Examines the fascinating and controversial career of Israel Zangwillauthor, journalist, feminist, Zionist, and the first Jewish celebrity of the twentieth century.

A historical tour de force, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a groundbreaking account of Jewish and Israeli history. Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In this iconoclastic work, which spent nineteen weeks on the Israeli bestseller list and won the coveted Aujourd'hui Award in France, Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel's future.

From the acclaimed biographer, screenwriter, and novelist Frederic Raphael, here is an audacious history of Josephus (37–c.100), the Jewish general turned Roman historian, whose emblematic betrayal is a touchstone for the Jew alone in the Gentile world. Joseph ben Mattathias’s transformation into Titus Flavius Josephus, historian to the Roman emperor Vespasian, is a gripping and dramatic story. His life, in the hands of Frederic Raphael, becomes a point of departure for an appraisal of Diasporan Jews seeking a place in the dominant cultures they inhabit. Raphael brings a scholar’s rigor, a historian’s perspective, and a novelist’s imagination to this project. He goes beyond the fascinating details of Josephus’s life and his singular literary achievements to examine how Josephus has been viewed by posterity, finding in him the prototype for the un-Jewish Jew, the assimilated intellectual, and the abiding apostate: the recurrent figures in the long centuries of the Diaspora. Raphael’s insightful portraits of Yehuda Halevi, Baruch Spinoza, Karl Kraus, Benjamin Disraeli, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Hannah Arendt extend and illuminate the Josephean worldview Raphael so eloquently lays out.

Traces the roots of ideologies and outlooks that shape Jewish life in Israel and the United States today Zionism and the Melting Pot pivots away from commonplace accounts of the origins of Jewish politics and focuses on the ongoing activities of actors instrumental in the theological, political, diplomatic, and philanthropic networks that enabled the establishment of new Jewish communities in Palestine and the United States. M. M. Silver’s innovative new study highlights the grassroots nature of these actors and their efforts—preaching, fundraising, emigration campaigns, and mutual aid organizations—and argues that these activities were not fundamentally ideological in nature but instead grew organically from traditional Judaic customs, values, and community mores. Silver examines events in three key locales—Ottoman Palestine, czarist Russia and the United States—during a period from the early 1870s to a few years before World War I. This era which was defined by the rise of new forms of anti-Semitism and by mass Jewish migration, ended with institutional and artistic expressions of new perspectives on Zionism and American Jewish communal life. Within this timeframe, Silver demonstrates, Jewish ideologies arose somewhat amorphously, without clear agendas; they then evolved as attempts to influence the character, pace, and geographical coordinates of the modernization of East European Jews, particularly in, or from, Russia’s czarist empire. Unique in his multidisciplinary approach, Silver combines political and diplomatic history, literary analysis, biography, and organizational history. Chapters switch successively from the Zionist context, both in the czarist and Ottoman empires, to the United States’ melting-pot milieu. More than half of the figures discussed are sermonizers, emissaries, pioneers, or writers unknown to most readers. And for well-known figures like Theodor Herzl or Emma Lazarus, Silver’s analysis typically relates to texts and episodes that are not covered in extant scholarship. By uncovering the foundations of Zionism—the Jewish nationalist ideology that became organized formally as a political movement—and of melting-pot theories of Jewish integration in the United States, Zionism and the Melting Pot breaks ample new ground.

It is my sincere desire that this simple and elegant practice of the Five Warrior Syllables, which is based on the highest teachings of the Tibetan Bn Buddhist tradition of which I am a lineage holder, will benefit many beings in the West. Please receive it with my blessing, and bring it into your life. Let it support you to become kind and strong and clear and awake. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche One of the world's oldest unbroken spiritual traditions is the Bon Buddhist tradition of Tibet. This wisdom path has survived, thanks to the efforts of a handful of dedicated lamas such as Bn lineage holder Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. Now, with Tibetan Sound Healing, you can connect to the ancient sacred sounds of the Bn practiceand through them, activate the healing potential of your natural mind. The Bn healing tradition invokes the Five Warrior Sylla blessed sounds that bring us to the essential nature of mind and release the boundless creativity and positive qualities that are fundamental to it. Through the medicine of sound, you can clear obstacles of your body, your energy and emotions, and the subtle sacred dimensions of your being. In this integrated book-and-CD learning program, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche gives you the tools to access wisdom and compassion and use the vibration of sacred sound to cultivate the healing power within your body s subtle channels. It is my sincere desire that this simple and elegant practice of the Five Warrior Syllables, which is based on the highest teachings of the Tibetan Bn Buddhist tradition of which I am a lineage holder, will benefit many beings in the West. Please receive it with my blessing, and bring it into your life. Let it support you to become kind and strong and clear and awake. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche One of the world's oldest unbroken spiritual traditions is the Bn Buddhist tradition of Tibet.

Nineteenth-century French Jewry was a community struggling to meet the challenges of emancipation and modernity. This struggle, with its origins in the founding of the French nation, constitutes the core of modern Jewish identity. With the Revolution of 1789 came the collapse of the social, political, and philosophical foundations of exclusiveness, forcing French society and the Jews to come to terms with the meaning of emancipation. Over time, the enormous challenge that the emancipation posed for traditional Jewish beliefs became evident. In the 1830s, a more comprehensive ideology of r�g�n�ration emerged through the efforts of younger Jewish scholars and intellectuals. A response to the social and religious implications of emancipation, it was characterized by the demand for the elimination of rituals that violated the French conceptions of civilisation and social integration; a drive for greater administrative centralization; and the quest for inter-communal and ethnic unity. In its various elements, regeneration formed a distinct ideology of emancipation that was designed to mediate Jewish interaction with French society and culture. In this book, Jay Berkovitz reveals the complexities inherent in the processes of emancipation and modernization, focusing on the efforts of French Jewish leaders to come to terms with the social and religious implications of modernity. All in all, his emphasis on the intellectual history of French Jewry provides a new perspective on a significant chapter of Jewish history.

Probing these questions, Gulie Ne'eman Arad finds that, more than the events themselves, what was instrumental in dictating and shaping the American Jews' response to Nazism was the dilemma posed by their desire for acceptance by American society, on the one hand, and their commitment to community solidarity, on the other. When American Jews were faced with the desperate plight of European Jews after Hitler's accession to power, they were hesitant to press the case for immigration for fear of raising doubts about their patriotism.

Perhaps the most significant development of the Georgian theater was its multiplication of ethnic, colonial, and provincial character types parading across the stage. In Theatrical Nation, Michael Ragussis opens up an archive of neglected plays and performances to examine how this flood of domestic and colonial others showcased England in general and London in particular as the center of an increasingly complex and culturally mixed nation and empire, and in this way illuminated the shifting identity of a newly configured Great Britain. In asking what kinds of ideological work these ethnic figures performed and what forms were invented to accomplish this work, Ragussis concentrates on the most popular of the "outlandish Englishmen," the stage Jew, Scot, and Irishman. Theatrical Nation understands these stage figures in the context of the government's controversial attempts to merge different ethnic and national groups through the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland, the Jewish Naturalization Bill of 1753, and the Act of Union with Ireland of 1800. Exploring the significant theatrical innovations that illuminate the central anxieties shared by playhouse and nation, Ragussis considers how ethnic identity was theatricalized, even as it moved from stage to print. By the early nineteenth century, Anglo-Irish and Scottish novelists attempted to deconstruct the theater's ethnic stereotypes while reimagining the theatricality of interactions between English and ethnic characters. An important shift took place as the novel's cross-ethnic love plot replaced the stage's caricatured male stereotypes with the beautiful ethnic heroine pursued by an English hero.

The second volume of Shmuel Feiner's The Jewish Eighteenth Century covers the period from 1750 to 1800, a time of even greater upheavals, tensions, and challenges. The changes that began to emerge at the beginning of the eighteenth century matured in the second half. Feiner explores how political considerations of the Jewish minority throughout Europe began to expand. From the "Jew Bill" of 1753 in Britain, to the surprising series of decrees issued by Joseph II of Austria that expanded tolerance in Austria, to the debate over emancipation in revolutionary France, the lives of the Jews of Europe became ever more intertwined with the political, social, economic, and cultural fabric of the continent. The Jewish Eighteenth Century, Volume 2: A European Biography, 1750-1800 concludes Feiner's landmark study of the history of Jewish populations in the period. By combining an examination of the broad and profound processes that changed the familiar world from the ground up with personal experiences of those who lived through them, it allows for a unique explanation of these momentous events.

A lively look at four major Jewish celebrities of early 1960s America, who together made their mark on both American culture and Jewish identity