Books in the Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture series

This book answers the questions: Why did the social sciences become an integral part of Jewish scholarship beginning in the late 19th century? What part did this scholarship play in the debate over emancipation and assimilation, Zionism and diasporism, the nature of Jewish identity, and the problem of Jewish continuity and survival?

Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age examines the nexus of new media and memory practices through an in-depth study of the Shoah Visual History Archive, the world's largest and most widely available collection of video interviews with Holocaust survivors, to understand how advances in digital technologies impact the practice of Holocaust remembrance.

Since the late 1700s, when the Jewish community ceased to be a semiautonomous political unit in Western Europe and the United States and individual Jews became integrated-culturally, socially, and politically-into broader society, questions surrounding Jewish status and identity have occupied a prominent and contentious place in Jewish legal discourse. This book examines a wide array of legal opinions written by nineteenth- and twentieth-century orthodox rabbis in Europe, the United States, and Israel. It argues that these rabbis' divergent positions-based on the same legal precedents-demonstrate that they were doing more than delivering legal opinions. Instead, they were crafting public policy for Jewish society in response to Jews' social and political interactions as equals with the non-Jewish persons in whose midst they dwelled. Pledges of Jewish Allegiance prefaces its analysis of modern opinions with a discussion of the classical Jewish sources upon which they draw.

This major work follows the reshaping of Franco-Jewish identity from legal emancipation after the French revolution through the creation in 1860 of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, the first international Jewish organization devoted to the struggle for Jewish rights throughout the world.

This work seeks to understand how, in 19th-century Germany, Jews and non-Jews shaped and experienced Jewish emancipation, a process whereby Jews were freed from ancient discriminatory laws and, over the course of decades, became citizens.

This book opens our eyes to the vast corpus of popular fiction written by Jews for Jews in nineteenth-century Germany, discovering a tradition of Jewish literature that is in many ways still with us today.

The story of the turbulent final sixty years of an important, and in many ways representative, Eastern European Jewish community.

This book examines the ways modern Jewish thinkers, writers, and artists appropriated the figure of Jesus as part of the process of creating modern Jewish culture.

This is a study of Isaac Luria (1534-72), one of the most remarkable and influential figures of late-medieval and early-modern Jewish mysticism. It looks primarily at Luria as a real historical figure, in the context of his relationship with his circle of disciples in the Galilean city of Safed, the great center of kabbalistic thought and teaching.

This is a work of unprecedented scope that traces the origins of Jewish autobiographical writing from the early-modern period to the early twentieth century.

This book examines the Jewish community of Morocco in the late 18th and early 19th centuries through the life of a merchant who was the chief intermediary between the Moroccan sultans and Europe .

This is a study of how the Breslau Jewish community, the third largest and one of the most affluent in Germany, coped with Nazi persecution from 1933 until its liquidation in 1943.

The author of "The Dybbuk," Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport, known as An-sky (1863-1920), was a figure of immense versatility and also ambiguity in Russian and Jewish intellectual, literary, and political spheres. Drawing together leading historians, ethnographers, literary scholars, and others, this far-ranging, multi-disciplinary examination of An-sky is the fullest ever produced.

This book considers some of the most famous Yiddish writers in America, the controversies their works aroused-in Yiddish and English-during the Holocaust, and the ways in which reading them contributes to a revision of American Jewish cultural development.

A pioneering biography of Nathan Birnbaum, one of the central but largely forgotten founders of Zionism, leader in Jewish nationalism, and theoretician of Orthodox political activism.

"Originally published in French under the title Histoire des grand-parents que je n'ai pas eus."

Through the lens of a long overlooked Sephardi community, The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: A Modern History rethinks the emergence of Jewish modernity by exploring shifting attitudes towards poverty and charity.

Sacred Bonds of Solidarity is a history of the emergence of Jewish international aid and the language of "solidarity" that accompanied it in nineteenth-century France.

Music from a Speeding Train challenges the view that there was no Jewish culture in the Soviet Union by exploring over one hundred Russian and Yiddish works from the 1920s to the turn of the 21st century.

A Place in History is a cultural study of Tel Aviv, Israel's population center and one of the original settlements, established in 1909. The book describes how a largely European Jewish immigrant society attempted to forge a home in the Mediterranean, and explores the difficulties and challenges of this endeavor.

"Stepchildren of the Shtetl considers marginal peoples in East European Jewish society and culture--the disabled, mentally ill, and indigent--and how stereotypes and self-perceptions of Jewish marginality have in turn shaped modern Jewish culture, society, and politics"--

The diaries of Willy Cohn chronicle the progressive constriction and eventual destruction of Jewish life in Breslau, Germany, under the Nazis.

Between Foreigners and Shi'is addresses nineteenth-century Iranian Jews' standing as influenced by the interplay between intervening foreigners, sectors of the Shi'i majority, and local Jews.

This text, which draws on primary sources and archival materials, offers the first major appraisal of French responses to the Jewish refugee crisis after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. It explores French policies and attitudes toward Jewish refugees from three interrelated vantage points.

This is the second volume of an unabridged, critical edition of Pauline Wengeroff's Memoirs of a Grandmother, the only full-scale memoir by a woman to chronicle Russian Jewish society's shift from traditionalism to modernity through the experience of women and families.

"Originally published in Hebrew in 2008 under the title Brenner: Sippur hayim."