This book offers a reappraisal of David Ben-Gurion's role in Jewish-Israeli history from the perspective of the twenty-first century, in the larger context of the Zionist 'renaissance', of which he was a major and unique exponent. Some have described Ben-Gurion's Zionism as a dream that has gone sour, or a utopia doomed to be unfulfilled. Now - after the dust surrounding Israel's founding father has settled, archives have been opened, and perspective has been gained since Ben-Gurion's downfall - this book presents a fresh look at this statesman-intellectual and his success and tragic failures during a unique period of time that he and his peers described as the 'Jewish renaissance'. The resulting reappraisal offers a new analysis of Ben-Gurion's actual role as a major player in Israeli, Middle Eastern, and global politics.

An anthology that explores religious and social revival in American Judaism in the 19th century

On pp. 90-117, "The Task of the Historian, " objects to the tendency to turn the Holocaust into the central focal point of Jewish history and of the Jewish "civil religion." Speaks against attempts of historians and politicians to make the Holocaust a paradigm of pre-Israeli Jewish history and to connect the establishment of the State of Israel with the Holocaust.

This book significantly revises the conventional view that the Jewish experience in medieval Spain--over the century before the expulsion of 1492--was one of despair, persecution, and decline. Focusing on the town of Morvedre in the kingdom of Valencia, Mark Meyerson shows how and why Morvedre's Jewish community revived and flourished in the wake of the horrible violence of 1391. Drawing on a wide array of archival documentation, including Spanish Inquisition records, he argues that Morvedre saw a Jewish "renaissance." Meyerson shows how the favorable policies of kings and of town government yielded the Jewish community's demographic expansion and prosperity. Of crucial importance were new measures that ceased the oppressive taxation of the Jews and minimized their role as moneylenders. The results included a reversal of the credit relationship between Jews and Christians, a marked amelioration of Christian attitudes toward Jews, and greater economic diversification on the part of Jews. Representing a major contribution to debates over the Inquisition's origins and the expulsion of the Jews, the book also offers the first extended analysis of Jewish-converso relations at the local level, showing that Morvedre's Jews expressed their piety by assisting Valencia's conversos. Comparing Valencia with other regions of Spain and with the city-states of Renaissance Italy, it makes clear why this kingdom and the town of Morvedre were so ripe for a Jewish revival in the fifteenth century.

Between 1917 and 1921, as revolution convulsed Russia, Jewish intellectuals and writers across the crumbling empire threw themselves into the pursuit of a "Jewish renaissance." Here is a brilliant, revisionist argument about the nature of cultural nationalism, the relationship between nationalism and socialism as ideological systems, and culture itself, the axis around which the encounter between Jews and European modernity has pivoted over the past century.