That the Jewish people has a distinct political tradition should not at all be surprising. Yet, it has been only about thirty years since the process of its recovery has begun. Major political thinkers, including Leo Strauss, Aaron Wildavsky, and especially Daniel Elazar, have made significant contributions to understanding the major impact that Jewish political thought has had on the Western political tradition. With the increasing secularization of political thought since the seventeenth century, there had been a marked reluctance to understand the Bible as a resource for political discussion. However, it has been demonstrated that the consent/contract basis of authority is derived directly from federalist theology of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries in Western Europe. “Federal,” after all, is derived from the Latin, foedus, which means covenant.1 Protestant churches searching for a basis of polity that was not based on Catholic hierarchical sacramental authority returned to the Hebrew Bible. Their clergy studied Hebrew with rabbinic tutors who most probably emphasized the Jewish mutual concept of covenant over the Christian unilateral covenant theory.

In the concluding pages of Kimmy Caplan's book, the author asks his ultimate question: “Did the Immigrant rabbis and preachers succeed?” (p. 312) To achieve success, in the eyes of Caplan, is to stimulate an emotionally charged response or to generate a change in perspective or action.

Originally published in Hebrew under the title Shafrir Mitzrayim (Tel Aviv, 1995), this thoroughly researched monograph, based on some 800 documents from the Cairo Genizah, illuminates an obscure and overlooked chapter in the history of the Jewish communities that flourished in the medieval Islamic world. As the author notes in her foreword, previous studies of Jewish leadership in Muslim lands have discounted the importance of local political activity, emphasizing instead the dominant role of the central authorities, that is, the Exilarchate and the yeshivot of Babylonia and Palestine. Bareket takes up the question of local leadership by focusing on the careers of nine individuals who headed the Palestinian and Babylonian congregations in Fustat's Jewish community during the first half of the eleventh century. While these leaders formally recognized the sovereignty of the central authorities, they nevertheless exercised considerable autonomy, establishing in Fustat a local school (midrash) for Torah study, issuing their own responsa, imposing bans, and corresponding with Jewish leaders outside of Egypt.

The 1920s witnessed great changes in the American Jewish community. Jews moved out of their areas of first settlement and became increasingly assimilated into mainstream American life, and many became prominent figures in the world of popular music, film, the law, and organized crime. Paradoxically, as they strove to be fully integrated into American society, they also desired to maintain their separate Jewish identity. The tension this created has remained a central theme of the American Jewish experience. Michael Alexander has constructed an elegantly written and compelling interpretation of how that second generation of American Jews sought to resolve this conflict. In so doing, he offers fresh insights into the sources of American Jewish liberalism.

This book is, without a doubt, a major contribution in the field of Judeo-Persian Studies. Judeo-Persian literature, which extends for about eight centuries, has been severely neglected except for the work of a small number of scholars. There are only four scholars in the United States who have dealt with any aspect of this field, and not many more elsewhere. The existing Judeo-Persian texts are a vast collection of all sorts of material and deserve much more attention. Vera Basch Moreen has made a great step forward by providing translation of a wide variety of literary texts. Especially valuable are her commentaries, explanations, and bibliography.

A feast for the imagination, Krutikov's Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity is best begun with dessert; the last chapter of this richly observed, original study of the modernist turn in Yiddish prose fiction repays with interest the reader's diligent investment in the first three-quarters of the book. Here, Krutikov not only offers the most concise and compelling version of his argument but also resolves some of the questions that bedevil his attempt to determine the role of literature in history. The problem is, of course, not his alone but of paramount importance for every student of Eastern European Jewish culture. Krutikov's diachronic reading of a single historical moment through the prism of fiction thus offers an immediate point of entry into the gap between the reality of Jewish lives in history and the construction of Jewish life in literature.

During the past two decades, many important works have been published—mostly by Israeli scholars—on virtually every aspect of Hasidism. The writings of David Assaf, Rachel Elior, Zeev Gries, Moshe Idel, Gedalia Nigal, Ada Rapaport-Albert, and Moshe Rosman, to name only the most prominent contemporary scholars of Hasidism, range from sweeping critical re-evaluations of earlier Hasidic historiography and theology to close studies of major sects within the Hasidic movement. In the course of this outpouring of Hasidic scholarship, the pioneering work of Scholem and his disciples has been demolished and rehabilitated several times over. Beyond even more detailed studies of later and minor Hasidic sects, it would have seemed, at this late date, that there was little left to add to the discussion of the origins and theology of classical, or “Beshtian,” Hasidism. Thus the appearance, in the year 2000, of a new book by Immanuel Etkes dedicated to the “Founder of Hasidism,” R. Israel Baal Shem Tov, could hardly be greeted without the question with which the author himself begins his introduction: “Why another book on the Besht? What can this book hope to add to all that has already been written and published on this topic?” (p. 9).

The October Revolution fostered the rise to prominence of two of the greatest Jewish art theatres of the twentieth century: the Hebrew-language Habima and the Yiddish-language Moscow State Yiddish Theater, the latter commonly referred to by its Russian acronym, Goset. The impetus for their creation predated the Revolution, with roots, respectively, in Bialystok and Petrograd; but it was only after they established themselves in Moscow that they spread their wings and attained artistic heights that would ensure a place in the annals of world theatre. Both were important participants in the great flowering of the Russian stage during the 1920s, a period that seethed with revolutionary fervor, as Moscow took the vanguard as the incubator for theatrical experimentation. It was here that the theories and artistic silhouette of the modern stage were examined, reshaped, and reinvented with an unwavering conviction that theatre matters, that it has the power to transform society.

When Daniel Swetschinski's dissertation appeared in 1980, it immediately became an indispensable work. It was a wide-ranging, clearly-ordered synthesis of scholarship on the Portuguese—Jewish community of Amsterdam in the seventeenth-century, incorporating some important original research. It surveyed the community's legal, demographic, economic, and institutional history, with a brief chapter on certain aspects of its cultural life. Its most original contribution was a detailed study of demographic data gleaned from the Amsterdam puyboecken, the municipal registers of intended marriages. On the basis of these records, Swetschinski charted in detail the immigration to Amsterdam of ex-conversos with origins in the Iberian Peninsula. His examination of the community's institutional life relied to a considerable extent on existing studies in Dutch, but also incorporated his own archival work, and it raised important questions about the structure of the community. Moreover, at a time when this was the exception rather than the rule, it dealt with the Portuguese Jews in an unsentimental, unromanticized fashion. The dissertation was far from exhaustive—a task beyond the reach of any young scholar—but it was a valuable contribution to Jewish communal history.

Much has been, and continues to be, written about the Conservative movement and its impact upon both American Judaism and world Jewry. Such works differ widely in scope and emphasis. The three recently published volumes under review serve to exemplify such diversity. One examines the movement in its entirety, concentrating on the present, primarily from a sociological perspective; the others focus more on history, illuminating in different ways the roles of two of the most influential figures in Conservative Judaism in the past.

This is a fine book, one which constructs its tasks with seriousness and depth. Grossman's book is all about the place of Yiddish in German cultural and intellectual contexts. The shortcomings are more a product of the limitations of the discipline than of the author.

The author of this review was once invited to give a historical lecture at a venerable New York City Jewish institution. The subject of antisemitism figured prominently in the talk. “Why do they hate us so?” wailed one member of the audience among the crowd that gathered afterward. “Can you tell me?” As she walked with me to my subway stop, pouring out her despair, I patiently tried to explain to her why perceptions of Jews might have developed as they had.

With America, Its Jews, and the Rise of Nazism, Gulie Ne'eman Arad has placed the American Jewish response to the rise of Nazism within its political and social context, thereby making an important contribution to the growing literature that seeks to historicize America's relationship to the Holocaust.

With few exceptions, classical study of Jewish liturgy has focused on the words of the prayers, largely ignoring the less tangible elements of setting, gesture, halakhic guidance, and music. When scholars like Eric Werner and A. Z. Idelsohn wrote about liturgical music, they, too, considered it a text. In recent years, and influenced by trends in the larger academy, the field has become more interdisciplinary, open to the insights of other scholarly methodologies, resulting in important studies on the archaeological history of the synagogue itself, prayer gestures, liturgical halakhah, and mystical approaches to prayer. Into this context, we can welcome warmly Jeffrey Summit's The Lord's Song in a Strange Land and its ethnographic study of the musical dimension of contemporary American Jewish liturgy.

Marc Gopin believes that religion can play an important role in forming a global society committed to peace and moral principles. He bases his belief on the fact that in most religions there is a “commitment to peace and elimination of violence” (p. 30) expressed in a broad range of values. Through the “internal hermeneutic dynamics of the tradition” (p. 60)—that is, through a textual investigation of how traditions have changed—he believes that Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others can contribute to promoting peace.

Perhaps it should be thought good luck if you've written a deeply flawed book that is overtaken and rendered very nearly useless by events. Saved by the bell, as it were, your bad book may not be noticed. (Or is it better to be embarrassed than ignored?)

The post-Zionist perspective is a commonplace in political and social discourse these days, and with this book it seeks to ensconce itself in the literary domain. Sidra Ezrahi, who teaches at the Hebrew University, situates herself here in an existential stance antipodal to Yehuda Halevy's: her heart is in the West even as she sits at the edge of the East. Manifestly Ezrahi, in readings of nine writers and poets, has constructed a literary triptych that seeks to rationalize the post-Zionist moment and narrative. What it boils down to is a book that is essentially a detailed gloss, in literary terms, on one of the seminal articulations of Diasporism as the anodyne to the moral ambiguities of political Zionism: George Steiner's 1985 essay “Our Homeland, the Text.”

Demographic studies and their findings have dominated research in to the American Jewish community since the first National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS) of 1970. When it comes to Jewish identity, both national and community-based demographic studies have been criticized for providing only superficial portraits of the character of American Jewish institutional life and being even less revelatory of the inner life of American Jews. Yet, few fiscal resources and little public notice have been given to those who sought to describe American Jews and their Judaism in depth through the use of qualitative research methods. It took Steven M. Cohen and Arnold M. Eisen, professors of sociology and religion respectively to risk the development of a theory of Jewish identity for more than 50 percent of America's adult Jewish population based on 45 in-depth interviews and two focus groups. To be sure, the authors, both highly respected and prolific scholars, set their findings against a backdrop provided by surveys mailed back by 1005 Jews. Nevertheless, it is the insights derived from the three hour interviews that are critical to the analysis. Paralleling the work of students of American Protestantism such as Robert Bellah, Wade Clark Roof, and Robert Wuthnow, Cohen and Eisen seek to decipher the inner workings of the life journeys of moderately affiliated Jews.

Rarely is there such synergy between literary texts and a critic's personal convictions as there is in Yael Feldman's latest book. Strong positions and emotional ties often prove a double-edged sword, especially when ideology dictates the interpretation. In the present case, the deep bond between the fictional narratives and the scholar is mostly beneficial, lending Feldman's writing exceptional verve and drama.

We live in the age of the scholarly monograph and the multi-authored history. The shifting and contentious nature of literary studies provides little encouragement to senior scholars to devote decades of their work to taking the long view and accepting responsibility for rendering a comprehensive account of the development of a whole field over a substantial period of time. Our epistemological uncertainty is such that we suspect that fairness and truth can be approximated only if we break up the whole among divers hands and listen to different viewpoints.