In August, 1929, Arabs in Palestine rose up in bloody riots against Jews. More than 130 Jews were killed, among them eight young American students. American Jews, hampered by the postwar mood of disillusionment and isolationism and by the vicious anti-Semitic attacks of the 1920s, failed to mount an effective campaign to influence either the government or public opinion. In addition, the community itself was hopelessly divided. Rival factions, some led by men who frequently sacrificed issue for ego, could not counter the anti-Zionist case. In The Year After the Riots, Naomi W. Cohen makes the first in-depth study of American responses to the riots and reveals the isolation and weaknesses of American Jewry. Official noninvolvement, anti-Semitism, and Jewish disunity are presented as an ominous prologue to the Hitler era.
A driving force in the history of American Jews has been the pursuit of religious equality under law. Jews reasoned that state and federal legislation or public practices which sanctioned religious, specifically Christian, usages blocked their path to full integration within society. Always a small minority and ever fearful of the outspoken proponents of the Christian state, nineteenth-century Jews became ardent defenders of church-state separation. In the twentieth century, Jewish defense organizations took a prominent role in landmark court cases on religion in the schools, Sunday laws, and public displays of Christian symbols. Over the last two centuries, Jews shifted from support of a neutral-to-all-religions government to a divorced-from-religion government, and from defense of their own interests to the defense of other religious minorities. Jews in Christian America traces in historical context the response of American Jews to the issues presented by a Christian-flavored public religion. Discussing the contributions of each major wave of Jewish immigrants to the reinforcement of a separationist stand, Cohen shows how Jewish communal priorities, pressures from the larger society, and Jewish-Christian relationships fashioned that response. She also makes clear that the Jewish community was never totally united on the goals and tactics of a separationist posture; despite the continued predominance of the strict separationists, others argued the adverse effects of that position on communal well-being and on the very survival of Judaism.
It is indeed remarkable that although Philo has quoted extensively from the Pentateuch, his works contain no more than forty-six references to the Prophets and Writings. The author provides a convincing explanation for every one of these citations. It corroborates the thesis that Philo availed himself of lexicographic aids and midrashic material, and further, that even when the language of their composition was Hebrew/Aramaic, that he used them in Greek translation. It identifies a circle engaged in esoteric philosophic allegorization of Scriptures, with which Philo associated, and it finds that the specific quotations from the Prophets point to the existence, already in the 1st century CE, of a traditional Haftarah Cycle. The book fills a long felt lacuna.
From all the evidence presented, the congregational rabbi emerges as a pioneer, the leader of a congregation, as well as spokesman for the Jews in the larger society, forging an independence from his European counterparts and laboring for the preservation of the Jewish faith and heritage in an unfamiliar environment."--BOOK JACKET.
A collection of brand-new short stories written by prize-winning, bestselling writers and inspired by Kafka - published to commemorate the centenary of his death *Chosen as a 2024 highlight in the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Daily Mail, New Statesman, Esquire and the New European* Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the great geniuses of twentieth-century literature. What happens when some of the most original literary minds of today take an idea, a mood or a line from his work and use it to spark something new? From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting. Inspired by the visionary imagination of a writer working one hundred years ago, they speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.
Get the inside scoop on the hottest cities and destinations in Europe. From celeb-studded nightclubs in London to scuba-diving off Croatia, MTV Europe shows you where you want to be, with choices for every budget to help you travel the way you want to. Alternative accommodations, cheap eats, great clubs and bars, world-class museums, and offbeat attractions—you’ll find them all in MTV Europe. Check out a free podcast featuring authors of MTV Europe talking about their travels in Europe.
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