This is a compact guide to the Jewish sights of western and eastern Europe, including Turkey and Russia, and covers everything from major collections of Jewish art to medieval Jewish ghettos, Holocaust memorials, synagogues, and cemeteries.

This book provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of the Jewish experience, from its ancient origins to its impact on contemporary popular culture.

New from Bradt is The Holocaust: Europe’s Sites, Museums and Memorials, a unique travel guidebook to European locations that tell the story of the greatest crime ever perpetrated – the Nazi genocide of 6 million Jews and other persecuted groups. In recent years countries once reluctant to delve into the dark corners of their past have begun to document the history of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Europe has many new ground-breaking museums and memorials that tell us as much about the present as they do the past. Chapters are dedicated to each country or region occupied by Nazi Germany, plus nations like the UK and neutral Sweden, which played a vital role both before and after the Holocaust. Organised around city hubs in each country, this Bradt guide helps visitors explore numerous destinations, whether infamous, well known or comparatively unexpected. This is much, much more than a guide to notorious sites such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald or Dachau. You can take a walking tour in Vienna, to view the new wall of names. Or visit the Memorial des Martyrs de la Deportation in Paris, Anne Frank House in Amsterdam or the Jewish Museum in Ferrara. And you can learn how babies were smuggled out of the Kovno ghetto in potato sacks in Lithuania or read about Bavaria’s Kloster Indersdorf, a remarkable children’s home that cared for survivors. Written by a journalist and travel writer specialising in Jewish history, Bradt’s The Holocaust: Europe’s Sites, Museums and Memorials provides the traveller with not only a list of must-see sites in each country but also a comprehensive list of organisations that run tours, commemorations and volunteer schemes. Suggestions of where to eat and stay (including Kosher restaurants and hotels) ease the traveller’s way, as do descriptions of local Jewish organisations and tips on how to pace potentially difficult journeys into Europe’s dark past. Bradt’s The Holocaust: Europe’s Sites, Museums and Memorials is the first comprehensive travel guide to the genocide and the first to help the traveller understand the Holocaust by seeing the places where it unfurled.

A myth exists that Jews can embrace the cultural components of Judaism without appreciating the legal aspects of the Jewish tradition. This myth suggests that law and culture are independent of one another. In reality, however, much of Jewish culture has a basis in Jewish law. Similarly, Jewish law produces Jewish culture. A cultural analysis paradigm provides a useful way of understanding the Jewish tradition as the product of both legal precepts and cultural elements. This paradigm sees law and culture as inextricably intertwined and historically specific. This perspective also emphasizes the human element of law's composition and the role of existing power dynamics in shaping Jewish law. In light of this inevitable intersection between culture and law, The Myth of the Cultural Jew: Culture and Law in Jewish Tradition argues that Jewish culture is shallow unless it is grounded in Jewish law. Roberta Rosenthal Kwall develops and applies a cultural analysis paradigm to the Jewish tradition that departs from the understanding of Jewish law solely as the embodiment of Divine command. Her paradigm explains why both law and culture must matter to those interested in forging meaningful Jewish identity and transmitting the tradition.

In a vibrant inter-disciplinary collection of essays from leading scholars in the field, this book introduces the main features and constructs of diasporas, and explores their implications for the consumption, production and practices of tourism.

Modernity offers people choices about who they want to be and how they want to appear to others. The way in which Jews choose to frame their identity establishes the dynamic of their social relations with other Jews and non-Jews - a dynamic complicated by how non-Jews position the boundaries around what and who they define as Jewish. This book uncovers these processes, historically, as well as in contemporary behavior, and finds explanations for the various manifestations, in feeling and action, of 'being Jewish.' Boundaries and borders raise fundamental questions about the difference between Jews and non-Jews. At root, the question is how 'Jewish' is understood in social situations where people recognize or construct boundaries between their own identity and those of others. The question is important because this is by definition the point at which the lines of demarcation between Jews and non-Jews, and between different groupings of Jews, are negotiated. Collectively, the contributors to the book expand our understanding of the social dynamics of framing Jewish identity. The book opens with an introduction that locates the issues raised by the contributors in terms of the scholarly traditions from which they have evolved. Part I presents four essays dealing with the construction and maintenance of boundaries - two by scholars showing how boundaries come to be etched on an ethnic landscape and two by activists who question and adjust distinctions among neighbors. Part II focuses on expressive means of conveying identity and memory, while, in Part III, the discussion turns to museum exhibitions and festive performances as locations for the negotiation of identity in the public sphere. A lively discussion forum concludes the book with a consideration of the paradoxes of Jewish heritage revival in Poland, and the perception of that revival by Jews and non-Jews. *** ..".these essays help us understand the social dynamics of Jewish identity and how identity is constructed in modern life." -- AJL Reviews, February/March 2015 (Series: Jewish Cultural Studies - Vol. 4) [Subject: Jewish Studies, Cultural Studies]

The earliest scientific studies of Jewish messianism were conducted by the scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums school, particularly Heinrich Graetz, the first great Jewish historian of the Jews since Josephus. These researches were invaluable because they utilized primary sources in print and manuscript which had been previously unknown or used only in polemics. The Wissenschaft studies themselves, however, prove to be polemics as well on closer inspection. Among the goals of this group was to demonstrate that Judaism is a rational and logical faith whose legitimacy and historical progress deserve recognition by the nations of Europe. Mystical and messianic beliefs which might undermine this image were presented as aberrations or the result of corrosive foreign influences on the Jews. Gershom Scholem took upon himself the task of returning mysticism and messianism to their rightful central place in the panorama of Jewish thought. Jewish messianism was, for Scholem, a central theme in the philosophy and life of the Jews throughout their history, shaped anew by each generation to fit its specific hopes and needs. Scholem emphasized that this phenomenon was essentially independent of messianic or millenarian trends among other peoples. For example, in discussing messianism in the early modern era Scholem describes a trunk of influence on the Jewish psyche set off by the expulsion from Spain in 1492.

The Complete Jewish Guide to France is the only resource you need to embark on a trip through Jewish France. Travel writer and journalist Toni L. Kamins catalogs information on well-known sights and little-known treasures, such as the Marais district (Paris's celebrated Jewish neighborhood), ancient ghettos, beautiful old synagogues around the country, and many other places. She includes information on transportation and lodging, plus hundreds of places to buy kosher food. Selected photographs and maps fill out the picture. Kamins also recounts the nearly two thousand years of French-Jewish history beginning with evidence that Jews may have lived in France as early as the first century, and continuing right up to the present day. The Complete Jewish Guide to France has everything you need to know to make your trip to France a success-and to put it into a historical context that will make it even more worthwhile.