Product Description: Highlighting the seminal role of German Jewish intellectuals and ideologues in forming and transforming the modern Jewish world, this volume analyzes the political roads taken by German Jewish thinkers; the impact of the Holocaust on the Central and East European Jewish intelligentsia; and the conundrum of modern Jewish identity...read more

Product Description: Volume XXIV of the distinguished annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry explores relations between Jews and Protestants in modern times. Far from monolithic, Protestantism has innumerable groupings within it, from the loosely organized Religious Society of Friends to the conservative Evangelicals of the Bible Belt, all of which hold a range of views on theology, social problems, and politics...read more

Product Description: Beginning in the 1890s, and continuing into the twentieth century, Jewish workers in the Russian Pale of Settlement organised themselves to improve their economic and cultural situation. Their struggle was the result of an alliance with the Jewish socialist intelligentsia, which began by teaching workers in select 'circles' and ended by assuming the leadership of a mass labour movement...read more

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Maurycy Gottlieb was born in 1856 in the small city known in Polish as Drohobycz, then attached to the province of Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the course of his very short life (he died at age 23), Gottlieb painted dozens of extraordinary works that have since found homes in museums in eastern Europe. (where he has long been honored as a Polish artist) and in Israel, where, following a major exhibition in 1991 in Tel-Aviv, he achieved the status of a founding father of Jewish art. The subjects of his paintings range from self-portraits and portraits of family and friends to "orientalist" themes, historical topics, and biblical scenes, including two important representations of Jesus. Ezra Mendelsohn situates this impressive body of work in the context of contemporary European painting, and uses Gottlieb's work to illuminate the sociopolitical and cultural complexity of the multi-ethnic and multi-religious Austro-Hungarian Empire prior to World War I. Interpreting the paintings, and their reception in Gottlieb's day and beyond, Mendelsohn touches on a number of key issues in modern Jewish history, among them identity, assimilation, acculturation, nationalism, the relationship between Jewry and European culture, and relations between Jews and non-Jews, particularly between Poles and Jews. Mendelsohn notes that Gottlieb "was an ideal subject for a historian of modern Jewish Eastern Europe with an interest in the visual dimension of Jewish culture." Since the artist's death in 1879, Polish nationalists, Jewish integrationists, Jewish nationalists, and finally the Israeli Jewish establishment, have laid claims to his art. Yet Mendelsohn shows that the subjects Gottlieb chose to paint--particularly the historical subjects--demonstrate that Gottlieb was first and foremost an artist of Jewish univeralism.

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Product Description: Historically leftist ideas and theories have had a profound impact on modern Jewish life. But, the left's impact on the Jewish community has greatly diminished today. Nonetheless, it can still be detected in the tendency of American Jews to vote for the liberal camp...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In the period between the two world wars, Poland's Jewish community of three million was second only in size to that of the United States, and was the laboratory in which the ideological orientations which dominated the Jewish world-Zionism, Bundism, Neo-Orthodoxy, assimilation-were tested...read more

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Product Description: This volume examines music's place in the process of Jewish assimilation into the modern European bourgeoisie and the role assigned to music in forging a new Jewish Israeli national identity, in maintaining a separate Sephardic identity, and in preserving a traditional Jewish life...read more

Product Description: This book is a concise guide to and analysis of the complexities of modern Jewish politics in the interwar European and American diaspora. "Jewish politics" refers to the different and opposing visions of the Jewish future as formulated by various Jewish political parties and organizations and their efforts to implement their programs and thereby solve the "Jewish question...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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"... a carefully crafted and important book... a first-class contribution to the literature on modern Europe." —American Historical Review"... valuable... the first historical work to attempt a 'synthetic sketch' of the problems indicated in the title." —Journal of Polish Jewish StudiesAn illuminating study of the demographic, cultural, and socioeconomic condition of East Central European Jewry, the book focuses on the internal life of Jewish communities in the region and on the relationships between Jews and gentiles in a nationalist environment.