Jewish Identities in Post-Modern Society

Focusing upon the life of Chaya Walkin—one little girl from a distinguished Torah lineage in Poland—this book illustrates the inner resources of the refugee community that made possible survival with dignity. Based on a wide variety of sources and languages, this book is crafted around the voice of a child who was five years old when she was forced to flee her home in Poland and start the terrifying journey to Vilna, Kobe, and Shanghai. The Song of Songs is used to provide an unexpected and poetic angle of vision upon strategies for creating meaning in times of historical trauma.

This book consists of a series of investigations into the cultural and behavioral patterns of east European immigrant Jews known to promote health and prevent disease beginning in the late 19th and into the 20th centuries.

Japan was a party to the Axis Alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. However, it ignored repeated German demands to harm the 40,000 Jews who found themselves under Japanese occupation during World War Two. This book attempts to answer why they behaved in a relatively humane fashion towards the Jews.

Practice-oriented educational philosopher Elie Holzer invites readers to grow as teachers, students, or co-learners through “attuned learning,” a new paradigm of mindfulness. Groundbreaking interpretations of classical rabbinic texts sharpen attention to our own mental, emotional, and physical workings as well as awareness of others within the complexities of learning interactions. Holzer integrates pedagogical pathways with ethical elements of transformative teaching and learning, the repair of educational disruptions, the role of the human visage, and the dynamics of argumentative and collaborative learning. Literary analyses reveal that deliberate self-cultivation not only leads to ethical and spiritual growth, but also offers a corrective for the pitfalls of the contemporary calculative modalities in educational thinking. The author speaks to the existential, humanizing art of learning and of teaching. This book can serve as a companion volume for A Philosophy of Havruta: Understanding and Teaching the Art of Text Study in Pairs, adding a new dimension of its model of joint learning.

Bookstores in Chinese cities are stocked with dozens of Chinese-language books on how Jews conduct business, manage the world, and raise their children. At least ten universities throughout China offer popular Jewish Studies programs, some with advanced degrees. Yet there are virtually no Jews in China. The Chinese are constructing an identity for a people that the large majority of them will never meet. This edited volume critically examines the image of Jews from the contemporary perspective of ordinary Chinese citizens. It includes chapters on Chinese Jewish Studies programs, popular Chinese books and blogs about Jews, China’s relations with Israel, and innovative examinations of the ancient Jewish community of Kaifeng.

This book contains fifteen original papers covering, a broad spectrum of topics in Jewish demography and identity, considering both Diaspora communities and the population of Israel. While most of the papers make use of quantitative data, some base themselves on qualitative and archive materials. The book is divided into five parts, reflecting the different complementary dimensions investigated: historical demography, history, and politics, immigration and immigrant adaptation, transnationalism, and demography and identity. This work is presented to Professor Sergio Dellapergola upon his retirement from teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The study of classical Jewish texts is flourishing in day schools and adult education, synagogues and summer camps, universities and yeshivot. But serious inquiry into the practices and purposes of such study is far rarer. In this book, a diverse collection of empirical and conceptual studies illuminates particular aspects of the teaching of Bible and rabbinic literature to, and the learning of, children and adults. In addition to providing specific insights into the pedagogy of Jewish texts, these studies serve as models of what the disciplined study of pedagogy can look like. The book will be of interest to teachers of Jewish texts in all contexts, and will be particularly valuable for the professional development of Jewish educators.

This pedagogical and sociological analysis of Shoah education in Israeli state schools is based on an empirical survey conducted from 2007–2009 among junior high school and high school students, teachers and principals in general and religious schools, and experts in the field. It explores issues such as materials and methods, beliefs and attitudes, messages imparted, pedagogical challenges, and implications for national and religious identity and universal values. Comparative and multi-dimensional analyses of sub-populations, such as by age and type of school, were conducted. The practical and theoretical implications of the findings are considered in the context of Shoah education in Israel and other educational settings over the past half century.

In the Jewish communal world, engaging 20- and 30-somethings is a hot button issue: How do we get young Jews to feel connected to Israel? To affiliate with traditional Jewish institutions? To care about Jewish continuity, ritual and tradition? As a member of this exclusive community, Stefanie Bregman set out to tackle these questions and sought out to compile a collection of personal essays and memoirs from Jewish 20- and 30-somethings across the country.

A Well-Worn Tallis for a New Ceremony is a study of contemporary ultra-Orthodox religiosity in Israel. This book analyzes the ongoing reconstruction of Haredi culture in Israel, a process which has been spurred on by the challenges of modernity, the worldwide resurgence of religion, and the strong sway of Israeliness. Despite its founders’ and the present leadership’s long-standing eff orts to establish and buttress a community enclave, various modern trends and state institutions, such as secularization, consumerism, feminism, and the military, are having a profound impact on the yeshiva world. In other words, modernity is making inroads into the Jewish state’s Haredi “ghetto” and transforming many aspects of everyday life. Over the course of her extended research on this community, Stadler has discerned changes in several key areas, including religious life; the family structure; and the community’s interface with government authorities and the rest of the populace. Her book sheds light on all of these developments.

Creating the Chupah assesses the role of Canadian Zionist organizations in the drive for communal unity within Canadian Jewry in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Two strands of Zionism, represented respectively by the Federation of Zionist Societies of Canada and Poale Zion, were often in conflicts that reflected greater disputes. The book also describes Zionist activities within the larger spectrum of Canadian Jewish life. Montreal was at the time the “capital” of Canadian Jewry, but the Jewish communities of Toronto and Winnipeg also played a significant role in these events. Srebrnik here makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of Zionism and twentieth-century Jewish life in Canada.

For centuries, fervently observant Jewish communities have produced thousands of works of Jewish law, thought, and spirituality. But in recent decades, the literature of America’s Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] community has taken on brand-new forms: selfhelp books, cookbooks, monthly magazines, parenting guides, biographies, picture books, even adventure stories and spy novels— all produced by Haredi men and women, for the Haredi readership. What’s changed? Why did these works appear, and what do they mean to the community that produces and consumes them? How has the Haredi world, as it seeks fidelity to unchanging tradition, so radically changed what it writes and what it reads? In answering these questions, Strictly Kosher Reading points to a central paradox in contemporary Haredi life. Haredi Jewry sets itself apart, claiming to reject modern secular culture as dangerous and threatening to everything Torah stands for. But in practice, Haredi popular literature reveals a community thoroughly embedded in contemporary values. Popular literature plays a critical role in helping Haredi Jews to understand themselves as different, even as it shows them to be very much the same.

Uzi Rebhun provides the reader with a thorough description and analysis of the multifaceted nature of Jewish internal migration in the United States. Using data from the 1990 and 2000 NJPS, and through up-to-date approaches in the social sciences, he traces changes in the levels, directions, and types of Jewish migration, evaluating the changing social and economic characteristics of the migrants. Finally, Rebhun tests the relationships between migration and Jewish behavior in both the private and public spheres, his findings contributing to the theoretical literature on internal migration and to a better understanding of American ethnicity. The Wandering Jew in America is an excellent resource for students of migration, ethnicity, and sociology of religion, as well as those interested in Jewish life in America.

The American Jewish Communist movement played a major role in the politics of Jewish communities in cities such as Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia, as well as in many other centers, between the 1920s and the 1950s. Making extensive use of Yiddish-language books, newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, and other materials, Dreams of Nationhood traces the ideological and material support provided to the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan, located in the far east of the Soviet Union, by two American Jewish Communist-led organizations, the ICOR and the American Birobidzhan Committee. By providing a detailed historical examination of the political work of these two groups, the book makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of twentieth-century Jewish life in the United States.