Jewish Search for a Usable Past

David G. Roskies is Professor of Jewish Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary. His books include Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture and A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling. He is founder and editor of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History.

"Roskies (Jewish Theol. Seminary) shows that the Jewish present is not evolving as a simple continuation of the past nor, contrary to what is often claimed, is it emerging from a radical break with the past. It sits, rather, upon what Roskies calls memory sites, images of the past recreated from the ashes of destruction and the potentially debilitating sense of Jewish loss these catastrophes create. How are such memory sites created? Roskies illustrates the process through careful and engaging examinations of, among other topics, Jewish chronicles of the Warsaw Ghetto, of Jewish rethinking of Jewish participation in the early socialist and Zionist movements, and of the function of the concept of holy space for secular Israelis. These studies, each a gem unto itself, together reveal how Jews cope with loss and catastrophe and illustrate that it is exactly by coping with loss and tragedy that Jews create a usable past and, in the process, define their present and shape their future. Recommended for general readers and for faculty and researchers. —A. J. Aver"—Peck, College of the Holy Cross, Choice, March 2000

• Preface and Acknowledgments1. The Jewish Search for a Usable Past2. The Library of Jewish Catastrophe3. Ringelblum's Time Capsules4. The Shtetl in Jewish Collective Memory5. Rabbis, Rebels, and the Lost Art of the Law6. The Golden Peacock: The Art of Song7. A Culture Set in Stone: The Art of Burial8. A City, a School, and a Utopian Experiment9. Zionism, Israel, and the Search of a Covenantal SpaceConclusionNotesIndex