Project MUSE®: Journal of Jewish Identities - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/463
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Journal of Jewish Identities.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USIssue 1 (2008) through current issueLatest Articles: Journal of Jewish IdentitiesTWOProject MUSE®Journal of Jewish Identities1946-25221939-7941Latest articles in Journal of Jewish Identities. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Advantageous Asynchrony: Toward a Reevaluation of the Dissolution of Jewish Life in Lebanon, 1943–1967
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978640
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In June 1957, preparations for the second annual Baalbek International Festival caused suspicion and uneasiness amongst Lebanon’s Jewish community leaders, stemming from their reservations about a scheduled British performance of Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice and its possible repercussions. Such was also the reaction of the local school board of the French Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), the foremost provider of Jewish education in the country.1 It cautioned that, while the performance of the play no longer posed a problem in Europe, where the audience knew how “to place the piece in its historical context and to retain only its artistic qualities,” disregarding its possible antisemitic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/463/image/coversmallAdvantageous Asynchrony: Toward a Reevaluation of the Dissolution of Jewish Life in Lebanon, 1943–19672025-12-19text/htmlen-USAdvantageous Asynchrony: Toward a Reevaluation of the Dissolution of Jewish Life in Lebanon, 1943–19672025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®1097302026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19Essayistic Travelogues in Israel: Between Anticipated Wonders and Encountered Realities
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978641
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The geography of modern Israel, shaped by millennia of cultural evolution and political conflict, poses a formidable challenge for those attempting to capture its complexity—particularly for visitors unfamiliar with its layered histories. Filmmakers who arrived in Israel hoping to distill its essence into cinematic language were soon confronted with the reality, as Edward Grossman aptly notes, where “the land and its people, overexposed, remain a mystery to the movie camera.”1 Their efforts to reconcile this enduring mystery inevitably produced what Rocco Giansante and Luna Goldberg describe as “the intersection between what it [Israel] projects externally and what is projected onto it.”2 For many foreign
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/463/image/coversmallEssayistic Travelogues in Israel: Between Anticipated Wonders and Encountered Realities2025-12-19text/htmlen-USEssayistic Travelogues in Israel: Between Anticipated Wonders and Encountered Realities2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®864962026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19The Origins of the Israeli Attitudes towards the Relation Between Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978642
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The October 7th massacre in Israel, along with the exceptional global wave of antisemitism that accompanied it,1 has once again intensified the discussion about “new antisemitism” and the relationship between anti-Zionism (or anti-Israelism) and antisemitism. This topic continues to be one of the most controversial in the discourse on antisemitism and the Israeli-Arab conflict, both in academia and in the West.2 In December 2023, an article was published in the New York Times under the headline “Is Anti-Zionism Always Antisemitic? A Fraught Question for the Moment,”3 and at the end of April 2024, following pro-Palestinian demonstrations on elite university campuses in the U.S., where hundreds of protesters were
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/463/image/coversmallThe Origins of the Israeli Attitudes towards the Relation Between Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism2025-12-19text/htmlen-USThe Origins of the Israeli Attitudes towards the Relation Between Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®1238542026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19Kafka’s Jewbird, Malamud’s Metamorphosis: Race, Self-Hate, and Antisemitism in Modern Jewish Fiction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978643
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Bernard Malamud’s short story “The Jewbird” (1963) is often interpreted as a parable about Jewish assimilation or as an allegory of Black–Jewish relations. Critics usually emphasize its central themes of compassion, suffering, and moral ambiguity.1 This article departs from this critical consensus and argues that the figure of the Jewbird draws on a long-standing and well-known antisemitic trope that circulated in European social discourses from the fin de siècle into the twentieth century. The Jewbird visualized the “metamorphosis” of the male Jew from an inhuman creature into an emancipated citizen who hides his animal nature behind the mask of modern civilization. In reclaiming this antisemitic image of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/463/image/coversmallKafka’s Jewbird, Malamud’s Metamorphosis: Race, Self-Hate, and Antisemitism in Modern Jewish Fiction2025-12-19text/htmlen-USKafka’s Jewbird, Malamud’s Metamorphosis: Race, Self-Hate, and Antisemitism in Modern Jewish Fiction2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®1217632026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig by Jordan D. Rosenblum (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978644
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In December 2015, I was one of approximately a dozen scholars who participated in the first Treyf Caucus at the annual meeting of the Association of Jewish Studies (AJS). One evening, we left the conference hotel to go to a restaurant where we shared a family-style pig roast. I cannot speak for the motives of others in the group. For me, being part of the Treyf Caucus, even away from the conference hotel, was a way of claiming the AJS as an academic space, firmly detached from the history of Jewish dietary laws or customs. Yet, that evening we never quite interrogated ourselves as we ought to have done. Why did we choose to perform our relationship to Jewish studies through eating non-kosher food (treyf) that was
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/463/image/coversmallForbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig by Jordan D. Rosenblum (review)2025-12-19text/htmlen-USForbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig by Jordan D. Rosenblum (review)2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®83572026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19Jewish Books in North Africa, 1450–1850: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds by Noam Sienna (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978645
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About a decade ago, Haviva Pedaya noted that scholarship on Mizrahi Jews often remained trapped in a folkloric frame of reference.1 That logic has shaped the historiography of Jews from Islamic lands more broadly, where early modern and modern histories have long been written through colonial and Orientalist lenses. Within this framework, Jews from these regions were frequently portrayed as cultural remnants or folkloric curiosities. Their intellectual traditions were seldom treated as dynamic or enduring sources of knowledge. Instead, they appeared as fragments, with the medieval period cast as a solitary peak followed by centuries of decline.In the years since, scholars have begun to move beyond these boundaries.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/463/image/coversmallJewish Books in North Africa, 1450–1850: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds by Noam Sienna (review)2025-12-19text/htmlen-USJewish Books in North Africa, 1450–1850: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds by Noam Sienna (review)2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®137592026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19Emotions of Conflict: Israel 1949–1967 by Orit Rozin (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978646
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Orit Rozin’s Emotions of Conflict joins a growing body of scholarship on Jewish and Israeli history, a research trend in which Rozin has been a central figure. It demonstrates how examining events through the lens of emotions can bring fresh perspectives to fields already extensively studied. While much has been written about the Arab–Israeli conflict, a study that asks how the conflict experienced in everyday life, that traces the daily and socio-political processes of meaning-making around events—what in Clifford Geertz’s terms constitutes a “thick description” of the conflict—remains relatively limited.As Geertz explained, the challenge posed by human society to the scholar lies in its multiplicity—of actors
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/463/image/coversmallEmotions of Conflict: Israel 1949–1967 by Orit Rozin (review)2025-12-19text/htmlen-USEmotions of Conflict: Israel 1949–1967 by Orit Rozin (review)2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®122982026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19Vanishing Vienna: Modernism, Philosemitism, and Jews in a Postwar City by Frances Tanzer (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978647
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In her groundbreaking new monograph, Vanishing Vienna: Modernism, Philosemitism, and Jews in a Postwar City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) historian Frances Tanzer deftly exhumes twentieth-century Vienna’s “Janus-faced” legacy with regard to the city’s real and symbolic presence of Jews and the close interrelation of Jewish absence and presence; philosemitism and antisemitism; and narratives of exclusion and inclusion. In the postwar period, leading political and cultural figures “hoped to revive the urban and modern version of the city that had been strongly associated with a real and imagined Jewish presence” (2). Postwar philosemitism manifested itself in the selective appropriation of Jewish artists
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/463/image/coversmallVanishing Vienna: Modernism, Philosemitism, and Jews in a Postwar City by Frances Tanzer (review)2025-12-19text/htmlen-USVanishing Vienna: Modernism, Philosemitism, and Jews in a Postwar City by Frances Tanzer (review)2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®105522026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought by Sonali Thakkar (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978648
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In the novel Our Sister Killjoy (1977), by the Ghanaian writer and politician Ama Ata Aidoo, a young African woman studying in postwar Germany is advised to visit Munich, and her reactions suggest what that city means to her. Among other things, it conjures up “Prime Minister Chamberlain / Hurrying from his island home to / Appease, / While freshly-widowed Yiddisher Mamas wondered / What Kosher pots and pans / Could be saved or not.” That this character, an African encountering Europe in the late 1960s, would associate Germans and complicit British politicians with the genocide of European Jews makes sense, of course, but the specifics of the allusion raise some questions. What has this character, Sissie, learned
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/463/image/coversmallThe Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought by Sonali Thakkar (review)2025-12-19text/htmlen-USThe Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought by Sonali Thakkar (review)2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®103562026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19All Consuming: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of Meat by John M. Efron (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978649
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In the past few decades, it is has become popular for scholars in various disciplines to dabble in Food Studies. Most of these studies merely dip their toes into the water. As a scholar who has spent his entire career swimming in the delta between Jewish Studies and Food Studies, I have learned that some of these visitors dive in and swim nimbly, others struggle to tread water, and still others stand on the shore and complain about the water temperature. Thus, it is always with trepidation that I agree to review a book on food and Jewish identity. Thankfully, in All Consuming, the esteemed historian John M. Efron proves himself capable of swimming laps around many of his peers.Efron begins by acknowledging that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/463/image/coversmallAll Consuming: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of Meat by John M. Efron (review)2025-12-19text/htmlen-USAll Consuming: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of Meat by John M. Efron (review)2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®84332026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19Herminie and Fanny Pereire: Elite Jewish women in nineteenth-century France by Helen M. Davies (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978650
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Set against the captivating background of post-revolutionary Bordelaise and Parisian society, Helen M. Davies’s latest contribution to French and French Jewish history documents how the previously overlooked lives of Herminie (1805–1874) and Fanny Pereire (1825–1910) tell a much larger and more complex story. Herminie and Fanny Pereire: Elite Jewish women in nineteenth-century France offers a window onto economic, technological, and political changes in France, as well as the social dynamics of the Jewish community and the role of women in nineteenth-century French society. Mobilizing a variety of archives and perspectives, Davies follows the trajectories of Herminie Pereire (née Rodrigues) and her daughter Fanny
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/463/image/coversmallHerminie and Fanny Pereire: Elite Jewish women in nineteenth-century France by Helen M. Davies (review)2025-12-19text/htmlen-USHerminie and Fanny Pereire: Elite Jewish women in nineteenth-century France by Helen M. Davies (review)2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®97002026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19