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American Jewish Life
Jewish political power certainly exists in the American polity, but before it can be determined whether it is inordinate, historian Henry L. Feingold declares that it first needs to be identified and defined. This book examines five recent instances beginning with the New Deal when the play of Jewish power, or power exercised by Jews, was evident. The work presents the reader with a picture of American Jewish participation in the American polity.
Messiahs of 1933 enlarges our understanding of Yiddish theatre and culture in the United States. It examines the stage performances created by the Artef collective, the Modicut puppeteers, and the Yiddish Unit of the Federal Theatre Project. And it introduces to contemporary readers some of the most popular theatre actors of the 30s, including Leo Fuchs, Menasha Skulnik, and Yetta Zwerling. Throughout, it includes relevant photographs and contemporary comic strips, along with the first English-language publication of excerpts from the featured plays.
The editors have gathered a variety of distinguished scholars, from Eugene Goodheart to Peter Novick to Nathan Glazer, from Morris Dickstein to Suzanne Klingenstein to Ilan Stavans, to revisit and rethink the legacy of the New York intellectuals. The authors show how a small New York group, predominantly Jewish, moved from communist and socialist roots to become a primary voice of liberal humanism and, in the case of a few, to launch a new conservative movement. Concentrating on Lionel [End Page 213] Trilling as the paradigmatic liberal intellectual, the book also includes reconsiderations of Irving Howe and Dwight MacDonald and explores the roots of the neoconservative movement and its changing role today.
This work explains how the concepts and practices of traditional European Judaism were adapted to North American culture beginning in the late nineteenth century. Part I focuses on issues including the origins of American Jewish history as a field of study, the Kehilla experiments of the early twentieth century, and the relationship between the Jewish Theological Seminary and Orthodox Judaism. Part II deals with the beginnings of Hasidic Judaism in North America prior to the Second World War, and Part III examines the issue of contemporary American Jewish attitudes toward evolution and intelligent design.
Ancient World and Archaeology
Hanan Eshel discusses the question of how we can learn political history from the Qumran scrolls. He summarizes the historical information contained in the scrolls and demonstrates that Josephus's description of the political history of the Hasmonean period is basically reliable.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are found in many publications, making specific texts difficult to locate. Joseph Fitzmyer explains the conventional system of abbreviations for the Scrolls and lists where readers can find each of the Scrolls and fragmentary texts from the eleven caves of Qumran and all the related sites, using the officially assigned numbers of the texts. He supplies information on concordances, dictionaries, translations, and outlines of longer texts, and indicates electronic resources for the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
