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  • Book Notes

American Jewish Life

Doubting the Devout: The Ultra-Orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination, by Nora L. Rubel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 207 pp. $24.50. ISBN 978-0-231-14187-1.

Before 1985, depictions of ultra-Orthodox Jews in popular American culture were rare. Yet the ordination of women into positions of religious leadership and other controversial issues have sparked an increasingly visible culture war between America's ultra-Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews, one that has found a particularly creative voice in literature, media, and film. Unpacking the work of Allegra Goodman, Tova Mirvis, Pearl Abraham, Erich Segal, Anne Roiphe, and others, as well as television shows and films such as A Price Above Rubies, Nora L. Rubel investigates the choices non-haredi Jews have made as they represent the character and characters of ultra-Orthodox Jews. In these artistic and aesthetic acts, Rubel recasts the war over gender and family and the anxieties over acculturation, Americanization, and continuity.

Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina, by Leonard Rogoff. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. 422 pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-8078-3375-9.

A chronicle of Jewish life in the Tar Heel State from colonial times to the present, this volume incorporates oral histories, original historical documents, and profiles of individuals. Leonard Rogoff considers how the North Carolina Jewish experience differs from that of Jews in other southern states. He explores how Jews very often settled in North Carolina's small towns, rather than in its large cities, and he documents the reach and vitality of Jewish North Carolinians' participation in building the New South and the Sunbelt. Many North Carolina Jews were among those at the forefront of a changing South, Rogoff argues, and their experiences challenge stereotypes of a society that was agrarian and Protestant. [End Page 196]

Jews of the Pacific Coast: Reinventing Community on America's Edge, by Ellen Eisenberg, Ava F. Kahn, and William Toll. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010. 336 pp. $50.00. ISBN 978-0-295-98965-5.

From the California Gold Rush of 1849 to the explosion of population centers in the Southwest in the 1980s, Jews have played a significant role in shaping the Pacific West. Through their mercantile networks, cultural innovations, philanthropic institutions, and political leadership, western Jews created a distinctive identity. In Jews of the Pacific Coast, Ellen Eisenberg, Ava F. Kahn, and William Toll have written an interpretive history of the Jews of this region. Drawing on manuscript collections, oral histories, newspapers, and private papers, the authors examine the distinctive roles that Jews played in the Pacific West, especially the innovative roles of women. Personal stories and anecdotes give the authors the opportunity to compare and contrast the nature of the Jewish experience in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the small towns of the West. They explain the differences among these cities, the significance of the regional shift of focus in the early twentieth century from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and, after 1960, the importance of Jewish contributions to new population centers like Las Vegas.

Ancient World and Archaeology

The Exegetical Encounter between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity, edited by E. Grypeou and H. Spurling. Leiden: Brill, 2009. 279 pp. $154.00. ISBN 978-90-04-17727-7.

This book is a collection of essays examining the relationship between Jewish and Christian biblical commentators. The contributions focus on analysis of interpretations of the book of Genesis, a text which has considerable importance in both Christian and Jewish tradition. The essays cover a wide range of Jewish and Christian literature, including primarily rabbinic and patristic sources, but also apocrypha, pseudepigrapha, Philo, Josephus, and Gnostic texts.

Jewish Identities in Antiquity: Studies in Memory of Menahem Stern, edited by Lee I. Levine, and Daniel R. Schwartz. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009. 442 pp. €119.00. ISBN 978-3-16-150030-5.

This book pays homage to one of the greatest scholars of ancient Jewish history in the twentieth century. Its theme stems from the recognition that Jewish life and society in the thousand-year period from Alexander's conquest in the fourth century BCE to the...

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