Forthcoming
Safed, Zionist Culture, and Jewish History: Toward a New Historical Perspective
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin
Sixteenth-century Safed was one of the most important centers of thought and learning in Jewish history, yet Zionist historical narratives, which emphasize the continuity of Jewish presence in Palestine, have consistently downplayed or ignored it. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin investigates this strange contradiction. His new book argues that Safed articulates a model of early modern Jewish national revival, one closely connected to the land and its material geography, yet radically different from the Zionist model that emerged in the late nineteenth century. While Zionism set out to restore Biblical Jewish sovereignty, rabbinic Safed’s emphasis on the Mishnah proposed a non-sovereign Jewish connection to the land.
As much a polemic as a historical and theological analysis, Safed, Zionist Culture, and Jewish History offers a provocative new perspective on questions related to nationalism, Judaism, and Israel.
About the Author
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin teaches in the Department of Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His books include The Censor, the Editor, and the Text: The Catholic Church and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon in the Sixteenth Century and Exil et souveraineté: judaïsme, sionisme et pensée binationale (preface de Carlo Ginzburg).
The Challenges of Sovereignty: Essays on Israel and Zionism
David Ellenson; edited by David N. Myers and Michael Marmur
Over the course of his rich career, David Ellenson—one of the most outstanding Jewish scholars, intellectuals, and thinkers of our time—probed the tension between tradition and modernity, especially as reflected in the ceaseless reinterpretation of liturgical and halakhic texts. Alongside that scholarly interest, largely centered on European Jewry, Ellenson produced an impressive body of work on Zionism and Israel.
This volume follows the arc of this body of work from Ellenson’s early articles on the Zionism of American rabbis to his last on the struggle between Jewish and democratic impulses in Israeli society. He draws on familiar sources of inquiry—Jewish prayers and legal sources—to chart changes in Israeli religious life and to excavate its theological-political foundation. What emerges is a profound meditation on some of the most important questions that Israel faces today: what does it mean to be Jewish in the state? What role should Halakhah play in a self-defined Jewish state? How should the state treat its non-Jewish minority? How deeply rooted is democracy in the state and its foundational texts? And can the state ever escape seemingly irrepressible internal and external conflict?
About the Author
David Ellenson (1947–2023) was a distinguished scholar of modern Jewish thought and history. Among his many academic roles, he directed the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies and was a visiting professor in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University from 2015–2018. Most recently, he coedited, with Michael Marmur, American Jewish Thought Since 1934: Writings on Identity, Engagement and Belief.
About the Editors
David N. Myers is Sady and Ludwig Kahn Distinguished Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he serves as the director of the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute. He is the author and editor of many books, including, with Nomi Stolzenberg, American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York.
Michael Marmur is professor of Jewish theology at the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. He is the author of Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Sources of Wonder, and most recently Living the Letters: An Alphabet of Emerging Jewish Thought.
Visual Imaginations and Modern Jewish History
Richard I. Cohen
Visual Imaginations and Modern Jewish History traces how visual experience reflected and shaped Jewish life from the late seventeenth century onward. Richard I. Cohen shows how images, spaces, and objects were central to the making of modern Jewish identities and how the act of seeing itself became a site of cultural negotiation. Cohen claims that the prominence of visual art in modern Jewish life cannot be overlooked. Visual expression has become such a significant factor in Jewish life that it serves as both mirror and agent of Jewish modernity.
Cohen engages with a range of artists, figures like Moses Mendelssohn, Uriel Da Costa and Baruch Spinoza, and such topics as the visual imaginings of the Mishnah, Jews in the military, and the motif of the Wandering Jew. Taken as a whole, the studies in this book argue that approaching modern Jewish history through images is not to replace the written word, but to restore to it the world of sight that Jews inhabited, created, and transformed.
"How rare that a historian so thoroughly, meticulously, and rigorously analyzes imaging – and not just images – for insights into major moments in the history of European Jews. Deft and eloquent, detailed and insightful, and above all erudite, Visual Imaginations and Modern Jewish History is a fascinating journey through the highways and byways of Jewish visual culture. He explores Jewish visual culture in its own right and as a lens, as a way of looking at history. A tour de force in the reading of images for what they can tell us about themselves and about those who made and consumed them." - Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, University Professor Emerita, New York University
About the Author
Richard I. Cohen is emeritus professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His books include The Burden of Conscience: French-Jewish Leadership During the Holocaust; Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe; and, with Mirjam Rajner, Samuel Hirszenberg 1865–1908: A Polish Jewish Artist in Turmoil. He has also co-curated and co-edited From Court Jews to the Rothschilds: Art, Patronage, and Power, 1600-1800 and Le Juif Errant: Un témoin de temps.