BiblioVault - Books about Jews

Tangled Roots

The Emergence of Israeli Culture

Israel Bartal

SBL Press, 2020

A new interpretation of the roots of Israeli culture

In Tangled Roots: The Emergence of Israeli Culture, Israel Bartal traces the history of modern Hebrew culture prior to the emergence of political Zionism. Bartal examines how traditional and modernist ideals and Western and non-European Jewish cultures merged in an unprecedented encounter between an ancient land (Israel) and a multigenerational people (the Jews). Premodern Jewish traditionalists, Palestinian locals, foreign imperial forces, and Jewish intellectuals, writers, journalists, and party functionaries each affected the Israeli culture that emerged. As this new Hebrew culture was taking shape, the memory of the recent European past played a highly influential role in shaping the image of the New Hebrew, that mythological hero who was meant to supplant the East European exilic Jew.

Features

A critical revision of most contemporary politicized histories of Jewish nationalism
An examination of the history of modern Hebrew culture prior to political Zionism

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Teaching Israel

Studies of Pedagogy from the Field

Edited by Sivan Zakai and Matt Reingold

Brandeis University Press, 2024

An edited volume that grapples with the complex issues and conflicts that face instructors developing curricula about Israel.

Jewish Americans are divided in their views on Israel. While scholars have outlined philosophical principles to guide educators who teach about Israel, there has been less scholarship focused on the pedagogy surrounding the country. This book resituates teaching—the questions, dilemmas, and decision-making that teachers face—as central to both Israel studies and Israel education. Contributors illuminate how educators from differing pedagogical orientations, who teach in a range of educational settings learn, understand, undertake, and ultimately improve the work of teaching Israel. The volume also looks at the professional support and learning opportunities teachers may need to engage with these pedagogical questions.

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Telling the Little Secrets

American Jewish Writing since the 1980s

Janet Handler Burstein

University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

Janet Burstein argues that American Jewish writers since the 1980s have created a significant literature by wrestling with the troubled legacy of trauma, loss, and exile. Their ranks include Cynthia Ozick, Todd Gitlin, Art Spiegelman, Pearl Abraham, Aryeh Lev Stollman, Jonathan Rosen, and Gerda Lerner. Whether confronting the massive losses of the Holocaust, the sense of “home” in exile, or the continuing power of Jewish memory, these Jewish writers search for understanding within “the little secrets” of their dark, complicated, and richly furnished past.

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The Tenement Saga

The Lower East Side and Early Jewish American Writers

Sanford Sternlicht

University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

Nearly two million Jewish men, women, and children emigrated from Eastern Europe between 1882 and 1924 and settled in, or passed through, the Lower East Side of New York City. Sanford Sternlicht tells the story of his own childhood in this vibrant neighborhood and puts it within the context of fourteen early twentieth-century East Side writers. Anzia Yezierska, Abraham Cahan, Michael Gold, and Henry Roth, and others defined this new "Jewish homeland" and paved the way for the later great Jewish American novelists.
Sternlicht discusses the role of women, the Yiddish Theater, secular values, the struggle between generations, street crime, politics, labor unions, and the importance of newspapers and periodicals. He documents the decline of Yiddish culture as these immigrants blended into what they called "The Golden Land."

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Tenement Songs

The Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants

Mark Slobin

University of Illinois Press, 1982

Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants brought a rich heritage of musical expression to the United States. On Manhattan's Lower East Side, a thriving Yiddish theater scene developed, and a new, distinctly Jewish American songcraft began to emerge. Mark Slobin's ethnographic study of the music and culture of the time traces the development of Yiddish popular song in America, delving into melodies, sheet music, and printers' iconography to bring alive a time and place that, while almost forgotten, still exercises an enormous effect on American popular culture.

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Textual Sources for the Study of Judaism

Edited by Philip S. Alexander

University of Chicago Press, 1990

"Alexander assembles material from Scripture and tradition, through religious law and ethical literature to a section on Society and the Jews, and prefaces the whole with an admirable introduction."—Jonathan Sacks, Jewish Chronicle

"The texts . . . which are drawn from over two thousand years of history, are usefully divided, annotated and glossed. They enable students to explore the tradition in a new way [and] give a marvellous insight into the richness and liveliness of the Jewish religion and culture: we are given wit and pathos in addition to popular story and religious law."—Janet Trotter, Resource

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"Therefore, Choose Life..."

An Autobiography

Moisey Wolf

Oregon State University Press, 2014

An annotated translation of the extraordinary autobiography of Dr. Moisey Wolf (1922-2007), “Therefore, Choose Life...” is an important addition to the literature of Jewish experience and deepens our understanding of the human condition in the twentieth century.

Wolf describes his Jewish childhood and youth in pre-war Poland, his escape from the Holocaust and subsequent medical service in the Soviet Army during World War II and the following decade, his distinguished career in psychiatry in post-Stalinist Soviet Russia, and his final years in Portland, Oregon, after his departure from the Soviet Union in 1992.

Wolf’s narrative skill and evocative personal insights, combined with Judson Rosengrant’s judicious editing and annotation and elegant translation, provide the reader with direct access to a world that has seemingly ceased to exist, yet continues to resonate and inform our own lives in powerful ways.

“Therefore, Choose Life…” will appeal to readers interested in the history of the East-European twentieth century, pre-Holocaust Jewish family life in Poland, and in the survival of a man of deep religious faith and cultivation in the face of the catastrophes and vicissitudes of his time and place.

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They Thought They Were Free

The Germans, 1933–45

Milton Mayer

University of Chicago Press, 2017

“When this book was first published it received some attention from the critics but none at all from the public. Nazism was finished in the bunker in Berlin and its death warrant signed on the bench at Nuremberg.”

That’s Milton Mayer, writing in a foreword to the 1966 edition of They Thought They Were Free. He’s right about the critics: the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1956. General readers may have been slower to take notice, but over time they did—what we’ve seen over decades is that any time people, across the political spectrum, start to feel that freedom is threatened, the book experiences a ripple of word-of-mouth interest. And that interest has never been more prominent or potent than what we’ve seen in the past year.

They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune.

A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.

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They Thought They Were Free

The Germans, 1933-45

Milton Mayer

University of Chicago Press, 1966

First published in 1955, They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.”--from Chapter 13, “But Then It Was Too Late”

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They Were Just People

Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust

Bill Tammeus & Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn

University of Missouri Press, 2009

Hitler’s attempt to murder all of Europe’s Jews almost succeeded. One reason it fell short of its nefarious goal was the work of brave non-Jews who sheltered their fellow citizens. In most countries under German control, those who rescued Jews risked imprisonment and death. In Poland, home to more Jews than any other country at the start of World War II and location of six German-built death camps, the punishment was immediate execution.

This book tells the stories of Polish Holocaust survivors and their rescuers. The authors traveled extensively in the United States and Poland to interview some of the few remaining participants before their generation is gone. Tammeus and Cukierkorn unfold many stories that have never before been made public: gripping narratives of Jews who survived against all odds and courageous non-Jews who risked their own lives to provide shelter.

These are harrowing accounts of survival and bravery. Maria Devinki lived for more than two years under the floors of barns. Felix Zandman sought refuge from Anna Puchalska for a night, but she pledged to hide him for the whole war if necessary—and eventually hid several Jews for seventeen months in a pit dug beneath her house. And when teenage brothers Zygie and Sol Allweiss hid behind hay bales in the Dudzik family’s barn one day when the Germans came, they were alarmed to learn the soldiers weren’t there searching for Jews, but to seize hay. But Zofia Dudzik successfully distracted them, and she and her husband insisted the boys stay despite the danger to their own family.

Through some twenty stories like these, Tammeus and Cukierkorn show that even in an atmosphere of unimaginable malevolence, individuals can decide to act in civilized ways. Some rescuers had antisemitic feelings but acted because they knew and liked individual Jews. In many cases, the rescuers were simply helping friends or business associates. The accounts include the perspectives of men and women, city and rural residents, clergy and laypersons—even children who witnessed their parents’ efforts.

These stories show that assistance from non-Jews was crucial, but also that Jews needed ingenuity, sometimes money, and most often what some survivors called simple good luck. Sixty years later, they invite each of us to ask what we might do today if we were at risk—or were asked to risk our lives to save others.

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Thinking in Jewish

Jonathan Boyarin

University of Chicago Press, 1996

How does one "think" in Jewish? What does it mean to speak in English of Yiddish as Jewish, as a certain intermediary generation of immigrants and children of immigrants from Jewish Eastern Europe has done?

A fascination with this question prompted Jonathan Boyarin, one of America's most original thinkers in critical theory and Jewish ethnography, to offer the unexpected Jewish perspective on the vexed issue of identity politics presented here. Boyarin's essays explore the ways in which a Jewish—or, more particularly, Yiddish—idiom complicates the question of identity. Ranging from explorations of a Lower East Side synagogue to Fichte's and Derrida's contrasting notions of the relation between the Jews and the idea of Europe, from the Lubavitch Hasidim to accounts of self-making by Judith Butler and Charles Taylor, Thinking in Jewish will be indispensable reading for students of critical theory, cultural studies, and Jewish studies.

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This Cannot Happen Here

Integration and Jewish Resistance in the Netherlands, 1940-1945

Ben Braber

Amsterdam University Press, 2013

This sweeping work is the first comprehensive English-language study of Jewish resistance in the Netherlands during World War II.

Adopting a comparative approach, Ben Braber explores the situation of Jews in the Netherlands against the backdrop of their experiences in other Western European countries. Charting the occurrences of Jewish resistance, he pays particular attention to the ways in which the integration of Jews into Dutch society influenced their responses to German persecution. Braber’s incisive analyses shed new light on Dutch and Jewish history, pointing the way toward future paths of inquiry.

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This Happy Land

The Jews of Colonial and Antebellum Charleston

James William Hagy

University of Alabama Press, 1993

This Happy Land charts the history of the Jewish community in Charleston, South Carolina, from the arrival of the first Jewish settlers in the 1690s until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. Charleston was the preeminent city of the South for many decades, and its Jewish community was the largest in North America from about the time of the American Revolution until around 1820. American Reform Judaism, one of the three major divisions of the faith, first appeared in Charleston in 1824 when the Reformed Society of Israelites was established. What happened among the Jews in Charleston thus affected the development of Judaism throughout America.

The Jews who lived in the city from the 17th century to 1861 are identified in Hagy’s comprehensive volume, which includes information on their places of origin, marriages, children, and deaths. From Hagy’s exhaustive research into published and archival sources, patterns emerged that allowed him to draw conclusions about the life of the people in the city and to develop both a social and religious history. Hagy shows that the Jews who lived in Charleston quickly adapted to Southern ways of life, including dueling and the ownership of slaves and plantations. Jewish residents gained full economic and political rights long before other communities in the western world, which led to their full participation in the town’s public, financial, intellectual, and social life. The also lived where they chose, followed the professions they wanted, and generally participated in the affairs of the city. Most viewed America as this “happy land” and Charleston as their “New Jerusalem.”

This book breaks new ground in the history of Jewish communities by providing such analyses as the origins of residents, the roles that women played in business, the causes of mortality, the antebellum Jewish family, the common aspects of life, and relations between Jews and African-Americans. It also provides a thorough analysis of the Reformed Society of Israelites that originated at Beth Elohim synagogue, and which became the first reform movement in America. The volume concludes with an appendix containing a list of all the known Jewish residents of Charleston for this period with selected biographical information.

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Three-Way Street

Jews, Germans, and the Transnational

Jay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2016

As German Jews emigrated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and as exiles from Nazi Germany, they carried the traditions, culture, and particular prejudices of their home with them. At the same time, Germany—and Berlin in particular—attracted both secular and religious Jewish scholars from eastern Europe. They engaged in vital intellectual exchange with German Jewry, although their cultural and religious practices differed greatly, and they absorbed many cultural practices that they brought back to Warsaw or took with them to New York and Tel Aviv. After the Holocaust, German Jews and non-German Jews educated in Germany were forced to reevaluate their essential relationship with Germany and Germanness as well as their notions of Jewish life outside of Germany.

Among the first volumes to focus on German-Jewish transnationalism, this interdisciplinary collection spans the fields of history, literature, film, theater, architecture, philosophy, and theology as it examines the lives of significant emigrants. The individuals whose stories are reevaluated include German Jews Ernst Lubitsch, David Einhorn, and Gershom Scholem, the architect Fritz Nathan and filmmaker Helmar Lerski; and eastern European Jews David Bergelson, Der Nister, Jacob Katz, Joseph Soloveitchik, and Abraham Joshua Heschel—figures not normally associated with Germany. Three-Way Street addresses the gap in the scholarly literature as it opens up critical ways of approaching Jewish culture not only in Germany, but also in other locations, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

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Through the Sands of Time

A History of the Jewish Community of St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands

Judah M. Cohen

Brandeis University Press, 2012

In 1796, the Jews of St. Thomas founded the first Jewish congregation on this Caribbean island. By 1803, new arrivals from England, France, and the neighboring islands of St. Eustatius and Curaçao increased the original number from a handful of congregants to twenty-two families. Their small synagogue was destroyed by fires and rebuilt several times. The congregation numbered sixty-four families by the time the present synagogue was erected in 1833. It is by now the oldest synagogue in continuous use under the American flag. The congregation was also among the first to receive copies of the new West London Reform liturgy when it came out in 1841 and the first in this hemisphere to hold a Jewish confirmation ceremony, two years later. In addition, the St. Thomas Synagogue has produced its own unique religious literature relating to hurricanes! While the synagogue has served for over 200 years as a central religious and social gathering place, the Jews of St. Thomas have been highly mobile members of a progressive, cosmopolitan society that at times rivaled any in the world. As an accepted part of the larger community, members were accomplished, model citizens in a highly tolerant Danish colonial society. Jews took positions in government, served as auctioneers, participated in the local Masonic lodges, and represented other countries as consuls in St. Thomas. As traders in a mercantile culture, the Jews contributed to the activity of one of the world’s busiest harbors and played a crucial role in St. Thomas’s nineteenth-century rise to prominence in the northern Caribbean.

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The Tiger in the Attic

Memories of the Kindertransport and Growing Up English

Edith Milton

University of Chicago Press, 2006

In 1939, on the eve of Hitler's invasion of Poland, seven-year-old Edith Milton (then Edith Cohn) and her sister Ruth left Germany by way of the Kindertransport, the program which gave some 10,000 Jewish children refuge in England. The two were given shelter by a jovial, upper-class British foster family with whom they lived for the next seven years. Edith chronicles these transformative experiences of exile and good fortune in The Tiger in the Attic, a touching memoir of growing up as an outsider in a strange land.

In this illuminating chronicle, Edith describes how she struggled to fit in and to conquer self-doubts about her German identity. Her realistic portrayal of the seemingly mundane yet historically momentous details of daily life during World War II slowly reveals istelf as a hopeful story about the kindness and generosity of strangers. She paints an account rich with colorful characters and intense relationships, uncanny close calls and unnerving bouts of luck that led to survival. Edith's journey between cultures continues with her final passage to America—yet another chapter in her life that required adjustment to a new world—allowing her, as she narrates it here, to visit her past as an exile all over again.

The Tiger in the Attic is a literary gem from a skilled fiction writer, the story of a thoughtful and observant child growing up against the backdrop of the most dangerous and decisive moment in modern European history. Offering a unique perspective on Holocaust studies, this book is both an exceptional and universal story of a young German-Jewish girl caught between worlds.

“Adjectives like ‘audacious’ and ‘eloquent,’ ‘enchanting’ and ‘exceptional’ require rationing. . . . But what if the book demands these terms and more? Such is the case with The Tiger in the Attic, Edith Milton’s marvelous memoir of her childhood.”—Kerry Fried, Newsday

“Milton is brilliant at the small stroke . . . as well as broader ones.”—Alana Newhouse, New York Times Book Review

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To Come to the Land

Immigration and Settlement in 16th-Century Eretz-Israel

Abraham David, translated by Dena Ordan

University of Alabama Press, 1999

To Come to the Land makes available in English a vast body of research,
previously available only in Hebrew, on the early history of the land now
known as Israel.

Abraham David here focuses on the Spanish and Portuguese Jews who fled
the Iberian Peninsula during the 16th century, tracing the beginnings of
Sephardic influence in the land of Israel.

After the Ottoman Turks conquered Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in 1516,
the Ottoman regime, unlike their Mamluk predecessors, encouraged economic
development and settlement throughout the region. This openness to immigration
offered a solution to the crisis Iberian Jews were undergoing as a result
of their expulsion from Spain and the forced conversions in Portugal. Within
a few years of the Ottoman conquest, Jews of Spanish extraction, many of
them clustered in urban areas, dominated the Jewish communities of Eretz-Israel.

In this carefully researched study, David examines the lasting impression
made by these enterprising Jewish settlers on the commercial, social, and
intellectual life of the area under early Ottoman rule. Of particular interest
is his examination of the cities of Jerusalem and Safed and David's succinct
biographies of leading Jewish personalities throughout the region.

This first English translation of a ground-breaking Hebrew work provides
a comprehensive overview of a significant chapter in the history of Israel
and explores some of the factors that brought to it the best minds of the
age. Essential for scholars of late Medieval Jewish history, To Come to
the Land will also be an important resource for scholars of intellectual
history, as it provides background crucial to an understanding of the intellectual
flourishing of the period.

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To Tell At Last

Survival under False Identity, 1941-45

Blanca Rosenberg

University of Illinois Press, 1993

      "Searing. . . . With
        an even hand and understated prose, Ms. Rosenberg, now a New York City
        psychotherapist, bravely depicts Nazi carnage in chilling detail."
        -- Susan Shapiro, New York Times Book Review
      "[A] harrowing account
        of intrigue and danger with all the elements of a war movie adventure."
        -- Miriam Rinn, The Forward
      This memoir of how a Jewish
        woman survived Nazi Germany by passing as an Aryan was selected as the
        best book on Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Literature by the Israeli
        committee of the Egit Grants.

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The Tragedy of a Generation

The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe

Joshua M. Karlip

Harvard University Press, 2013

The Tragedy of a Generation is the story of the rise and fall of an ideal: an autonomous Jewish nation in Europe. It traces the origins of two influential but overlooked strains of Jewish thought—Yiddishism and Diaspora Nationalism—and documents the waning hopes and painful reassessments of their leading representatives against the rising tide of Nazism and, later, the Holocaust.

Joshua M. Karlip presents three figures—Elias Tcherikower, Yisroel Efroikin, and Zelig Kalmanovitch—seen through the lens of Imperial Russia on the brink of revolution. Leaders in the struggle for recognition of the Jewish people as a national entity, these men would prove instrumental in formulating the politics of Diaspora Nationalism, a middle path that rejected both the Zionist emphasis on Palestine and the Marxist faith in class struggle. Closely allied with this ideology was Yiddishism, a movement whose adherents envisioned the Yiddish language and culture, not religious tradition, as the unifying force of Jewish identity.

We follow Tcherikower, Efroikin, and Kalmanovitch as they navigate the tumultuous early decades of the twentieth century in pursuit of a Jewish national renaissance in Eastern Europe. Correcting the misconception of Yiddishism as a radically secular movement, Karlip uncovers surprising confluences between Judaism and the avowedly nonreligious forms of Jewish nationalism. An essential contribution to Jewish historiography, The Tragedy of a Generation is a probing and poignant chronicle of lives shaped by ideological conviction and tested to the limits by historical crisis.

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The Translated Jew

German Jewish Culture outside the Margins

Leslie Morris

Northwestern University Press, 2018

The Translated Jew brings together an eclectic set of literary and visual texts to reimagine the transnational potential for German Jewish culture in the twenty-first century. Departing from scholarship that has located the German Jewish text as an object that can be defined geographically and historically, Leslie Morris challenges national literary historiography and redraws the maps by which transnational Jewish culture and identity must be read.

Morris explores the myriad acts of translation, actual and metaphorical, through which Jewishness leaves its traces, taking as a given the always provisional nature of Jewish text and Jewish language. Although the focus is on contemporary German Jewish literary cultures, The Translated Jew also turns its attention to a number of key visual and architectural projects by American, British, and French artists and writers, including W. G. Sebald, Anne Blonstein, Hélène Cixous, Ulrike Mohr, Daniel Blaufuks, Paul Celan, Raymond Federman, and Rose Ausländer.

In thus realigning German Jewish culture with European and American Jewish culture and post-Holocaust aesthetics, this book explores the circulation of Jewishness between the United States and Europe. The insistence on the polylingualism of any single language and the multidirectionality of Jewishness are at the very center of The Translated Jew.

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Transmitting Jewish History

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in Conversation with Sylvie Anne Goldberg

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Sylvie Anne Goldberg

Brandeis University Press, 2021

The deeply personal reflections of a giant of Jewish history.

Scholar Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932–2009) possessed a stunning range of erudition in all eras of Jewish history, as well as in world history, classical literature, and European culture. What Yerushalmi also brought to his craft was a brilliant literary style, honed by his own voracious reading from early youth and his formative undergraduate studies. This series of interviews paints a revealing portrait of this giant of history, bringing together exceptional material on Yerushalmi’s personal and intellectual journeys that not only attests to the astonishing breakthrough of the issues of Jewish history into “general history,” but also offers profound insight into being Jewish in today's world.

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Travail In An Arab Land

Samuel Romanelli

University of Alabama Press, 1989

Samuel Romanelli was a free spirit, a son of the Enlightenment, who spend most of his life travelling in search of adventure, knowledge, and patrons for his literary endeavors. By the early 1780s, Romanelli had travelled from his homeland to England and established himself among the Maskilim, or Jews of the Enlightenment, and patrons of Hebrew culture. Fluent in ten languages, he was a poet and translator of classical and contemporary literature into Hebrew, and apparently he earned a good living.

During a return voyage to Italy in 1786, he became stranded in Gibraltar for an extended time which depleted his funds, and his economic circumstances forced him to join a merchant travelling to Morocco. Through misadventure in Morocco, he lost his passport and was retained in that country for four years, the story of which forms Travail in an Arab Land, first published in 1792 in Berlin. The book is a firsthand account of the author’s adventures during the four years he was stranded in Sharifan Morocco between 1787 and 1790.

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Traveling Heavy

A Memoir in between Journeys

Ruth Behar

Duke University Press, 2013

Traveling Heavy is a deeply moving, unconventional memoir by the master storyteller and cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar. Through evocative stories, she portrays her life as an immigrant child and later, as an adult woman who loves to travel but is terrified of boarding a plane. With an open heart, she writes about her Yiddish-Sephardic-Cuban-American family, as well as the strangers who show her kindness as she makes her way through the world. Compassionate, curious, and unafraid to reveal her failings, Behar embraces the unexpected insights and adventures of travel, whether those be learning that she longed to become a mother after being accused of giving the evil eye to a baby in rural Mexico, or going on a zany pilgrimage to the Behar World Summit in the Spanish town of Béjar.

Behar calls herself an anthropologist who specializes in homesickness. Repeatedly returning to her homeland of Cuba, unwilling to utter her last goodbye, she is obsessed by the question of why we leave home to find home. For those of us who travel heavy with our own baggage, Behar is an indispensable guide, full of grace and hope, in the perpetual search for connection that defines our humanity.

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Tropical Zion

General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa

Allen Wells

Duke University Press, 2009

Seven hundred and fifty Jewish refugees fled Nazi Germany and founded the agricultural settlement of Sosúa in the Dominican Republic, then ruled by one of Latin America’s most repressive dictators, General Rafael Trujillo. In Tropical Zion, Allen Wells, a distinguished historian and the son of a Sosúa settler, tells the compelling story of General Trujillo, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and those fortunate pioneers who founded a successful employee-owned dairy cooperative on the north shore of the island.

Why did a dictator admit these desperate refugees when so few nations would accept those fleeing fascism? Eager to mollify international critics after his army had massacred 15,000 unarmed Haitians, Trujillo sent representatives to Évian, France, in July, 1938 for a conference on refugees from Nazism. Proposed by FDR to deflect criticism from his administration’s restrictive immigration policies, the Évian Conference proved an abject failure. The Dominican Republic was the only nation that agreed to open its doors. Obsessed with stemming the tide of Haitian migration across his nation’s border, the opportunistic Trujillo sought to “whiten” the Dominican populace, welcoming Jewish refugees who were themselves subject to racist scorn in Europe.

The Roosevelt administration sanctioned the Sosúa colony. Since the United States did not accept Jewish refugees in significant numbers, it encouraged Latin America to do so. That prodding, paired with FDR’s overriding preoccupation with fighting fascism, strengthened U.S. relations with Latin American dictatorships for decades to come. Meanwhile, as Jewish organizations worked to get Jews out of Europe, discussions about the fate of worldwide Jewry exposed fault lines between Zionists and Non-Zionists. Throughout his discussion of these broad dynamics, Wells weaves vivid narratives about the founding of Sosúa, the original settlers and their families, and the life of the unconventional beach-front colony.

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Troubled Waters

Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia

I. Michael Aronson

University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990

In this pathbreaking study, I. Michael Aronson offers a closely argued and many-faceted reinterpretation of Russian anti-Semitism and tsarist nationalities policy. He examines, and refutes, the widely held belief that the anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia in 1881 were a result of a conspiracy supported by the tsarist government or circles close to it, investigating claims and counterclaims about what happened during that fateful year and guiding the reader through a maze of events and decades of subsequent interpretations.

Although the pogroms are treated within the context of Russian history, Aronson's analysis has significance for Jewish studies as well. When the Russian government adopted reactionary and repressive policies, Jews began to seek new solutions to the problems that plagued them: massive numbers emigrated to the United States; other turned to revolutionary socialism; still others were attracted to Zionism and supported the creation of the state of Israel.

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Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew

Entangled Lives in Morocco

Lawrence Rosen

University of Chicago Press, 2015

In this remarkable work by seasoned scholar Lawrence Rosen, we follow the fascinating intellectual developments of four ordinary Moroccans over the span of forty years. Walking and talking with Haj Hamed Britel, Yaghnik Driss, Hussein Qadir, and Shimon Benizri—in a country that, in a little over a century, has gone from an underdeveloped colonial outpost to a modern Arab country in the throes of economic growth and religious fervor—Rosen details a fascinating plurality of viewpoints on culture, history, and the ways both can be dramatically transformed.

Through the intellectual lives of these four men, this book explores a number of interpretative and theoretical issues that have made Arab culture distinct, especially in relationship to the West: how nothing is ever hard and fast, how everything is relational and always a product of negotiation. It showcases the vitality of the local in a global era, and it contrasts Arab notions of time, equality, and self with those in the West. Likewise, Rosen unveils his own entanglement in their world and the drive to keep the analysis of culture first and foremost, even as his own life enmeshes itself in those of his study. An exploration of faith, politics, history, and memory, this book highlights the world of everyday life in Arab society in ways that challenge common notions and stereotypes.

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