Bringing together leading Jewish historians, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and liturgists, Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity offers a collective view of a historically and culturally significant issue that will be of interest to Jewish scholars of many disciplines.

A reinterpretation of thinkers from Benjamin and Rosenzweig to Simone Weil and Derrida Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays challenges the philosophical presentation of Judaism as the sublime ‘other’ of modernity. Here, Gillian Rose develops a philosophical alternative to deconstruction and post-modernism by critically re-engaging the social and political issues at stake in every reconstruction.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent social thinkers in France, Germany, and the United States sought to understand the modern world taking shape around them. Although they worked in different national traditions and emphasized different features of modern society, they repeatedly invoked Jews as a touchstone for defining modernity and national identity in a context of rapid social change. In Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought, Chad Alan Goldberg brings us a major new study of Western social thought through the lens of Jews and Judaism. In France, where antisemites decried the French Revolution as the “Jewish Revolution,” Émile Durkheim challenged depictions of Jews as agents of revolutionary subversion or counterrevolutionary reaction. When German thinkers such as Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber debated the relationship of the Jews to modern industrial capitalism, they reproduced, in secularized form, cultural assumptions derived from Christian theology. In the United States, William Thomas, Robert Park, and their students conceived the modern city and its new modes of social organization in part by reference to the Jewish immigrants concentrating there. In all three countries, social thinkers invoked real or purported differences between Jews and gentiles to elucidate key dualisms of modern social thought. The Jews thus became an intermediary through which social thinkers discerned in a roundabout fashion the nature, problems, and trajectory of their own wider societies. Goldberg rounds out his fascinating study by proposing a novel explanation for why Jews were such an important cultural reference point. He suggests a rethinking of previous scholarship on Orientalism, Occidentalism, and European perceptions of America, arguing that history extends into the present, with the Jews—and now the Jewish state—continuing to serve as an intermediary for self-reflection in the twenty-first century.

Written by leading authors in their respective fields, this first comprehensive handbook on the relationship between modern Judaism and historical thinking contributes to a differentiated interpretation of Jewish historiography and its interaction with other academic disciplines since the Enlightenment.

Religion and Secular Modernity in Russian Christianity, Judaism, and Atheism is a multifaceted account of the engagement between religion and the secular in Russia's Christian, Jewish, and atheist traditions. Ana Siljak brings together an interdisciplinary group of leading scholars to present unique perspectives on the secularization dynamic in Russia and the Soviet Union, telling stories about theologians, sects, churches, poets, and artists. From the Jewish Christian priest Alexander Men, to the cross-dressing poet Zinaida Gippius, to the Soviet promoter of Yiddish theater Solomon Mikhoels, Religion and Secular Modernity in Russian Christianity, Judaism, and Atheism gives a voice to a variety of actors who have grappled with the possibilities of faith and unbelief in an industrialized, modern, and seemingly secular world. Now more than ever, as one narrative of Russia's religious history dominates official Russian accounts, alternative perspectives of the relationship between Russian religion and secularism should be highlighted and emphasized.

Explores the impact on Jews and Judaism of the crisis of modernity, analyzing modern Jewish dilemmas and providing a prescription for their resolution.

Scholars of Jewish studies, German history, and religious history will appreciate this timely volume.

In the last century a series of revolutions have reshaped the nature of Jewish communities in the United States and in Israel. Judaism, including the religious ideologies, institutions, and orientations of Jews, has been transformed as a part of, and in response to, the revolutionary changes in the social contexts of the Jewish communities. The assaults of an American secular pluralistic society have produced radical changes on the fragile contemporary Jewish identity. These seventeen essays discuss the major events and trends in modern Jewish history as well as religious and secular movements which have responded to those trends and events. From "1881: Watershed Year of Modern Jewish History" through to the "New Roles for Jewish Women", the Jewish community has been challenged in the face of tragedy and historical change. Jewish culture and social philosophy have radically and sometimes tragically been transformed, to the point that, despite its unbreakable historical continuity, the Jewish identity has been abruptly altered. After the cataclysmic events of mid-centurythe Holocaust, the establishment of Israel, the return of Oriental Jewry, and the loosening of the traditional religious bonds - the search for new understandings has been the most significant feature of modern Judaism.

"In the 1930s, through the prose of Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), the Polish language became the linguistic raw material for a profound exploration of the modern Jewish experience. Rather than turning away from the language like many of his Galician Jewish colleagues who would choose to write in Yiddish, Schulz used the Polish language to explore his own and his generation's relationship to East European Jewish exegetical tradition, and to deepen his reflection on golus or exile as a condition not only of the individual and of the Jewish community, but of language itself, and of matter. Drawing on new archival discoveries, this study explores Schulz's diasporic Jewish modernism as an example of the creative and also transient poetic forms that emerged on formerly Habsburg territory, at the historical juncture between empire and nation-state"--

This book presents critical studies of modern reconfigurations of conceptions of the past, of the 'classical', and of national heritage. Its scope is global (China, India, Egypt, Iran, Judaism, the Greco-Roman world) and inter-disciplinary (textual philology, history of art and architecture, philosophy, gardening). Its emphasis is on the complexity of the modernization process and of reactions to it: ideas and technologies travelled from India to Iran and from Japan to China, while reactions show tensions between museumization and the recreation of 'presence'. It challenges readers to rethink the assumptions of the disciplines in which they were trained