The Jew in the Modern World

The Jew in the Modern World PDF

Author: Paul R. Mendes-Flohr

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 772

ISBN-13: 9780195074536

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The last two centuries have witnessed a radical transformation of Jewish life. Marked by such profound events as the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel, Judaism's long journey through the modern age has been a complex and tumultuous one, leading many Jews to ask themselves not only where they have been and where they are going, but what it means to be a Jew in today's world. Tracing the Jewish experience in the modern period and illustrating the transformation of Jewish religion, culture, and identity from the 17th century to 1948, the updated edition of this critically acclaimed volume of primary materials remains the most complete sourcebook on modern Jewish history. Now expanded to supplement the most vital documents of the first edition, The Jew in the Modern World features hitherto unpublished and inaccessible sources concerning the Jewish experience in Eastern Europe, women in Jewish history, American Jewish life, the Holocaust, and Zionism and the nascent Jewish community in Palestine on the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel. The documents are arranged chronologically in each of eleven chapters and are meticulously and extensively annotated and cross-referenced in order to provide the student with ready access to a wide variety of issues, key historical figures, and events. Complete with some twenty useful tables detailing Jewish demographic trends, this is a unique resource for any course in Jewish history, Zionism and Israel, the Holocaust, or European and American history.

Judaism in the Modern World

Judaism in the Modern World PDF

Author: Alan L. Berger

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 1994-10-01

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 9780814712238

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As anti-semitism finds new followers and Israel makes peace with old enemies, Jews in the modern world face constantly metamorphosizing relationships. From the eighteenth century to the present, unprecedented opportunities have grown up alongside new challenges for the Jewish people. While modern society is permitting Judaism a place, profound questions over Jewish identity are taking shape. The essays gathered in Judaism in the Modern World address the issue of Jewish persistence amidst changing forms of identity. Exploring a wide range of sources, the essayists examine historical issues, the Holocaust and its repercussions, literature, and theological dimensions while seeking the nature of Judaism in modern times. As they reassess Judaism's past while pursuing a meaningful Jewish future, these essays raise crucial questions about the tradition's central mythic structures, such as covenant and redemption. The contributors to this volume broach everything from feminism to the creation of the state of Israel. Sander Gilman illustrates how Jewish identity is inextricably linked to the physical, showing how racial identity both reflects and defines Jewishness. Raul Hilberg examines Holocaust remembrance, in the wake of Holocaust denial, as an act of revolt. A wide-ranging and thoughtful collection, Judaism in the Modern World will appeal to readers concerned with the fate of Judaism in the modern era.

A History of the Jews in the Modern World

A History of the Jews in the Modern World PDF

Author: Howard M. Sachar

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 924

ISBN-13: 0307424367

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The distinguished historian of the Jewish people, Howard M. Sachar, gives us a comprehensive and enthralling chronicle of the achievements and traumas of the Jews over the last four hundred years. Tracking their fate from Western Europe’s age of mercantilism in the seventeenth century to the post-Soviet and post-imperialist Islamic upheavals of the twenty-first century, Sachar applies his renowned narrative skill to the central role of the Jews in many of the most impressive achievements of modern civilization: whether in the rise of economic capitalism or of political socialism; in the discoveries of theoretical physics or applied medicine; in “higher” literary criticism or mass communication and popular entertainment. As his account unfolds and moves from epoch to epoch, from continent to continent, from Europe to the Americas and the Middle East, Sachar evaluates communities that, until lately, have been underestimated in the perspective of Jewish and world history—among them, Jews of Sephardic provenance, of the Moslem regions, and of Africa. By the same token, Sachar applies a master’s hand in describing and deciphering the Jews’ unique exposure and functional usefulness to totalitarian movements—fascist, Nazi, and Stalinist. In the process, he shines an unsparing light on the often widely dissimilar behavior of separate European peoples, and on separate Jewish populations, during the Holocaust. A distillation of the author’s lifetime of scholarly research and teaching experience, A History of the Jews in the Modern World provides a source of unsurpassed intellectual richness for university students and educated laypersons alike.

Genius & Anxiety

Genius & Anxiety PDF

Author: Norman Lebrecht

Publisher: Scribner

Published: 2020-12-08

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 1982134267

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This lively chronicle of the years 1847­–1947—the century when the Jewish people changed how we see the world—is “[a] thrilling and tragic history…especially good on the ironies and chain-reaction intimacies that make a people and a past” (The Wall Street Journal). In a hundred-year period, a handful of men and women changed the world. Many of them are well known—Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Kafka. Others have vanished from collective memory despite their enduring importance in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Paul Ehrlich, no chemotherapy. Without Siegfried Marcus, no motor car. Without Rosalind Franklin, genetic science would look very different. Without Fritz Haber, there would not be enough food to sustain life on earth. What do these visionaries have in common? They all had Jewish origins. They all had a gift for thinking in wholly original, even earth-shattering ways. In 1847, the Jewish people made up less than 0.25% of the world’s population, and yet they saw what others could not. How? Why? Norman Lebrecht has devoted half of his life to pondering and researching the mindset of the Jewish intellectuals, writers, scientists, and thinkers who turned the tides of history and shaped the world today as we know it. In Genius & Anxiety, Lebrecht begins with the Communist Manifesto in 1847 and ends in 1947, when Israel was founded. This robust, magnificent, beautifully designed volume is “an urgent and moving history” (The Spectator, UK) and a celebration of Jewish genius and contribution.

How Judaism Became a Religion

How Judaism Became a Religion PDF

Author: Leora Batnitzky

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2011-09-11

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0691130728

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A new approach to understanding Jewish thought since the eighteenth century Is Judaism a religion, a culture, a nationality—or a mixture of all of these? In How Judaism Became a Religion, Leora Batnitzky boldly argues that this question more than any other has driven modern Jewish thought since the eighteenth century. This wide-ranging and lucid introduction tells the story of how Judaism came to be defined as a religion in the modern period—and why Jewish thinkers have fought as well as championed this idea. Ever since the Enlightenment, Jewish thinkers have debated whether and how Judaism—largely a religion of practice and public adherence to law—can fit into a modern, Protestant conception of religion as an individual and private matter of belief or faith. Batnitzky makes the novel argument that it is this clash between the modern category of religion and Judaism that is responsible for much of the creative tension in modern Jewish thought. Tracing how the idea of Jewish religion has been defended and resisted from the eighteenth century to today, the book discusses many of the major Jewish thinkers of the past three centuries, including Moses Mendelssohn, Abraham Geiger, Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Zvi Yehuda Kook, Theodor Herzl, and Mordecai Kaplan. At the same time, it tells the story of modern orthodoxy, the German-Jewish renaissance, Jewish religion after the Holocaust, the emergence of the Jewish individual, the birth of Jewish nationalism, and Jewish religion in America. More than an introduction, How Judaism Became a Religion presents a compelling new perspective on the history of modern Jewish thought.

The Life of Judaism

The Life of Judaism PDF

Author: Harvey E. Goldberg

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2001-12-11

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0520227530

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This book offers readers an insider's view into the ways Judaism is lived and experienced. it presents narrative and ethnographic accounts of present day Jewish practices the rituals, communities, and political involvement.

Jews in the Early Modern World

Jews in the Early Modern World PDF

Author: Dean Phillip Bell

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 9780742545182

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Jews in the Early Modern World presents a comparative and global history of the Jews for the early modern period, 1400-1700. It traces the remarkable demographic changes experienced by Jews around the globe and assesses the impact of those changes on Jewish communal and social structures, religious and cultural practices, and relations with non-Jews.

American Judaism

American Judaism PDF

Author: Jonathan D. Sarna

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2019-06-25

Total Pages: 558

ISBN-13: 0300190395

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Jonathan D. Sarna's award-winning American Judaism is now available in an updated and revised edition that summarizes recent scholarship and takes into account important historical, cultural, and political developments in American Judaism over the past fifteen years. Praise for the first edition: "Sarna . . . has written the first systematic, comprehensive, and coherent history of Judaism in America; one so well executed, it is likely to set the standard for the next fifty years."--Jacob Neusner, Jerusalem Post "A masterful overview."--Jeffrey S. Gurock, American Historical Review "This book is destined to be the new classic of American Jewish history."--Norman H. Finkelstein, Jewish Book World Winner of the 2004 National Jewish Book Award/Jewish Book of the Year