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This book seeks to expand the horizons of modern Jewish historiography by focusing on 'ordinary' rather than exceptional Jews, arguing that what ordinary people did or felt can do more to deepen our understanding of Jewish history than what a few exceptional individuals thought and wrote. The book makes a strong case for comparative history, showing convincingly that only a comparison across national borders can identify the Germanness of German Jewish history or the Englishness of English Jewish history, and thereby reveal what is unique about each. The book redefines the area under consideration and deftly restates the need for Jewish social history to counterbalance the current focus on cultural studies. The book offers an important examination of the major trends in the writing of modern Jewish history and the assumptions that have guided historians in their narration of the Jewish past. It shows in particular how the two watershed events of twentieth-century Jewish history — the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel — influenced Jewish historiography for decades thereafter. It also demonstrates how progressive integration into the scholarly framework of American academia has shaped both the form and the content of Jewish historical research. Each of the case studies focuses on a largely unknown figure whose career illustrates the often tortuous paths of integration and acceptance that Jews faced. Some achieved fleeting fame but many of the people who populate the volume remain altogether unknown, their histories recoverable only as statistics.

For all their unquestionable importance, the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel now loom so large in modern Jewish history that we have mostly lost sight of the fact that they are only part of—and indeed reactions to—the central event of that history: emancipation. This book seeks to reorient Jewish history by offering the first comprehensive account in any language of the process by which Jews became citizens with civil and political rights in the modern world. Ranging from the mid-sixteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, the book tells the ongoing story of how Jews have gained, kept, lost, and recovered rights in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, the United States, and Israel. Emancipation, the book shows, was not a one-time or linear event that began with the Enlightenment or French Revolution and culminated with Jews' acquisition of rights in Central Europe in 1867–71 or Russia in 1917. Rather, emancipation was and is a complex, multidirectional, and ambiguous process characterized by deflections and reversals, defeats and successes, triumphs and tragedies. For example, American Jews mobilized twice for emancipation: in the nineteenth century for political rights, and in the twentieth for lost civil rights. Similarly, Israel itself has struggled from the start to institute equality among its heterogeneous citizens. By telling the story of this foundational but neglected event, the book reveals the lost contours of Jewish history over the past half millennium.

This book is the first comparative study of Jewish communities in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe. It analyzes how Jews used social and religious spaces to reformulate patterns of fraternity, celebration, and family formation and expressions of self-identification. It suggests that the social patterns that developed between 1890 and the 1930s were formative for the fundamental reshaping of Jewish community and remain essential to our understanding of contemporary Jewish life. Focusing on the social interactions of urban European Jews, this book offers a new perspective on how Jews confronted the challenges of modernity. As membership in the official community was becoming increasingly a matter of individual choice, Jews created spaces to meet new social and emotional needs. Cafés, hotels, and restaurants became places to gather and celebrate festivals and holy days, and summer camps served as sites for the informal education of young children. These places facilitated the option of secular Jewish belonging, marking a clear distinction between Judaism and Jewishness that would have been impossible on a large scale in the pre-emancipation era. By creating new centers for Jewish life, a growing number of historical actors, including women and youth, took the process of community building into their own hands. The contexts of Jewish life expanded beyond the confines of “traditional” Jewish spaces and sometimes challenged the desires of Jewish authorities. The book further argues that these social practices remained vital in reconstructing certain Jewish communities in the wake of the devastation of the Holocaust.

This book explores the social and political activism of American Jewish women from approximately 1890 to the beginnings of World War II. It demonstrates that no history of the birth control, suffrage, or peace movements in the United States is complete without analyzing the impact of Jewish women's presence. The book is based on years of extensive primary source research in more than a dozen archives and among hundreds of primary sources, many of which have previously never been seen. Personal papers and institutional records paint a vivid picture of a world in which both middle-class and working-class American Jewish women were consistently and publicly engaged in all the major issues of their day and worked closely with their non-Jewish counterparts on behalf of activist causes. The book makes a unique contribution to the study of modern women's history, modern Jewish history, and the history of American social movements.

Wartime sermons reveal how Jews perceive themselves in relation to the majority society and how Jewish and national values are reconciled when the fate of a nation is at stake. They also illustrate how rabbis guide their communities through the challenges of their times. The sermons reproduced here were delivered by American and British rabbis from across the Jewish spectrum from the Napoleonic Wars to the attacks of 9/11. Each sermon is prefaced by a comprehensive introduction explaining the context in which it was delivered. Detailed notes explain allusions unfamiliar to a present-day readership and draw comparisons where appropriate to similar passages in contemporary newspapers and other sermons. A general introduction surveys more broadly the distinctive elements of modern Jewish preaching. What Jewish religious leaders said to their congregations when their countries went to war (or, in some cases, were considering going to war) raises questions of central significance for both modern Jewish history and religious thinking in the civic context. This book makes an important contribution to the American- and Anglo-Jewish history of this period while also making available a collection of mostly unknown Jewish texts produced at dramatic moments of the past two centuries.

Hasidism has been a seminal force and source of controversy in the Jewish world since its inception in the second half of the eighteenth century. Indeed, almost every ideological trend that has made itself felt among Jews since that time has claimed to have derived some inspiration from this vibrant movement. While this is sure testimony to its vitality and originality, it has also given rise to many misconceptions as to what hasidism is about. This book offers a wide-ranging treatment of the subject in all its aspects. The book encompasses a complete field of modern scholarship in a discipline that is central to the understanding of modern Jewish history and the contemporary Jewish world. The book is dedicated to the memory of Joseph Weiss, and its opening section assesses his contribution to the study of hasidism in the context of his relationship with Gershom Scholem and Scholem's long-standing influence on the field. The remaining chapters are arranged thematically under seven headings: the social history of hasidism; the social functions of mystical ideals in the hasidic movement; distinctive outlooks and schools of thought within hasidism; the hasidic tale; the history of hasidic historiography; contemporary hasidism; and the present state of research on hasidism. The book also incorporates an extensive introduction that places the various articles in their intellectual context, as well as a bibliography of hasidic sources and contemporary scholarly literature. It shows an intellectual world at an important juncture in its development and points to the direction in which scholarly study of hasidism is likely to develop in the years to come.

Who Rules the Synagogue explores how American Jewry in the nineteenth century transformed from a lay dominated community to one whose leading religious authorities were rabbis. Previous scholars have charter the religious history of American Judaism during this era but never with religious authority in mind. In contrast, this book aims to place this subject at the center of this formative period. Early in the century, American Jews consciously excluded rabbinic forces from playing a role in their community’s development. By the final decades of the 1800s, ordained rabbis—most noticeably in the commotion caused by the Pittsburgh rabbinic conference of 1885—were in full control of America’s leading synagogues and large sectors of American Jewish life. In this refreshing study, Zev Eleff weaves together many of the important episodes and debates that shaped American Judaism and places this story into the larger context of American religious history and modern Jewish history.