Product Description: This book was a finalist in the 2009 Jewish Book Council Awards in the category of Anthologies and Collections. The twelve essays in this fascinating collection range broadly over time, covering the period from early modern era to the early twenty first century...read more

"Traversing farflung Jewish communities in South Africa, Australia, Texas, Brazil, China, New Zealand, Quebec, and elsewhere, this wide-ranging collection explores the notion of "frontier" in the Jewish experience as a historical geographical reality and a conceptual framework. As a compelling alternative to viewing the periphery only as a locus of dispossession and exile from the "homeland," this work imagines a new Jewish history written as the history of the Jews at the frontier. In this new history, marked by the dynamics of change, confrontation, and accommodation, marginalized experiences are brought to the center and all participants are given voice. By articulating the tension between the center/periphery model and the frontier model, "Jewries at the Frontier" shows how the dynamic confrontation between and among cultures and peoples provides a new, multivocal account of Jewish history." (view table of contents)

Although South Africa is universally regarded as a metaphor for racism and bigotry, there has been surprisingly little scholarly focus on antisemitism in that society. Historians of South African Jewry have depicted antisemitism in the 1930s and early 1940s as an essentially alien phenomenon, a product of Nazi propaganda at a time of great social and economic trauma. Milton Shain argues that antisemitism was an important element in South African society long befor 1930. Using previously unmined sources, such as novels, plays, caricatures, and even jokes, he demonstrates that the roots of anti-Jewish outbursts of the 1930s and early 1940s are to be found in a widely shared negative stereotype of the Jew that had evolved from the late ninteenth century.