Modern Jewish History

Introduction

Just when the modern period in Jewish history begins has long been a point of contention among historians. As is true for general history, not every Jewish community experienced the onset of modernity at the same time. It was a long and uneven process. Dating the onset of the modern period depends on the criteria used, which in turn reflect the cultural and ideological biases and predilections of the historian doing the dating. While a cogent argument can be made for the middle of the 17th century, a more convincing one can be made for the middle of the 18th century. Beginning then and extending until today, the modern period is the time in the Jewish historical experience when Jews were more widely dispersed, more religiously variegated, more secular, more multilingual, more politicized, more assimilated, more institutionally organized, more conscious of the Jewish past, and more economically and socially secure that at any time in their long history. This same period has also seen more Jews than ever before divorced from the Jewish community, more undergo conversion, more intermarry, and, most tragic of all, more Jews murdered for the sheer fact of their being Jewish that at any other time in Jewish history. The establishment of the State of Israel a mere three years after the Holocaust illustrates most vividly the wild fluctuations of Jewish experience at this time. The modern era, then, is one of extremes in Jewish history, a period in which the Jews met with both greater acceptance and greater rejection than at any other time in history.

General Histories

The first texts to address the history of the Jews in the modern period appeared in the context of the great single-authored, multivolume histories of the Jews that first appeared in 19th-century Germany and, later, eastern Europe and the United States. However, the explosion of knowledge together with the trend toward specialization has seen the demise of that genre. Since the 1960s a number of modern Jewish history texts have appeared, all written by specialists. These include the valuable though politically tendentious Ettinger 1976 (original Hebrew edition, 1969); Seltzer 1980, which emphasizes intellectual history; Vital 1999, a political history of the Jews; and Gartner 2001, a fine study that stresses the sociological features of Jewish life. Biale 2002 is an ambitious approach to Jewish cultural history that, in addition to taking account of the contributions of the intellectual classes, includes vernacular Jewish culture as part of the whole, seeing it as intertwined with both elite Jewish culture and that of the surrounding environment. By contrast, Sachar 2005 provides us with a long and dense history from above. Efron, et al. 2013 is the most up-to-date telling of the story through a transnational and comparative lens.

Biale, David, ed. Cultures of the Jews: A New History. New York: Schocken, 2002.
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See Part 3: “Modern Encounters.” The essays cover eastern and western European Jewry, Sephardic Jews, and those in the lands of Islam, Israel, and the United States. Seeks to demonstrate the diversity of Jewish cultures, their mutability over time, and the extent of interaction with the larger environment in the making of those disparate Jewish cultures.
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Efron, John M., Steven Weitzman, and Matthias Lehmann. The Jews: A History. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2013.
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The most recent history of the modern Jewish experience, this study emphasizes social and cultural history, paying particular attention to ethnography, popular secular culture, lived religious lives, economic history, and the subject of language choice for modern Jews.
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Ettinger, Shmuel. “The Modern Period.” In A History of the Jewish People. Edited by H. H. Ben-Sasson, et al. 727–1096. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.
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A learned work, but one that is severely compromised due to the ideologically driven quality of the narrative that sees the Jewish past through the prism of Zionism.
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Gartner, Lloyd P. History of the Jews in Modern Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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A fine study that begins in the 17th century and takes the story through to 1980. It is especially strong in the dealing with demography, migration, and the structure of Jewish communities worldwide.
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Sachar, Howard M. A History of the Jews in the Modern World. New York: Knopf, 2005.
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A massive tome with copious detail and written in an engaging style. It is strongest when discussing governments’ policies toward Jews and how those policies impacted upon them by concentrating on Jewish elites. German Jewry seems to be the model used here for modernization, largely because the author equates modernity with secularization. As such, his descriptions of religion, especially Hasidism, recall some of the excesses of Heinrich Graetz.
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Seltzer, Robert M. Jewish People, Jewish Thought: The Jewish Experience in History. New York: Macmillan, 1980.
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A work that, while not as strong on the life of the Jewish people as the title promises, nonetheless successfully explicates Jewish thought. A fine intellectual history of the Jews.
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Vital, David. A People Apart: The Jews in Europe, 1789–1933. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
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While it offers little in the way of intellectual, cultural or social history, this is far and away the fullest general political history of modern Jewry. However, it adopts a Zionist-inspired lachrymose conception of the post-emancipation Jewish experience that somewhat teleologically portrays the course of European Jewish history and its catastrophic end.
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National and Regional Jewish Histories

In contrast to the general histories of the Jewish people, which are global in scale, the appearance of a number of excellent volumes that focus on single countries or regions are a welcome and valuable addition to the literature on the modern Jewish experience. The following list does not pretend to be comprehensive, but instead focuses on the larger Jewish population centers or communities most frequently studied in a classroom setting.

Eastern Europe

The opening up of new archives in the former Soviet Union, plus the increased number of scholars entering into the field of eastern European Jewish history, has led to a vibrant growth in the field. Bartal 2005 is the best single-volume general account of the period, and one that introduces the reader to the very latest research findings. Polonsky 2010–2012 begins where Bartal 2005 ends and is a masterful survey. Gitelman 1988 likewise begins in 1881 in imperial Russia but carries the story forward into the Soviet Era. Hundert 2008 is the best and most comprehensive reference work about eastern European Jewry. See also the book series Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry.

Bartal, Yisra’el. The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772–1881. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
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Effectively decenters the Haskalah as the primary engine of change in Jewish society and puts the onus on the centralizing state, the decline of Jewish autonomy and the changing economy. Those changes fostered the need for concrete political responses and gave birth to modern Jewish politics.
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Gitelman, Zvi. A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present. New York: Schocken, 1988.
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Though written before the all-important opening of the Russian archives after 1991, Gitelman’s work nonetheless picks up chronologically where Bartal 2005 leaves off, providing a solid general account.
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Hundert, Gershon David, ed. YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. 2 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
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Each entry has been written by a specialist and contains a very useful bibliography. The encyclopedia is now available online, with updated and new entries, plus there is access to rare audio and video files, interactive maps, and many images.
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Polonsky, Antony, ed. Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1986–.
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This excellent series first appeared in 1986 and publishes an annual thematically conceived volume on Polish-Jewish history. Information on individual volumes can be found on the Littman Library website.
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Polonsky, Antony. The Jews in Poland and Russia. 3 vols. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010–2012.
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An ambitious work, Volume 2 covers the period 1881 to 1914, while Volume 3 extends from 1914 to 2008. Large tomes, these volumes are written with great verve and display Polonsky’s mastery of the subject. He provides a wealth of detail, adeptly handling both internal Jewish culture and society as well as government policies directed at Jews.
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Sephardic History

Sephardic history, too, is enjoying increasing scholarly attention. The three texts chosen here represent three different approaches. Rodrigue 1990 looks a singular institution, its ideological underpinnings, and its practical impact on Turkish Jews, set against the backdrop of the changing political character of Turkey itself—the transition from empire to republic. Benbassa and Rodrigue 1995 is a masterful guide to the history of Jews in various Balkan lands, almost all of whom are Ladino-speaking Jews in Christian countries. Stein-Abrevaya 2004 is an inventive comparative study of the Jewish daily press among Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews in their respective imperial settings—the Ottoman and Russian empires.

Benbassa, Esther, and Aron Rodrigue. The Jews of the Balkans: The Judeo-Spanish Community, 15th to 20th Centuries. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
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There are very few single country accounts of Jews in Balkan lands, and so this volume fulfills a very important function, introducing the reader to the general characteristics of Sephardic Jewry in this part of Europe while being attentive to the wide array of social, cultural, and religious contexts in which each Jewish community resided.
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Rodrigue, Aron. French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey 1860–1925. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
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A study of Alliance schools in Turkey and the unintended consequences of their program of Jewish “regeneration.” This included making these newly educated Jews too Western to remain in Muslim lands, but concomitantly failing to integrate them into the Alliance’s leadership structure. It also failed to prevent increasing numbers of Jews turning to Zionism, an ideology anathema to that of the Alliance.
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Stein-Abrevaya, Sarah. Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
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A study of Jews in imperial settings that focuses on the role of the daily press—Yiddish and Ladino—in comparative perspective, and how newspapers played a seminal role in helping Jews make the social and cultural choices that came to define their lives.
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The Americas

American Jewish history has likewise flourished, with many scholars now working in the field. Diner 2004 is one of the best places to begin. Where Diner’s is predominantly a social history, Sarna 2005, by contrast, is a comprehensive history of the evolution of Judaism in the United States. After the United States, the largest Jewish populations in the Western Hemisphere were to be found in Latin America. Elkin 1998 surveys most countries in the region and makes a fine introduction to the history of those communities.

Diner, Hasia. The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
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Argues that the openness of American democracy fostered self-confidence among Jews, enabling them to construct a distinct sense of self both within America and vis á vis other Jewries while enjoying full integration into the larger society.
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Elkin, Judith Laikin. The Jews of Latin America. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1998.
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A pathbreaking book in that, before its appearance, the historiography on the subject had largely been produced by members of the various Latin American Jewish communities. This is the first scholarly account of these diverse communities.
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Sarna, Jonathan. American Judaism: A History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.
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A study of American Judaism from its origins in the colonial era through the present day.
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Jews in the Muslim World

Though interest in the subject is growing, outside of Israel there are still relatively few scholars working in the fields of Jewish and Middle Eastern history. Written by a leading voice in the field, Stillman 1991 is a history of Jews in the Arab world combined with an enormous collection of primary source documents. Stillman 2010 is an indispensable and up-to-date research tool—the best of its kind. Gottreich and Shroeter 2011 is the interdisciplinary product of an important conference that took place in Morocco in 2004. Among other things, a major desideratum remains general histories of Jewish life in various countries. Those that currently exist have often not been written by professional historians but by people who were raised in those communities and have a genuine desire to record their histories. Rarely do they rise to the scholarly level required, however. Bashkin 2012 is a highly scholarly study of modern Iraqi Jewry and could serve as a model for future projects on other countries.

Bashkin, Orit. New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.
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The best and most recent comprehensive treatment of the subject.
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Gottreich, Emily, and Daniel Shroeter. Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa. Indiana Series in Sephardi and Mizrahi Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.
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An interdisciplinary volume edited by two historians that fruitfully brings together essays from the fields of history, anthropology, literature, and sociology.
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Stillman, Norman A. The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991.
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This document collection is the companion volume to The Jews of Arab Lands (Stillman 1979, cited under Document Collections) and brings the story into the 20th century, opening with a 180-page history of Jews in Arab lands in the modern period.
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Stillman, Norman A., et al., ed. Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World. 5 vols. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2010.
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The definitive reference work on the subject.
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Western and Central Europe

The Jews of western and central Europe have long attracted the attentions of historians. Endelman 2002 is a social history of Anglo-Jewry and is particularly helpful in elucidating the way an organic, nonprogrammatic process of Jewish acculturation took place in England. Hyman 1998 is a comprehensive history of French Jewry from the Revolution of 1789 to today. Over that time France went from having a Jewish population of about 40,000 to currently being home to Europe’s largest Jewish population, with about 600,000 Jews. Over that 200-year period they enjoyed acceptance thanks to France’s republican tradition, but they were also constantly in the line of fire by those forces that were never reconciled to the revolution and its universalist message of liberty, equality, fraternity. Kieval 1988 is a case study at great odds with the situation in Britain and France. In those nations, with a single national language, Jews were expected to speak the vernacular. By contrast, in Czech lands, the Jews of the modern period were confronted with a difficult choice—whether to pursue acculturation by adopting either German or Czech, or to follow a third path and join the Czech-Jewish movement, which was Zionist in orientation and stood as an alternative to the other assimilatory paths. Meyer 1996–1998 examines German Jewry and is the fullest account of a community that in a short period of time was remarkably productive, creating, among other things, Jewish history writing, new forms of Judaism, institutional forms of Jewish self-defense, and transforming itself from what had been a parochial and poor Jewish community into a worldly, financially stable, disproportionately well-educated Bildungsbürgertum. In Patai 1996, language is likewise seen as crucial where, over the course of the 19th century in Hungary, Jews went from speaking Yiddish to German, and then finally switching to Hungarian, the result of an orchestrated program led by Jewish elites. The adoption of the Hungarian language and development of indigenous forms of Judaism, such as the Neolog movement, came to mark the distinctiveness of Hungarian Jewry.

Endelman, Todd. The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
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The most up-to-date account of British-Jewish history, and one that is especially strong on the social history of the community.
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Hyman, Paula. The Jews of Modern France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
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A fine introduction to French-Jewish history that picks up the story just prior to the Revolution of 1789 and takes it forward to the bicentennial year of 1989.
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Kieval, Hillel J. The Making of Czech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870–1918. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
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A study of identity formation among modern Bohemian and Moravian Jews. The author points out the twin trajectories of this community. On the one hand, there was the Czech-Jewish movement, which advocated the adoption of the Czech language and culture among Jews, and on the other hand, there was Prague Zionism, which was promoted as an alternative to both German and Czech assimilation.
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Meyer, Michael, ed. German-Jewish History in Modern Times. 4 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–1998.
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Written by multiple authors, all experts in the field of German-Jewish history, these four excellent volumes extend from 1600–1945.
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Patai, Raphael. The Jews of Hungary: History, Culture, Psychology. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996.
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Of the largest prewar Jewish communities, Hungary is the least studied. This is mostly because there are very few Jewish historians who are trained in Hungarian history and have the language skills to work in this area. Patai, an anthropologist and historian, was a Hungarian Jew, and his is the most comprehensive history of his community that exists in English.
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State of Israel

Shapira 2012 is the latest of many single-volume histories of the State of Israel, and it is the best place to start. Shapira begins with Zionism’s origins and carries the story through to today. When Segev 1986 first appeared it posed a serious and important challenge to the orthodox historical narrative of Israel’s emergence, one that posits Israel as having been a benign and welcoming haven for all Jews. Segev stresses intercommunal tensions, the existence of discrimination, and the cynicism of the leadership. In his rejection of the standard, heroic, Zionist narrative, Segev ironically fulfills the Zionist dream of turning the Jewish people into a nation like any other. In many ways, Israel emerges from this study as handling, creating, and solving problems in a similar fashion to the way they are dealt with by other nation-states. He does this without ignoring some of the unique features of Israeli statehood. Shapira 1992 tries to understand the metamorphosis among Jewish self-perceptions vis á vis their abhorrence of violence to the Israeli position of not hesitating to resort to it when necessary. Focusing on the ideology of the dominant Labor Party, Shapira writes that the growth of Palestinian Arab nationalism after World War I led to Zionists formulating what Shapira calls a “defensive ethos” of power. It was while Jews were engaged in peaceful, nation-building that they were confronted with Arab mob violence, orchestrated by reactionary effendis. Out of this “defensive ethos” depictions of heroic defense of the land became a staple of Zionist self-perceptions and culture. However, this was not the end of it. By the end of World War II the defensive ethos was transformed into one of military activism, reflecting a generational and cultural shift from immigrant fathers to native-born sons. The study complements the more traditional military histories. Zerubavel 1995 takes a broader view of the formation of modern Israeli culture, one that accounts for the development of a heroic ethos by Zionism’s interpretation of traumatic events that occurred in the Land of Israel in antiquity and in the more recent past. Troen and Lucas 1995 provides a wide-ranging collection of articles that situates the new Israeli culture against the social, economic, and military background in which it emerged. Much of what marks later developments in Israel is a result of political and cultural changes occurring in the Mandate era. Segev 2000 is a history of Mandate Palestine and makes clear that many of the problems still confronting the region had their origins in this period. Penslar 2007 continues an approach raised in Segev 1986, a study of 1949. Penslar argues for the “the need to study Israeli history within multiple and overlapping comparative frameworks,” and in this he succeeds admirably. For example, in comparing the work of the “New Historians” of Israeli history with new interpretations of the Cold War by American historians, one sees the Israeli undertaking as not merely a serious and novel challenge to the traditional narrative, but also as a normative development of a maturing historiographical tradition. Other essays on whether Zionism is colonialism and the question of Israel’s Jewish identity also succeed in contextualizing, through the use of fruitful comparisons, Israel’s past and, indeed, its present. Shafir and Peled 2002 also considers the impact of colonialism and identifies a variety of fault lines in Israeli society. The authors claim that while it was in the ascendancy, Labor Zionism papered over the cracks, but with its decline in the 1970s and the concomitant rise of the political Right, those fissures remain as deep as ever.

Penslar, Derek J. Israel in History: The Jewish State in Comparative Perspective. New York: Routledge, 2007.
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Characteristically balanced and thoughtful, Penslar establishes what is indeed unique about Israel while at the same time demythologizing the country’s history by employing a comparative historical framework to explore such questions as “Is Israel a Jewish State?” and “Is Zionism a Colonial Movement?” Nuanced, learned, and thought-provoking.
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Segev, Tom. 1949: The First Israelis. New York: Free Press, 1986.
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Segev complicates the heroic story of Israel’s founding with tales of dispossession and displacement for both Arabs and Jews, especially mizrahim from Arab lands, as well as the often painful encounter between veteran Israelis and new immigrants and the very real clash between Zionist myths and Israeli realities in Israel’s first year of existence after gaining independence.
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Segev, Tom. One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000.
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Compellingly written with arresting detail, the author highlights the mismanagement of British rule and the conflicting promises they made to the Jews and the Arabs. Asserts that Britain did not support the Zionists out of shared ideology or sympathy but because they believed that Jewish power and influence in the United States could be made to work in Britain’s interests.
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Shafir, Gershon, and Yoav Peled. Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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Structured around the categories of “colonialism,” “ethno-nationalism,” and “democracy,” this political sociology explores the tensions inherent to the concept of a “Jewish democracy.” It then goes beyond this to explore clashing conceptions of Judaism and its place in the state, as well as ethnic stratification.
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Shapira, Anita. Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
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A pathbreaking intellectual history of the evolution of Zionist thinking about the use of force to achieve the goal of a sovereign Jewish homeland.
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Shapira, Anita. Israel: A History. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012.
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The most recent and best general account in the English language.
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Troen, Ilan S., and Noah Lucas, eds. Israel: The First Decade of Independence. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.
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A remarkably comprehensive volume that addresses the problems and opportunities that confronted the newly established State of Israel in its formative phase. Methodologically sophisticated and variegated, the essays represent some of the best political, social, economic, cultural, and military history writing on the subject.
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Zerubavel, Yael. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
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Focuses on three traumatic events—the fall of Masada, the Bar Kochba revolt against the Romans, and the battle for Tel Hai in 1920—and the way Zionism interpreted them for the purposes of shaping Zionist and Israeli collective memory.
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Document Collections

Because the modern Jewish experience is so variegated, lived out in so many countries and in so many languages, it is impossible for any one person to know where to search for primary sources outside of their specialty, or to have sufficient mastery of the languages to access them all in the original. As such, primary source collections, particularly in translation, are of enormous worth, especially in the classroom. There are general document collections such as Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz 2011, which is global in its coverage, and then there are those that focus on particular themes and communities. Hertzberg 1959 is a most valuable collection of primary sources that explicate Zionist thought. As for geographically specific collections, Dawidowicz 1996 covers eastern Europe, Stillman’s volumes (Stillman 1979 and Stillman 1991) covers Jews in Arab lands ; Shandler 2002 collects documents on interwar Poland, Rodrigue 2003 assembles important documents on the Ottoman Empire, and Kaplan and Penslar 2011 covers Jewish Palestine from the 1880s to 1948.

Dawidowicz, Lucy S. The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996.
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Despite the fact that the introduction, an eighty-page survey of eastern European Jewish history, contains some errors and has, in fact, been well surpassed by new scholarship, the assembled documents, many of which had been translated from Yiddish and Hebrew expressly for this anthology, remain a very valuable resource. Originally published in 1967.
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Hertzberg, Arthur. The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader. New York: Doubleday, 1959.
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Still the best collection of primary sources in English of the various strains of Zionist thought.
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Kaplan, Eran, and Derek J. Penslar. The Origins of Israel, 1882–1948: A Documentary History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011.
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An invaluable collection that largely focuses on social, economic, and cultural history from the First Aliyah to the foundation of the State of Israel.
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Mendes-Flohr, Paul, and Jehuda Reinharz, eds. The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History. 3d ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
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Arranged thematically and chronologically, this is the most comprehensive document collection covering the modern period.
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Rodrigue, Aron. Jews and Muslims: Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Modern Times. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.
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A valuable collection of translated documents from the archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. The sources are largely letters and reports of teachers, employed in the vast network of Alliance schools located throughout the Mediterranean, and they reflect changing social and economic conditions and political sensibilities among Jews in the century preceding the end of Jewish life in Muslim lands.
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Shandler, Jeffrey, ed. Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
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In the 1930s the Vilna YIVO ran three essay competitions for the best youth autobiographies. This volume presents an excellent sample of the submissions, illuminating the highly diverse character of Polish-Jewish life.
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Stillman, Norman A. The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1979.
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Although the documents in this collection date from the rise of Islam, the last chapter of this collection offers forty-four valuable primary sources from the 19th century.
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Stillman, Norman A. The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991.
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This collection is the companion volume to Stillman 1979 and brings the story into the 20th century.
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Jewish Historiography

The turn to writing history among modern Jews began in 19th-century Germany. This undertaking represented a significant rupture between the Jews’ traditional commitment to collective memory and a newfound development among them of historical consciousness. The modern Jewish urge to write history was a response, at its most existential level, to the decline of religious faith and practice among Jews and the simultaneously urgent need for interpretation, principally interpretation of the meaning of Jewishness. The historian, led by mundane sources, and not the Providential hand, thus represented a new figure in Jewish society. The dramatic turn to history writing among Jews has occasioned a significant historiography itself. Meyer 2001 considers the issue of periodization and the onset of modernity in Jewish history. Yerushalmi 1982 is the most profound meditation on the clash between Jewish history and memory, whereas Rosman 2007 examines the clash between Jewish historiography and postmodernism. Brenner 2010 provides the fullest account of different Jewish historical schools, while Schorsch 1994 offers an in-depth examination of the modern Jewish historiographical tradition as it unfolded in Germany. Myers 1995 follows the story from its European roots to Jerusalem, focusing on the first generation of Jewish historians and the advance of a Zionist interpretation of the Jewish past. Almog 1987 offers a more comprehensive study of Zionist historiography, taking the story beyond the first generation of scholars in Israel. We now also have a number of biographies of important Jewish historians, some of which are cited in the next section, Biographies of Jewish Historians.

Almog, Shmuel. Zionism and History: The Rise of a New Jewish Consciousness. New York: St. Martin’s, 1987.
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An overview of Zionist interpretations of Jewish history.
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Brenner, Michael. Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
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The best and most comprehensive account of modern Jewish history writing in all of its forms, according to a variety of ideological positions. Covers the origins of modern Jewish historiography from its beginnings in Germany through the eastern Europe schools of historical thought and on to the United States, England, and Israel, concluding with the most recent conceptual turns in the writing of the Jewish history.
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Meyer, Michael A. “Where Does the Modern Period in Jewish History Begin?” In Judaism within Modernity: Essays on Jewish History and Religion. Edited by Michael A. Meyer, 21–31. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001.
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An important essay that discusses the various attempts by Jewish historians to establish when the modern period in Jewish history began. The different answers highlight the difficulty of periodization and demonstrate the extent to which ideology often guided the choices made by historians. Originally published in Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought (Summer 1975): 329–338.
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Myers, David. Re-inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
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A superb examination of the first generation of Jewish scholars at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Myers explores the tensions they experienced in their attempts to reconcile their commitment to scholarly objectivity with the demand to produce a new history of the Jewish people informed by the strictures of Zionism.
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Rosman, Moshe. How Jewish is Jewish History? Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007.
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Rosman posits that all Jewish historians, to varying degrees, are influenced by postmodernism, and suggests that in place of the untenable metahistories hitherto favored by Jewish historians that we turn to writing more locally inflected “cultural studies” or “cultural history.” Whether that is a suitable substitute remains an open but stimulating question.
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Schorsch, Ismar. From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism. Hanover, NH: New England University Press, 1994.
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The most detailed study of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, the academic study of Judaism, and its emergence in 19th-century Germany.
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Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982.
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A classic volume that examines the divide between Jewish collective memory and historical consciousness among Jews, and how the latter’s emergence in the 19th century constituted a major rupture in Jewish thought.
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Biographies of Jewish Historians

Michael 1983 and Michael 2003 are on Isaac Marcus Jost and Heinrich Graetz, respectively, while Liberles 1995 is the only full-length treatment of Salo Wittmayer Baron. Kassow 2007 is a masterful account of Emanuel Ringelblum.

Kassow, Samuel. Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.
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A masterful treatment of one of the great interwar Polish Jewish historians—many others are dealt with here—and his historiographical contributions as well as his work collecting historical materials concerning what he called the “martyrology of the Jews in Poland” during the Shoah.
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Liberles, Robert. Salo Wittmayer Baron: Architect of Jewish History. New York: New York University Press, 1995.
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A biography of the most significant Jewish historian of the 20th century.
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Michael, Reuven. Y.M. Yosṭ, avi ha-hisṭoryografyah ha-yehudit ha-modernit. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1983.
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A biography of Isaac Marcus Jost, the first Jewish historian to write a multivolume history of the Jews,.
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Michael, Reuven. Hainrikh Grets: Ha-hisṭoryon shel ha-ʻam ha-Yehudi. Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 2003.
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A biography of the greatest Jewish historian of the 19th century. Michael demonstrates how Graetz fundamentally reconceptualized Jewish history from that which preceded him by presenting the Jews as a national group.
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Emancipation

In European Jewish history, the subject of the political emancipation of Jews is one of the central themes. Katz 1964 explores the term “emancipation,” and Katz 1973 makes a further contribution with a study of the social circumstances under which emancipation was considered in Germany. Birnbaum and Katznelson 1995 serves as an excellent general introduction to the subject, stressing the diverse patterns of emancipation across Europe and the Ottoman Empire, while Sorkin 2001 offers a valuable historiographical critique and path to reconceptualizing emancipation. Schechter 2003 considers the disproportionate attention accorded to Jews by social commentators and politicians over the course of the 18th century until the end of Napoleonic rule. Goldfarb 2009 offers the only popular account of Jewish emancipation.

Birnbaum, Pierre, and Ira Katznelson, eds. Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
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An extremely valuable contribution, not only because of the high quality of the essays, but also because the subject of emancipation is dealt with in comparative perspective.
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Goldfarb, Michael. Emancipation: How Liberating Europe’s Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009.
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A popular and highly readable general account of emancipation. Very suitable for classroom use.
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Katz, Jacob. “The Term ‘Jewish Emancipation’: Its Origin and Historical Impact.” In Studies in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Intellectual History. Edited by Alexander Altmann, 1–25. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964.
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A history of the term “emancipation” in which Katz delineates the changing words used for this process, beginning with “naturalization,” then “civic improvement.” Only after 1828, in connection with Catholic emancipation in England, was the word “emancipation” used to denote civic and political rights granted to Jews.
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Katz, Jacob. Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–1870. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973.
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A classic though flawed study because of its Germano-centric view and focus on elites. Katz studies Jewish-Gentile relations and mutual self-perceptions in Germany toward the end of the 18th century. He concludes that the formation of friendships and love interests between the two groups led to the creation of a “neutral society,” which, he claims, was an essential precondition for Jewish emancipation.
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Schechter, Ronald. Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715–1815. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
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Focuses on the disproportionate amount of ink spilled on the relatively small Jewish community of 18th-century France. Schechter suggests that the reason for the focus on Jews is that French social commentators saw in them a group so degraded and debased that they would make an ideal test case for the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment’s optimistic view of human nature and capacity for improvement.
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Sorkin, David. “Port Jews and the Three Regions of Emancipation.” Jewish Culture and History 4.2 (2001): 31–46.
DOI: 10.1080/1462169X.2001.10512228Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An important critique of the historiography of emancipation that includes a rejection of that literature’s tendency to see emancipation in terms of an East-West divide. Instead, Sorkin suggests that emancipation be considered according to a tripartite division of western, central and eastern Europe, because all three regions represent different models of the emancipation process.
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Eighteenth-Century Social History

While many of the classic markers of modernity, such as the breakdown of traditional religious authority, a greater interest in science, the disintegration of communal solidarity, and assimilation can all be traced to earlier periods, new forms of Jewish religious, social, and cultural expression emerged in the 18th century on a scale that marked them as novel. This was also the time when what could be loosely termed a pan-Ashkenazic world began to split in two, with western and central Europe on one side and eastern Europe on the other. Divided between western and eastern Europe, the focus in this section is on Jewish social histories of the period. Very few such histories exist, which makes the ones that do all the more valuable.

Western Europe

Posener 1939 remains one of the only social histories of French Jewry that deals with the economic consequences of emancipation. Endelman 1979 approaches the story of Jewish acculturation in England, and rather than focus on intellectuals and wealthy merchants, a characteristic of most of the historiography on this subject, it concentrates on the poor, working Jews, and the venues and the social spaces they inhabited, in order to chart the process of acculturation. Steven Lowenstein is nearly alone among scholars of German Jewry in employing hard-core social and demographic history in his study of Berlin Jewry in the Age of Enlightenment, Lowenstein 1994.

Endelman, Todd. The Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979.
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A pioneering book in the field of Jewish social history. It focuses on poor Jews, mostly unexceptional figures, who made up the vast majority of Jews in England, and the way they became acculturated and negotiated the transition to modernity.
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Lowenstein, Steven. The Berlin Jewish Community: Enlightenment, Family, and Crisis, 1770–1830. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
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In contrast to nearly all other studies of Berlin’s small but prominent Jewish community, which tend to focus on the intellectual life of its members, the author provides a detailed and statistically rich social history of this transitional generation of Jews.
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Posener, S. “The Immediate Economic and Social Effects of the Emancipation of the Jews in France.” Jewish Social Studies 1.3 (1939): 271–326.
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Offering many statistics, this article details the myriad residential and occupational restrictions suffered by Jews in France up until the French Revolution, and the changes Jews experienced thereafter. After emancipation, the occupational spectrum broadened, but the economic situation worsened as a result of general economic and political developments, which hit the Jews particularly hard.
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Eastern Europe

Whereas the German experience was once the accepted model for the Jewish transition to modernity, that is no longer the dominant view of historians. Rather, different models other than one that begins in Berlin and moves east have added layers of complexity to our understanding of these historical processes. In the 18th century, Poland was home to 750,000 Jews, and so extrapolating a model of modernization based on the experiences of a mere 3,500 Jews in Berlin requires rethinking. Mahler 1958 is a foundational text for the study of Jewish demography and social history. Rosman 1990 focuses on Polish-Jewish economic history and the meaning and consequences of Jewish economic security, while Hundert 1992 studies the role of Jews in the urban economy in Poland, using the town of Opatów as a case study. In Hundert 2004 the author broadens his studies of 18th-century Poland, surveying Jewish demographic and economic trends but also expanding his study to include religious history and thought.

Hundert, Gershon David. The Jews in a Polish Private Town: The Case of Opatów in the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
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A highly detailed study of the role of the Jews in 18th-century Polish urban life, commerce, and culture. The author concludes that Polish urban economies might have collapsed had it not been for the role played by Jews, and that in recognition of their importance, Gentile authorities created conditions that were favorable for the Jewish community.
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Hundert, Gershon David. Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
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A fine survey that incorporates some of the most recent scholarship in social history—there are chapters on Jewish demography, economic activity, and communal structure and intellectual history, the Catholic church’s relationship to the Jews, the impact of Kabbalah on Jewish culture, religious radicalism and mysticism, and the advent of Hasidism.
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Mahler, Raphael. Yidn in amolikn Poyln in likhṭ fun tsifern: Di demografishe un sotsyal-ekonomishe struktur fun Yidn in Ḳroyn-Poyln in akhtsntn yorhundert. Warsaw, Poland: Idish Bukh, 1958.
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A pathbreaking study based on contemporary sources of the Polish-Jewish population in the years 1764 and 1765. As a text it is the fundamental starting point for modern Polish-Jewish social history.
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Rosman, Moshe J. The Lords’ Jews: Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
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Based on extensive archival research on the Sieniawski-Czartoryski estates, the author emphasizes the importance of the specialized economic role played by Jews and the symbiotic nature of the relationship between Jews and magnates. Jews ensured the economic well-being of the landholders, and in return, the magnates provided secure conditions in which Jewish religious, social, and economic life thrived.
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Religious History in Eastern Europe

The religious history of modern eastern European Jewry, beginning with the advent of Hasidism in the 18th century, its splintering into many courts, and the concomitant rise of their dogged opponents, the Mitnagdim, includes some of the most significant religious and social developments in the history of the Jewish people. By the 20th century, ultra-Orthodox Jews had come to form a transnational Jewish community of enormous vitality and political power, all while bearing enormous social problems, not the least of which are caused by increasing poverty due to high birth rates and low employment rates. This is especially the case in Israel, but it is by no means confined to the Jewish state.

Hasidism

Hasidism was the great pietistic religious movement that began in the 18th century. Recent scholarship goes beyond classifying it as merely a theological expression, seeing it also as a great social movement, especially in the way it democratized access to the divine, popularized Kabbalah, and created a new social structure and forms of communal leadership via the relationship between Hasidim and their individual rebbes. From its origins among small groups of individuals, Hasidism spread like wildfire, and by the 19th century over two-thirds of eastern European Jewry were Hasidic in one way or another. By the early 20th century, Hasidism’s fortunes had declined due to modernization, urbanization, and emigration. Because they were so conspicuous, death rates among Hasidim during the Holocaust were extremely high, and it was believed by many that, despite the remnant of survivors, Hasidism had for the most part run its historical course. This prediction turned out to be false, and in Israel, the United States and other enclaves such as Strasbourg, Antwerp, London, and Melbourne, Hasdism is thriving. In the case of Israel, it is part of the politically powerful bloc of religiously orthodox Jews. Hundert 1991 is an edited volume of excellent essays that includes translations of some of the pioneering historical work on Hasidism. Lamm 1999 is an excellent source for exploring Hasidic teachings. Hasidism venerates the zaddik (also tsaddik or tzadik), or holy man, and in part owes its success to the building up of personality cults. For this reason, scholarly biographies of individuals are very valuable because, as represented in the popular realm, the lives of the venerated are always swaddled in myths and miraculous events. This is most certainly the case with Hasidim’s founder, Israel Baal Shem Tov. Rosman 1996 seeks to break free of hagiography and depicts the Baal Shem Tov’s life according to the available historical sources, including ones drawn from Polish archives. Rapoport-Albert 1988 is one of the few studies to address the role of women in Hasidism and the movement’s attitude toward them. Rapoport-Albert 1996 is one of the best anthologies, treating both the religious and social history of Hasidism. According to Assaf 2002, Hasidic religious culture reflects the larger environment in which it emerged, one where superstition, mysticism, and messianic fervor dominated. Dynner 2006 concurs with Assaf that Hasidism was a social as well as a religious movement and focuses on the Hasidic court and its role in the spread and vitality of Hasidism. Most of the above-mentioned studies deal with Hasidism’s origins in the 18th century and its growth in the 19th. After the turn of the 20th century, war, revolution, emigration, and the Shoah almost entirely decimated Hasidism. However, after World War II, Hasidic communities soon began to reconstitute themselves, principally in Israel and the United States, but also in a number of other places. The Hasidim now form a large and thriving transnational Jewish community. Dan 1996 outlines the contours of the recent resurgence of Hasidism. Under the leadership of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Chabad (or Habad) has emerged as the most popular and most powerful of all Hasidic groups. Fishkoff 2003 is a popular though nonetheless excellent account of Chabad-Lubavitch Judaism.

Assaf, David. The Regal Way: The Life and Times of Rabbi Israel of Ruzhin. Translated by David Louvish. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
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In this study of Rabbi Israel of Ruzhin, Assaf holds that Hasidism was a social movement, and he concentrates on the role played by the zaddik and the nature of the Hasidic court.
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Dan, Joseph. “Hasidism: The Third Century.” In Hasidism Reappraised. Edited by Ada Rapoport-Albert, 415–426. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996.
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An introduction to the history of Hasidism in the 20th century.
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Dynner, Glenn. Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
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Dynner, like Assaf, examines the social component of Hasidism by examining the structure of Hasidic courts, their dependency on the patronage of the mercantile elites, and the marriage alliances they orchestrated to ensure the well-being of the court.
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Fishkoff, Sue. The Rebbe’s Army: Inside the World of Chabad-Lubavitch. New York: Schocken, 2003.
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An excellent account of the Chabad-Lubavich branch of Hasidism, emphasizing its very public profile, not just on the Jewish street but in America at large.
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Hundert, Gershon, ed. Essential Papers on Hasidism: Origins to Present. New York: New York University Press, 1991.
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A valuable collection of essays about various aspects of Hasidism. Also includes English translations of seminal works by Simon Dubnow and Benzion Dinur.
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Lamm, Norman. The Religious Thought of Hasidism: Text and Commentary. New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1999.
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A large collection of Hasidic teachings, organized according to subject with commentaries.
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Rapoport-Albert, Ada. “On Women in Hasidism: S. A. Horodecky and the Maid of Ludomir Tradition.” In Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky. Edited by Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein, 495–528. London: Halban, 1988.
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A leading authority on Hasidism, Rapoport-Albert studies Hannah Rokhel, known as the Maiden of Ludmir, who took a vow of celibacy and acted for a while as a rebbe. The author’s investigation leads her to reject the claim that Jewish woman were granted equality in Hasidism, and she instead argues that Hasidism barely changed the role and status of women in Jewish society.
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Rapoport-Albert, Ada, ed. Hasidism Reappraised. London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 1996.
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Emphasizes the social history of Hasidism in the 19th century.
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Rosman, Moshe J. Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba’al Shem Tov. Contraversions 5. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
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The author’s great methodological innovation in trying to recover the historical Israel Baal Shem Tov is to use archival sources, often in Polish, to examine the Besht’s life, with special focus on his hometown environment of Międzyboż.
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Mitnagdism

Opposition to Hasidism was fierce and included excommunications and the rallying of support from non-Jewish authorities. On matters of theology and practice, there were deep divisions between Mitnagdim (opponents) and the Hasidim, and these are dealt with in Nadler 1997. The Mitnagdim were many, but their leading figure was the Gaon of Vilna, the subject of Etkes 2002. A important strain of Mitnagdism was known as the Musar (ethics) movement. Its leader, Yisroel Salanter, who is the subject of Etkes 1993, preached the goal of ethical self-perfection and self-restraint, hoping to foster a spiritual and ethical revival within Lithuanian Jewry. Finally, while neither about Hasidism nor Mitnagdism, Teter 2005 falls within the realm of religious history and considers the 18th-century Catholic Church’s attitude to the Jews in Poland.

Etkes, Immanuel. Rabbi Israel Salanter and the Mussar Movement: Seeking the Torah of Truth. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1993.
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A study of Rabbi Yisroel Salanter and his Musar movement. Salanter emphasized the need for ethical self-perfection and psychological introspection. Etkes argues that Salanter’s emphasis on the psychological categories of the conscious and unconscious mind and the need for ethical education suggest a sympathy with Enlightenment ideas.
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Etkes, Immanuel. The Gaon of Vilna: The Man and his Image. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
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Focuses on the central role in opposing Hasidism played by the leading figure in Lithuanian Jewry, Elijah, Gaon of Vilna. After his death, the Gaon was the subject of heroic myth making and fantasy by his followers, and Etkes seeks to cut through the hagiography in order to paint a more realistic portrait of the man.
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Nadler, Allan. The Faith of the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997.
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Focusing on the 18th-century Lithuanian rabbi and preacher Rabbi Phinehas of Polotsk, this is a study of Mitnagdic theology and explicates the radically different position of the Mitnagdim compared to the Hasidim on topics such as prayer, Torah study, and Kabbalah.
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Teter, Magda. Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-reformation Era. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511499043Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A revisionist argument about the 18th-century Polish Catholic Church’s attitude toward the Jews and other non-Catholics. The author emphasizes the weakness and insecurity of the church in multi-religious Poland, where, in the 18th century, Catholics were not even in the majority.
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Religious History in Germany, the United States, and Israel

In response to changes in the legal, political, social, and economic status of German Jews in the 19th century, new forms of Judaism were created in order to reflect their changing cultural and religious sensibilities. Reform Judaism, positive-historical Judaism (called Conservative Judaism in its later American incarnation), and Modern Orthodoxy had all emerged by the middle of the 19th century in what had been a tremendous burst of religious creativity.

Reform Judaism, Positive-Historical Judaism, and Neo-Orthodoxy

Liberles 1985 looks at the conflict between Reform and Orthodox Judaism in Frankfurt. Meyer 1988 is the best history of Reform Judaism. The bulk of studies on neo-Orthodoxy focus on its founder, Samson Raphael Hirsch but there was more than one neo-Orthodox position and Ellenson 1990 focuses on the leader of Berlin Orthodoxy, Esriel Hildesheimer. Breuer 1992 is a general history of Modern Orthodoxy in Germany. Brämer 2000 is the most recent and fullest biography of Zacharias Frankel.

Brämer, Andreas. Rabbiner Zacharias Frankel: Wissenschaft des Judentums und konservative Reform im 19. Jahrhundert. Hildesheim, Germany: Olms, 2000.
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A comprehensive biography of the founder of positive-historical (Conservative) Judaism.
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Breuer, Mordechai. Modernity within Tradition: The Social History of Orthodox Jewry in Imperial Germany. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
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One of the best studies of German neo-Orthodoxy. Although purporting to be a general history, the focus is clearly on Orthodoxy in Frankfurt, with an emphasis on the towering figures of Samson Raphael Hirsch and Isaac Breuer. The author, a member of the Breuer family, which succeeded Hirsch in his leadership of the Frankfurt community, brings a wealth of personal reflections and insights to this work.
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Ellenson, David. Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer and the Creation of a Modern Jewish Orthodoxy. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990.
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An important study of Esriel Hildesheimer, the founder in 1873 of the Rabbinerseminar, the first Modern Orthodox rabbinical seminary in Germany. In focusing on Hildesheimer, Ellenson introduces us to the diversity of thought within Modern Orthodoxy for Hildesheimer parted with the founder of neo-Orthodoxy, Samson Raphael Hirsch, who opposed the use of the critical methods of Wissenschaft des Judentums.
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Liberles, Robert. Religious Conflict in Social Context: The Resurgence of Orthodox Judaism in Frankfurt am Main, 1838–1877. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985.
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Addresses the social context of Orthodoxy’s rise in Frankfurt and its secession from the larger Jewish community in 1877. Beyond questions of theology as a cause for splits within the community, Liberles observes that there existed a link between denominational affiliation and social class, observing that the Orthodox Israelitische Religionsgesellschaft (IRG) was made up of the community’s wealthier and more aristocratic families.
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Meyer, Michael. Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
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A brilliant study of Reform Judaism that tells the story from its origins and development in Germany through to its emergence and transformation in the United States.
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United States

If American Judaism in its earliest stages was in debt intellectually, personally, and even aesthetically to Europe, over time it began to develop its own forms of Judaism. Jick 1976 suggests that the impetus for change, that is, the unmooring from Europe, came from the social and cultural desire for Americanization and the freedom that was a consequence of living in a voluntaristic society with few institutional restraints. The place of women in American synagogue life was long ignored by scholars, but that is no longer the case. Goldman 2000 focuses on the 19th century and is one of the best places to begin to explore the role of women in American Judaism. Raphael 2003 provides the most comprehensive overview of all the denominations of American Judaism.

Goldman, Karla. Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in American Judaism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
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Argues that the desire for middle-class respectability, acceptance, and Americanization led to a restructuring of gender roles in American synagogue life. Focusing on the changing nature of women’s galleries, the author argues that there was a corresponding change in women’s behavior and, eventually, roles, leading to greater and ever more egalitarian participation in the synagogue.
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Jick, Leon A. Americanization of the Synagogue, 1820–1870. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1976.
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Argues that American Reform owed little to its European forebear and was essentially an indigenous form of religious expression that evolved not from top-down theological positions set out by the rabbis, but from the social practices of the lay leadership and congregants alike.
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Raphael, Marc Lee. Judaism in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
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A fine study that is part history and part ethnography. The author attended over one hundred different congregations of all stripes to produce a comprehensive study of the diversity of American Judaism.
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Israel

The nature of Judaism underwent significant change with the emergence of the State of Israel, and for the first time Judaism became the official religion of a nation-state. Because of the link to politics, Israeli religious leadership also became part of the nation’s political leadership. In addition, with Israel’s political system of proportional representation, coalition governments have had to be cobbled together, frequently with an alliance of one or more of the religious political parties. This has endowed them with enormous political power but also religious power, insofar as all non-Orthodox forms of Judaism have been denied formal recognition. Ravitzky 1996 is one of the most penetrating and erudite studies of the variety of Israeli ultra-Orthodox views on Zionism. Barak-Erez 2007 is essentially a legal history of pre-1948, and then Israeli, law as it pertains to the farming and sale of pigs in Israel. It is an intriguing way to get at the complex mix of religion, history, politics, and culture in Israel. Heilman 1987 offers a very valuable portrait of contemporary ultra-Orthodoxy in Israel and the United States, showing, among other things, that Haredim form a genuine transnational community.

Barak-Erez, Daphne. Outlawed Pigs: Law, Religion, and Culture in Israel. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007.
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A study of the laws pertaining to the farming and sale of pigs in Israel. Tracing the history of such laws, Barak-Erez provides the reader with a window onto those moments when religious sensibilities and political exigencies coincide and help determine the contours and changing patterns of Israeli law and culture.
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Heilman, Samuel. Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
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More historical ethnography than straight history, this study provides a fascinating and intimate portrait of Haredi (those who tremble before God) life today in Israel and the United States, and argues that rather than being a throwback to an earlier form of Judaism, ultra-Orthodoxy is most decidedly a new, post-Holocaust form of Judaism.
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Ravitzky, Aviezer. Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
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One of the very best studies of Israeli religious history and political theology, this deeply learned work explicates the history of various streams of ultra-Orthodox theology as they relate to Zionism and the various accommodations the anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox parties have made with the State of Israel.
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Jewish Enlightenment

Along with emancipation and antisemitism, the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, is one of the central themes studied by modern Jewish historians. Traditionally seen as pathbreaking figures, recent scholarship stresses the very conservative nature of figures once considered radicals. Altmann 1973 takes one of the figures focused on by Meyer and produces the definitive biography of the leading intellectual of Jewish Berlin in the 18th century, Moses Mendelssohn. Sorkin 1987 considers the unintended consequences of the Haskalah, through a study of communal figures and institutions imbued with maskilic ideology to demonstrate how ideology and social experience served to create a distinct German-Jewish subculture. As the Haskalah manifested itself in eastern Europe, it took on a very different coloration from what had been the case in Berlin. Feiner 1993 is one of the few studies that address the attitude of the maskilim toward women, indicating the essentially conservative nature of the Haskalah. Fishman 1995 explores the Haskalah in one Byelorussian town, demonstrating the intricate webbing of the social, the commercial, and the intellectual. Sinkoff 2004 turns her attention to Poland and the conflict between the Haskalah and Hasidism. Feiner 2004 claims the maskilim wished to promote secularism and a new tripartite identity of man, citizen, and Jew. This new social type harmonized the ideals of the Enlightenment and Hebrew-language Jewish culture. The Haskalah has almost exclusively been seen as an Ashkenazic phenomenon. Lehmann 2005 expands the entire orientation of Haskalah scholarship with this study of the Sephardic Haskalah. Litvak 2012 provides a new challenge to traditional interpretations of the Haskalah as the “Jewish Enlightenment,” and especially those claims that situate its origins in 18th-century Berlin.

Altmann, Alexander. Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1973.
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A magisterial biography of the Berlin Haskalah’s leading figure.
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Feiner, Shmuel. “Ha-’ishah ha-yehudit ha-modernit: Mikreh-mivhan be-yahasei ha-haskalah ve-ha-modernah.” Tsiyon 58 (1993): 453–499.
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The essentially conservative nature of the eastern European Haskalah is borne out in this study, which argues for the ambivalent attitude of the maskilim toward gender equality.
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Feiner, Shmuel. The Jewish Enlightenment. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
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Feiner’s comprehensive study of the Haskalah in which he attributes to the maskilim the goal of promoting among Jews an ideology of secular, liberal modernity. That did not mean they were anti-religion, and Feiner makes clear they were committed to creating a modernized religion for a modernized Jewry.
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Fishman, David E. Russia’s First Modern Jews: The Jews of Shklov. New York: New York University Press, 1995.
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An especially valuable book because it is the story of the Haskalah in one town; namely, Shklov. Fishman demonstrates the interconnectedness of commerce, modernization, Gentile patronage, and Haskalah.
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Lehmann, Matthias. Ladino Rabbinic Literature and Ottoman Sephardic Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.
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Lehmann superbly captures the modern Sephardic experience, explicating how Jews in the Ottoman Empire underwent profound cultural, political, and economic changes over the course of the 19th century. By the end of the century, Ottoman Sephardic identity had been transformed, thanks to the processes of Westernization and secularization.
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Litvak, Olga. Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism. Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012.
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A new interpretation of the Haskalah that rejects the idea that it set the Jewish people on the course toward liberalism. Rather, Litvak sees the Haskalah as a conservative movement and the maskilim as having led a Jewish Romantic revolution.
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Sinkoff, Nancy. Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands. Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2004.
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The principle focus here is on the leading Polish maskil, Mendel Lefin of Podolia, and his protégé, Yosef Perl. The social context of their maskilic program is all important, for even though they were enamored of certain aspects of the Berlin Haskalah, their location meant that the focus of their attention would be on their battle with the Hasidic world.
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Sorkin, David. The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
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Argues that as part of the process of regeneration the Jewish community went through in preparation for emancipation, it adopted the ideals of the Bildungsbürgertum. Paradoxically, however, Jews were unaware that the ways they went about this failed to advance the cause of social integration as much as they served to preserve Jewish separateness by the creation of a Jewish subculture.
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Women and Gender

Women’s history and gender history have contributed much to the depth of modern Jewish historiography and have helped to enliven and enrich the field. They have also provided a much more complex picture of the lived lives of Jews in the past. When historians have traditionally written about “the Jews,” they have invariably meant Jewish men. Women’s and gender history have offered a much-needed corrective to this inclination. Work in the field crosses borders, classes, and religious sensibilities. Hyman 1980 links consumerism with the self-assertion of Jewish women in turn-of-the-century New York. Hertz 1988 offers a radically different picture, with an examination of the elite Jewish salon women of 18th-century Berlin. By contrast, Kaplan 1991 examines middle-class Jewish women in Imperial Germany. Hyman 1995 offers an expansive view by studying European and American Jewish women in comparative perspective. The study of masculinity is essential to any broad understanding of gender, and Mosse 1996 addresses masculinity through an analysis of the way the Jewish male body served as a foil for Christian notions of the masculine ideal. Freeze 2002 addresses marriage patterns in Imperial Russia and the particular difficulties confronted by women in the case of divorce. Freeze, et al. 2005 is a stellar volume that focuses on Jewish women in eastern Europe, while Baader 2006 offers a comprehensive account of the domestication of German Judaism in the 19th century by focusing on women’s roles.

Baader, Benjamin Maria. Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture in Germany, 1800–1870. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
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Traces transformations in 19th-century German Judaism and the increasingly central role played by women in Jewish society. Examines the synagogue, associational life, philanthropic organizations, and the kindergarten movement, demonstrating how the presence of women in areas previously closed to them had the overall effect of domesticating Judaism and even feminizing the religious practices of Jewish men in Germany
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Freeze, ChaeRan Y. Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002.
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Examines the declining divorce rate among Jews from the rather high rates of the early 1830s to the lower ones of the early 1900s. Discusses the legal, economic, and social difficulties women faced when seeking a formal divorce.
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Freeze, ChaeRan Y., Paula Hyman, Antony Polonsky, eds. Jewish Women in Eastern Europe. Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 18. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2005.
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Opens with an excellent historiographical essay on eastern European Jewish women and concludes with a comprehensive bibliography. Contains fine essays on the domestic sphere, religious experience, economic and cultural life, and the political engagement of Jewish women.
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Hertz, Deborah. Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988.
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The story of Jewish salon women who, between 1780 and 1806, hosted social events where Jews and Christians gathered to discuss literature, the arts, and current affairs. Important venues in the history of Jewish-Christian sociability, the salons provided Jewish women with power and exposure to high culture. Marriage and conversion to Christianity were two further outcomes of this encounter.
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Hyman, Paula. “Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest: The New York Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902.” American Jewish History 70.1 (1980): 91–105.
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A classic in the field that captures the agency, politicization, and strategic sophistication of immigrant women who used their control of the domestic sphere to assert themselves outside of the home and effectively win the battle over the price of a basic commodity.
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Hyman, Paula. Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995.
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This book examines the role of women in modern Jewish history in comparative perspective, traversing different social, political, and cultural environments, in eastern and western Europe as well as the United States. Covering the period 1850 to 1950, Hyman argues that the process of assimilation for Jewish women was significantly different than it was for Jewish men.
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Kaplan, Marion. The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
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One of the most important books in the field of Jewish women’s history, Kaplan demonstrates the central role played by women in the formation of the German-Jewish middle class.
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Mosse, George L. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
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Although not exclusively about Jews, they play a central role in the author’s thesis, since Mosse presents Jewish men as symbolizing the countertype to the ideal masculine Christian male.
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Material and Popular Culture

With their focus on intellectual history, studies of the modern Jewish experience have all too frequently ignored cultural forms that are material or popular in nature. And yet the modern period is in large part characterized by the creative participation of Jews in the realm of both secular and religious culture to a greater extent than at any time in their history. New forms of Jewish art, architecture, and music have completely altered the aesthetics of Judaism and Jewish life, while modern forms of entertainment such as theater, film, music, and sport have done as much to change the Jewish relationship to both Gentile and Jewish culture as any of the major intellectual movements since the 18th century. What follows is a sample of more recent works of interest in this area. The number of edited volumes is testament to the increasing interest in Jews and the arts, which has now been the subject of many museum exhibitions and academic conferences.

Art

Howes and Paucker 1989 offers an in-depth study of the graphics tied to Jewish book production in Germany. Cohen 1998 is a pioneering work on the place of art and artistic creation among modern Jews. Bland 2000 explores claims of Jewish aniconism. Harshav 2006 focuses on the use and meaning of Jewish themes in the work of the most significant Jewish artist of the 20th century, Marc Chagall. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Karp 2008 is an edited volume that takes an expansive approach in dealing with a broad array of artistic endeavors and Jewish involvement in them. Goodman 2008 brings together art and theater in a study of how those two realms intersected in the Soviet Jewish theater. Katz 2010 explores one of the most fascinating aspects of contemporary Chabad culture; namely, its heavy reliance on aesthetics. Brod 2012 is an important study of the American comic book and the almost completely Jewish contribution to the creation of the superhero.

Bland, Kalman P. The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
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A study of the historical claim that Jews have no artistic tradition, supposedly having been culturally hamstrung by the prohibition against making graven images.
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Brod, Harry. Superman Is Jewish?: How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth, Justice, and the Jewish-American Way. New York: Free Press, 2012.
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The author, a professor of philosophy, has written a fascinating study of the American comic book superhero. Almost all of the most important such characters were invented by Jews, and the author situates this story within the larger history of American Jewry in the 20th century, and the history of the graphic/literary form that is the comic book.
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Cohen, Richard I. Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
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The best general work on art and the modern Jewish experience. Cohen turns to art to write the social history of modern Jews and argues that all sympathetic modern images of Jews, whether by Christian or Jewish artists, should be read as signifiers of “Jewishness.”
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Goodman, Susan Tumarkin. Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater. New York: Jewish Museum, 2008.
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Published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Jewish Museum in New York in 2008–2009, this valuable volume goes beyond Chagall to study art as it related to Jewish theater in the Soviet Union; that is, Jewish theater in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian.
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Harshav, Benjamin. Marc Chagall and the Lost Jewish World: The Nature of Chagall’s Art and Iconography. New York: Rizzoli, 2006.
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A sumptuous book of Chagall’s paintings, with nine scholarly chapters by Harshav, who masterfully situates both Chagall and his work in the context of the artist’s native Vitebsk and the Yiddish culture in which he was raised and which never left him.
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Howes, Justin, and Pauline Paucker. “German Jews and the Graphic Arts.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 34 (1989): 443–473.
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An important study of the artistic contribution of Jewish typographers, calligraphers, and book designers to the production of the Jewish book in Germany. The authors argue that the emergence of a well-to-do Jewish bourgeoisie changed Jewish attitudes toward the book, increasing the demand for beautiful volumes, which in turn provided opportunities for the development of Jewish graphic culture.
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Katz, Maya Balakirsky. The Visual Culture of Chabad. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
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A highly original study of the plethora of religious images and rabbinic portraits that Chabad produces and that confront members of Chabad on a daily basis. These include portraits of the rebbe, public menorahs, and replicas of Chabad’s headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. Katz has written a social history of the movement by examining its vibrant visual culture.
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Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, and Jonathan Karp, eds. The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
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The volume is a product of a research seminar on “Jews and the Arts” held at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University Pennsylvania in 2000–2001. The book’s wide range, treating music, theater, dance, film, and much besides, succeeds in its intention to have the arts “figure more fully in Jewish Studies and the Jewish experience more fully in the arts disciplines” (Introduction).
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Theater

The Yiddish theater in both eastern Europe and the United States was a major source of entertainment for Jews, with audiences in the millions. The theater was also one of the great vehicles for Jewish modernization and acculturation. Sandrow 1977 is a fine general history of the modern Yiddish theater. Levy 1979 is a first-rate history of Habima, a Hebrew theater company. Berkowitz 2003, an edited volume, covers greater ground both chronologically and in terms of genre than Sandrow 1977, while also setting out a programmatic statement for future studies of Yiddish theater. Steinlauf and Polonsky 2003, part of the Polin series, is dedicated to the diverse forms of Polish-Jewish popular culture. Veidlinger 2006 is a study of one of the most important Jewish cultural institutions in the Soviet Union, the Moscow State Yiddish Theater. It is especially strong in placing it in the overall context of Stalinism. Of the many theatrical forms Jews have been involved with in the modern period, comedy has been one of the most popular, but it is also the one subjected to the least scholarly scrutiny. Efron 2012 examines the political satire of the Yiddish cabaret stars and stand-up comedians Dzigan and Shumacher.

Berkowitz, Joel, ed. Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches. Oxford and Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2003.
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As much a manifesto as an excellent work of scholarship; the editorial thrust of the work is to place scholarship on Yiddish theater as a central theme in Jewish studies. Includes an impressive range of essays covering subjects such as the early modern Purimshpil and Yiddish theater in Vienna until the Anschluss of 1938.
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Efron, John M. “From Lodz to Tel Aviv: The Yiddish Political Satire of Shimen Dzigan.” Jewish Quarterly Review 102.1 (Winter 2012): 50–79.
DOI: 10.1353/jqr.2012.0010Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Considers Yiddish comedy as a distinct expression of Jewish modernity through an examination of the comedy duo Dzigan and Shumacher, the content of their sketches, and the difficulties faced by performers who have lost their audience, in this case through genocide. It also chronicles their reemergence as stars in Israel, when they had to work in an environment that was officially hostile to the Yiddish language.
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Levy, Emanuel. The Habima, Israel’s National Theater, 1917–1977: A Study of Cultural Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.
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A fine study of the Hebrew theater troupe that began in Russia in 1905. Following a tour to the United States in 1926, some cast members decided to stay in New York while others went on to Palestine, forging what would become Israel’s national theater.
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Sandrow, Nahma. Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.
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Still the best overview of the history of the modern Yiddish theater. The author traces the evolution of the theater from its origins in Europe and examines all of its forms from the most popular shows to experimental theatrical forms.
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Steinlauf, Michael C., and Antony Polonsky, eds. Jewish Popular Culture and its Afterlife. Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 16. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2003.
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The entire issue is dedicated to various forms of Jewish popular entertainment in Poland, much of it to do with theater and cabaret.
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Veidlinger, Jeffrey. The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
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A pioneering study of the Yiddish theater, its relationship to the regime, including support from Stalin, its meaning for Jewish audiences, and its sudden decimation after the war.
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Photography and Film

Gidal 1987 is one of the earliest accounts of the heavy participation of Jews in photography. Avrutin, et al. 2009 is a study of the photographs taken during the 1912 An-sky ethnographic expedition through the Pale of Settlement. Jews have played a foundational role across the entire spectrum of the American entertainment industry, nowhere more so than Hollywood. Gabler 1988 is a popular but thoughtful study of the Jewish movie moguls and how their immigrant consciousness informed their view of America and Americans, which they then depicted on screen. Hoberman and Shandler 2003 starts from the position that Jewishness is performative, and it then explores the myriad ways Jews have been portrayed in a variety of modern media. Shandler 2009 studies the interplay between Judaism and media and how Jews have used the latter in its various forms to interpret and reinterpret their religious culture. Though not widely known today, well into the 1940s there had been a thriving Yiddish film industry in Poland, the United States and elsewhere. Goldman 2011 is a far-reaching study of the Yiddish films everywhere they were produced.

Avrutin, Eugene M., Valerii Dymshits, Alexander Ivanov, Alexander Lvov, Harriet Murav, and Alla Sokolova, eds. Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2009.
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A study of An-Sky’s 1912–1914 ethnographic expedition to Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev provinces. With the project funded by Baron Vladimir Gintsburg, An-sky’s team took over 2,000 photographs of “old synagogues, and their internal decorations, Jewish historical buildings, ethnographic types, scenes from daily life” and “recorded more than 1,800 folktales”(p. 3).
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Gabler, Neal. An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. New York: Crown, 1988.
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A study of the Jewish movie moguls that created Hollywood and helped shape the images of America that they exported to the world. Those representations, it is argued, were formed out of the immigrant Jewish experience of those who “invented Hollywood.”
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Gidal, Nachum T. “Jews in Photography.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 32 (1987): 437–453.
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One of the very few works even dedicated to the subject, which is surprising given the heavy involvement of Jews in both eastern and western Europe in the development of photography in all of its dimensions from the technical to the creative and commercial.
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Goldman, Eric. Visions, Images and Dreams: Yiddish Film Past and Present. Rev. ed. Teaneck, NJ: Holmes & Meier, 2011.
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An international study of Yiddish film. The author examines the genre’s development in multiple countries, including Poland, Austria, the United States, and the Soviet Union. The focus is on the films’ origins in the Yiddish theater, production techniques, audiences, and performers. The best study of its kind.
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Hoberman, J., and Jeffrey Shandler, eds. Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.
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Following the Jewish Museum of New York’s 2003 exhibit, this lavish and thoughtful volume explores “the ways in which the subject of Jews and the entertainment media has been presented from the beginning of the 20th century to the start of the current millennium” (p. 12).
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Shandler, Jeffrey. Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America. New York: New York University Press, 2009.
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An inventive study of the relationship between religion and the media, documenting the myriad ways American Jews have used older media such as cantorial recordings, radio, television and film, and newer media such as the Internet to engage Judaism.
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Architecture

In the field of Jewish architectural history there is now a significant body of scholarship on European synagogues. Hammer-Schenk 1981 is the most exhaustive, painstakingly documented study of German synagogues in the modern period. Krinsky 1985 takes a broader approach, looking at all of Europe, and although it extends chronologically from Antiquity to modern times, well over half the book is dedicated to the modern period. Hubka 2003, by contrast, focuses on just one Polish synagogue, that of Gwoździec, considered to have been one of the most perfect examples of Poland’s wooden synagogues. Piechotka and Piechotka 2004 is the best comprehensive study of Poland’s wooden synagogues. Coenen Snyder 2013 is not so much an architectural history but an innovative attempt at a comparative social history of London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Berlin Jewries, written through the prism of 19th-century synagogue building in those cities. “Synagogues in Germany: A Virtual Reconstruction” is a remarkable website with CAD drawings of the exterior and interior of important synagogues destroyed on the Kristallnacht of November 9, 1938.

Coenen Snyder, Saskia. Building a Public Judaism: Synagogues and Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
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A fine, comparative social history of 19th-century synagogues in Berlin, London, Amsterdam, and Paris. With an examination of the very different building histories of the synagogues, the author is able to explicate the radically different character of each congregation, the political pressures each community faced, their different socioeconomic profiles, their respective levels of religiosity, and a host of other factors.
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Hammer-Schenk, Harold. Synagogen in Deutschland: Geschichte einer Baugattung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (1780–1933). 2 vols. Hamburg, Germany: H. Christians, 1981.
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A brilliant work of scholarship, Hammer-Schenk’s account of modern synagogues in Germany is the definitive work on this subject. It goes well beyond an analysis of the buildings themselves, accounting for the social, political, and cultural contexts in which they were built.
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Hubka, Thomas C. Resplendent Synagogue: Architecture and Worship in an Eighteenth-Century Polish Community. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2003.
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Prior to World War II, Poland was dotted with about one thousand wooden synagogues, many of which were spectacularly exotic structures, some dating back to the 17th century. This book is a study of the magnificent wooden synagogue in Gwoździec. With its elaborate polychrome ceiling made up of biblical verses, proverbs, anagrams, animal figures, and complex foliage, this synagogue was one of the finest examples of this kind of Jewish architecture.
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Krinsky, Carol Herselle. Synagogues of Europe: Architecture, History, Meaning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985.
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While some of the synagogues analyzed here predate the modern period, the bulk of this excellent volume deals with 19th and 20th century synagogues across Europe. The best work of its kind.
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Piechotka, Maria, and Kazimierz Piechotka. Heaven’s Gates: Wooden Synagogues in the Territories of the Former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Warsaw, Poland: Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences, 2004.
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A comprehensive survey of Poland’s wooden synagogues.
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Synagogues in Germany: A Virtual Reconstruction.
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In 1995 the Department of Architecture at the Technische Universität-Darmstadt undertook a project to produce CAD drawings of what had been some of Germany’s most important synagogues. The website shows plans of the buildings, a brief history of them, and has virtual reconstructions of both interiors and exteriors.
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Sports History

Long overlooked by scholars, the participation of Jews in competitive sports was one of the most significant social activities undertaken by Jews in the modern period. Organized sports intersected with politics, class, medicine, and the fight against antisemitism, and they also played an important role in secular, Jewish self-fashioning. Baar 1959 is the most thorough account of the Viennese sports club, Hakoah. Bodner 1997 studies the heavy participation of Jews in boxing, recalling the link between their working-class social status and their choice of preferred sport. Brenner and Reuveni 2006 is an edited volume that traverses the late 19th century into the period after World War II, while Kugelmass 2007 is interdisciplinary in nature and, in addition to Europe, has contributions on the United States, Libya, and the Yishuv.

Baar, Arthur. 50 Jahre Hakoah, 1909–1959. Tel-Aviv: Verlagskomitee Hakoah, 1959.
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The definitive history of what had been the biggest—it had some five thousand members—and most successful Jewish sports club in the world. Before being disbanded in 1938—it was started up again in 1945—Hakoah was a transnational source of Jewish pride, particularly during the interwar period when Jews were feeling especially beleaguered.
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Bodner, Allen. When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997.
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A popular but reliable oral history of American-Jewish boxers, who fought from the 1920s through the 1940s. Discusses their second-generation immigrant status, their desire for fame and fortune, and the parental and communal disapproval they encountered, noting that while the Yiddish daily Forward did not report on Jewish boxers, it did see fit to cover those who were not Jewish.
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Brenner, Michael, and Gideon Reuveni, eds. Emancipation through Muscles: Jews and Sports in Europe. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.
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A broad-ranging work both chronologically and thematically and one of the best introductions to recent historiography on sports.
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Kugelmass, Jack, ed. Jews, Sports, and the Rights of Citizenship. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007.
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An interdisciplinary volume with contributions by leading anthropologists and historians. It seeks to understand how sports and athletics can serve as a “unique window onto Jews and their modernization, relations with coterritorial populations, and expressions of group pride” (p. 6).
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Music

Like sport and other forms of popular entertainment, far too little attention has been dedicated to Jewish musical history and the place of music in the modern Jewish experience. But while Jewish studies as a whole has been inattentive to this area, musicologists and social historians of music have produced a splendid body of work on this subject, and as the definition of Jewish studies is expanded and the field becomes more ecumenical, it would do well to incorporate musical history and culture into its repertoire. It should also be recognized that Jewish musicology has itself been invigorated and influenced by its encounter with Jewish studies. Idelsohn 1914–1932 is a monumental work based on field research of Oriental and Sephardic and Ashkenazic music. Idelsohn 2011 (first published in 1929) is a world history of Jewish music, written in English for an American readership. Slobin 1982 addresses the musical culture that emerged among the immigrants, laying out the continuities it shared with its European forms and the ruptures that went into making it a new, American genre of song. Mendelsohn 1993 is an edited collection of essays on music and its role in the modern Jewish experience. Hirshberg 1995 focuses on the struggle of the Yishuv to forge a new musical culture, one that incorporated Western and Eastern traditions. Regev and Seroussi 2004 is the best study of the link between Israeli culture and music. Especially welcome because it covers the widest possible range of musical forms and their meanings, from Zionists hymns to contemporary Israeli rock music. Loeffler 2010 is a study of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory of Music and its role in the promotion of music as a profession among Russian Jews. Loeffler also takes note of the backlash against the Jewish presence in Russian music. HaCohen 2011 is a conceptually brilliant study of the ancient charge that the Jews lack musicality.

HaCohen, Ruth. The Music Libel against the Jews. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.
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A truly interdisciplinary work that studies the charge that Jews are inherently noisemakers, and thus the opposite of idealized Christians, who were said to have been endowed with inner harmony and musicality.
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Hirshberg, Jehoash. Music in the Jewish Community of Palestine, 1880–1948: A Social History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
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A social history of how immigrant pioneers in the pre-state period sought to develop a musical culture that struck a balance between the natural inclination to use European music and the ideological imperative of Zionism to integrate Middle Eastern musical forms into the new musical culture.
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Idelsohn, Abraham Zvi. Hebräisch-orientalischer Melodienschatz. 10 vols. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1914–1932.
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Following a field trip to the Middle East in 1907 in search of Oriental and Sephardic melodies, Idelsohn published the results of his field research between 1914 and 1929 as the first five volumes of this work. Volumes 6–10 focused on Ashkenazic music. These ten volumes remain foundational in the field of Jewish ethnomusicology, which focuses, for the most part, on liturgical music.
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Idelsohn, Abraham Zvi. Jewish Music in its Historical Development. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2011.
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A major work in Jewish musicology and still in wide use. Methodologically groundbreaking, for as a Zionist, Idelsohn sought to impose a master narrative on Jewish musical cultures in order to argue that despite tonal differences that he dismissed as minor, synagogue music was essentially everywhere the same. Originally published in 1929.
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Loeffler, James Benjamin. The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.
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A study focusing on the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. Argues that because there were no admission restrictions on Jews at that institution, music became an attractive and viable profession for Russian Jews. However, with the rise of Romantic nationalism the conservatory became a target for Russian nationalists who decried what they considered its Western and Jewish orientation.
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Mendelsohn, E., ed. Modern Jews and Their Musical Agendas. Studies in Contemporary Jewry 9. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
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Deals admirably with the relationship of modern Jews to music, both popular and classical. Also addresses the impression of non-Jews to the heavy presence of Jews in European music.
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Regev, Motti, and Edwin Seroussi. Popular Music and National Culture in Israel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
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Argues that with the rise of the State of Israel, and the invention of a new Israeli culture, music played a crucial role, for as a popular form it served as a unifying force, one that offered a shared experience around which a very diverse people rallied in unison.
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Slobin, Mark. Tenement Songs: The Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982.
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Focuses on the period of mass migration, 1880–1920. Argues that the immigrants brought with them to the United States a rich repertoire of songs that had eclectic roots in cantorial music, Yiddish theater, and the European ballad and folksong. Once in the United States, Jewish songs became Americanized as they took up themes reflective of the immigrants’ lives.
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Language

The massive social, political, economic, and cultural changes experienced by modern Jews is reflected in the languages they spoke. Perhaps more than most ethnic groups this was often a matter of deliberate choice, and as such, they were participants in a vigorous and at times quite ugly language politics. Goldsmith 2000 is the most comprehensive study of the ideology of Yiddishism, also called the Yiddish language movement. Alter 1988 is a literary study of the maskilic project of turning the language of the Bible into a vernacular tongue. Harshav 1993 charts the Zionist revival of the Hebrew language and its ideological and intellectual underpinnings, whereas Miron 1995 is concerned with the invention of modern Yiddish literature. Helman 2002 demonstrates some of the practical steps taken to enforce the use of Hebrew in Mandate-era Tel Aviv, stressing the success as well as the real challenges and resistance to that program. Rodrigue 2002 discusses the polyglot nature of modern Sephardic culture. Trachtenberg 2008 studies the intellectuals whose field of inquiry was Yiddish language and culture, while Saposnik 2008 focuses on Ottoman-era Palestine and those who strove to create a new, Hebrew culture.

Alter, Robert. The Invention of Hebrew Prose: Modern Fiction and the Language of Realism. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988.
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Analyzes the way maskilic writers transformed biblical Hebrew from being a language of scripture to a modern vernacular.
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Goldsmith, Emanuel S. Modern Yiddish Culture: The Story of the Yiddish Language Movement. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000.
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A study of the 1908 Czernowitz Conference and the four principles of Yiddishism—Natan Birnbaum, Y.L. Peretz, Matisyohu Mieses, and Chaim Zhitlovsky. Originally published in 1976.
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Harshav, Benjamin. Language in Time of Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
DOI: 10.1525/california/9780520079588.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A history of the Zionist revival of the Hebrew language, situated in the context of modernism and its multiple meanings and manifestations.
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Helman, Anat. “‘Even the Dogs in the Street Bark in Hebrew’: National Ideology and Everyday Culture in Tel-Aviv.” Jewish Quarterly Review 42.3–4 (January–April 2002): 359–382.
DOI: 10.1353/jqr.2002.0029Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A study of the effort of Mandate-era Tel- Aviv’s municipal government to enforce the use of Hebrew as the single public language of the city. Despite its best efforts, other languages prevailed, “revealing a gap between the ideological consensus and every-day reality in an immigrant society.”
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Miron, Dan. A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995.
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A study of the invention of modern Yiddish literature, with a focus on S.Y. Abramovitch and his literary character Mendele. That invention entailed the creation of a “tradition” in order to make Yiddish literature legitimate. According to Miron, this was the work of “a few writers and journalists” in the 1880s.
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Rodrigue, Aron. “The Ottoman Diaspora: The Rise and Fall of Ladino Literary Culture.” In Cultures of the Jews: A New History. Edited by Biale, David, 863–885. New York: Schocken, 2002.
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Discusses the assault on Ladino by educated Francophone Sephardim, who often referred to the language as “jargon.” Stresses that despite these sentiments the people persisted in using the language until the destruction of its speakers in the Holocaust. Concludes by noting the indifference and hostility of the State of Israel toward the language. The story of Ladino carries strong echoes of the discourse on Yiddish. Part III: Modern Encounters.
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Saposnik, Arieh Bruce. Becoming Hebrew: The Creation of a Jewish National Culture in Ottoman Palestine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195331219.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Saposnik’s intervention focuses on subjects hitherto not given their due in the literature on the new Hebrew culture: the importance of the Ottoman period for this cultural revolution, the entwined relationship of Zionist to traditional Jewish culture, and cultural activists and the institutions they built to realize the new Hebrew culture.
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Trachtenberg, Barry. The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903–1917. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008.
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Focuses on Shmuel Niger, Ber Borochov, and Nokhem Shtif, and argues that as revolutionaries their cultural work on Yiddish was also political work.
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Encounters

In the 19th century, Jews began a series of encounters with Jews unlike themselves and with non-Jews in ways that were qualitatively different from the way such relationships had played themselves out in the past. Aschheim 1982 is a study of the social and cultural encounter, whether real or imagined, between German and eastern European Jews. Stanislawski 1983 sees state sponsorship of Enlightenment as having helped transform the Haskalah into an ideology and a movement that had a transformative impact on Jewish intellectual, social, and economic life. Zipperstein 1991 traces a unique kind of encounter, the one between Jews and the multiethnic population of Odessa. Zipperstein tells the story from the city’s founding in 1794 to the pogroms of 1881. Nathans 2002 traces another kind of encounter in Russia, one occasioned by the permission given to privileged classes of Jews to live outside of the Pale of Settlement. Litvak 2006 addresses the encounter between Jewish child conscripts into the army of Tsar Nicholas I through a study of the many Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish literary accounts of that episode. Veidlinger 2009 details the formation of a Jewish public sphere in Russia where, with the establishment of a plethora of new voluntary associations after the 1905 Revolution, Jews created new forms of secular Jewish culture. This process led to new forms of Jewish cultural and social encounter. Avrutin 2010 tells how a commitment to population management by Russia’s imperial government sought to manage the realm’s ethnic diversity and, as pertains to Jews, administer them in order to end their isolation and separateness. The encounter between the Jews and the Russian state led to their bureaucratization and the passage of a welter of laws to manage them. This, in turn, encouraged Jews to seek to circumvent these laws, and the diverse ways they did this is Avrutin’s focus.

Aschheim, Steven E. Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.
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Traces the negative image of the eastern European Jew in Germany as it developed over the course of the 19th century, and culminates with the radical reassessment of that image after German-Jewish soldiers encountered Polish Jews on the Eastern Front in World War I. Many expressed deep dissatisfaction with their “inauthentic” Jewish identities as they heralded the “authentic” Jewishness of the Ostjuden.
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Avrutin, Eugene M. Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010.
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Avrutin discusses a new kind of encounter; namely, that of Jews with the Imperial Russian bureaucracy. As part of a program of population management, Russian Jews were painstakingly catalogued in order to establish who was Jewish and where Jews resided. With this cataloguing came a vast number of laws particular to Jews, laws that Jews sought to subvert.
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Litvak, Olga. Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
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A study of the literary depictions of Jewish child soldiers, known as cantonists, and the way those representations shaped popular Jewish consciousness about what it meant to be a Russian Jew. Litvak argues that Jewish writers used the trope of the child draftees to express their own ambivalent feelings about Enlightenment and the breakdown of traditional society.
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Nathans, Benjamin. Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
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A study of the “selective integration” practiced by the Imperial state,” which permitted those Jews classified as “useful” (ex-soldiers, university students, and guild merchants) to settle beyond the Pale of Settlement. The experience of these privileged Jews, who, for the most part settled in St. Petersburg, constituted a new kind of relationship between Jews and the Imperial state.
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Stanislawski, Michael. Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825–1855. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983.
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Argues that the reforms of Tsar Nicholas I, such as conscription and state-sponsored Enlightenment, have traditionally been seen as merely persecutory, but, in fact, they helped hasten the end of traditional communal leadership, drastically transforming Russian Jewish society.
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Veidlinger, Jeffrey. Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009.
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Studies the way Russian Jews engaged with Jewish culture in new settings such as voluntary associations like libraries, dramatic societies, various clubs, and historical societies.
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Zipperstein, Steven. The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794–1881. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.
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Traces the radical transformation experienced by Jews over the course of the 19th century in the newly created (1794) Black Sea port of Odessa. Zipperstein stresses the impact of engagement with non-Jews, the process of embourgeoisement, and the absence of traditional religious authority as crucial factors in the development of Russia’s most modern Jewish community.
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World War I

While the Great War has long been a major focus of European historians, Jewish historians have generally not paid it the attention that it deserves. One might surmise that the reason is that the Holocaust and the State of Israel captures the bulk of the attention in 20th-century Jewish history. But with Jews fighting on both sides, and Jewish civilians caught between both sides, vast numbers of Jews had their lives irrevocably changed by the experience of World War I. It is a subject that warrants more attention than it has hitherto garnered. George Mosse was one of the earliest historians to note the centrality of World War I for German Jews; see Mosse 1977. Pulzer 1998 provides one of the best general summaries of German Jewry during World War I, with a useful bibliography. Landau 1999 has written a fine general history of French Jewry and the Great War, even extending his study into the postwar period to trace the war’s lasting and negative impact on Franco-Jewish fortunes. Rechter 2001 asserts that, in terms of ideological positioning, the war failed to make much of a difference to Viennese Jewry. Rozenblit 2001 offers a starkly different interpretation, claiming that World War I led to a major reconsideration of Jewish identity politics and cultural and political affiliations. Sterba 2003 is a comparative study of Jewish and Italian immigrants in America during the war. The focus on the Holocaust has generally obscured the fact that terrible violence befell the Jews of Eastern Galicia during the First World War and the immediate postwar period, and Prusin 2005 is ths a welcome intervention.

Landau, Philippe. Les Juifs de France et la Grande Guerre: Un patriotisme républicain, 1914–1941. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1999.
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Claims the war engendered such extreme patriotism among Jews that it blinded them to the earliest signs of what would become manifest under the Vichy regime. Postwar mythologization and commemoration of Jewish wartime contributions led to “Israélitisme,” an ideology that blended national-republican universalist values and Jewish particularism. This only further galvanized antisemitic forces.
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Mosse, George L. The Jews and the German War Experience, 1914–1918. Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture 21. New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1977.
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Identifies World War I as a pivotal and all-too overlooked moment in German-Jewish history.
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Prusin, Alexander. Nationalizing a Borderland: War, Ethnicity, and Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914–1920. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005.
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Compares the wartime policies toward Galician Jewry of the Russian occupational regime with those of the postwar Polish Republic. Argues that both saw the Jews of East Galicia as an “inner enemy,” and that both wished to remove Jews, through a mix of propaganda and violence from economic and social life. The assault on the Jews was part of the Russification and Polonization campaigns of the respective regimes.
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Pulzer, Peter. “The First World War.” In German-Jewish History in Modern Times. Vol. 3, Integration in Dispute, 1871–1918. Edited by Michael Meyer, 360–384. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
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Brief yet detailed account of the impact of the war on German-Jewish culture and sentiment, as well as the political backlash against Jews during the war with the “Jew Count” of 1916. Pulzer emphasizes that by 1918 and the onset of revolution, important sectors of German Jewry recognized that the situation would worsen for them.
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Rechter, David. The Jews of Vienna and the First Word War. London and Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001.
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A political and social history of Viennese Jewry during World War I.
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Rozenblit, Marsha L. Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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Contends that the prewar “tripartite identity,” one that combined political loyalty to the state, affiliation with a major culture of the region, and a strong sense of separate Jewish ethnicity, was no longer tenable in the postwar period with the rise of the new nation-state and antisemitism.
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Sterba, Christopher M. Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants During the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
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Examines the wartime experiences of two populations, the Italian colonia of New Haven, Connecticut, and the eastern European Jews of New York City. Both groups formed fighting units, on the one hand an all-Italian machine gun company, and on the other, the highly decorated “Melting Pot,” or Seventy-seventh Division under the command of Private Abraham Krotoshinsky, Explores the extent of and limits to acculturation during the Great War.
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New Jews

Beginning in the late 19th century, but especially by the interwar period, many Jews were gripped by the idea of change and the desire to dispense with the worlds of their fathers in order to reinvent themselves. Jews in the newly proclaimed Soviet Union were encouraged to create a particular Soviet Yiddish culture, while others became Russified. In Germany the encounter with eastern European Jews during World War I, as well as the rising tide of antisemitism in the Weimar years, led a young generation of Jews to a deep engagement with a newly invented Jewish culture, one that was at great remove from that of the bourgeois homes from which they came. Other Jews in Germany pursued a path to transformation via the university and the practice of medicine. In Palestine the Zionist leadership continued the work of the Second Aliyah, militantly committed to transforming the Yiddish-speaking Diaspora Jew into the new, Hebrew pioneer. Slezkine 2004 sees Russian Jews, Soviet ones in particular, as paradigmatic of not only modern Jews but all people transformed by modernity. Shneer 2004 takes a different approach and, instead of privileging the Russified Jews as Slezkine does, traces the formation of a new Soviet Jewish identity in Yiddish. Shternshis 2006 goes beyond literary culture to examine a broad array of cultural practices that went into the formation of a unique Soviet-Jewish popular culture. Moss 2009 challenges Slezkine’s Russification narrative and is a complement to Shternshis’s, insofar as Moss is concerned with the work of intellectuals who sought to create a new Jewish culture in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian that was not an instrumentalist tool of political ideology. Brenner 1996 focuses on Germany and the profound engagement of erstwhile, assimilated Jews with new forms of Jewish culture unique to the Weimar Republic. The modern Jewish doctor was born in Germany. Efron 2001 examines this new social type, as the first Jewish intellectuals to attend university instead of a Yeshiva chose to study medicine, and did so in numbers so large that it transformed the character and values of German Jewry as well as the social makeup and structure of the practice of medicine in Germany. Almog 2000 studies the culture of an entirely new Jewish type, the Sabras, and the lasting cultural influence they had on subsequent generations of Israelis. Helman 2010 is but one of a series of articles by the author that focus on Tel Aviv in the 1920s and 1930s, examining how the new Hebrew culture played out in what was called the “the first Hebrew city.”

Almog, Oz. The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
DOI: 10.1525/california/9780520216426.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The “new Jew” was reborn as a tough, fearless, Hebrew-speaking pioneer. This is a study of the earliest coterie of Jews to exhibit those qualities, the first generation of Sabras, or Jews born in Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s. Though they were few in number, it was their cultural and linguistic practices that formed the template for Israeli culture in the ensuing decades.
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Brenner, Michael. The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
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Often seen as a high point in Jewish assimilation, the Weimar Republic is presented here as the site of intense Jewish cultural activity. Brenner argues that assimilated Weimar Jews seeking Jewish cultural engagement invented new Jewish traditions. He looks at a broad range of institutions and cultural productions, among them Jewish adult-education classes and youth movements, new Jewish encyclopedias, popular literature, and theater.
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Efron, John M. Medicine and the German Jews: A History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.
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The encounter between Jews and medicine was a major factor in the transformation of German Jewry from a tradition-bound community to one that was largely secular, skeptical, and scientifically avant-garde.
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Helman, Anat. Young Tel Aviv: A Tale of Two Cities. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010.
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An analysis of the new Hebrew culture in the 1920s and 1930s. What makes the work highly original is that in contrast to most studies of early Hebrew culture that focus on Zionist pioneers and the Jewish return to nature and farming, Helman’s focus is on how the story played out in Tel Aviv.
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Moss, Kenneth B. Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
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Focusing on that brief period from 1917 to 1919, Moss argues for those Jewish intellectuals, the “culturists,” who sought to create a new Jewish art and high culture in Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish. Above all, the works were to constitute an end in themselves and not be a tool of political manipulation.
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Shneer, David. Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918–1930. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
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Argues for Jewish cultural agency in that the state permitted and financed, as well as placed in Jewish hands, responsibility for the creation of a new Soviet Jewish culture in Yiddish.
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Shternshis, Anna. Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
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An account of the remaking of Jewish identity in the Soviet Union. An account of the process and content by which Jewishness was shorn of Judaism and a new Jewish culture emerged, one that was “national in form” and “socialist in content.”
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Slezkine, Yuri. The Jewish Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
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Argues that Soviet Jews adapted to the modern world better than almost any other group and, in fact, became the paradigmatic moderns. Highlights the extraordinary social, educational, and occupational opportunities the early Soviet regime afforded Jews, and how this process led to a new form of Russian-Jewish identity.
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Jewish Political History

Of the many changes experienced by Jews in the modern period, their politicization is one of the most important. This played itself out most intensely in eastern Europe, especially Poland, in the interwar period. The myriad political choices and positions on offer demonstrated a high level of Jewish engagement, concern, and hope for the future, as well as levels of division that seemed to make impossible a political solution to the social and economic problems faced by Jews. Frankel 1981 is an indispensible study of the rise and development of Russian-Jewish socialism in its many forms. Mendelsohn 1983 is an excellent introduction to the complexity of interwar Jewish politics in all of its forms. Lederhendler 1989 sees modern Jewish politics as emerging from the political vacuum created by the abolition of Jewish communal autonomy in the 18th century. Mendelsohn 1993 is a fine synthetic account of Jewish politics that focuses mostly on precommunist eastern Europe and the United States. The Bund was the first modern Jewish political party, and just about the biggest on the eve of World War II. Jacobs 2001 offers a multi-perspective and comprehensive view of the party’s history, the heyday of which was in interwar Poland. Laqueur 2003 is the best single-volume history of Zionism, which the author situates within the context of contemporary European politics and ideological developments. Michels 2005 provides a detailed account of Jewish socialist politics in New York and complements Frankel insofar as those radicals in the United States contributed to Jewish socialism in Russia by providing them with pamphlets and newspapers when the censors made the production of such written materials in Russia extremely difficult. Engel 2009 is a recent, brief, and incisive account of Zionism’s origins.

Engel, David. Zionism. Harlow, UK, and New York: Longman, 2009.
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A very brief yet excellent introduction to the history of Zionism. Covers both the birth and development of the movement in Europe as well as state-building in Palestine.
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Frankel, Jonathan. Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511572494Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Arguing for the internationalist character of Russian-Jewish socialism, Frankel not only focuses on Russia, but also examines the socialist politics and ideologies Russian Jews took with them to Palestine and the United States. He stresses the dilemma that Jewish socialists faced in being torn between the conflicting impulses to universal revolution and a specific redemption of the Jewish people.
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Jacobs, Jack, ed. Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100. New York: New York University Press, 2001.
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A collection of high-quality essays on all aspects of the Bund as both a political and cultural force.
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Laqueur, Walter. A History of Zionism. New York: Schocken, 2003.
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Although a little dated—it was originally published in 1972—this is a learned, judicious, detailed, and engaging history of the subject.
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Lederhendler, Eli. The Road to Modern Jewish Politics: Political Tradition and Political Reconstruction in the Jewish Community of Tsarist Russia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
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A study that takes a longue durée approach and, instead of identifying the pogroms of 1881 and/or ideology as the sparks for modern Jewish political engagement, sees the impetus residing in the breakdown of Jewish communal and supracommunal autonomy in eastern Europe in the 18th century. Claims that new rabbis, businessmen, and maskilim emerged as political leaders.
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Mendelsohn, Ezra. The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.
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The most comprehensive country-by-country analysis of Jewish political culture in the interwar period.
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Mendelsohn, Ezra. On Modern Jewish Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
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Addresses both secular and religious politics mostly in the interwar period, seeking to account for the appeal, success, and failures of the parties in question. With so many monographic studies of Jewish politics, this synthetic account is a most useful volume.
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Michels, Tony. A Fire in their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
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A study of New York radical Yiddish politics that examines its many varieties and, according to Michels, its long-lasting impact on American Jews. Challenges the dominant American Jewish narrative of immigrant groups abandoning their radical politics in the quest for economic advancement and Americanization.
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Jewish Economic History

Until recently, Jewish economic history has not really received the kind of attention that it deserves. This is particularly puzzling, given the very long-standing and intensive engagement of Jews in trade and commerce. Added to this is the fact that various economic crises generated huge transformations in Jewish life, such as mass migration from eastern Europe, while the dire economic conditions of the Jewish proletariat in Europe and the United States gave rise to political ideologies such as Bundism and Labor Zionism, which aimed at solving the “Jewish problem” by beginning with a warts-and-all analysis of the Jewish economy. In modern central and western Europe, economic success (as opposed to crisis) saw Jews ascend from dire poverty to becoming solidly bourgeois. Finally, there is the prominence of economic themes in modern antisemitic discourse, in which Jews have been portrayed as either heartless exploiters or incorrigible paupers. With the exception of those historians who have examined Jewish political ideologies, scant work has been undertaken on some of the above-mentioned themes. However, the few classic works in the field have now been joined by a number of important recent studies that reflect the opening of a new path in modern Jewish historiography. The doyen of Jewish economic historians was the Belarussian-born Simon Kuznets, winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize for economics. He is best known for his work on development economics. What he was barely known for, in part because they were either left unpublished or were published in specifically Jewish forums, where economists did not venture and Jewish historians did not much take note, was his pioneering work on Jewish economic history. Kuznets 2011 and Kuznets 2012 collect Kuznets’s works in this area in two hefty volumes, with superb introductory essays. Kuznets is perhaps the best place to start to if one wishes to gain a broad understanding of Jewish economic history. Penslar 2001 takes a very different tack from that of Kuznets. Penslar’s focus is not the realities of the Jewish economy, per se, but rather on Jewish and Gentile perceptions of the Jewish economy and on Jews as economic actors. Karp 2008 is an intellectual history of economic discourse on Jews and its relationship to the debates over emancipation, and it complements Penslar’s work rather nicely. Avraham Barkai is one of the few Jewish historians trained in the field of economic history, and he brings his methodological skills and sophistication to Barkai 1988. His focus in this study is the impact of industrialization on German Jewry. The valuable Lederhendler 2009 is transnational in approach, comparing Russian-Jewish economic history with American immigrant economic history. Reuveni and Wobick-Segev 2010 provides an arresting set of case studies that seek to explore what the authors call “Jewish economic uniqueness,” thus challenging the work of economists who reject arguments having to do with ethnicity and nearly all of postwar historiography that has shied away from such questions because of sensitivity to charges of antisemitism. The twelve excellent essays in Kobrin 2012 are the product of a conference that dealt with Jews and the American economy, and they emphasize specific areas of the economy that Jews developed, as well as their larger political and philosophical relationship to capitalism. The essays demonstrate the extent to which American Jews thrived thanks to capitalism, as well as the extent to which its excesses turned them into some of America’s greatest detractors of the system.

Barkai, Avraham. Jüdische Minderheit und Industrialisierung: Demographie, Berufe, und Einkommem der Juden in Westdeutschland 1850–1914. Tübingen, Germany: J. S. B. Mohr, 1988.
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Over this period Germany was transformed from a largely agriculture-based economy to an industrial powerhouse. The period also saw the marked upward mobility and embourgeoisement of Jews. That process was mostly facilitated by their concentration in commerce and the professions rather than in the industrial sector, where they were only a tiny percentage of either employers or workers.
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Karp, Jonathan. The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638–1848. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511499081Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Covers the crucial two centuries when western Europe changed from an agrarian feudal economy to one of industrial capitalism and the concomitant emancipation and modernization of Jews in western Europe. Teller argues the two developments are intimately related, and he sets about demonstrating this through rereading many well-known texts, which are here set into a new framework.
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Kobrin, Rebecca, ed. Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012.
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Has essays on economic niches occupied by Jews (garment and music industries, scrap metal, liquor, and even the Native-American curio trade); their relationship to capitalism (socialist critique but also what Eli Ledehendler calls a “Third Way,” a non-universalist, neocommunitarian, religiously conservative critique); and American capitalism’s impact on Jewish culture and practice (marketing of cantorial music and Manischewitz’s introduction of machine-made matzah).
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Kuznets, Simon. Jewish Economies: Development and Migration in America and Beyond. Vol. 1, The Economic Life of American Jewry. Edited by Weyl, E. Glen and Stephanie Lo. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011.
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Contains Kuznets’s indispensible essay, “Economic Structure and Life of the Jews.” Particularly valuable is that this version is the groundbreaking and detailed draft version of 1956. A shorter version was published in 1961 in Louis Finkelstein’s edited volume, The Jews: Their History, Culture, and Religion. The essay is especially useful for its comparative methodology, highlighting global similarities in the Jewish economy.
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Kuznets, Simon. Jewish Economies: Development and Migration in America and Beyond. Vol. 2, Comparative Perspectives on Jewish Migration. Edited by Weyl, E. Glen and Stephanie Lo. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2012.
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This volume contains Kuznets’ most important works on Jewish economic history and its relation to immigration. In addition to two essays on the United States, this volume contains “Israel’s Economic Development,” which addresses the impact of mass immigration on Israel’s economy. A passionate Zionist, Kuznets played a major advisory role in the economic life of the Jewish state.
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Lederhendler, Eli. Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 1880–1920: From Caste to Class. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
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The economic life of Jews in 19th-century Russia is compared with that of Jewish immigrants in the United States. Ledehendler argues that whatever skills Jews brought with them to the United States were of little use, so that Jews had to make their way by adapting to the American labor market.
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Penslar, Derek J. Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
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With Jewish emancipation in the 19th century, their centuries-long economic distinctiveness was seen by Jews and non-Jews as a major impediment to social integration. Penslar explores how Jewish religious and lay leaders internalized much of the negative discourse about the Jewish economy and set about creating political ideologies and philanthropic associations designed to solve the Jewish (economic) problem.
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Reuveni, Gideon, and Sarah Wobick-Segev, eds. The Economy in Jewish History: New Perspectives on the Interrelationship between Ethnicity and Economic Life. New York: Berghahn, 2010.
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This volume brings together recent research on what Reuveni calls the “economic turn” in modern Jewish historiography. Thematically arranged, this collection of diverse case studies by a multinational team of scholars argues for “Jewish economic uniqueness,” and seeks to establish phenomenological patterns in global Jewish economic activity.
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Antisemitism

Antisemitism has been a force of incalculable power and devastation in the modern period. Its distinguishing qualities—ideologically and organizationally—are what make it a distinctly modern phenomenon. From an ideological point of view, what underpins modern antisemitism is a belief in Jewish power and an active conspiracy by Jews, the goal of which is world domination. By contrast, premodern manifestations of antisemitism or anti-Judaism, which were mostly theological in nature, held that Jews were rejected by God for the crime of deicide, or their refusal to recognize Muhammad’s prophecy, and as such, they were punished by being degraded, humiliated, and marginalized. The dominant religious groups among whom Jews lived never believed in such a thing as Jewish power and the ability of Jews to do them harm. In the modern period those opposed to Jews thought otherwise, with many predicting a race war against Jews. What distinguishes modern antisemitism from an organizational point of view was its politicization. Existing political parties often incorporated antisemitism into their platforms, or new political parties emerged in late 19th-century Europe with the sole intention of combating Jews. The literature on antisemitism is vast, and so only general surveys and reference works will be mentioned here. Beginning with Eisenmenger as a transitional figure between medieval and modern antisemitism, Katz 1980 argues that medieval, theologically based anti-Judaism did not disappear but was metamorphosed into a secular doctrine of racial antisemitism. Mosse 1985 views the 18th century as a pivotal moment when, coterminous with the emergence of ideas of human equality, a counter-narrative emerged that stressed human difference in racial terms and attributed qualitative values to those differences. Wistrich 1991 extends back to antiquity but the bulk of the book deals with the modern period and is global in its coverage. Cohn 1967 is an analysis of the single most important text in the arsenal of modern antisemitism, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Cohn, Norman. Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. New York: Harper & Row, 1967.
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A historical and literary analysis of the Protocols.
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Katz, Jacob. From Prejudice to Destruction: Antisemitism, 1700–1933. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.
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A comparative, national study of modern European antisemitism in which Katz posits that Christian teachings still continued to inform a broad array of antisemites, from those who continued to believe in Christianity to rationalists who were anti-Christian, such as Voltaire. The paradox was resolved, in that “it was the image of the Jew that was inherited from Christianity that determined the secular perception of the Jew” (p. 320).
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Mosse, George L. Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
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Mosse places the history of antisemitism in the larger context of European racial thought and contends that crucial to the development of racial ideologies were Enlightenment aesthetics. European notions of beauty and ugliness also informed the emerging discipline of physical anthropology, which was driven by statistical analysis, thus providing antisemitism with the appearance of scientific objectivity.
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Wistrich, Robert S. Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred. New York: Pantheon, 1991.
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As the title suggests, this volume begins in antiquity and takes the story into our own times. Of general histories of antisemitism, it is also the most global in its coverage.
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Reference Works

Cohen 1987– is an annotated bibliography that appears annually. Levy 2005 and Michael and Rosen 2007 are comprehensive dictionaries of antisemitism.

Cohen, Susan Sarah, ed. Antisemitism: An Annotated Bibliography. Munich: K. G. Saur, 1987–.
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Annotated bibliography of recent publications on antisemitism. Has appeared annually since 1987. Produced by the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which has a searchable online version.
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Levy, Richard S., ed. Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution. 2 vols. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005.
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Two-volume reference work with over six hundred articles on key figures and events in the history of antisemitism. Entries include bibliographies and cross-references to related articles.
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Michael, Robert, and Philip Rosen. Dictionary of Antisemitism from the Earliest Times to the Present. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2007.
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Reference work containing over 2,500 entries on all manner of events, individuals, institutions, and publications in the history of antisemitism.
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The Holocaust

Hardly any subject in European or Jewish history has generated quite so much literature as has the history of the Holocaust. Add to books the very best websites, with their links to primary sources as well as audio and video files, and the researcher has at his or her disposal an almost unmanageable wealth of information. It would appear that the best way to approach the subject is through a tripartite division between perpetrators, bystanders, and victims. Of course, in reality, these categories are not so neatly divided, with some bystanders eligible for placement among the perpetrators. For the most part, works that stress one of the categories tend to ignore the others, and even general histories that make claims to comprehensiveness err in one direction or another. In part this is due to conceptual problems, but technical ones also determine historical approaches. Language is the main obstacle. Rare is the genuine polyglot Holocaust historian, so one is restricted to working in the languages one knows, and for the most part the languages of those in the three different categories of actors do not readily overlap. Most Holocaust historiography focuses on the Nazis, which means that German is essential. It is fair to say that the majority of those scholars do not know the myriad languages in which the Holocaust was played out. In particular, very few know Yiddish, Hebrew, or Ladino. This therefore precludes any serious engagement with victims from eastern and southeastern Europe—in other words, the majority. Hungarian, the non-Jewish language of the largest number of Jewish victims, also eludes most researchers. None of this is to suggest that excellent scholarship hasn’t been produced despite these limitations. Rather, it is to point out that the inherent difficulties that face Holocaust historians are of a different order and magnitude from those facing modern historians working in other fields. Indeed, the order and magnitude of accurate historical reconstruction corresponds to the order and magnitude of the event itself. The recommended readings that follow include general works, those on sites and methods of destruction, and firsthand accounts.

General Histories and Reference Works

Hilberg 2003 (first published in 1961) remains the most detailed account dealing with the policies and actions of the perpetrators. Friedländer 1997 and Friedländer 2007 provide the best synthetic account of the history of the Holocaust, and Gutman 1990 is one of the best reference tool available. Dombrovska, et al. 1976–2005 is especially valuable because of its focus on Polish-Jewish communities both large and small.

Dombrovska, D., Abraham Wein, and Aharon Vais, eds. Pinkas haKehillot: Polin. 8 vols. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1976–2005.
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Detailed descriptions of histories of fifteen hundred Polish-Jewish communities, with emphasis placed on the period 1939–1945. There is an abridged English version, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and during the Holocaust, edited by Shmuel Spector and Geoffrey Wigoder (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2001).
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Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews. Vol. 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.
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Friedländer has an uncanny ability to combine generalities and fine-grained details, and this work is absorbing and does a better job than any other in combining the stories of perpetrators, bystanders, and victims. Friedländer provides an intimate portrait, focusing on both the implementation of Nazi policies and their impact on the daily lives of Jews in Germany and Austria.
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Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews. Vol. 2, The Years of Extermination, 1939–1945. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.
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With remarkable sweep, Friedländer covers nearly every country in Europe to detail the murder of European Jewry in the killing fields on the Eastern Front, the ghettos, and the death camps. The material is presented in a highly detailed, scholarly, yet unfailingly intimate manner. Both volumes together form the definitive general history of the Holocaust.
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Gutman, Israel, ed. The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. 4 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1990.
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This standard reference work on the Holocaust.
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Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. 3d ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.
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A magisterial work that painstakingly lays the evolution of Nazi policies toward the Jews and the destruction process itself. Its focus is almost entirely on the perpetrators, and since its first publication in 1961, it has aroused controversy for its claim that Jews failed to resist the Nazis, a failure conditioned by Jewish history. The book remains an unsurpassed achievement.
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Ghettos, Einsatzgruppen Killing Fields, and Death Camps

Michman 2011 is the first and only linguistic-cultural study of the emergence of Jewish ghettos during the Holocaust. Dobroszycki 1987 is an edited volume of a detailed chronicle that was compiled in the Lodz ghetto and provides one of the most vivid accounts of the conditions there. Engelking and Leociak 2009 is one of the most detailed studies of any of the ghettos in occupied Poland, and is especially valuable because it deals with the largest one of all: Warsaw. Over 1.5 million Jews were murdered by mobile death squads, a fact often overlooked because of the focus on extermination camps. Klee, et al. 1991 provides vivid, eyewitness accounts of Einsatzgruppen operations. Rhodes 2002 offers one of the most accessible general histories of the Einsatzgruppen. As the site of industrialized, assembly-line murder, the extermination camps loom large in both scholarly accounts of the Holocaust and the popular imagination. Focusing on three of the six extermination camps, Arad 1999 is one of the best comparative accounts of the establishment and operation of these killing centers. By contrast, Gutman and Berenbaum 1994 is a volume of inestimable worth about the largest of all the death camps, Auschwitz.

Arad, Yitzhak. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
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Operation Reinhard was the Aktion to murder Polish Jewry and was launched in the summer of 1942. The three extermination camps studied here, with significant attention to the individuals who ran these camps, is one of the best accounts of this aspect of the Holocaust available.
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Dobroszycki, Lucjan, ed. The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.
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The Chronicle was compiled by a group of intellectuals working in the Department of Archives in the Lodz ghetto administration from January 1941 to July 1944. It consists of an amalgam of some 1,000 reports on life and death in the ghetto, often recorded daily, and in painstaking detail.
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Engelking, Barbara, and Jacek Leociak. The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
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One of the most deeply researched and painstakingly detailed studies of nearly every aspect of the Warsaw ghetto, from its administration to its economy and cultural life.
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Gutman, Yisrael, and Michael Berenbaum, eds. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
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An edited volume of twenty-nine essays on various aspects of Auschwitz, grouped into six parts: (1) the camp’s history, (2) the mass murder perpetrated there, (3) the perpetrators, (4) the inmates and victims, (5) resistance within the camp, and (6) the knowledge and behavior of the outside world toward the camp.
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Klee, Ernst, Willi Dressen, Volker Riess, eds. “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by its Perpetrators and Bystanders. Translated by Deborah Burnstone. New York: Free Press, 1991.
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Firsthand accounts by those who either participated in or were witness to the murder of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen, as well as those who recorded their impressions of the murder of Jews by Latvian and Lithuanian civilians.
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Michman, Dan. The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos during the Holocaust. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
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Studies the prehistory of ghettos, how the Nazis used the term “ghetto” and what they understood by it, as well as the different kinds of ghettos that emerged under Nazi rule.
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Rhodes, Richard. Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust. New York: Knopf, 2002.
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Perhaps the best synthetic account of the activities of the mobile death squads. One can ignore the unsupportable theory of violence that the author employs to explain the psychology of the murderers.
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Firsthand Accounts

During the war, a number of firsthand accounts in the form of diaries and chronicles were written, and these have provided historians with extremely valuable and vivid details about the day-to-day struggles faced by Jews under Nazi occupation. Kaplan 1965 tells of life and death in the largest of the ghettos, that of Warsaw. Originally written in Hebrew, one of his greatest concerns, repeated through the diary, is that it survive the war and be made public. Barnouw and van der Stroom 1989 is the critical edition of Ann Frank’s justly famous diary. Klemperer 1999 is an account by a man who lived in Dresden throughout the Nazi years and kept a diary of exquisite detail, one that allows us to chart the ever-tightening restrictions the Nazis imposed upon Jews. Sierakowiak 1996 is the shattering diary of a teenager, a precocious intellectual trapped in the Lodz ghetto. One of the predominant themes is hunger, the promotion of which was a deliberate policy of the Nazis. The other major theme that runs through the account is Sierakowiak’s almost unquenchable thirst for knowledge, even in the face of brutality and starvation.

Barnouw, David, and Gerrold van der Stroom, eds. The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition. By Anne Frank. Translated by Arnold J. Pomerans and B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday. New York: Doubleday, 1989.
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This most famous of all Holocaust diaries has been published in many editions. This critical edition is based on comparative studies of the diary’s different iterations.
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Kaplan, Chaim A. Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan. Translated by Abraham I. Katsh. Macmillan Publishing Co., 1965.
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Kaplan was a school principal and originally wrote his diary in Hebrew. Often making several entries per day, he was committed to recording as many factual details as possible for the purpose of sharing them with posterity. Despite the privations under which he worked, including being cut off from the outside world, his astute observations about the Nazis and their intentions were remarkable for their sagacity.
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Klemperer, Victor. I Will Bear Witness, 1933–1941: A Diary of the Nazi Years. Translated by Martin Chalmers. New York: Random House, 1999.
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Klemperer was a professor of Romance literatures and lived out the war years with his Gentile wife in the city of Dresden. Confined to a Judenhaus (a segregated apartment building for Jews, which was subject to repeated Gestapo raids and violence), Klemperer provides one of the most detailed firsthand accounts of life for Jews under the ever tightening noose of Nazi persecution.
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Sierakowiak, Dawid. The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak, Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto. Translated by Kamil Turowski. Edited by Alan Adelson. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
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A brilliant and poignant diary by a young intellectual in the Lodz ghetto. Written between his fifteenth and nineteenth years, it charts the story of the ghetto’s brutality, the starvation that he and others experienced, and his attempts to continue his political and intellectual engagement while living under terror.
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The Postwar Era

The postwar era is the focus of increasing historical attention. With the rebuilding of Jewish life in Germany, the growth of the French-Jewish community, and the mass exodus of Jews from the former Soviet Union after 1989, the face of Jewish Europe is changing drastically. Nearly one million of those Jews who left Russia went to Israel, Germany, and the United States. In the case of the former two places, the impact has been enormous. Brenner 1997 takes up the story of the Jews in Germany in the immediate postwar period and the difficulties they faced in the attempt to reconstitute Jewish life in “the land of the murderers.” Of Poland’s 3.3 million Jews in 1939, only 300,000 survived the Holocaust. Most of the survivors returned to Poland in search of relatives and friends and were confronted with rejection and violence, a story told in Gross 2006. By 1950 about one in three Israelis were Holocaust survivors. Segev 1993 addresses the impact of the Holocaust on Israeli public culture and psychology. In contrast to those studies that identify a rebirth of Jewish life in Europe, Wasserstein 1996 predicts a shrinking European Jewry. By contrast, Aviv and Shneer 2005 points to a contemporary vibrancy of Jewish life outside of Israel.

Aviv, Caryn, and David Shneer. New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora. New York: New York University Press, 2005.
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Aviv and Shneer argue provocatively that with thriving new Jewish cultures in the Diaspora, young Jews no longer feels themselves to be living in exile. As such, they no longer consider Israel the Jewish “homeland.” While it is premature to pronounce the death of the Israel-Disapora dichotomy, the authors’ challenge to the traditional bifurcation provides food for thought.
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Brenner, Michael. After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
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In aftermath of the war, some 250,000 Jews found themselves in Displaced Person’s camps in Germany. By the early 1950s most had departed, leaving a remnant of the some 30,000 Jews, who set about rebuilding Jewish life. This study offers a brief history of Jewish life in the postwar period and supplements it with a set of revealing interviews.
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Gross, Jan T. Fear: Antisemitism in Poland after Auschwitz. New York: Random House, 2006.
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Some 250,000 Jews returned to Poland after the war and were subject to a hostile reception and violence. Pogroms erupted throughout the country and approximately 1,500 Jews were killed as a result of individual acts of murder or in the pogroms. Gross’s story focuses on the 1946 Kielce pogrom, in which some forty Jews were killed in the wake of a ritual murder accusation.
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Segev, Tom. The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.
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Traces the Holocaust’s impact on Israeli culture and politics from two angles: the official government response, and that of individuals with respect to their attitudes toward the survivors, toward Germany, and reparations, as well as the political and historical uses Ben Gurion made of the Eichmann trial in order to shape the world’s conscience and Israeli consciousness.
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Wasserstein, Bernard. Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe since 1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
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An especially bleak picture about the future for Jews in Europe. After 1945, European Jews found themselves either living under Communism, where assimilation and antisemitism continued to threaten Jewish life, or in Western Europe, where increasing assimilation, a rising intermarriage rate, and very low birth rates conspired to ensure that the European Jewish community would become virtually extinct.
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