An acclaimed U.S. professor of history finds his roots in a personal journey through Israel--and through assimilated America, academia, baseball, and family--headlong into deep tensions about country, culture, identity and religion. Worried about the commitment of Jews to their heritage, Auerbach (renowned author of Unequal Justice) shares his story and musings with insight, irony, and intensity.
A collection of essays and insights from the hindsight of a renowned historian: "I was exceedingly fortunate to teach (for forty years) in an elite undergraduate college, where I could mentor intelligent young women who were eager to learn. But Wellesley, still a bastion of Christian privilege a century after its founding, continued to experience (and demurely tolerate) dismaying episodes of anti-Semitism. How ironic that Wellesley and Israel, each in its own distinctive way, had converged to liberate me from my past as a non-Jewish Jew. Regardless of the subjectlaw, modern American history, American Judaism, Israeldeference to the conventional wisdom never had been my style. I always enjoyed the stimulation of writing against the grain: discovering hidden meanings, challenging historical and political pieties, and exposing the self-serving ideology that often lurked beneath self-evident truths. Providing intellectual catnip, it also enabled me to reach readers far beyond the narrow confines of academic journals. My creative work always was done in the solitude of my study, my sanctum within my home. Enclosed within the treasured artifacts, maps, photographs, prints, and books accumulated during decades of research and travel, I explored the historical past that both inspired and reflected my own intellectual trajectory. Virtually every book I have written, to my genuine surprise, contained within it the seed of its successor. That, of course, is discernible only with hindsightwhich, after all, is the distinctive attribute of a historian. I invite my family, friends, and interested readers to accompany me to some favorite destinations during my journey.
Auerbach here focuses on the elite nature of the profession, examining its emphasis on serving business interests and its attempts to exclude participation by minorities.
At the dawn of the Israeli state, the tragic sinking of the Israeli ship Altalena -- by Israeli commandos no less -- threatened to tear the new country apart, and has lessons still for Israeli politics and peace. The first book in English on this fascinating event, and the first by a historian, this book tells the story, and the present implications, of a moment in the birth of modern Israel that has angles and repercussions relevant to many issues today, in Israel and beyond.
A renowned historian examines the special contributions of rabbis and lawyers to American Jewish acculturation. Based on extensive research in U.S. and Israeli archives, his analysis of how lawyers displaced rabbis as community leaders in the 20th century illuminates a decisive moment in U.S Jewish history, and shows how law became deified, to the point of slighting the Holocaust and Zionism.
But a covenantal Israel, which draws its Jewish identity from divine promise and the biblical narrative, refuses to surrender to modern imperatives. As the very nature of Jewish statehood has become ever more polarized, American Jewish life has been profoundly affected by this fateful Zionist contradiction.".
In this first comprehensive history in English of the Jews of Hebron, Jerold S. Auerbach explores one of the oldest and most vilified Jewish communities in the world. Spanning three thousand years, from the biblical narrative of Abraham's purchase of a burial cave for Sarah to the violent present, it offers a controversial analysis of a community located at the crossroads of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle over national boundaries and the internal Israeli struggle over the meaning of Jewish statehood. Hebron Jews sharply challenges conventional Zionist historiography and current media understanding by presenting a community of memory deeply embedded in Zionist history and Jewish tradition. Auerbach shows how the blending of religion and nationalism_Orthodoxy and Zionism_embodied in Hebron Jews is at the core of the struggle within Israel to define the meaning of a Jewish state.
After Adolph Ochs purchased The New York Times in 1896, Zionism and the eventual reality of the State of Israel were framed within his guiding principle, embraced by his Sulzberger family successor, that Judaism is a religion and not a national identity. Apprehensive lest the loyalty of American Jews to the United States be undermined by the existence of a Jewish state, they adopted an anti-Zionist critique that remained embedded in its editorials, on the Opinion page and in its news coverage. Through the examination of evidence drawn from its own pages, this book analyzes how all the news “fit to print” became news that fit the Times’ discomfort with the idea, and since 1948 the reality, of a thriving democratic Jewish state in the historic homeland of the Jewish people.
Explorers in Eden uncovers a vast array of diaries, letters, photographs, paintings, postcards, advertisements, and scholarly monographs, revealing how Anglo-Americans developed a fascination with pueblo culture they identified with biblical associations.
Jewish statehood was restored in 1948 amid a struggle over legitimacy that has persisted in Israel ever since: Who rules? Who decides? Antagonism between the political left and right erupted into bloody violence over the Altalena. Secular-religious discord even made defining who is a Jew in a Jewish state contentious. After the Six-Day War, the return of religious Zionist settlers to biblical Judea and Samaria reframed the struggle over legitimacy. Who decides where in the Land of Israel Jews may live: settlers and rabbis or the government? Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 provoked the first significant eruption of military disobedience, undermining the authority of the Israel Defense Forces with competing claims of personal conscience. Ever since the United Nations declared Zionism to be “a form of racism,” Israel has confronted an escalating international assault on its legitimacy. In political, academic, media, and cultural circles it has been demonized as an “apartheid,” even “Nazi,” state that much of the world despises. These conflicts are explored in this illuminating study of the dilemmas of legitimacy in the world’s only Jewish state and most reviled pariah nation. A new addition to the Contemporary Society Series from Quid Pro Books.
Explorers in Eden uncovers a vast array of diaries, letters, photographs, paintings, postcards, advertisements, and scholarly monographs, revealing how Anglo-Americans developed a fascination with pueblo culture they identified with biblical associations.
A collection of essays and insights from the hindsight of a renowned historian: "I was exceedingly fortunate to teach (for forty years) in an elite undergraduate college, where I could mentor intelligent young women who were eager to learn. But Wellesley, still a bastion of Christian privilege a century after its founding, continued to experience (and demurely tolerate) dismaying episodes of anti-Semitism. How ironic that Wellesley and Israel, each in its own distinctive way, had converged to liberate me from my past as a non-Jewish Jew. Regardless of the subjectlaw, modern American history, American Judaism, Israeldeference to the conventional wisdom never had been my style. I always enjoyed the stimulation of writing against the grain: discovering hidden meanings, challenging historical and political pieties, and exposing the self-serving ideology that often lurked beneath self-evident truths. Providing intellectual catnip, it also enabled me to reach readers far beyond the narrow confines of academic journals. My creative work always was done in the solitude of my study, my sanctum within my home. Enclosed within the treasured artifacts, maps, photographs, prints, and books accumulated during decades of research and travel, I explored the historical past that both inspired and reflected my own intellectual trajectory. Virtually every book I have written, to my genuine surprise, contained within it the seed of its successor. That, of course, is discernible only with hindsightwhich, after all, is the distinctive attribute of a historian. I invite my family, friends, and interested readers to accompany me to some favorite destinations during my journey.
After Adolph Ochs purchased The New York Times in 1896, Zionism and the eventual reality of the State of Israel were framed within his guiding principle, embraced by his Sulzberger family successor, that Judaism is a religion and not a national identity. Apprehensive lest the loyalty of American Jews to the United States be undermined by the existence of a Jewish state, they adopted an anti-Zionist critique that remained embedded in its editorials, on the Opinion page and in its news coverage. Through the examination of evidence drawn from its own pages, this book analyzes how all the news “fit to print” became news that fit the Times’ discomfort with the idea, and since 1948 the reality, of a thriving democratic Jewish state in the historic homeland of the Jewish people.
An acclaimed U.S. professor of history finds his roots in a personal journey through Israel--and through assimilated America, academia, baseball, and family--headlong into deep tensions about country, culture, identity and religion. Worried about the commitment of Jews to their heritage, Auerbach (renowned author of Unequal Justice) shares his story and musings with insight, irony, and intensity.
In this first comprehensive history in English of the Jews of Hebron, Jerold S. Auerbach explores one of the oldest and most vilified Jewish communities in the world. Spanning three thousand years, from the biblical narrative of Abraham's purchase of a burial cave for Sarah to the violent present, it offers a controversial analysis of a community located at the crossroads of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle over national boundaries and the internal Israeli struggle over the meaning of Jewish statehood. Hebron Jews sharply challenges conventional Zionist historiography and current media understanding by presenting a community of memory deeply embedded in Zionist history and Jewish tradition. Auerbach shows how the blending of religion and nationalism_Orthodoxy and Zionism_embodied in Hebron Jews is at the core of the struggle within Israel to define the meaning of a Jewish state.
But a covenantal Israel, which draws its Jewish identity from divine promise and the biblical narrative, refuses to surrender to modern imperatives. As the very nature of Jewish statehood has become ever more polarized, American Jewish life has been profoundly affected by this fateful Zionist contradiction.".
A renowned historian examines the special contributions of rabbis and lawyers to American Jewish acculturation. Based on extensive research in U.S. and Israeli archives, his analysis of how lawyers displaced rabbis as community leaders in the 20th century illuminates a decisive moment in U.S Jewish history, and shows how law became deified, to the point of slighting the Holocaust and Zionism.
At the dawn of the Israeli state, the tragic sinking of the Israeli ship Altalena -- by Israeli commandos no less -- threatened to tear the new country apart, and has lessons still for Israeli politics and peace. The first book in English on this fascinating event, and the first by a historian, this book tells the story, and the present implications, of a moment in the birth of modern Israel that has angles and repercussions relevant to many issues today, in Israel and beyond.
Jewish statehood was restored in 1948 amid a struggle over legitimacy that has persisted in Israel ever since: Who rules? Who decides? Antagonism between the political left and right erupted into bloody violence over the Altalena. Secular-religious discord even made defining who is a Jew in a Jewish state contentious. After the Six-Day War, the return of religious Zionist settlers to biblical Judea and Samaria reframed the struggle over legitimacy. Who decides where in the Land of Israel Jews may live: settlers and rabbis or the government? Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 provoked the first significant eruption of military disobedience, undermining the authority of the Israel Defense Forces with competing claims of personal conscience. Ever since the United Nations declared Zionism to be “a form of racism,” Israel has confronted an escalating international assault on its legitimacy. In political, academic, media, and cultural circles it has been demonized as an “apartheid,” even “Nazi,” state that much of the world despises. These conflicts are explored in this illuminating study of the dilemmas of legitimacy in the world’s only Jewish state and most reviled pariah nation. A new addition to the Contemporary Society Series from Quid Pro Books.
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