In Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History, David N. Myers explores a fascinating and untold chapter in modern Jewish intellectual history: the role of the first generation of Jewish scholars at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in establishing Jewish studies within the framework of a Jewish national university. Re-Inventing the Jewish Past will be of interest to students of Jewish, European, and Middle Eastern history, as well as to scholars engaged in the study of diasporas, comparative nationalism, and the relationship between history and memory.

"Black Power, Jewish Politics expands with this revised edition that includes the controversial new preface, an additional chapter connecting the book's themes to the national reckoning on race, and a foreword by Jews of Color Initiative founder Ilana Kaufman that all reflect on Blacks, Jews, race, white supremacy, and the civil rights movement"--

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.

The author explores the phenomenon of the Jewish culture in Europe. In this book she askes in what way do non-Jews embrace and enact Jewish culture and for what reasons.

The selective relish with which most American Jews affirm their identity -- consuming kosher delicacies once a year, extravagantly celebrating the bar mitzvahs of their sons and the weddings of their daughters -- has usually given rise to satire or consternation. The Wonders of America offers an alternative perspective, for this pioneering social history of Jewish culture highlights the cultural ingenuity and adaptive genius of American Jewish life. Drawing on advertisements, etiquette manuals, sermons, and surveys, Jenna Weissman Joselit constructs a lively and humorous account of how three generations of American Jews created their distinctive American culture. This provocative, enlightening study describes the forging of a rich and exuberant modern Jewish identity and makes it clear that it is not the theoretical debates of rabbis and scholars but the small choices of daily life that shape and sustain a culture

Inventing New Beginnings is the first book-length study to examine the conceptual underpinnings of the "Jewish Renaissance," or "return" to Judaism, that captured much of German-speaking Jewry between 1890 and 1938. The book addresses two very fundamental, yet hitherto strangely understated, questions: What did the term "renaissance" actually mean to the intellectuals and ideologues of the "Jewish Renaissance," and how did this understanding relate to wider currents in European intellectual and cultural history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? It also addresses the larger question of how we can contemplate "renaissance" as a mode of thought that is conditioned by the consciousness and experience of modernity and that extends to our present time.

The postwar decades were not the “golden era” in which American Jews easily partook in the religious revival, liberal consensus, and suburban middle-class comfort. Rather it was a period marked by restlessness and insecurity born of the shock about the Holocaust and of the unprecedented opportunities in American society. American Jews responded to loss and opportunity by obsessively engaging with the East European past. The proliferation of religious texts on traditional spirituality, translations of Yiddish literature, historical essays , photographs and documents of shtetl culture, theatrical and musical events, culminating in the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, illustrate the grip of this past on post-1945 American Jews. This study shows how American Jews reimagined their East European past to make it usable for their American present. By rewriting their East European history, they created a repertoire of images, stories, and ideas that have shaped American Jewry to this day.

Through an exhaustive analysis of Paul's letters to the Galatians and the Roman, illuminating answers are given to the key questions about the teachings of Paul.

The lively essays collected here explore colonial history, culture, and thought as it intersects with Jewish studies. Connecting the Jewish experience with colonialism to mobility and exchange, diaspora, internationalism, racial discrimination, and Zionism, the volume presents the work of Jewish historians who recognize the challenge that colonialism brings to their work and sheds light on the diverse topics that reflect the myriad ways that Jews engaged with empire in modern times. Taken together, these essays reveal the interpretive power of the "Imperial Turn" and present a rethinking of the history of Jews in colonial societies in light of postcolonial critiques and destabilized categories of analysis. A provocative discussion forum about Zionism as colonialism is also included.