James Loeffler

Nancy Sinkoff

Jonathan Karp

Howard Lupovitch

Reconsidering how early modern and modern Jews navigated schisms between Jewish community and European society. This collection brings together original scholarship by seventeen historians drawing on the pioneering research of their teacher and colleague, Michael Stanislawski. These essays explore a mosaic of topics in the history of modern European Jewry from early modern times to the present, including the role of Jewish participants in the European revolutions of 1848, the dynamics of Zionist and non-Zionist views in the early twentieth century, the origins of a magical charm against the evil eye, and more. Collectively, these works reject ideological and doctrinal clichés, demythologize the European Jewish past, and demonstrate that early modern and modern Jews responded creatively to modern forms of culture, religion, and the state from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Contributors to this volume pose new questions about the relationship between the particular and universal, antisemitism and modernization, religious and secular life, and the bonds and competition between cultures and languages, especially Yiddish, Hebrew, and modern European languages. These investigations illuminate the entangled experiences of Jews who sought to balance the pull of communal, religious, and linguistic traditions with the demands and allure of full participation in European life.

New Perspectives on European Jewish History

A Jew in the Street

Lucy S. Dawidowicz

From that Place and Time is the memoir of Lucy S. Dawidowicz, an American-Jewish historian who set out to study Yiddish language and Jewish history at YIVO, the Jewish Scientific Institute in Vilna, Poland, in 1938. Escaping Poland only days before the Nazi onslaught, she worked in the New York YIVO during the war, and returned to Europe from 1946 to 1947 to aid Jewish displaced persons in Munich and Belsen with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Dawidowicz's memoir not only describes her pre-war year in Jewish Eastern Europe, but also treats the ghostly post-war period, and her role in salvaging what remained of Vilna's scorched Jewish archives and libraries. Nancy Sinkoff's new introduction explores the historical forces, particularly the dynamic world of secular Yiddish culture, which shaped Dawidowicz's decision to journey to Poland and her reassessment of those forces in the last years of her life.

A Memoir, 1938-1947

From that Place and Time

Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands

Out of the Shtetl

Intellectual biography of Holocaust historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz.

Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History

From Left to Right

Rebecca Cypess

A rich interdisciplinary exploration of the world of Sara Levy, a Jewish salonnière and skilled performing musician in late eighteenth-century Berlin, and her impact on the Bach revival, German-Jewish life, and Enlightenment culture.

Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin

Sara Levy's World

Nancy Sinkoff

Books

Your next favorite book is out there