Books in the Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture series

In History's Grip is a study of three novels by Philip Roth-American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain-showing that they are built upon the notion of history as disruptive for individuals, cities, and nations and exploring their place in Roth's career.

The book explores the Christian interest in and engagement with the Yiddish language and literature in early modern Germany (ca. 1500-1750).

This book seeks to revolutionize the way scholars use the treasure trove of the Cairo Geniza, the largest and richest store of documentary evidence for the medieval Islamic world.

Through an examination of North African Jewish youth practices in Paris, Rhinestones explains the production of race, alienation, and intolerance within an understudied European minority population.

The book traces how German and French Jews employed anti-Catholic polemics to create their own visions of modernity, national belonging, and proper religiosity from the Enlightenment to the early twentieth century.

This book, a vivid first-hand account of a lost Jewish world, represents the translation of the first Ladino-language memoir known to be written: its author was a leading journalist and publisher in the Ottoman city of Salonica.

This is a study of German historical novels about Jewish history from the 1800s through the Holocaust.

This work traces the history of attitudes toward power and the use of armed force within the Zionist movement from an early period in which most leaders espoused an ideal of peaceful settlement in Palestine, to the acceptance of force as a legitimate tool for achieving a sovereign Jewish state.

This book brings together a uniquely wide variety of sources, including historical chronicles, gravestones, ritual objects, liturgy, popular songs and more, to sketch a portrait of the ways in which Jews of this storied, populous, understudied community preserved their own local history and sought to transmit it to future generations.

The Full Severity of Compassion is both a modular retrospective of Yehuda Amichai's poetric project and a reassessment-by attending closely to the theory embedded in the poetry-of major issues in contemporary literary studies, from the politics of form to radical allusion, and from metaphor to translation.

The book explores the drama of the Hebrew poetry coping with the violence of the Holocaust and the Israel-Arab war.

Confessions of the Shtetl explores Jewish conversions to a variety of Christian confessions in the Russian empire, with special attention to the relations of trust and attraction between Jews and Christians that facilitated religious conversions in the provincial heartland of Jewish Eastern Europe.

What is meant by "e;Jewish Spain"e;? The term itself encompasses a series of historical contradictions. No single part of Spain has ever been entirely Jewish. Yet discourses about Jews informed debates on Spanish identity formation long after their 1492 expulsion. The Mediterranean world witnessed a renewed interest in Spanish-speaking Jews in the twentieth century, and it has grappled with shifting attitudes on what it meant to be Jewish and Spanish throughout the century.At the heart of this book are explorations of the contradictions that appear in different forms of cultural memory: literary texts, memoirs, oral histories, biographies, films, and heritage tourism packages. Tabea Alexa Linhard identifies depictions of the difficulties Jews faced in Spain and Northern Morocco in years past as integral to the survival strategies of Spanish Jews, who used them to make sense of the confusing and harrowing circumstances of the Spanish Civil War, the Francoist repression, and World War Two. Jewish Spain takes its place among other works on Muslims, Christians, and Jews by providing a comprehensive analysis of Jewish culture and presence in twentieth-century Spain, reminding us that it is impossible to understand and articulate what Spain was, is, and will be without taking into account both "e;Muslim Spain"e; and "e;Jewish Spain."e;

Talks about a small city in Eastern Europe where Jews were a majority of the population from the end of the eighteenth century. Pinsk boasted both traditional rabbinic scholars and Hasidic figures, and over time became an international trade emporium, a center of the Jewish Enlightenment, and a cradle of Zionism and the Jewish Labor movement.

In A Question of Tradition, Kathryn Hellerstein explores the roles that women poets played in forming a modern Yiddish literary tradition. Women who wrote in Yiddish go largely unrecognized outside a rapidly diminishing Yiddish readership. Even in the heyday of Yiddish literature, they were regarded as marginal. But for over four centuries, women wrote and published Yiddish poems that addressed the crises of Jewish history-from the plague to the Holocaust-as well as the challenges and pleasures of daily life: prayer, art, friendship, nature, family, and love. Through close readings and translations of poems of eighteen writers, Hellerstein argues for a new perspective on a tradition of women Yiddish poets. Framed by a consideration of Ezra Korman's 1928 anthology of women poets, Hellerstein develops a discussion of poetry that extends from the sixteenth century through the twentieth, from early modern Prague and Krakow to high modernist Warsaw, New York, and California. The poems range from early conventional devotions, such as a printer's preface and verse prayers, to experimental, transgressive lyrics that confront a modern ambivalence toward Judaism. In an integrated study of literary and cultural history, Hellerstein shows the immensely important contribution made by women poets to Jewish literary tradition.

"Originally published in French in 2012 under the title Les juifs et la Bible."

Promised Land questions the prevailing assumption that Eastern European Jews were motivated by Zionism to immigrate to Palestine in the early twentieth century.

A deeply researched and revealing study of the Jews of Moravia throughout the nineteenth century.

The Mediterranean port of Livorno was home to one of the most prominent and privileged Jewish enclaves of early modern Europe. Focusing on Livornese Jewry, this book offers an alternative perspective on Jewish acculturation during the eighteenth century, and reassesses common assumptions about the interactions of Jews with outside culture and the impact of state reforms on the corporate Jewish community. Working from a vast array of previously untapped archival and literary sources, Francesca Bregoli combines cultural analysis with a study of institutional developments to investigate Jewish responses to Enlightenment thought and politics, as well as non-Jewish perceptions of Jews, through an exploration of Jewish-Christian cultural exchange, sites of sociability, and reformist policies. Mediterranean Enlightenment shows that Livornese Jewish scholars engaged with Enlightenment ideals and aspired to contribute to society at large without weakening the boundaries of traditional Jewish life. By arguing that the privileged status of Livorno Jewry had conservative rather than liberalizing effects, it also challenges the notion that economic utility facilitates Jewish integration, nuancing received wisdom about processes of emancipation in Europe.

Reconstructing Ashkenaz shows that, contrary to traditional historical accounts, the Jews of western Europe in the High Middle Ages were not a society of saints and martyrs.

From Kabbalah to Class Struggle is an intellectual biography of Meir Wiener (1893-1941), a Austrian Jewish intellectual and a student of Jewish mysticism, who emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1926 and reinvented himself as a Marxist scholar and Yiddish writer.

"Original title: Herkunft und Textkultur: euber jeudische Erfahrungswelten in romanischen Literaturen 1499-1627."

Reading Across Borders analyzes the relationship between Jewish Americans and Jewish Israelis through the lens of translation studies, shedding light on the different ways in which each Jewish cultural center responded to the challenge-and potential inspiration-represented by the other.