How have Jews experienced their environments and how have they engaged with specific places? How do Jewish spaces emerge, how are they contested, performed and used? With these questions in mind, this anthology focuses on the production of Jewish space and lived Jewish spaces and sheds light on their diversity, inter-connectedness and multi-dimensionality. By exploring historical and contemporary case studies from around the world, the essays collected here shift the temporal focus generally applied to Jewish civilization to a spatially oriented perspective. The reader encounters sites such as the gardens cultivated in the Ghettos during World War II, the Israeli development town of Netivot, Thornhill, an Orthodox suburb of Toronto, or new virtual sites of Jewish (Second) Life on the Internet, and learns about the Jewish landkentenish movement in Interwar Poland, the Jewish connection to the sea and the culinary landscapes of Russian Jews in New York. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, with a strong foothold in cultural history and cultural anthropology, this anthology introduces new methodological and conceptual approaches to the study of the spatial aspects of Jewish civilization.

This book-series, initiated in 1992, has an interdisciplinary orientation; it comprises research monographs, collections of essays and annotated editions from the 18th century to the present. The term German-Jewish literature refers to the literary work of Jewish authors writing in German to the extent that Jewish aspects can be identified in these. However, the image of Jews among non-Jewish authors, often determined by anti-Semitism, is also a factor in the history of German-Jewish relations as reflected in literature. This series provides an appropriate forum for research into the whole problematic area.

This book presents original studies of how a cultural concept of Jewishness and a coherent Jewish history came to make sense in the experiences of people entangled in different historical situations. Instead of searching for the inconsistencies, discontinuities, or ruptures of dominant grand historical narratives of Jewish cultural history, this book unfolds situations and events, where Jewishness and a coherent Jewish history became useful, meaningful, and acted upon as a site of causal explanations. Inspired by classical American pragmatism and more recent French pragmatism, we present a new perspective on Jewish cultural history in which the experiences, problems, and actions of people are at the center of reconstructions of historical causalities and projections of future horizons. The book shows how boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish are not a priori given but are instead repeatedly experienced in a variety of situations and then acted upon as matters of facts. In different ways and on different scales, these studies show how people's experiences of Jewishness perpetually probe, test, and shape the boundaries between what is Jewish and non-Jewish, and that these boundaries shape the spatiotemporal linkages that we call history.

"Berlin emerged from the First World War as a multicultural European capital of immigration from the former Russian Empire, and while many Russian emigres moved to France and other countries in the 1920s, a thriving east European Jewish community remained. Yiddish-speaking intellectuals and activists participated vigorously in German cultural and political debate. Multilingual Jewish journalists, writers, actors and artists, invigorated by the creative atmosphere of the city, formed an environment which facilitated exchange between the main centres of Yiddish culture: eastern Europe, North America and Soviet Russia. All this came to an end with the Nazi rise to power in 1933, but Berlin remained a vital presence in Jewish cultural memory, as is testified by the works of Sholem Asch, Israel Joshua Singer, Zalman Shneour, Moyshe Kulbak, Uri Zvi Grinberg and Meir Wiener. This volume includes contributions by an international team of leading scholars dealing with various aspects of history, arts and literature, which tell the dramatic story of Yiddish cultural life in Weimar Berlin as a case study in the modern European culture."

This book analyzes the ways in which literary works and cultural discourses employ the construct of the Jew’s body in relation to the material world in order either to establish and reinforce, or to subvert and challenge, dominant cultural norms and stereotypes. It examines the use of physical characteristics, embodied practices, tacit knowledge and senses to define the body taxonomically as normative, different, abject or mimetically desired. Starting from the works of Gogol and Dostoevsky through to contemporary Russian-Jewish women’s writing, broadening the scope to examining the role of objects, museum displays and the politics of heritage food, the book argues that materiality can embody fictional constructions that should be approached on a culture-specific basis.

Research on Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel in the modern era has long neglected the sea and its shores. This book explores the Yishuv’s hold on the Mediterranean and other bodies of water during the British Mandate in Palestine and the Zionist “maritime revolution,” a shift from a focus on land-based development to an embrace of the sea as a source of security, economic growth, clandestine immigration (haapala), and national pride. The transformation is tracked in four spheres – ports, seamanship, fishery, and education – and viewed within the context of the Jewish/Arab conflict, internal Yishuv politics, and the Second World War. Archives, memoirs, press, and secondary sources all help illuminate the Zionist Movement’s road to maritime sovereignty. By the State of Israel’s founding in 1948, the Yishuv had a flourishing nautical presence: a national shipping company, control over the country’s three active ports, maritime athletics, fish farming, and a nautical training school.

The Marrano phenomenon is a still unexplored element of Western culture: the presence of the borderline Jewish identity which avoids clear-cut cultural and religious attribution and – precisely as such – prefigures the advent of the typically modern "free-oscillating" subjectivity. Yet, the aim of the book is not a historical study of the Marranos (or conversos), who were forced to convert to Christianity, but were suspected of retaining their Judaism "undercover." The book rather applies the "Marrano metaphor" to explore the fruitful area of mixture and cross-over which allowed modern thinkers, writers and artists of the Jewish origin to enter the realm of universal communication – without, at the same time, making them relinquish their Jewishness which they subsequently developed as a "hidden tradition." The book poses and then attempts to prove the "Marrano hypothesis," according to which modern subjectivity derives, to paraphrase Cohen, "out of the sources of the hidden Judaism": modernity begins not with the Cartesian abstract ego, but with the rich self-reflexive self of Michel de Montaigne who wrestled with his own marranismo in a manner that soon became paradigmatic to other Jewish thinkers entering the scene of Western modernity, from Spinoza to Derrida. The essays in the volume offer thus a new view of a "Marrano modernity," which aims to radically transform our approach to the genesis of the modern subject and shed a new light on its secret religious life as surviving the process of secularization, although merely in the form of secret traces.

This beautifully illustrated volume looks at the spaces created by and for Jews in areas under the political or religious control of Muslims. Covering regions as diverse as Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Spain, it asks how the architecture of synagogues responded to contextual issues and traditions, and how these contexts influenced the design and evolution of synagogues. As well as revealing how synagogues reflect the culture of the Jewish minority at macro and micro scales, from the city to the interior, the book also considers patterns of the development of synagogues in urban contexts and in connection with urban elements and monuments.

Analyses by the Israeli sociologist Michael Feige embraced every aspect of the State of Israel. He examined the ever-changing and complex identity of Israelis; how they remember and commemorate themselves; the long- and short-term conceptions of time of the left- and right-wing political movements; the spacial concept of the settlers; myths underlying the lives and deaths of its citizens; and the dialectical vicissitudes of the real and imagined Israel. The book contains material from Professor Feiges literary output, contextualized in an Introduction by David Ohana. Chapters delve into the meaning of Israeli signs and symbols; the semiotics of secular spaces (sites of disasters and graves of political and religious leaders); the semiotics of historical time and daily existence; forms of commemoration (of figures like David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Rabin, airforce pilots, a female settler and a peace activist). Feige scrutinized communities formed around political cells, the processes of fragmentation and globalization in Israel, the traumas and scars from the Yom Kippur War, the evacuation of settlements, and the killing of Yitzhak Rabin. Feiges scrutiny illuminated Israeli society in myriad ways. He was a sociologist among historians and a historian among sociologists, and internationally acknowledged as having an extraordinary ability to convey sociological meaning and structure to Israels radical political culture as expressed in its social actions and underlying mythology. Semiotics of Israeli Space and Time is not only an essential sociological toolbox for students and an historical masterpiece for the wider Israeli public to better understand the society to which they belong, but a commemorative volume to honour his life and work. Michael was murdered on 8 June 2016 when two Palestinian gunmen opened fire in the Sarona Market in Tel Aviv.

Commentary on memorials to the Holocaust has been plagued with a sense of “monument fatigue”, a feeling that landscape settings and national spaces provide little opportunity for meaningful engagement between present visitors and past victims. This book examines the Holocaust via three sites of murder by the Nazis: the former concentration camp at Buchenwald, Germany; the mass grave at Babi Yar, Ukraine; and the razed village of Lidice, Czech Republic. Bringing together recent scholarship from cultural memory and cultural geography, the author focuses on the way these violent histories are remembered, allowing these sites to emerge as dynamic transcultural landscapes of encounter in which difficult pasts can be represented and comprehended in the present. This leads to an examination of the role of the environment, or, more particularly, the ways in which the natural environment, co-opted in the process of killing, becomes a medium for remembrance.