The Jews of Modern France

The Jews of Modern France: Images and Identities synthesizes much of the original research on modern French Jewish history published over the last decade. Themes include Jewish self-representation and discursive frameworks, cultural continuity and rupture from the eve of emancipation to the contemporary period, and the impact of France's role as a colonial power. This volume also explores the overlapping boundaries between the very categories of "Jewish" and "French."

As a whole, this volume focuses on the shifting boundaries between inner-directed and outer-directed Jewish concerns, behaviors, and attitudes in France over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contributors highlight the fluidity of French Jewish identity, demonstrating that there is no fine line between communal insider and outsider or between an internal and external Jewish concern.

Zvi Jonathan Kaplan, Ph.D. (2003), Columbia University, is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at the Lander College for Women of Touro College in Manhattan. He has published on Moses Mendelssohn, Hungarian Ultra-Orthodoxy, and modern French Jewish history. He is the author of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea? French Jewry and the Problem of Church and State (Brown University Press, 2009).

Nadia Malinovich, Ph.D (2000), University of Michigan, is Associate Professor of American Studies at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne. She is the author of French and Jewish: Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early Twentieth Century France (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), and has also published on Sephardic Jews in the United States in the post-World War II years.

"The chief merit of this book is its showcasing of recent high-quality scholarship tackling the relationship between the Jews of metropolitan France and those of the colonies, and its coupling of the history of French Jewry with that of Jews of the colonies." Pierre Birnbaum, University Paris 1, in History, Biography, and Social Science.