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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

Lyrically enacting the cognitive dissonance and embodied contradictions of our contemporary age, Hadara Bar-Nadav’s The Animal Is Chemical collects innovative poems that straddle the frontiers of language and scientific knowledge. She brilliantly draws on her own experience as a medical editor and her family’s history of Holocaust survival to write into the hybrid legacy of Western medicine: part clinical empiricism, part human fallibility and moral bankruptcy. Displaying a robust formal range, these poems move from feverish elegies to drug-pamphlet erasures, tangible articulations of Bar-Nadav’s epigenetic, cultural, and memorial inheritance as a writer navigating chronic illness and pain. In these pages, Nazi medical experiments, pharmaceutical literature, and manifestations of intergenerational trauma collide in the lyrical archive of Bar-Nadav’s latest collection, winner of the 2022 Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry. Just as she illuminates the paradox of time — that we may think of the past as something gone and yet always present in context and legacy — Bar-Nadav proves the enduring ambivalence of pharmakon, that antidote which poisons us, the medicine that kills. This febrile, fierce book casts spells and confronts illusions, ignites grief and awe, and challenges our assumptions about what it means to heal our bodies, our families, and our shared histories. Perhaps this work fulfills the specious salvation it describes in its opening pages, performing an exorcism of truth-telling that harnesses the heat of a “myth in which a god sets us / on fire and then sets us free.” 

In 1898, the Dreyfus Affair plunged French society into a yearlong frenzy. In Paris and provincial villages throughout the country, angry crowds paraded through the streets, threatening to attack Jews and destroy Jewish-owned businesses. Anger about the imagined power of Jewish capital, as well as fears of treason and racial degeneration, made anti-Semitism a convenient banner behind which social and political factions could fall in line. Anti-Semitic feelings that had been simmering in France for decades came boiling to the surface.

Here Pierre Birnbaum guides readers on a tour of France during this crisis. He shows that in the midst of violence, Jewish citizens bravely and effectively defended themselves and were aided by a police force determined to maintain order. Birnbaum paints a vivid portrait of French Jewish culture at the time and explains why the French state remained strong in this time of widespread unrest.

The Nazi 1933 Civil Service Law and the 1935 Nuremberg Laws are often considered the first anti-Jewish decrees in interwar Europe. Mária M. Kovács convincingly argues that Hungary’s numerus clausus law of 1920, which introduced a Jewish quota at Hungary’s institutions of higher learning, was, in fact, interwar Europe’s first antisemitic law. By defining—and discriminating against—Jews as a separate “racial” or “national” group, it abrogated the principle of equal rights that had been enshrined into law; as such, it marked an abrupt reversal of Jewish emancipation in Hungary. Moreover, the numerus clausus law set the stage for subsequent “Jewish Laws” (in the late 1930s and early 1940s) that sought to solve Hungary’s “Jewish Question” by means of extraordinary legal measures that targeted Jews alone. This book examines the origins and implementation of the numerus clausus, as well as the attempts to dampen its impact on Hungary’s international reputation, focusing on the debates surrounding it promulgation (1920), its modification (1928) and its eventual application to other areas of Jewish life (1938–45).

“After Auschwitz to write even a single poem is barbaric.” The Conflagration of Community challenges Theodor Adorno’s famous statement about aesthetic production after the Holocaust, arguing for the possibility of literature to bear witness to extreme collective and personal experiences. J. Hillis Miller masterfully considers how novels about the Holocaust relate to fictions written before and after it, and uses theories of community from Jean-Luc Nancy and Derrida to explore the dissolution of community bonds in its wake.

Ladislav Grosman's powerful story of a twelve-year-old Jewish boy in wartime Slovakia smuggled into Hungary to escape deportation. 

In The Devil's Own Luck, readers experience the horrors of war and the Holocaust through the lens of the young boy's obsessive reading of pulp fiction, imposing a layer of adventure on the bleak landscape of his experience. This simultaneously tragic, humorous, and poetic novel by Ladislav Grosman was published posthumously.

A little over 100 years ago, the first production of An-sky’s The Dybbuk, a play about the possession of a young woman by a dislocated spirit, opened in Warsaw. In the century that followed, The Dybbuk became a theatrical conduit for a wide range of discourses about Jews, belonging, and modernity. This timeless Yiddish play about spiritual possession beyond the grave would go on to exert a remarkable and unforgettable impact on modern theater, film, literature, music, and culture. 

The Dybbuk Century collects essays from an interdisciplinary group of scholars who explore the play’s original Yiddish and Hebrew productions and offer critical reflections on the play’s enduring influence. The collection will appeal to scholars, students, and theater practitioners, as well as general readers.

An intellectual biography that critically engages Adolf Jellinek’s scholarship and communal activities

Adolf Jellinek (1821–1893), the Czech-born, German-educated, liberal chief rabbi of Vienna, was the most famous Jewish preacher in Central Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. As an innovative rhetorician, Jellinek helped mold and define the modern synagogue sermon into an instrument for expressing Jewish religious and ethical values for a new era. As a historian, he made groundbreaking contributions to the study of the Zohar and medieval Jewish mysticism. Jellinek was emblematic of rabbi-as-scholar-preacher during the earliest, formative years of communal synagogues as urban religious space. In a world that was rapidly losing the felt and remembered past of premodern Jewish society, the rabbi, with Jellinek as prime exemplar, took hold of the Sabbath sermon as an instrument to define and mold Judaism and Jewish values for a new world.

One woman’s quest for a great bagel becomes a poignant pursuit of culture and belonging.
Bagels have always been Jen Rubin’s cultural comfort food. Born and raised in New York City, she grew up on family gatherings anchored by sprawling bagel spreads. But after moving to Wisconsin thirty years ago, she struggled to maintain ties to her Jewish heritage—including a bagel worthy of her New York upbringing. When her mother’s death leads her to revisit her roots, Rubin embarks on a deeply personal mission: to discover whether the Midwest can produce a quality, authentic bagel. What begins as a search for comfort and connection becomes an enlightening exploration of food, identity, and belonging.
In The Great Midwest Bagel Quest, Rubin visits Chicago and St. Louis, Detroit and Ann Arbor, the Twin Cities, and Madison and Milwaukee—with a couple of side trips to New York City—sampling dozens of bagels, meeting artisan bakers, and exploring the histories of Jewish communities across the region. Along the way, she challenges the assumption that the Midwest has never produced truly authentic bagels.
Blending memoir, culinary history, travel narrative, and cultural reporting, Rubin uncovers a rich but overlooked bagel tradition while reflecting on her own complicated relationship with home. As she traces the evolution of the bagel from Jewish immigrant staple to mass-market commodity to the innovative artisanal varieties being produced today, she begins to see an evolution in her own relationship to her Jewish and familial traditions.
Warm, witty, and illuminating, The Great Midwest Bagel Quest is a fresh contribution to food writing that will appeal to readers of culinary history, immigrant history, and memoir. Most of all, it is a celebration of how food creates and sustains community—and how the search for the perfect bagel can lead us back to our true selves.

Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer stands virtually alone among prominent writers for being more widely known through translations of his work than through the original texts. Yet readers and critics of the Yiddish originals have long pointed out that the English versions are generally shortened, often shorn of much description and religious matter, and their perspectives and denouements are significantly altered. In short, they turn the Yiddish author into a Jewish-American English writer, detached from of his Eastern European Jewish literary and cultural roots.

By contrast, this collection of essays by leading Yiddish scholars seeks to recover the authentic voice and vision of the writer known to his Yiddish readers as Yitskhok Bashevis. The essays are grouped around four themes:

• The Yiddish language and the Yiddish cultural experience in Bashevis's writings
• Thematic approaches to the study of Bashevis's literature
• Bashevis's interface with other times and cultures
• Interpretations of Bashevis's autobiographical writings

A special feature of this volume is the inclusion of Joseph Sherman's new, faithful translation of a chapter from Bashevis's Yiddish "underworld" novel Yarme and Keyle.

Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany systematically destroyed an estimated 100 million books throughout occupied Europe, an act that was inextricably bound up with the murder of 6 million Jews. By burning and looting libraries and censoring “un-German” publications, the Nazis aimed to eradicate all traces of Jewish culture along with the Jewish people themselves. 

The Holocaust and the Book examines this bleak chapter in the history of printing, reading, censorship, and libraries. Topics include the development of Nazi censorship policies, the celebrated library of the Vilna ghetto, the confiscation of books from the Sephardic communities in Rome and Salonika, the experience of reading in the ghettos and concentration camps, the rescue of Polish incunabula, the uses of fine printing by the Dutch underground, and the suppression of Jewish books and authors in the Soviet Union. Several authors discuss the continuing relevance of Nazi book burnings to the present day, with essays on German responses to Friedrich Nietzsche and the destruction of Bosnian libraries in the 1990s. 

The collection also includes eyewitness accounts by Holocaust survivors and a translation of Herman Kruk's report on the Vilna ghetto library. An annotated bibliography offers readers a concise guide to research in this growing field.

By the mid-twentieth century, Eastern European Jews had become one of Argentina's largest minorities. Some represented a wave of immigration begun two generations before; many settled in the province of Entre Ríos and founded an agricultural colony. Taking its title from the resulting hybrid of acculturation, The Invention of the Jewish Gaucho examines the lives of these settlers, who represented a merger between native cowboy identities and homeland memories.

The arrival of these immigrants in what would be the village of Villa Clara coincided with the nation's new sense of liberated nationhood. In a meticulous rendition of Villa Clara's social history, Judith Freidenberg interweaves ethnographic and historical information to understand the saga of European immigrants drawn by Argentine open-door policies in the nineteenth century and its impact on the current transformation of immigration into multicultural discourses in the twenty-first century. Using Villa Clara as a case study, Freidenberg demonstrates the broad power of political processes in the construction of ethnic, class, and national identities. The Invention of the Jewish Gaucho draws on life histories, archives, material culture, and performances of heritage to enhance our understanding of a singular population—and to transform our approach to social memory itself.

A historical account of Jewish agricultural colonies in New Jersey that examines how immigrants built farming communities in early America.

The Land Was Theirs is about Farmingdale, New Jersey, a community of Jewish farming communities in the United States established with the help of the Jewish Agricultural Society. The 50 year history of Farmingdale provides a perspective on the pressures, problems, and satisfactions of rural Jewish life as experienced in one community.

Beginning in 1919, the community grew around the small town of Farmingdale, when two Jewish families pooled their resources to establish a farm. The community evolved gradually as unrelated individuals with no previous farm experience settled and then created the institutions and organizations they needed to sustain their Jewish life. By 1945 Farmingdale was one of the leading egg-producing communities in the United States, and contributed in large measure to New Jersey’s reputation as the “egg basket of America.”

The Land Was Theirs draws from life-history interviews with 120 farmers, from the author’s personal experiences, and from a variety of private and community papers and documents. They are the pieces from which a full picture of a single Jewish farm community emerges.

A budding journalist and a housing advocate join forces to investigate a series of crimes spurred by an act of vandalism at the Boston Holocaust Memorial. 

On the eve of the “Summer of Hate,” Mark Bergman, a young struggling Bar Mitzvah photographer trying to break into serious journalism, meets fellow tenant Annie Holt, a Catholic housing activist. The same night, across town, someone vandalizes the Boston Holocaust Memorial, which at first appears to be an isolated event, but when Mark joins Annie at an eviction protest across town, they soon discover it was a part of a more sinister and coordinated series of attacks. From the Vilna Shul in Beacon Hill down to South Carolina low country, Mark and Annie’s relationship deepens as they hunt the perpetrators and ultimately reach a point, both with each other and the crimes they’re investigating, where they must make the most difficult decisions they ever faced. Told from alternating points of view, Last People follows both Mark and Annie and a series of humorous minor characters, all of whom are searching for identity and a place in a fractured, volatile, and dangerous America. Part love story, part mystery, part coming of age, Last People is a novel about homelessness—literally, metaphorically—and the ways in which people grasp onto labels in order to find meaning and purpose in their lives even when those labels fail to adequately define them.

Just before the end of the Holocaust, Dr. Josef Mengele made “the last selection.” Goldie Szachter Kalib, then a 13-year old Jewish girl from Bodzentyn, Poland, and her mother were part of that selection. In The Last Selection: A Child's Journey through the Holocaust, Goldie describes her life during World War II. She includes accounts about her charming childhood in Bodzentyn, Poland, her experiences hiding with a Polish Christian family, her time in the slave camp and then Auschwitz, life in the gas chamber, her experiences in Bergen-Belsen, and finally liberation. Portions of The Last Selection: A Child's Journey through the Holocaust were used in the ABC Daytime Emmy-Award winning movie on children in the Holocaust.