Journeys of dislocation and return, of discovery and conquest hold a prominent place in the imagination of many cultures. Wherever an individual or community may be located, it would seem, there is always the dream of being elsewhere. This has been especially true throughout the ages for Jews, for whom the promises and perils of travel have influenced both their own sense of self and their identity in the eyes of others. How does travel writing, as a genre, produce representations of the world of others, against which one's own self can be invented or explored? And what happens when Jewish authors in particular—whether by force or of their own free will, whether in reality or in the imagination—travel from one place to another? How has travel figured in the formation of Jewish identity, and what cultural and ideological work is performed by texts that document or figure specifically Jewish travel? Featuring essays on topics that range from Abraham as a traveler in biblical narrative to the guest book entries at contemporary Israeli museum and memorial sites; from the marvels medieval travelers claim to have encountered to eighteenth-century Jewish critiques of Orientalism; from the Wandering Jew of legend to one mid-twentieth-century Yiddish writer's accounts of his travels through Peru, Jews and Journeys explores what it is about travel writing that enables it to become one of the central mechanisms for exploring the realities and fictions of individual and collective identity.

When fast-breaking political events forced British novelist Jacobson (Peeping Tom) to put off a trip to Lithuania planned as a search for his Jewish roots, he accepted an offer from the BBC to visit Jewish communities around the globe instead. This informed and witty account of his experiences deals with the wide variety of contemporary Jewish life, as well as with how Jacobson's observations affected his own concept of what it means to be a Jew. Riding an emotional roller coaster, he witnessed the hostility between Jews and African Americans in New York City, attended services in a gay synagogue in California and found his basic cynicism about religion reinforced after he spent time with Orthodox Jews in Israel, although his spirits were lifted by a visit to an idealistic, tolerant Israeli kibbutz. His journey concluded with the postponed trip to Lithuania, where the author found virulent anti-Semitism.

This beautifully Illustrated history book is the the first volume to be published in a planned six-volume series directed at Jewish young adults. It is noteworthy that this inaugural volume tells the story of Jews returning to the Land of Israel, while the Diaspora continues to thrive in a world of superpowers which clash and cooperate - a period not unlike our own. We hope that this series will go some way to rectify the ignorance of our unique, long, and complex history, and to enable future Jewish adults to understand both their past and ground their future in a changing and evolving world.

Between ten and fifteen thousand persons of Cuban-Jewish heritage currently live in Miami. Until now, however, this vibrant community and its unique traditions have, to a large extent, escaped the notice of ethnographers, historians, and other scholars. In Cuban-Jewish Journeys, Caroline Bettinger-López remedies that neglect with an engaging, in-depth look at a people whose rich mix of cultures confounds typical ethnic images. The author begins by investigating the history and development of the Cuban-Jewish community, tracing its origins back to Jewish enclaves in Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Mediterranean. She explores how these people came to Cuba in the first half of the twentieth century and how they eventually resettled in the United States as part of the larger Cuban migration that followed Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution. In recounting this history, Bettinger-López draws heavily on numerous stories told to her by Cuban Jews in Miami and elsewhere. Those oral histories also form the basis of Bettinger-López's subsequent exploration of the identity and assimilation issues facing "Jewbans" (as many in Miami began calling themselves in the 1970s). She found that place and date of birth, for instance, may affect an individual's identification with a particular homeland and political ideology, which may in turn influence how the individual "remembers" Cuban-Jewish history. The future of Miami's Jewban community, she suggests, now lies in the hands of a generation that, for the most part, has grown up within the United States. Already, the community is transforming itself linguistically, culturally, and religiously to accommodate the younger generation. Skillfully interweaving historical analysis, personal reflections, inter-generational stories, theories of diaspora, photographs, and current debates on ethnographic writing, Cuban-Jewish Journeys will appeal not only to scholars but to anyone interested in the ever-changing face of multicultural America. The Author: Caroline Bettinger-López, a native of Miami, studied anthropology at the University of Michigan. Since her graduation, she has worked in various teaching and social-service positions in Miami. Most recently, she has taught disadvantaged children in Haiti.

An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother's maternal line. Using family heirlooms to unlock the mystery of Moses's ancestors, Once We Were Slaves overturns the reclusive heiress's assumptions about her family history to reveal that her grandmother and great-uncle, Sarah and Isaac Brandon, actually began their lives as poor Christian slaves in Barbados. Tracing the siblings' extraordinary journey throughout the Atlantic World, Leibman examines artifacts they left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and, finally, New York, to show how Sarah and Isaac were able to transform themselves and their lives, becoming free, wealthy, Jewish, and--at times--white. While their affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors that of the largely forgotten population of mixed African and Jewish ancestry that constituted as much as ten percent of the Jewish communities in which the siblings lived, and sheds new light on the fluidity of race--as well as on the role of religion in racial shift--in the first half of the nineteenth century.

This expanded and updated edition includes new coverage of Austria, Ukraine, and Lithuania in addition to Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and all of the ancestral homes to the great majority of North American Jews.

Internationally renowned essayist and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans spent five years traveling from across a dozen countries in Latin America, in search of what defines the Jewish communities in the region, whose roots date back to Christopher Columbus’s arrival. In the tradition of V.S. Naipaul’s explorations of India, the Caribbean, and the Arab World, he came back with an extraordinarily vivid travelogue. Stavans talks to families of the desaparecidos in Buenos Aires, to “Indian Jews,” and to people affiliated with neo-Nazi groups in Patagonia. He also visits Spain to understand the long-term effects of the Inquisition, the American Southwest habitat of “secret Jews,” and Israel, where immigrants from Latin America have reshaped the Jewish state. Along the way, he looks for the proverbial “seventh heaven,” which, according to the Talmud, out of proximity with the divine, the meaning of life in general, and Jewish life in particular, becomes clearer. The Seventh Heaven is a masterful work in Stavans’s ongoing quest to find a convergence between the personal and the historical.