Zionist Diarist And Other Polemics

What is Zionism? Is anti-Zionism the same as anti-Semitism? When is criticism of Israel fair and when unfair? Who decides who is a Jew? What is the present state of Yiddish? Is the stereotype of the Jewish-American princess funny or anti-Semitic? Is there a new anti-Semitism or is it the same as the old anti-Semitism? Why are so many Jews attracted to science? Professor Jeffry V. Mallow addresses these and many other questions in Zionist Diarist and Other Polemics, a collection of essays on the condition of the Jews over the last several decades. Jeffry V. Mallow is a Zionist, Yiddishist, feminist, humorist, and physicist. He has lived in the US, Israel, and Europe. He is the author of several books, including ?Our Pal, God? and Other Presumptions, a book of Jewish humor. He and his family live in Chicago.

"This Very Short Introduction discloses a history of Zionism from the origins of modern Jewish nationalism in the 1870's to the present. Michael Stanislawski provides a lucid and detached analysis of Zionism, focusing on its internal intellectual and ideological developments and divides"--

This volume commemorates Theodor Herzl, the Viennese journalist and writer who, incongruously, founded Zionism as a political movement which led ultimately to the founding of the State of Israel. The contributors look at Herzl and seek to place him in historical context. In particular, they examine his relations with Viennese contemporaries, his use of his position as a prominent journalist to obtain audiences with world leaders, his negotiations with Germany and Britain to obtain a national territory for the Jews, and his attempts to analyze and reshape the Jewish character in his fictional writings.

Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Con­tem­po­rary Jew­ish Life and Prac­tice Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Wall Street Journal, Chicago Public Library, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living. Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture—and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks—Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the "righteous Gentile" Varian Fry. Throughout, she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present. Horn draws upon her travels, her research, and also her own family life—trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious ten-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children’s school, the profound perspective offered by traditional religious practice and study—to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an antisemitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget," is on the rise. As Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past—making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity.