University of California Series in Jewish History and Cultures – serie

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.In this book, Deborah A. Starr recuperates the work of Togo Mizrahi, a pioneer of Egyptian cinema. Mizrahi, an Egyptian Jew with Italian nationality, established himself as a prolific director of popular comedies and musicals in the 1930s and 1940s. As a studio owner and producer, Mizrahi promoted the idea that developing a local cinema industry was a project of national importance. Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema integrates film analysis with film history to tease out the cultural and political implications of Mizrahi’s work. His movies, Starr argues, subvert dominant notions of race, gender, and nationality through their playful—and queer—use of masquerade and mistaken identity. Taken together, Mizrahi’s films offer a hopeful vision of a pluralist Egypt. By reevaluating Mizrahi’s contributions to Egyptian culture, Starr challenges readers to reconsider the debates over who is Egyptian and what constitutes national cinema.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.For more than four decades, socially disadvantaged Israeli Mizrahim—descendants of Jews from Middle Eastern and North African communities—have continuously supported right-wing political parties. Scholars, left-wing politicians, and activists tend to view Mizrahim as reacting against their structural exclusion, or more crudely as acting against their own interests, but Nissim Mizrachi locates the source of their so-called paradoxical behavior within the limitations of the liberal grammar by which their outlook and behavior are read. In Beyond Suspicion, Mizrachi turns the direction of inquiry back on itself, contrasting liberal grammar—which values autonomy, equality, and universal reason and morality as the only authentic human choice—with the grammar of rootedness, in which the self is experienced through a web of relational commitments, temporal ties, and codes of collective identity. Recognizing rootedness as a fundamental need and desire for belonging is necessary to understand both scholarly and political rifts in Israel and throughout the world.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean brings together the fascinating personal stories of Jewish writers, scholars, and intellectuals who came of age in lands where Islam was the dominant religion and everyday life was infused with the politics of the French imperial project. Prompted by novelist Leïla Sebbar to reflect on their childhoods, these writers offer literary portraits that gesture to a universal condition while also shedding light on the exceptional nature of certain experiences. The childhoods captured here are undeniably Jewish, but they are also Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Turkish; each essay thus testifies to the multicultural, multilingual, and multi-faith community into which its author was born. The present translation makes this unique collection available to an English-speaking public for the first time. The original version, published in French in 2012, was awarded the Prix Haïm Zafrani, a prize given by the Elie Wiesel Institute of Jewish Studies to a literary project that valorizes Jewish civilization in the Muslim world.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.Golden Ages is an ethnographic study of young singers in the contemporary Brooklyn Hasidic community who base their aesthetic explorations of the culturally intimate space of prayer on the gramophone-era cantorial golden age. Jeremiah Lockwood proposes a view of their work as a nonconforming social practice that calls upon the sounds and structures of Jewish sacred musical heritage to disrupt the aesthetics and power hierarchies of their conservative community, defying institutional authority and pushing at normative boundaries of sacred and secular. Beyond its role as a desirable art form, golden age cantorial music offers aspiring Hasidic singers a form of Jewish cultural productivity in which artistic excellence, maverick outsider status, and sacred authority are aligned.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.The Scourge of Jewish Nationalism is the first book-length study of the theopolitical writings of Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar (1887–1979). A towering figure in twentieth-century Judaism, Teitelbaum was the founder and spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidic sect, today the largest Hasidic sect in the world. He emerged in the post-Holocaust years as one of the most provocative thinkers in traditional Judaism. The book situates Teitelbaum’s dense rabbinic writing in the larger context of contemporary political thought and theology on questions of nationalism, messianism, and Jewish covenantal theology. Introducing readers to Teitelbaum’s anti-Zionist writings, Shaul Magid argues that Teitelbaum’s anti-Zionist ideas were among the most significant Jewish theological interventions of the twentieth century. Putting his work into dialogue with important philosophers, theologians, and theorists inside and outside of Judaism, The Scourge of Jewish Nationalism closely examines Teitelbaum’s work as an illustration of how the Jewish tradition challenges, and is challenged by, the modern nationalist project and its Jewish articulation in Zionism.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.The Scourge of Jewish Nationalism is the first book-length study of the theopolitical writings of Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar (1887–1979). A towering figure in twentieth-century Judaism, Teitelbaum was the founder and spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidic sect, today the largest Hasidic sect in the world. He emerged in the post-Holocaust years as one of the most provocative thinkers in traditional Judaism. The book situates Teitelbaum’s dense rabbinic writing in the larger context of contemporary political thought and theology on questions of nationalism, messianism, and Jewish covenantal theology. Introducing readers to Teitelbaum’s anti-Zionist writings, Shaul Magid argues that Teitelbaum’s anti-Zionist ideas were among the most significant Jewish theological interventions of the twentieth century. Putting his work into dialogue with important philosophers, theologians, and theorists inside and outside of Judaism, The Scourge of Jewish Nationalism closely examines Teitelbaum’s work as an illustration of how the Jewish tradition challenges, and is challenged by, the modern nationalist project and its Jewish articulation in Zionism.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar, one of the most celebrated Hasidic masters of the twentieth century, is known not only for founding the world’s largest Hasidic dynasty, but also for his strongly held anti-Zionist views. His work articulates a Jewish political theology against Zionism built on the foundations of traditional Jewish sources, and its influence remains strong within the ultra-Orthodox Satmar community and beyond. Dense with references to rabbinic, medieval, and modern sources, Teitelbaum’s writing is notoriously challenging even for scholars of Torah to parse. In this volume, Shaul Magid provides a richly annotated translation of selections from the books Vayoel Moshe and ‘Al Ha-Geulah ve 'al Ha-Temurah, making Teitelbaum’s major political writings accessible to English-speaking readers for the first time.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar, one of the most celebrated Hasidic masters of the twentieth century, is known not only for founding the world’s largest Hasidic dynasty, but also for his strongly held anti-Zionist views. His work articulates a Jewish political theology against Zionism built on the foundations of traditional Jewish sources, and its influence remains strong within the ultra-Orthodox Satmar community and beyond. Dense with references to rabbinic, medieval, and modern sources, Teitelbaum’s writing is notoriously challenging even for scholars of Torah to parse. In this volume, Shaul Magid provides a richly annotated translation of selections from the books Vayoel Moshe and ‘Al Ha-Geulah ve 'al Ha-Temurah, making Teitelbaum’s major political writings accessible to English-speaking readers for the first time.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.In A Volcano of Our Own Making, Avi-ram Tzoreff explores the biography, writings, and activism of Yehoshua Radler-Feldman (1880–1957), a prominent figure in the history of modern Jewish thought and in the movements for binationalism in Palestine. Known to his readers as Rabbi Binyamin, Radler-Feldman continued to demand the return of Palestinian refugees and the abolition of Israeli military rule, following the Nakba and the establishment of the state of Israel. In this book, Tzoreff introduces the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of R. Binyamin’s theoretical reflections on Jewish tradition, Hebrew literature, governance, civilization, and ethnicity. More than an intellectual biography, this book uses R. Binyamin as a lens for a comprehensive, critical understanding of the Zionist settler-colonial project, and sheds light on patterns of resistance to it from the perspective of an oppositionist from within the Zionist movement itself. In doing so, Tzoreff examines larger questions about pre-WWI multinational empires, global anticolonial movements, and the intersections between religion, secularism, and nationalism.