Lewisohn's efforts would later bear fruit in the Jewish renewal movement of the next generation.

Based on a medieval extrabiblical Christian legend, the figure of the Wandering Jew has long served as a negative representation of all Jews. Condemned by Christ to endless wandering and everlasting life, the Wandering Jew has lived on ever since in literature and criticism as a legendary and symbolic paradigm, ranging from anti-Jewish stereotype to the generalized cultural Other. While Romanticism took him outside of the Jewish context, nineteenth-century antisemitic racism again adopted the figure in an evolving discourse that culminated in his image in Nazi propaganda as the despicable, racialized cultural Other who needed to be exterminated. The present work takes up this trope in all its complex, intersecting facets and shifts the focus of the inquiry from the perspective of the dominant culture to that of the Jewish Other. Starting with nineteenth-century American popular and mainstream writers, it explores the responses to, and the subversions and reinventions of, the paradigmatic figure in works by a variety of European, Canadian, and American Jewish writers and thinkers. It also opens the discussion to the broader issues of contemporary society and politics, such as pervasive uprootedness, transborder migration, the plight of refugees, and states’ rights versus human rights.

Brandeis University is the United States’ only Jewish-sponsored nonsectarian university, and while only being established after World War II, it has risen to become one of the most respected universities in the nation. The faculty and alumni of the university have made exceptional contributions to myriad disciplines, but they have played a surprising formidable role in American politics. Stephen J. Whitfield makes the case for the pertinence of Brandeis University in understanding the vicissitudes of American liberalism since the mid-twentieth century. Founded to serve as a refuge for qualified professors and students haunted by academic antisemitism, Brandeis University attracted those who generally envisioned the republic as worthy of betterment. Whether as liberals or as radicals, figures associated with the university typically adopted a critical stance toward American society and sometimes acted upon their reformist or militant beliefs. This volume is not an institutional history, but instead shows how one university, over the course of seven decades, employed and taught remarkable men and women who belong in our accounts of the evolution of American politics, especially on the left. In vivid prose, Whitfield invites readers to appreciate a singular case of the linkage of political influence with the fate of a particular university in modern America.

"The essays tell how these and other individuals faced the tensions and contradictions of their time and place. While some traced their lineage back to the city's first families, others were relative newcomers. Some broke new ground racially and sexually as well as artistically; others perpetuated the myths of the Old South. Some were censured at home but praised in New York, London, and Paris. The essays also underscore the significance and growth of such cultural institutions as the Poetry Society of South Carolina, the Charleston Museum, and the Gibbes Art Gallery."--BOOK JACKET.

A biography of Lewisohn (1882-1955), an American Jewish writer, editor, and critic. In vol. I, pp. 137-141 discuss Lewisohn's rejection for a university teaching post due to antisemitism. Pp. 278-282 relate to WASP critiques of this Jew for presuming to think he could understand American culture. Pp. 612-633 deal largely with his public criticism, from 1933, of the Nazi regime in Germany, including its genocidal attitude toward Jews. He hoped that the West would be moved to fight Hitler and provide refuge for Jews. In vol. II, ch. 40 (pp. 297-324), "Holocaust Revealed, " highlights Lewisohn's Zionism as a reaction to Jewish assimilation and to the Western, Christian world's indifference to the fate of the Jews in the Holocaust. He criticized the West's failure to oppose the rise of Nazism and to provide safe havens, as Roosevelt had promised, to Jews (e.g. in Hungary) whom Hitler had not yet murdered. Lewisohn's novel "Breathe upon These" (1944) blamed the British for closing the gates to Palestine in the faces of Jews who might have found refuge there.

Article abstracts and citations of reviews and dissertations covering the United States and Canada.