Studies in Jewish History – serie

Between Dignity and Despair draws on the extraordinary memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters of Jewish women and men to give us the first intimate portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany.Kaplan tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, nor from the vantage of the persecutors, but from the bewildered and ambiguous perspective of Jews trying to navigate their daily lives in a world that was becoming more and more insane. Answering the charge that Jews should have left earlier, Kaplan shows that far from seeming inevitable, the Holocaust was impossible to foresee precisely because Nazi repression occurred in irregular and unpredictable steps until the massive violence of Novemer 1938. Then the flow of emigration turned into a torrent, only to be stopped by the war. By that time Jews had been evicted from their homes, robbed of their possessions and their livelihoods, shunned by their former friends, persecuted by their neighbors, and driven into forced labor. For those trapped in Germany, mere survival became a nightmare of increasingly desperate options. Many took their own lives to retain at least some dignity in death; many others went underground and endured the terrors of nightly bombings and the even greater fear of being discovered by the Nazis. Most were murdered. All were pressed to the limit of human endurance and human loneliness.Focusing on the fate of families and particularly women's experience, Between Dignity and Despair takes us into the neighborhoods, into the kitchens, shops, and schools, to give us the shape and texture, the very feel of what it was like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany.

This comprehensive study of Jewish women in Imperial Germany (1871-1918) addresses the complex interrelationships of ethnicity, sex, and class. It examines the changing lives and roles of women who were part of an urbanizing, economically mobile, but socially spurned minority group, and also looks at their relationship with the rest of society.The author identifies German-Jewish women's `double burden' as females - discriminated against in both German and Jewish traditions - and as Jews - objects of the increasing anti-Semitism of their era. She also points out the ambiguous, often contradictory role that Jewish women played: they were powerful agents of acculturation, encouraging their families to adapt outwardly to German customs and norms, and also determined upholders of tradition, maintaining family rituals, kin networks, and Jewish communal organizations.

The creation of the term "anti-Semitism" a century ago signalled a turning point in the history of Jew-hatred, marking the division between the classical, Christian hatred of Jews and the modern, politically-rooted racist attitudes. This is the first biography of radical writer and politician Wilhelm Marr, the man who introduced the term "anti-Semitism" into politics and founded the first "Anti-Semitic League." Marr (1819-1904) began his political career as ademocrat and revolutionary, fighting for the emancipation of all oppressed groups including the Jews. But when he became disillusioned with contemporary politics, Jews became the focus of his attack.Drawing on Marr's published and unpublished works, as well as on previously unexamined journals and voluminous correspondence, Zimmermann sets out to discover why an intellectual radical like Marr would become a virulent anti-Semite. As Zimmermann follows Marr's profound influence in the political, literary, and artistic circles of his day and his collaborations with Karl Marx, Richard Wagner, and other radical founders of modern anti-Semitism, he reveals the diverse ways that anti-Semitismcame to permeate German thought and illuminates critical moments in the emergence of the German Reich. The book also includes Marr's surprising, never-before-published "Testament of an Anti-Semite,"written at the end of his life when he finally turned his back on the movement he helped to create. This is the first volume in a new Oxford series, Studies in Jewish History. The General Editor for the series is Jehuda Reinharz of Brandeis University.

This book examines the conflict between Louis D. Brandeis and Chaim Weizmann, two dominant personalities, each credited by devoted followers as the hero of a crucial era in recent Jewish history. The author considers how each man confronted the problem of his Jewish identity and the extent to which they both served as models for rival solutions.

This is the first full-length biography, in any language, of Judah Leib Gordon, one of the pivotal intellectual and cultural figures in Russian Jewry, and the most important Hebrew poet of the nineteenth century. Setting Gordon's life and work amidst the political, cultural, and religious upheavals of his society, Stanislawski attempts to counter traditional stereotypical readings of Eastern European Jewish history. Judah Leib Gordon's personal story is a fascinating drama that both symbolizes and summarizes the cultural and political challenges facing Russian Jewry at a crucial time in history, challenges that remain pertinent and controversial today.

In this work a former member of the French Resistance, Jacques Adler, examines the diverse Jewish organizations that existed in Paris during the German occupation from 1940 to 1944. Showing how they combated gradual anti-Jewish measures, he presents an important portrait of communal solidarity and communal conflict, of heroes and of those whose courage failed.

In this innovative study, Eli Lederhandler explores the previously ignored antecedents to the political awakening of Jewish intellectuals and their break with the traditional, religion-centred culture in Tsarist Russia. Only in the last few years have scholars begun to consider the place of politics in pre-modern Jewish society, and then only from a purely theoretical point of view. Lederhandler's work will be the first to examine in depth the actual political functioning of a Jewish community in its relations with the non-Jewish state and with its own citizens.

Illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine prior to the founding of the State of Israel forms one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of Zionism and modern Jewish history. Bringing Jews from Europe to Palestine by land and by sea in defiance of restrictive British immigration policies was partly an undertaking of national rescue and partly a calculated strategy of political brinkmanship. Ofer focuses on this important phase in the history of the Holocaust.

This book examines how American Jews from colonial times to the present have contended with living in a fundamentally Christian state. Separation of church and state has become a veritable creed in the American Jewish community, and the focus of the work is the way in which Jewish actions have contributed to the development of this separation in the US.

In the period from 1780 to 1840 German Jewry underwent a twofold revolution that set the basic patterns of its experience for the century to follow: the end of the Jews's feudal status as an autonomous community forced them to face a protracted process of political and civic emancipation and a far-reaching social metamorphosis, while their encounter with the surrounding culture resulted in an intense productivity. In this groundbreaking study, David Sorkin argues that emancipation and the encounter with German culture and society led not to assimilation but to the creation of a new Jewish identity and community - a vibrant subculture - that produced many of Judaism's modern movements and a pantheon of outstanding writers, artists, composers, scientists, and academics.

When East European Jews migrated westward in ever larger numbers between 1870 and 1914, both German government officials and the leaders of German Jewry were confronted by a series of new challenges. What policies did government leaders devise to cope with the seemingly unending tide of Jews flooding across Germany's borders? What was the actual, as opposed to the perceived, character of these Jewish migrants? How did native Jews respond to the arrival ofcoreligionists from the East? Drawing on archival research conducted in East and West Germany, Israel, and the United States, Unwelcome Strangers probes into these questions, touching on some of the mosttroubling issues in modern German and Jewish history--the behavior of Germans toward strangers in their midst, the status and self-perception of emancipated Jews in pre-Nazi Germany, and the responses of "privileged" Jews to needy, but alien, coreligionists.

This engagingly written study provides a very useful analysis of modern Jewish politics in the interwar European and American diaspora. Mendelsohn, a distinguished historian of modern Jewry, discusses the opposing visions of the Jewish future as formulated by various political parties and organizations in an effort to solve the `Jewish question.'The book begins by attempting a typology of these Jewish groups, dividing them into a number of schools or `camps,' thereby suggesting a `geography' of Jewish politics by locating the `core areas' of the various Jewish political camps. This is followed by an analysis of the competition among the various Jewish political camps for hegemony in the Jewish world. The discussion focuses on the situation in the United States and in Poland, the two largest diasporas, in the 1920s and 1930s.The final chapters of the book ask the following questions: what were the sources of appeal of the various Jewish political camps (such as the Jewish left and Jewish nationalism)? Secondly, to what extent did the various Jewish political factions succeed in their efforts to implement their plans for the Jewish future? And finally, in what ways was Jewish politics similar to, or different from, the politics of other minority groups in Europe and America? A brief conclusion discusses the great changes that have occurred in the world of Jewish politics since World War II.

The Berlin Jewish community was both the pioneer in intellectual modernization and the first to experience a crisis of modernity. This original and imaginative book connects intellectual and political transformation with the social structures and daily activities of the Jewish community. Steven M. Lowenstein has used extraordinarily rich documentation about the life of Berlin Jewry in the period and assembled a collective biography of the entire community of Berlin Jews. He has examined tax lists, subscription lists, genealogical records, and address lists as well as kosher meat accounts to give us a vivid picture of daily life. On another level in detailing the complexity of Jewish life in Berlin during this period, this book illuminates the connections between the "peaceful stage" of enlightenment and the crisis that followed.

Zionism and the Creation of a New Society is the history of the development of the Jewish State from the early idea of Jewish nationalism. Ranging from the Zionist movements in the late nineteenth century to the establishment of Israel in 1948, this study clearly demonstrates the continuity between the principles and practices of those early movements and the social and political structure of Israel today. Jehuda Reinharz and the late Ben Halpern, the two foremost students of Zionism in the United States, have produced the most comprehensive and incisive history of Zionism in the English language.

A social history of Jewish women in Imperial Germany, this study synthesizes German, women's, and Jewish history. The book explores the private--familial and religious--lives of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie and the public roles of Jewish women in the university, paid employment and social service. It analyses the changing roles of Jewish women as members of an economically mobile, but socially spurned minority. The author emphasizes the crucial role women played in creating the Jewish middle class, as well as their dual role within the Jewish family and community as powerful agents of class formation and acculturation and determined upholders of tradition.

This book explores the impact of war and political crisis on the national identity of Jews, both in the multinational Habsburg monarchy and in the new nation-states that replaced it at the end of the First World War. Jews enthusiastically supported the Austrian war effort because it allowed them to assert their Austrian loyalties and Jewish solidarity at the same time. They faced a grave crisis of identity when the multinational state collapsed and they lived in nation-states mostly uncomfortable with ethnic minorities. This book raises important questions about Jewish identity, and about the nature of ethnic and national identity in general.