Download or read book Re envisioning Jewish Identities written by Efraim Sicher and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-30 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative study combines readings of contemporary literature, art, and performance to explore the diverse and complex directions of contemporary Jewish culture in Israel and the diaspora.
Download or read book New Jewish Identities written by Zvi Y. Gitelman and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2003-07-30 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique collection of essays that deal with the intriguing and complex problems connected to the question of Jewish identity in the contemporary world. Based on a conference held in Budapest, Hungary in July 2001, it analyzes and compares how Jews conceive of their Jewishness. Do they see it in mostly religious, cultural or ethnic terms? What are the policy implications of these views and how have they been evolving? What do they portend for the future of world Jewry? The authors present new data from west European and post-Communist countries (Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Russia, Ukraine) and re-interpret data from other European countries as well as from Israel and the United States, making this a truly comprehensive, comparative and contemporary work.
Download or read book Mapping Jewish Identities written by Laurence J. Silberstein and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2000-07 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is Jewish identity flourishing or in decline? Community leaders and scholarly researchers continually seek to determine the attitudes, beliefs, and activities that best measure Jewish identity. At issue, according to these studies, is the very survival of the Jewish community itself. But such studies rarely ask what actually is being examined when we attempt to assess "Jewish identity" or any identity. Most tend to assume that identity is a preexisting, relatively fixed frame of reference reflecting shared cultural and historical experiences. Drawing on recent work in such fields as cultural studies, poststructuralist theory, postmodern philosophy, and feminist theory, Mapping Jewish Identities challenges this premise. Contesting conventional approaches to Jewish identity, contributors argue that Jewish identity should be conceptualized as an ongoing dynamic process of "becoming" in response to changing cultural and social conditions rather than as a stable defining body of traits. Contributors, including Daniel Boyarin, Laura Levitt, Adi Ophir, and Gordon Bearn, examine such topics as American Jews' desires to connect with a lost immigrant past through photography, the complicated function of the Holocaust in the identity formation of contemporary Jews, the impact of the struggle with the Palestinians on Israeli group identity construction, and the ways in which repressed voices such as those of women, Mizrahim, and Israeli Arabs have changed our ways of thinking about Jewish and Israeli identity.
Download or read book Beyond Jewish Identity written by Jon A. Levisohn and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2019-12-31 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is something deeply problematic about the ways that Jews, particularly in America, talk about “Jewish identity” as a desired outcome of Jewish education. For many, the idea that the purpose of Jewish education is to strengthen Jewish identity is so obvious that it hardly seems worth disputing—and the only important question is which kinds of Jewish education do that work more effectively or more efficiently. But what does it mean to “strengthen Jewish identity”? Why do Jewish educators, policy-makers and philanthropists talk that way? What do they assume, about Jewish education or about Jewish identity, when they use formulations like “strengthen Jewish identity”? And what are the costs of doing so? This volume, the first collection to examine critically the relationship between Jewish education and Jewish identity, makes two important interventions. First, it offers a critical assessment of the relationship between education and identity, arguing that the reification of identity has hampered much educational creativity in the pursuit of this goal, and that the nearly ubiquitous employment of the term obscures significant questions about what Jewish education is and ought to be. Second, this volume offers thoughtful responses that are not merely synonymous replacements for “identity,” suggesting new possibilities for how to think about the purposes and desired outcomes of Jewish education, potentially contributing to any number of new conversations about the relationship between Jewish education and Jewish life.
Download or read book Jewish Identities in Postcommunist Russia and Ukraine written by Zvi Gitelman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-15 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the USSR collapsed, ethnic identities were imposed by the state. This book analyzes how and why Jews decided what being Jewish meant to them after the state dissolved and describes the historical evolution of Jewish identities. Surveys of more than 6,000 Jews in the early and late 1990s reveal that Russian and Ukrainian Jews have a deep sense of their Jewishness but are uncertain what it means. They see little connection between Judaism and being Jewish. Their attitudes toward Judaism, intermarriage and Jewish nationhood differ dramatically from those of Jews elsewhere. Many think Jews can believe in Christianity and do not condemn marrying non-Jews. This complicates their connections with other Jews, resettlement in Israel, the United States and Germany, and the rebuilding of public Jewish life in Russia and Ukraine. Post-Communist Jews, especially the young, are transforming religious-based practices into ethnic traditions and increasingly manifesting their Jewishness in public.
Download or read book Forging Modern Jewish Identities written by Michael Berkowitz and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forging Modern Jewish Identities illuminates facets of modern Jewish identity through engagement with diverse historical moments, political and social currents and literature as an aspect of popular culture. This volume is distinctive, and it can be enjoyed by the general reader as well as having potential as a teaching tool, as the experience of Jewry in the United States, Britain, Central and Western Europe, Russia and the Soviet Union is addressed by experts in each of these fields. Its introduction places the volume within the burgeoning genre of anthologies that constitutes a significant - but little noticed - development in Jewish and ethnic-national historiography. Cutting across disciplinary and national boundaries, the articles highlight Jewry's encounter with modernity from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. While acknowledging the power of acculturation, each of the contributions details how Jews transformed themselves, individually and communally, while reshaping notions of Jewish community and what it means to be a Jew in the modern world.
Download or read book Boundaries of Jewish Identity written by Susan A Glenn and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The subject of Jewish identity is one of the most vexed and contested issues of modern religious and ethnic group history. This interdisciplinary collection draws on work in law, anthropology, history, sociology, literature, and popular culture to consider contemporary and historical responses to the question �Who and what is Jewish?� These essays are focused especially on the issues of who creates the definitions, and how, and in what social and political contexts. The ten leading authorities writing here also look at the forces, ranging from new genetic and reproductive technologies to increasingly multicultural societies, that push against established boundaries. The authors examine how Jews have imagined themselves and how definitions of Jewishness have been established, enforced, challenged, and transformed. Does being a Jew require religious belief, practice, and formal institutional affiliation? Is there a biological or physical aspect of Jewish identity? What is the status of the convert to another religion? How do definitions play out in different geographic and historical settings? What makes Boundaries of Jewish Identity distinctive is its attention to the various Jewish �epistemologies� or ways of knowing who counts as a Jew. These essays reveal that possible answers reflect the different social, intellectual, and political locations of those who are asking. This book speaks to readers concerned with Jewish life and culture and to audiences interested in religious, cultural, and ethnic studies. It provides an excellent opportunity to examine how Jews fit into an increasingly diverse America and an increasingly complicated global society.
Download or read book Cultural Disjunctions written by Paul Mendes-Flohr and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Contemporary Jews variously configure their identity, which is no longer necessarily defined by an observance of the Torah and God's commandments. Indeed, the Jews of modernity are no longer exclusively Jewish. They are affiliated with many communities-vocational, professional, political, and cultural-whose interests may not coincide with that of the community of their birth and inherited culture. In Cultural Disjunctions, Paul Mendes-Flohr explores the possibility of a spiritually and intellectually engaged cosmopolitan Jewish identity for our time. To ground this project, he draws on the sociology of knowledge and cultural hermeneutics to reflect on the need to participate in the life of a community so that it enables multiple relations beyond its borders and allows one to balance a commitment to the local and a genuine obligation to the universal. Over the course of six provocative chapters, Mendes-Flohr lays out what this delicate balance can look like for contemporary Jews, both in the Diaspora and in Israel. Mendes-Flohr takes us through the ghettos of twentieth-century Europe, the differences between the personal libraries of traditional and secular Jews, and the role of cultural memory. Ultimately, the author calls for Jews to remain discontent with themselves (as a check on hubris), but also discontent with the social and political order, and to fight for its betterment"--
Download or read book Are We One written by Jerold S. Auerbach and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: But a covenantal Israel, which draws its Jewish identity from divine promise and the biblical narrative, refuses to surrender to modern imperatives. As the very nature of Jewish statehood has become ever more polarized, American Jewish life has been profoundly affected by this fateful Zionist contradiction.".
Download or read book Dynamic Belonging written by Harvey E. and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2011-12-30 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World Jewry today is concentrated in the US and Israel, and while distinctive Judaic approaches and practices have evolved in each society, parallels also exist. This volume offers studies of substantive and creative aspects of Jewish belonging. While research in Israel on Judaism has stressed orthodox or "extreme" versions of religiosity, linked to institutional life and politics, moderate and less systematized expressions of Jewish belonging are overlooked. This volume explores the fluid and dynamic nature of identity building among Jews and the many issues that cut across different Jewish groupings. An important contribution to scholarship on contemporary Jewry, it reveals the often unrecognized dynamism in new forms of Jewish identification and affiliation in Israel and in the Diaspora.
Download or read book Jewish Identity written by Ruth Shamir and published by Gefen Books. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though the seemingly impossible dream of a sovereign Jewish state became a reality more than sixty years ago, the question of Jewish identity remains as much an enigma as ever. That enigma is at the heart of Dr. Ruth Shamir's book as it explores the history - at times tragic, at times triumphant - of the evolution of Jewish identity in the modern era. Dr. Shamir skillfully guides the reader through a myriad of issues that are today at the center of a passionate debate both in Israel itself as well as in the Diaspora, where half of the world's Jews still live. The debate - and hence the main themes of the book - revolves around such questions as: - Are we a nation or just a religious community? - How do Israelis and Jews around the world conceptualize their loyalties? - How acceptable is Jewish fundamentalism and how does Israel deal with the Arab population within its borders? - How do Diaspora Jews view Israeli identity and how do Israelis define the identity of Diaspora Jews? - Above all, who is a Jew? However difficult it may be to accomodate the many complex and continually changing Jewish identities under the single roof of Judaism, Dr. Shamir contends that we have no alternative - neither for Israelis nor for the Jews of the Diaspora. But if that overarching identity is to be preserved, Jews must internalize the core ideas of multiculturalism to create a multifaceted Jewish identity that positively reflects the freedoms of today's world.
Download or read book Deepening the Dialogue written by Stanley Davids and published by CCAR Press. This book was released on 2019-11-01 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using the vision embedded in Israel's Declaration of Independence as a template, this anthology presents a unique and comprehensive dialogue between North American Jews and Israelis about the present and future of the State of Israel. With each essay published in both Hebrew and English, in one volume, Deepening the Dialogue is the first of its kind, outlining cultural barriers as well as the immediate need to come together in conversation around the vision of a democratic solution for our nation state.
Download or read book We Are Many written by Edward S. Shapiro and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2005-06-03 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The topics of Edward Shapiro's book span the gamut of the American Jewish experience: from the politics of American Jews, the nature of American Jewish identity, relations between Jews and blacks, and Jews and American capitalism. He discusses writer Herman Wouk; Patrick Buchanan and the Jews; John Higham's interpretation of American anti-Semitism, Nathan Glazer's view of American Orthodoxy, and the Jewishness of Sidney Hook. Of particular interest is the author's exploration of how American Jews have reconciled their dual identities as Americans and as Jews. These solutions has shaped the way Jews have voted, prayed, earned a living, married, and chosen a profession. America, Shapiro argues, has truly been different for Jews, but this difference has shaped the history of America's Jews in unexpected and ironic ways. The fact that Jews have risen rapidly up the economic and social ladder and have become politically influential has not eliminated their insecurity and the sense they have of themselves as a marginal group.
Download or read book The Stranger in Early Modern and Modern Jewish Tradition written by Catherine Bartlett and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-07-15 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout history, Jews have often been regarded, and treated, as “strangers.” In The Stranger in Early Modern and Modern Jewish Tradition, authors from a wide variety of disciplines discuss how the notion of “the stranger” can offer an integrative perspective on Jewish identities, on the non-Jewish perceptions of Jews, and on the relations between Jews and non-Jews in an innovative way. Contributions from history, philosophy, religion, sociology, literature, and the arts offer a new perspective on the Jewish experience in early modern and modern times: in contact and conflict, in processes of attribution and allegation, but also self-reflection and negotiation, focused on the figure of the stranger.
Download or read book Envisioning Israel written by Allon Gal and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how North American Jews have envisioned Israel From the late 19th century to the present.
Download or read book Beyond Whiteness written by Jonathan Karp and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-15 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of ethnicity, once in vogue, has largely gone out of fashion among twenty-first-century social scientists, now replaced by models of assimilation defined in terms of the construction of whiteness and white supremacy. Beyond Whiteness: Revisiting Jews in Ethnic America explores the benefits of reconfiguring the ethnic concept as a tool to analyze the experiences of twentieth-century American Jews—not only in relation to other “white” groups of European descent, but also African Americans and Asian Americans, among others. The essays presented here, ranging from comparative studies of Jews and Asians as “model minorities” to the examination of postethnic “Jews of color,” demonstrate that expanding ethnicity beyond the traditional Eurocentric frame can yield fresh insights into the character of Jewish life in the modern United States.
Download or read book Jewish Identity in America written by David M. Gordis and published by Ktav Publishing House. This book was released on 1991 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
