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  • Book Notes

American Jewish Life

Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America, by Kenneth L. Marcus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 211 pp. $85.00. ISBN 978-0-521-12745-5.

What does it mean to be Jewish? This ancient question has become a pressing civil rights controversy. Despite a recent resurgence of antisemitic incidents on American college campuses, the U.S. Department of Education's powerful Office for Civil Rights has been unable to protect Jewish students. Given jurisdiction over race and national origin but not religion, federal agents have had to determine whether Jewish Americans constitute a race or national origin group. They have been unable to do so. This has led to enforcement paralysis, as well as explosive internal confrontations and recriminations within the federal government. This book examines the legal and policy issues behind the ambiguity involved with civil rights protections for Jewish students. Written by a former senior government official, this book reveals the extent of this problem and presents a workable legal solution.

Ancient World and Archaeology

Apocalypse Against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism, by Anathea E. Portier-Young. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011. 462 pp. $50.00. ISBN 978-0-8028-6598-4.

Portier-Young argues that the first Jewish apocalypses emerged as a literature of resistance to Hellenistic imperial rule. She makes a case for this [End Page 196] argument by examining three extant apocalypses, giving careful attention to the interplay between social theory, history, textual studies, and theological analysis. In particular, Portier-Young contends, the book of Daniel, the Apocalypse of Weeks, and the Book of Dreams were written to supply an oppressed people with a potent antidote to the destructive propaganda of the empire—renewing their faith in the God of the covenant and answering state terror with radical visions of hope.

Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit: Jewish Daily Life in the Time of Jesus, by Jodi Magness. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011. 335 pp. $25.00. ISBN 978-0-8028-6558-8.

In Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit Jodi Magness unearths "footprints" buried in both archaeological and literary evidence to shed new light on Jewish daily life in Palestine from the mid-first century B.C.E. to 70 C.E. Magness analyzes recent archaeological discoveries from such sites as Qumran and Masada together with period texts, including the New Testament, the works of Josephus, and rabbinic teachings. Layering all these sources together, she reconstructs a variety of everyday activities—dining customs, Sabbath observance, fasting, toilet habits, burial customs, and more.

Walking in Their Sandals: A Guide to First-Century Israelite Ethnic Identity, by Markus Cromhout. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010. 128 pp. $18.00. ISBN 978-1-60608-649-0.

This volume invites readers to immerse themselves in the identity, values, and institutions of first-century CE Israelites with the help of contemporary social-scientific studies and theories. What emerges is that the Israelites did not practice a religion. Rather, they were an ethnos, an ethnic identity, who lived out a particular way of life and culture. They obtained their collective identity, honor, and sense of worth from their socialization and membership in Israel and from the social convention of loyalty to their rich cultural tradition. Their world, among other things, preferred collectivism over individualism, and orthopraxy over orthodoxy.

Art, Music, Film

Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds, by J. Hoberman. Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2010. 480 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978-1-58465-870-2.

Both populist and preservationist in spirit, the Yiddish-language cinema of the early twentieth century memorialized the rapidly disappearing folkways and lifestyle of Jewish Eastern Europe and served as a driving [End Page 197] force in the growth and dissemination of the transnational culture of the Diaspora. Hoberman demonstrates the significance of these films as cultural statements as well as nostalgic relics of a bygone time. This work, originally published in 1991, appears here in an expanded edition that includes a DVD of the documentary The Yiddish Cinema.

The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative and Religious Imagination, by Marc Michael Epstein. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. 342 pp. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-300-15666...

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