Taking Stock

Michal Kravel-Tovi is Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. Her work has appeared in American Ethnologist, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.Deborah Dash Moore is Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of History and Director of the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is author of GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation.

Taking Stock is...an important contribution to a Jewish conversation about how we understand who we are and how we put this knowledge to use. The editors are to be commended for curating this argument in a way that will provoke further discussion and new consideration of quantitative data about individuals and communities.(Contemporary Jewry)

• Introduction: Counting in Jewish Michal Kravel-Tovi Part I. Counting the Dead: Iconic Numbers and Collective Memory1. Six Million: The Numerical Icon of the Holocaust Oren Baruch Stier 2. Breathing Life into Iconic Numbers: Yad Vashem's "Shoah Victims' Names Recovery Project" and the Constitution of a Posthumous Census of Six Million Holocaust Dead Carol A. Kidron 3. Putting Numbers into Space: Place Names, Collective Remembrance, and Forgetting in Israeli Culture Yael Zerubavel Part II. Counting the Living: Putting "the Jewish" in Social Science4. "Jewish Crime" by the Numbers, or Putting the "Social" in Jewish Social Science Mitchell B. Hart 5. Counting People: The Co-Production of Ethnicity and Jewish Majority in Israel-Palestine Anat Leibler 6. Wet Numbers: The Language of Continuity Crisis and the Work of Care among the Organized American Jewish Community Michal Kravel-Tovi Part III. Counting Objects: Material Subjects and the Social Lives of Enumerated Things7. "Let's Start with the Big Ones:" Numbers, Thin Description and the 'Magic' of Yiddish at the Yiddish Book Center Josh Friedman 8. 130 Kilograms of Matza, 3,000 Hard-boiled Eggs, 100 Kilograms of Haroset and 2,000 Balls of Gefilte Fish: Hyperbolic Reckoning on Passover Vanessa L. OchsPostscript: Balancing Accounts: Commemoration and Commensuration Theodore M. Porter BibliographyList of ContributorsIndex