A weekly review of politics, literature, theology, and art.

In a style richly accessible to the general reader, this book presents Roth's secular Jewishness, with its own mysteries and humor, as most representative of the American Jewish experience. Thirty years into his career as a writer, Philip Roth remains known to most readers as a self-hating Jew or a flawed would-be comic. Philip Roth and the Jews shows Roth the ironist, the master of absurdity, for whom twentieth-century America and modern Jewish history resonate with each other's signal accomplishments and anxieties. Roth's "egoism" is a persona, an abashed moralist discomfited by the world. Cooper shows that in the "Jewish" works Roth has taken the pulse of America and read the pressures of the world. Modernism, the universal tug for individual sovereignty and against tribal definition, is an issue everywhere. Roth's own odyssey of betrayal, loss, and return—the pattern of the Jewish writer in the last 200 years—is so shaped by his origins that Roth has carried his home and neighborhood into the corners of the earth and thus never left them.

This three-volume work is a cornerstone resource on the evolution and dynamics of the Jewish Diaspora as it played out around the world—from its beginnings to the present. Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture is the definitive resource on one of world history's most curious phenomenons, encompassing the communities, cultures, ethnicities, and experiences created by the Diaspora in every region of the world where Jews live or Jewish ancestry exists. The encyclopedia is organized in three volumes. The first includes 100 essays on the Jewish Diaspora experience, with coverage ranging from ethnography and demography to philosophy, history, music, and business. The second and third volumes feature hundreds of articles and essays on Diaspora regions, countries, cities, and other locations. With an editorial board of renowned Jewish scholars, and with an extraordinarily accomplished team of contributors, Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora captures the full scope of its subject like no other reference work before it.

Since the 1960s the relationship between Blacks and Jews has been a contentious one. While others have attempted to explain or repair the break-up of the Jewish alliance on civil rights, Seth Forman here sets out to determine what Jewish thinking on the subject of Black Americans reveals about Jewish identity in the U.S. Why did American Jews get involved in Black causes in the first place? What did they have to gain from it? And what does that tell us about American Jews? In an extremely provocative analysis, Forman argues that the commitment of American Jews to liberalism, and their historic definition of themselves as victims, has caused them to behave in ways that were defined as good for Blacks, but which in essence were contrary to Jewish interests. They have not been able to dissociate their needs--religious, spiritual, communal, political--from those of African Americans, and have therefore acted in ways which have threatened their own cultural vitality. Avoiding the focus on Black victimization and white racism that often infuses work on Blacks and Jews, Forman emphasizes the complexities inherent in one distinct white ethnic group's involvement in America's racial dilemma.

Irving Howe. Saul Bellow. Lionel Trilling. These are names that immediately come to mind when one thinks of the New York Jewish intellectuals of the late thirties and forties. And yet the New York Jewish intellectual community was far larger and more diverse than is commonly thought. In The Other New York Jewish Intellectuals we find a group of thinkers who may not have had widespread celebrity status but who fostered a real sense of community within the Jewish world in these troubled times. What unified these men and women was their commitment and allegiance to the Jewish people. Here we find Hayim Greenberg, Henry Hurwitz, Marie Syrkin, Maurice Samuel, Ben Halperin, Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, Morris Raphael Cohen, Ludwig Lewisohn, Milton Steinberg, Will Herberg, A. M. Klein, and Mordecai Kaplan, and many others. Divided into 3 sections--Opinion Makers, Men of Letters, and Spiritual Leaders--the book will be of particular interest to students and others interested in Jewish studies, American intellectual history, as well as history of the 30s and 40s.

Based on recently discovered documents, Rafael Medoff reassesses the hows and whys behind the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration’s fateful policies concerning European Jewry during the Holocaust.