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This chapter explains the book's central foci—the ways in which Zionism's vision of a new Hebrew nation was translated into the concrete institutions, practices, and rituals that generated a national entity in Palestine. This is placed within the context of the existing literature on the history of Zionism and the Jewish community of Palestine and is framed in terms of the implications of this study for understanding nationalism, secularization, and Jewish modernity. In this context, the chapter sets out the three principal areas in which the book seeks to shed new light. These include chronology (an earlier dating of the formative years to the prewar decade); the relationship between the new Hebrew culture of Palestine and traditional Jewish cultures; and a thicker description of what that culture entailed, based in a methodology that incorporates discourse and imagery with praxis and ritual.

This chapter addresses how Europe became a mass society in the fin de siècle (1870–1914). Explosive population growth gave rise to major metropolises whose residents were divided by rank and religion, gender and class. The new conditions of the fin de siècle, mass migration from eastern Europe, and the rise of the new organized political anti-Semitism propelled Jews across Europe and in the United States to establish social welfare and civil defense organizations. The former practiced solidarity on a grand scale; the latter intervened to protect equality. The organizations' promotion of emancipation was predicated on Jews being a confession or religious group: by functioning under the guise of “welfare” and “civil defense,” they deliberately eschewed political claims. From the 1890s, new forms of mass Jewish politics emerged that contested that basic assumption.

This chapter examines how Russian Jewish culture began to unravel from within as early as the first years of World War I, beginning with a now classic ideological debate over the very Jewishness of Jewish music. It analyzes how the complicated fate of Russian Jewish culture reflected the multiple legacies and divergent experiences of Jews in interwar Soviet Russia, Mandatory Palestine, and the United States. The chapter also suggests that the resurgence of Jewish politics coupled with the broader aesthetic challenge of European modernism that led to the decisive breakdown of the Jewish cultural movement.

This chapter discusses the formation of an African American diasporic imagination that was deeply influenced by Jewish diasporic politics and European Jewish Zionism. Beginning in the 1860s, African Americans traveled to Ottoman Palestine as slaves traveling with masters or as free black ministers in search of holy lands. The chapter examines the politics of diaspora and early pan-Africanism by identifying the comparisons black intellectuals drew between the European “Jewish question” and the condition of blacks within the United States. Both groups developed political imaginaries that responded to racial modernity. In the late nineteenth century, European Jews confronted the Dreyfus affair at the same time that black Americans witnessed how their nation failed to realize Reconstruction and allowed the ascendency of Jim Crow legislation.

Though he left it incomplete, Schoenberg never gave up Jakobsleiter, the Balzacian/Swedenborgian rise to heaven and Strindbergian struggle for faith of which stayed central to the composer's religious visions. Like his involvement in Jewish politics, his ideas about religion had no practical implications. Schoenberg's rare attempts to put his art in the service of any religious ritual more specific than the worship of an abstract, unimaginable God resulted in awkward interactions between him and religious authorities. The best summary of his religious beliefs are the texts of Modern Psalms, which recycle many ideas from The Biblical Way, Moses und Aron, and his political writings. Instead of seeing these works as the final manifestations of a journey toward Jewish identity, one should recognize in them the same idiosyncratic combination of spiritual, political, and artistic concerns that characterized some of Schoenberg's earlier compositions.

This chapter examines three episodes in Arendt's political life and considers her own political engagements as they illuminate her conception of political agency. It covers, first, her Jewish politics in the interwar years, from 1926 to 1941; second is the phase from 1941 to 1948, referred to as the “heartbreak over the Jewish state”; and third is her engagement with the American republic from the early 1960s onward, which may be named “citizenship in a new republic”.

This introductory chapter provides a background of David Oppenheim and his Jewish library. At the core of Oppenheim's identity and activity as a rabbi, intellectual, and communal leader stood his library. His library gained renown among Jewish colleagues and Christian contemporaries. It thus informed the decisions of local courts and distant decisors. He possessed highbrow scholarly material alongside popular pamphlets and broadsides, and he preserved diplomatic exchanges and communal ordinances in manuscript—an archive of contemporary Jewish life. Oppenheim's intellectual authority made him a much-sought-after source for endorsements for newly written books. This book then tells the story of premodern Jewish life, politics, and intellectual culture through an exploration of a book collection, the man who assembled it, and the circles of individuals who brought it into being and made use of it.

This chapter presents a number of reviews of books in the fields of history and social science. Topics covered in the first few books reviewed include the emigration of Jews from the Russian Empire; the history, identity, and experiences of different Jewish groups in Africa; and the postwar experiences of Holocaust survivors and their postwar immigration and integration into American society. The next selection of books reviewed consider Jewish power in America, modern Jewish politics, the experiences of American and British Jews during the Great Migration, and the history of the emergence of an influential Jewish group in France during the early 20th century. Finally, the last few books analyzed here examine Jewish historiography, the political views of German art historian Aby Warburg, Jewish organizations, and Soviet Jews.