In Revising Dreyfus, contributors from a wide variety of disciplines (art history, film, media, theater, sociology, history) offer new ways of understanding the ever-evolving meanings of the Dreyfus Affair. Although the Dreyfusards led the way in explicating the nuances of the Affair in lengthy treatises, the anti-Dreyfusards far outstripped their opponents on the graphic front, particularly through print media, photographs, postcards, broadsides, films, illustrated journal covers, and the plastic arts. Revising Dreyfus traces the dominant modes of “seeing” the Dreyfus Affair, often in opposition to “reading” the Affair in three major contexts: French, Zionist, and American.

An insightful new biography of the central figure in the Dreyfus Affair, focused on the man himself and based on newly accessible documents On January 5, 1895, Captain Alfred Dreyfus’s cries of innocence were drowned out by a mob shouting “Death to Judas!” In this book, Maurice Samuels gives readers new insight into Dreyfus himself—the man at the center of the affair. He tells the story of Dreyfus’s early life in Paris, his promising career as a French officer, the false accusation leading to his imprisonment on Devil’s Island, the fight to prove his innocence that divided the French nation, and his life of quiet obscurity after World War I. Samuels’s striking perspective is enriched by a newly available archive of more than three thousand documents and objects donated by the Dreyfus family. Unlike many historians, Samuels argues that Dreyfus was not an “assimilated” Jew. Rather, he epitomized a new model of Jewish identity made possible by the French Revolution, when France became the first European nation to grant Jews full legal equality. This book analyzes Dreyfus’s complex relationship to Judaism and to antisemitism over the course of his life—a story that, as global antisemitism rises, echoes still. It also shows the profound effect of the Dreyfus Affair on the lives of Jews around the world.

From immigrant ghetto love stories such as The Cohens and the Kellys (1926), through romantic comedies including Meet the Parents (2000) and Knocked Up (2007), to television series such as Transparent (2014–), Jewish-Christian couplings have been a staple of popular culture for over a century. In these pairings, Joshua Louis Moss argues, the unruly screen Jew is the privileged representative of progressivism, secular modernism, and the cosmopolitan sensibilities of the mass-media age. But his/her unruliness is nearly always contained through romantic union with the Anglo-Christian partner. This Jewish-Christian meta-narrative has recurred time and again as one of the most powerful and enduring, although unrecognized, mass-culture fantasies. Using the innovative framework of coupling theory, Why Harry Met Sally surveys three major waves of Jewish-Christian couplings in popular American literature, theater, film, and television. Moss explores how first-wave European and American creators in the early twentieth century used such couplings as an extension of modernist sensibilities and the American “melting pot.” He then looks at how New Hollywood of the late 1960s revived these couplings as a sexually provocative response to the political conservatism and representational absences of postwar America. Finally, Moss identifies the third wave as emerging in television sitcoms, Broadway musicals, and “gross-out” film comedies to grapple with the impact of American economic globalism since the 1990s. He demonstrates that, whether perceived as a threat or a triumph, Jewish-Christian couplings provide a visceral, easily graspable, template for understanding the rapid transformations of an increasingly globalized world.

With the success of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) and Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist (2011) nothing seems more contemporary in recent film than the styles, forms, and histories of early and silent cinemas. This collection considers the latest return to silent film alongside the larger historical field of visual repetitions and affective currents that wind their way through 20th and 21st century visual cultures. Contributors bring together several fields of research, including early and silent cinema studies, experimental and new media, historiography and archive theory, and studies of media ontology and epistemology. Chapters link the methods, concerns, and concepts of early and silent film studies as they have flourished over the last quarter century to the most recent developments in digital culture—from YouTube to 3D—recasting this contemporary phenomenon in popular culture and new media against key debates and concepts in silent film scholarship. An interview with acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin closes out the collection.

The last generation of German Jewish philosophers—the best known (Buber, Rosenzweig, Baeck, Strauss, Scholem) and the less known (Breuer, Birnbaum, Klatzkin, Guttmann)—are thoroughly explicated here with generous primary text citations appearing in English for the first time.

In the years before, during, and after the First World War, hundreds of young Jews flocked to Paris, artistic capital of the world and center of modernist experimentation. Some arrived with prior training from art academies in Kraków, Vilna, and Vitebsk; others came armed only with hope and a few memorized phrases in French. They had little Jewish tradition in painting and sculpture to draw on, yet despite these obstacles, these young Jews produced the greatest efflorescence of art in the long history of the Jewish people. The paintings of Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, and Emmanuel Mané-Katz, the sculptures of Jacques Lipchitz, Ossip Zadkine, Chana Orloff, and works by many other artists now grace the world's museums. As the École de Paris was the most cosmopolitan artistic movement the world had seen, the left-bank neighborhood of Montparnasse became a meeting place for diverse cultures. How did the tolerant, bohemian atmosphere of Montparnasse encourage an international style of art in an era of bellicose nationalism, not to mention racism and antisemitism? How did immigrants not only absorb but profoundly influence a culture? This book examines how the clash of cultures produced genius.

A groundbreaking look at the life and art of one of the most influential, modern painters of the late nineteenth century and founder of the Impressionist movement “Wullschläger emerges with a strikingly different picture of the artist. Passionate, prickly, edgy and unstable, her Monet, the unrecognizable Monet, is a powerful new character in art.” —The Sunday Times (London) Drawing on thousands of never-before-translated letters and unpublished sources, this biography reveals dramatic new information about the life and work of one of the late nineteenth century’s most important painters. Despite being mocked at the beginning of his career, and living hand to mouth, Monet risked all to pursue his vision, and his early work along the banks of the Seine in the 1860s and ’70s would come to be revered as Impressionism. In the following decades, he emerged as its celebrated leader in one of the most exciting cultural moments in Paris, before withdrawing to his house and garden to paint the late Water Lilies, which were ignored during his lifetime and would later have a major influence on all twentieth-century painters both figurative and abstract. This is the first time we see the turbulent life of this volatile and voracious man, who was as obsessed by his love affairs as he was by nature. He changed his art decisively three times when the woman at the center of his life changed; Wullschläger brings these unknown, passionate, and passionately committed women to the foreground. Monet's closest friend was Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau; strong intellectual currents connected him to writers from Zola to Proust, as well as to his friends Manet, Renoir, and Pissarro. Brilliant and absorbing, this biography will forever change our understanding of Monet's life and work.

Legal systems like to think of themselves as impartial and fair, dispensing the objective morality of Justice. But, from time to time, a court of law can be as political, prejudiced, and biased as any other arm of the State. The classic instance is the story of the trials of Alfred Dreyfus. In December 1894 a French military tribunal found Alfred Dreyfus guilty of high treason. Dreyfus was a Jew; the War Office was determined that at all costs the honour and good name of the Army must be upheld; and both left and right in the French Parliament used the convulsions of the case for what they believed to be their own advantage. The original verdict affected the Army, the Church, the Judiciary and the State over the following twelve years. Even now the case provokes arguments of fierce intensity. Guy Chapman's classic exposition of the long drawn-out trials has been out of print for many years and this present thorough revision incorporates the findings of recent scholarship; it is compellingly readable and unapproachably authoritative. The questions still remain - how far were the Dreyfus Trials the product of a conscious conspiracy, how far an unconscious conspiracy of silence, and how far did 'justice' prevail?

How can immortality be a curse? According to the Wandering Jew legend, as Jesus made his way to Calvary, a man refused him rest, cruelly taunting him to hurry to meet his fate. In response, Jesus cursed the man to wander until the Second Coming. Since the medieval period, the legend has inspired hundreds of adaptations by artists and writers. Instrument of Memory: Encounters with the Wandering Jew, the first English-language study of the legend in over fifty years, is also the first to examine the influence of the legend’s medieval and early modern sources over the centuries into the present day. Using the lens of memory studies, the work shows how the Christian tradition of the legend centered the memory of the Passion at the heart of the Wandering Jew’s curse. Instrument of Memory also shows how Jewish artists and writers have reimagined the legend through Jewish memory traditions. Through this focus on memory, Jewish adapters of the legend create complex renderings of the Wandering Jew that recognize not only the entanglement of Jewish and Christian memory, but also the impact of that entanglement on Jewish subjects. This book presents a complex, sympathetic, and more fully realized version of the legend while challenging the limits of the presentism of memory studies.