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This article examines the reactions of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European Jewish musicians to Richard Wagner's classic antisemitic essay, Judaism in Music." The voluminous debates about Wagner's antisemitism have overshadowed the question of his essay's impact on Jewish musicians and Jewish musical identity. Strikingly, two of the key intellectual architects of the concept of modern Jewish music, Lazare Saminsky and Abraham Tzvi Idelsohn, embraced selective aspects of Wagner's myth even as they called for a new kind of Jewish musical nationalism. Recovering their responses to Wagner helps explain the role of antisemitism in the formation of modern Jewish musical aesthetics and cultural nationalism in the Russian Empire and Ottoman Palestine. The article concludes with a discussion of the lingering questions of Wagner's appeal and controversy among contemporary American and Israeli Jews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article calls for a reassessment of the thought of Paula Winkler (1877–1958), paying renewed attention to her contributions to the cultural Zionist movement in her work on the domestic space as a site of Jewish cultural renewal. Criticizing the trend in modern Jewish scholarship of focusing on Winkler's biography and her relationship with her husband Martin Buber at the expense of appreciating her innovations as a Zionist thinker, it proposes and demonstrates a close reading of her work as a corrective. Focusing on Winkler's 1901 essays on Zionism and the Jewish woman, this article illustrates the important challenges Winkler leveled to Buber and the young Zionist intellectual community by awarding the Jewish woman and the private sphere an active and positive role in the Zionist transformation of Jewish life. It concludes that questions of Winkler's identity are best approached through her own careful navigation of her liminal status in the Jewish and Zionist communities, and the way that she engages the perspective awarded to her as a woman and a non-Jew to formulate her arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]