Forging Modern Jewish Identities

Forging Modern Jewish Identities illuminates facets of modern Jewish identity through engagement with diverse historical moments, political and social currents and literature as an aspect of popular culture. This volume is distinctive, and it can be enjoyed by the general reader as well as having potential as a teaching tool, as the experience of Jewry in the United States, Britain, Central and Western Europe, Russia and the Soviet Union is addressed by experts in each of these fields. Its introduction places the volume within the burgeoning genre of anthologies that constitutes a significant - but little noticed - development in Jewish and ethnic-national historiography. Cutting across disciplinary and national boundaries, the articles highlight Jewry's encounter with modernity from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. While acknowledging the power of acculturation, each of the contributions details how Jews transformed themselves, individually and communally, while reshaping notions of Jewish community and what it means to be a Jew in the modern world.

This extensively-researched collection of essays lucidly explores how members of the ever-beleaguered Jewish people grappled with their identities during the past century in the United States and in Eretz Israel, the new centers of Jewry's long historical experience. With the pivotal 1903 Kishinev pogrom setting the stage, the author proceeds to examine how the Land of Promise across the Atlantic exerted different influences on Abraham Selmanovitz, Felix Frankfurter, the founders of the American Council for Judaism, and Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Professor Penkower then shows how the prospect of nationalism in the biblical Promised Land engendered other tensions and transformations, ranging from the plight of Hayim Nahman Bialik, to rivalry within the Orthodox Jewish camp, to on-going strife between the political Left and Right over the nature of the emerging Jewish state.

Nineteenth-century French Jewry was a community struggling to meet the challenges of emancipation and modernity. This struggle, with its origins in the founding of the French nation, constitutes the core of modern Jewish identity. With the Revolution of 1789 came the collapse of the social, political, and philosophical foundations of exclusiveness, forcing French society and the Jews to come to terms with the meaning of emancipation. Over time, the enormous challenge that emancipation posed for traditional Jewish beliefs became evident. In the 1830s, a more comprehensive ideology of regeneration emerged through the efforts of younger Jewish scholars and intellectuals. A response to the social and religious implications of emancipation, it was characterized by the demand for the elimination of rituals that violated the French conceptions of civilization and social integration; a drive for greater administrative centralization; and the quest for inter-communal and ethnic unity. In its various elements, regeneration formed a distinct ideology of emancipation that was designed to mediate Jewish interaction with French society and culture. Jay Berkovitz reveals the complexities inherent in the processes of emancipation and modernization, focusing on the efforts of French Jewish leaders to come to terms with the social and religious implications of modernity. All in all, his emphasis on the intellectual history of French Jewry provides a new perspective on a significant chapter of Jewish history.

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.

Musician Josh Groban claims that he is not Jewish because of his paternal lineage. Contrariwise, Comedian Tiffany Haddish claims Jewish identity specifically because of similar lineage. Using this contrast as a jumping off point, this book explores how Judaism and Jewishness represent themselves in popular culture.

A unique collection of essays that deal with the intriguing and complex problems connected to the question of Jewish identity in the contemporary world. Concerning the problem of identity formation, this book addresses very important issues: What is the content or meaning of Jewish identity? What has replaced religion in defining the content of Jewishness? How do people in different age groups construct their Jewish identity? In most cases, the authors have combined a variety of research methods: they drew samples or relied on the sample surveys of others; used personal interviews with respondents who are especially knowledgeable about their own Jewish communities, or based their research on participant observation of particular communities or communal institutions.

This volume explores the processes that led several modern Jewish leaders – rabbis, politicians, and intellectuals – to make radical changes to their ideology regarding Zionism, Socialism, and Orthodoxy. Comparing their ideological change to acts of conversion, the study examines the philosophical, sociological, and psychological path of the leaders’ transformation. The individuals examined are novelist Arthur Koestler, who transformed from a devout Communist to an anti-Communist crusader following the atrocities of the Stalin regime; Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, who moved from the New Left to neoconservative, disillusioned by US liberal politics; Yissachar Shlomo Teichtel, who transformed from an ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist Hungarian rabbi to messianic Religious-Zionist due to the events of the Holocaust; Ruth Ben-David, who converted to Judaism after the Second World War in France because of her sympathy with Zionism, eventually becoming a radical anti-Israeli advocate; Haim Herman Cohn, Israeli Supreme Court justice, who grew up as a non-Zionist Orthodox Jew in Germany, later renouncing his belief in God due to the events of the Holocaust; and Avraham (Avrum) Burg, prominent centrist Israeli politician who served as the Speaker of the Knesset and head of the Jewish Agency, who later became a post-Zionist. Comparing aspects of modern politics to religion, the book will be of interest to researchers in a broad range of areas including modern Jewish studies, sociology of religion, and political science.

"Contemporary Jews variously configure their identity, which is no longer necessarily defined by an observance of the Torah and God's commandments. Indeed, the Jews of modernity are no longer exclusively Jewish. They are affiliated with many communities-vocational, professional, political, and cultural-whose interests may not coincide with that of the community of their birth and inherited culture. In Cultural Disjunctions, Paul Mendes-Flohr explores the possibility of a spiritually and intellectually engaged cosmopolitan Jewish identity for our time. To ground this project, he draws on the sociology of knowledge and cultural hermeneutics to reflect on the need to participate in the life of a community so that it enables multiple relations beyond its borders and allows one to balance a commitment to the local and a genuine obligation to the universal. Over the course of six provocative chapters, Mendes-Flohr lays out what this delicate balance can look like for contemporary Jews, both in the Diaspora and in Israel. Mendes-Flohr takes us through the ghettos of twentieth-century Europe, the differences between the personal libraries of traditional and secular Jews, and the role of cultural memory. Ultimately, the author calls for Jews to remain discontent with themselves (as a check on hubris), but also discontent with the social and political order, and to fight for its betterment"--