, and Spartacus, Fast joined the American Communist Party in 1943 and remained a loyal member until 1957, despite being imprisoned for contempt of Congress. Gerald Sorin illuminates the connections among Fast’s Jewishness, his writings, and his left-wing politics and explains Fast’s attraction to the Party and the reasons he stayed in it as long as he did. Recounting the story of his private and public life with its adventure and risk, love and pain, struggle, failure, and success, Sorin also addresses questions such as the relationship between modern Jewish identity and radical movements, the consequences of political myopia, and the complex interaction of art, popular culture, and politics in twentieth-century America.

“A notable study of a thorny protagonist whose life has much to reveal about the times in which he lived and about the interplay of political belief, personal identity, art, and ambition.” —Publishers Weekly

“Sorin . . . has written a heavily researched critical biography of Fast. . . . The volume’s strength is its explication and analysis of the complex social and political context of Fast’s activism and creative work. . . . Sorin’s lengthy critique of Fast’s adherence to Communism long after most American writers and intellectuals had abandoned the party, and his shameful public silence on Stalin’s crimes and Soviet anti-Semitism, are of significant import. . . . Recommended.” —Choice

“An intriguing biography, not least for its examination of how Fast interwove his political activism, his Jewishness and his art during the heyday of McCarthyism. Recommended.” —Recorder (Melbourne)

Howard Fast: Life and Literature in the Left Lane

“A brilliantly conceived and long overdue opening up [or deconstruction] of the Anne Frank story. ” —James Clifford, Professor Emeritus, History of Consciousness Department, University of California

As millions of people around the world who have read her diary attest, Anne Frank, the most familiar victim of the Holocaust, has a remarkable place in contemporary memory. Anne Frank Unbound looks beyond this young girl’s words at the numerous ways people have engaged her life and writing. Apart from officially sanctioned works and organizations, there exists a prodigious amount of cultural production, which encompasses literature, art, music, film, television, blogs, pedagogy, scholarship, religious ritual, and comedy. Created by both artists and amateurs, these responses to Anne Frank range from veneration to irreverence. Although at times they challenge conventional perceptions of her significance, these works testify to the power of Anne Frank, the writer, and Anne Frank, the cultural phenomenon, as people worldwide forge their own connections with the diary and its author.

“This collection of brilliant essays offers fascinating and unexpected insights into the significance of Anne Frank’s iconic Holocaust-era diary from many disciplinary perspectives in the arts and humanities. ” —Jan T. Gross, the Norman B. Tomlinson Professor of War and Society, Princeton University

“This volume is a major contribution to scholarship regarding Anne Frank's diary and its cultural influence … Highly recommended. ” —Choice

“Engrossing … The overall aim is to provide a greater understanding of the general and particular engagement with Anne Frank as a person, a symbol, an icon, an inspiration, and perhaps most polarizing, as one victim, not the victim of the Nazi holocaust. ” —Broadside

Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory

Arnold M. Eisen

An exploration of how American Jewish thinkers grapple with the notion of being the isolated “Chosen People” in a nation that is a melting pot.

What does it mean to be a Jew in America? What opportunities and what threats does the great melting pot represent for a group that has traditionally defined itself as “a people that must dwell alone?” Although for centuries the notion of “The Chosen People” sustained Jewish identity, America, by offering Jewish immigrants an unprecedented degree of participation in the larger society, threatened to erode their Jewish identity and sense of separateness.

Arnold M. Eisen charts the attempts of American Jewish thinkers to adapt the notion of chosenness to an American context. Through an examination of sermons, essays, debates, prayer-book revisions, and theological literature, Eisen traces the ways in which American rabbis and theologians—Reconstructionist, Conservative, and Orthodox thinkers—effected a compromise between exclusivity and participation that allowed Jews to adapt to American life while simultaneously enhancing Jewish tradition and identity.

“This is a book of extraordinary quality and importance. In tracing the encounter of Jews (the chosen people) and America (the chosen nation) . . . Eisen has given the American Jewish community a new understanding of itself.” —American Jewish Archives

“One of the most significant books on American Jewish thought written in recent years.” —Choice

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