This book provides a rich and wide-ranging analysis of Jewish history and culture, relating them to theories of modernity and postmodernity and to recent debates on ethnicity and postcolonialism. The sixteen essays are divided into four parts, addressing psychoanalysis and gender, literary antisemitism, modernity/postmodernity and the Jew, and the memory of the Holocaust. A Foreword and Afterword place these concerns in an extended multicultural and postcolonial context. What is at stake when Jewish history and culture are inserted into current feminist, gay and lesbian, postcolonial and postmodern revisions of modernity? Even the radical reconstruction of modernity has created a host of new orthodoxies which themselves need to be unsettled. Along with an amorphous political correctness, mainstream cultural studies has, routinely, written out the question of Jewishness, assuming it as part of a supposed Judeo-Christian tradition. On the other side of the barricades, however, those apologists for the efficacy of Western modernity have continued to banish Jewish difference from their brave new world in a desperate bid to signify the universality of the modern project. The essays in this collection are written in the margins of these reductive oppositions. They recognize that the Jewish other is both at the heart of Western metropolitan culture and is also what must be excluded in order for dominant racial and sexual identities to be formed and maintained. There is a virtue in this ambivalent positioning, this center of the road, which characterizes Jewish history and culture both then and now. "

The French tradition: 1789 and the Jews -- The German tradition: capitalism and the Jews -- The American tradition: the city and the Jews

Bringing together leading Jewish historians, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and liturgists, Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity offers a collective view of a historically and culturally significant issue that will be of interest to Jewish scholars of many disciplines.

"The purpose of this collection of Rieff's writings ... is to trace the evolution of the 'Jews of culture' over the course of his work." --introd.

"Freedman's final book is a tour de force that examines the history of Jewish involvement in the decadent art movement. While decadent art's most notorious practitioner was Oscar Wilde, as a movement it spread through western Europe and even included a few adherents in Russia. Jewish writers and artists such as Catulle Mèndes, Gustav Kahn, and Simeon Solomon would portray non-stereotyped characters and produce highly influential works. After decadent art's peak, Walter Benjamin, Marcel Proust, and Sigmund Freud would take up the idiom of decadence and carry it with them during the cultural transition to modernism. Freedman expertly and elegantly takes readers through this transition and beyond, showing the lineage of Jewish decadence all the way through to the end of the twentieth century"--

The most prominent story of nineteenth-century German and French Jewry has focused on Jewish adoption of liberal middle-class values. The Modernity of Others points to an equally powerful but largely unexplored aspect of modern Jewish history: the extent to which German and French Jews sought to become modern by criticizing the anti-modern positions of the Catholic Church. Drawing attention to the pervasiveness of anti-Catholic anticlericalism among Jewish thinkers and activists from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, the book turns the master narrative of Western and Central European Jewish history on its head. From the moment in which Jews began to enter the fray of modern European politics, they found that Catholicism served as a convenient foil that helped them define what it meant to be a good citizen, to practice a respectable religion, and to have a healthy family life. Throughout the long nineteenth century, myriad Jewish intellectuals, politicians, and activists employed anti-Catholic tropes wherever questions of political and national belonging were at stake: in theoretical treatises, parliamentary speeches, newspaper debates, the founding moments of the Reform movement, and campaigns against antisemitism.

Finalist, 2023 National Jewish Book Award Winners in Women’s Studies In Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939, Allison Schachter rewrites Jewish literary modernity from the point of view of women. Focusing on works by interwar Hebrew and Yiddish writers, Schachter illuminates how women writers embraced the transgressive potential of prose fiction to challenge the patriarchal norms of Jewish textual authority and reconceptualize Jewish cultural belonging. Born in the former Russian and Austro‐Hungarian Empires and writing from their homes in New York, Poland, and Mandatory Palestine, the authors central to this book—Fradl Shtok, Dvora Baron, Elisheva Bikhovsky, Leah Goldberg, and Debora Vogel—seized on the freedoms of social revolution to reimagine Jewish culture beyond the traditionally male world of Jewish letters. The societies they lived in devalued women’s labor and denied them support for their work. In response, their writing challenged the social hierarchies that excluded them as women and as Jews. As she reads these women, Schachter upends the idea that literary modernity was a conversation among men about women, with a few women writers listening in. Women writers revolutionized the very terms of Jewish fiction at a pivotal moment in Jewish history, transcending the boundaries of Jewish minority identities. Schachter tells their story and in so doing calls for a new way of thinking about Jewish cultural modernity.